Shoppers Drug Mart on Queen Street. Early on a frigid February night. I’m buying a box of tissues and a case of fudge popsicles, both in aid of my burgeoning cold. The counter at the checkout is covered with piles of receipts being organized by the cashier. A clerk is on the other side of the counter chatting with her.

Cashier: I can help you here. I’m trying to get organized, but I never will. It’s a strange night; is it a Full Moon?

Clerk: I don’t know. Maybe it’s a Lunar Moon?

Me (showing off): Aren’t all Moons Lunar Moons?

Clerk: I don’t know about that.

Cashier: No, I don’t know anything about that.

Clerk: Anyway, did you see the sparkles on her hands?

Cashier: When those women come over from the jewelry store – I know!

I have failed at showing off.

(Shoppers Drug Mart, by the way, is a major retailer of The Old Farmer’s Almanac in Canada)

I’ve long looked for an easy way to drop OpenStreetMap maps into another site, and although there are myriad “under the hood” ways of doing this none of them ever had the “embed” ease-of-use of sticking a Google Map on a page. But with CloudMade maps, it’s easy to generate embed code that you can paste anywhere, and the maps draw from the same OpenStreetMap data, so anything you edit there will show up on CloudMade. Here’s Charlottetown, for example:

I love timelines.

I’ve maintained my own timeline in the Rukapedia for the last 5 years and it’s proved an invaluable tool for helping me keep track of my personal history – where I’ve lived, how old I was, who I was dating – and for giving me visual sense of my own march toward mortality (I use the excellent EasyTimeline extension to MediaWiki to manage it).

My favourite timeline of late is Memolane, a web application that slurps in a selection of time and location feeds from sites like Twitter and Flickr and displays them in a very pleasant right-and-left-scrolling visual timeline. I find it interesting to see these disparate items laid next to each other, and I find it especially interesting to scroll left and explore my recent personal history. Memolane is the binoculars to my life-long timeline’s telescope (although, as I’ve just discovered – there’s a “macro navigation” bar at the bottom of the page – Memolane has slurped in 10 years worth of my life, which is pretty telescopic).

Memolane is in a closed beta right now, but if you sign up on the front page you’ll eventually get an invite code.

Being a corporation with employees, [[Reinvented]] has to file payroll summaries – T4s – with Canada Revenue before the end of February every year.

If memory serves correctly, in the first 12 years of our corporate existence I met this deadline, um, never.

But this year, I’m happy to report, it’s only February 6 and the the T4s are calculated and filed.

It’s hard to believe, as to file these electronically requires joining up two asynchronous events: the receipt of a “Web Access Code” from Canada Revenue in the mail sometime around the end of December and the actual use of this code to sign in to the T4 Web Forms website. Although it probably seems to digital bureaucrats that this is a simple filing exercise, it remains one of the most challenging bureaucratic duties of my usually just-in-time office lifestyle.

While it would be hard to describe the web application for filing T4s as intuitive – it’s essentially an electronic wrapper around a still-confusing paper-based process – Canada Revenue has made tiny improvements every year, to the point where it’s now at least usable. Indeed I went through the entire process in about 30 minutes for 3 employees.

Now, all I have to do is meet the RRSP deadline of March 1 and the GST filing deadline of March 31 and I’ll have a hat trick of filing perfection.

There has been much hand wringing this week here in Canada over the decision by the CRTC that allows large network operators to charge their wholesale customers – generally smaller Internet service providers – using a “usage-based billing” model. What this means, in simple terms, is that wholesalers who’ve been paying companies like Bell Canada for unlimited access to an Internet “pipe” of a certain diameter are now going to also be billed for how much data “flows through the pipe.”

It’s a move similar to that being implemented by the City of Charlottetown’s water utility, moving residential customers from a flat-free billing, where we pay a fixed amount and can use all the water that we like, to water-meter-regulated billing, where we pay for what we use.

Much of the hand-wringing this week – take this rant by George Stroumboulopoulos – is simple-minded and makes it appear that the CRTC decision is much broader than it actually is.

But usage-based billing isn’t something new, and usage-based billing by the large networks to their retail customers is not only not new, but it’s also something that the CRTC doesn’t regulate: “The Commission notes that carriers’ retail UBB rates are market-based and are not subject to prior Commission approval – that is, they are forborne from regulation.” writes the CRTC in its decision. The decision only applies to wholesale customers, and so while consumers will be affected, it’s only consumers of smaller independent ISPs that will be affected directly.

While I’m the first to admit that using the Internet with a meter is a completely different experience than using a free and unlimited Internet – I still have visceral unpleasant memories of using dial-up when I was paying “by the minute” – I strongly believe that we have only ourselves to blame for the situation we’ve now found ourselves in.

We didn’t have to end up with an Internet controlled by a few large companies: the Internet is designed to be a cooperative, decentralized network, and if we (the people) had been more active and alert in the 1990s as our Internet access future was being plotted, we would have advocated for a cooperative, decentralized Internet – we would have built our own Internet, in other words – rather than lazily outsourcing the task to the incumbent telecommunications companies.

Where we ended up instead is with an Internet not unlike the telephone and cable television systems that preceded it, with not only the billing and the usage rules beyond our control, but the very nature of the network itself.

Back in the early 1990s, when the Internet was ours to build, those of us in the thick of it had to become versed in routers and switches and bare copper circuits and the mystical incantations of TCP/IP. Much of that knowledge has died on the vine in the intervening years, and we’re now all content to simply plug in an Ethernet cable to a port controlled by an opaque third party that handles all the messy bits.

Metered Internet isn’t good Internet, and I’m as concerned as the next guy about how this trend is going to affect how we all use the network.

But those who are protesting the CRTC’s decision, like those behind SaveOurNet.ca, appear to want the private-sector companies that control the network to operate on some loftier public-minded plane, and that seems completely unreasonable. Large network operators should be able to charge as much or as little as they like for their services, using whatever billing mechanism they want.  If Eastlink decides that it wants to charge me $5 more to watch a movie on streamed Netflix, why shouldn’t it be able to do that? Companies are supposed to be greedy: that’s their mandate.

The answer to this quandary lies not in regulating the private sector Internet, but rather to realize that ultimately the only way the Internet is going to be a truly revolutionary force is if we rebuild it as non-profit public infrastructure, free from market forces. There’s no technical reason that we can’t have unlimited, unmetered Internet running into every home in the country; to get there, though, we’re going to have to do it ourselves, and not gripe endlessly when private companies, well, behave like private companies.

I know, I know, I promised to stop it with the business cards, calling cards and other letterpress personal ephemera. But I decided I needed to put the Reinvented logo engraving to a practical use. And I also needed to start printing again, lest I forget how. So I whipped up this card, printed on several colours of pre-cut business card blanks from Paper Source in Cambridge.

Regular readers may recall the annual photo-with-the-Premier that’s been taken since 2004 at the Premier’s Levee at the Confederation Centre of the Arts on New Year’s Day. Well, the 2011 photo arrived last week, and I’m happy to say the it’s my least-dorky-looking yet:

I think you’ll agree that I got my colour coordination perfect this year (in last year’s photo I was wearing way, way too much red)  I’m even wearing and Island Tartan tie.

For the first time this year we took [[Oliver]] to the levee – just the Premier’s, for a start; he’s too young to be exposed to the Masons and the Bishop – and so here’s the first in his own series of photos-with-the-Premier:

It’s a pretty good start – compared to my high level of dorkitude on my first go especially – and I think you could make the case that his colour coordination hit an even higher level than mine. Just got to work on the “when you shake hands with someone, look them in the eye” technique and he’ll be set. But he’s got the stance down.

It was a nice touch that the Premier’s Office sent Oliver his photo in his own envelope (the office amazes me every year in its ability to figure out where to mail these photos; I don’t believe I’ve ever given them our address).

For a long time I’d end up in a different “spare” office at [[Yankee]] every time I visited, but for the last couple of years I’ve settled nicely into the “crow’s nest” office high atop the Sagendorph Building on the Yankee campus: it’s the little extension on the 3rd floor that you can see to the right of the chimney in this photo:

Inside, the office looks like this:

The office plays double role as a meeting room for the web team, so I never have to leave the office to go to meetings. It has the benefit of being near everyone, having a nice big table (Yankee, true to its corporate ethos, makes its own tables), has a monitor already available, has a pleasant view of central Dublin, NH, and has all the electricity and wifi I need. The only downsides to the office are the variable temperature – sometimes stiflingly hot, sometimes chilly – and the occasional emergence of cluster flies if I happen to time my visit to their dehibernation schedule.

Upside: it’s nice that Charlottetown’s newest pedestrian signals talk to you; much better usability than the anonymous bleeps and bloops and other “accessible” signals have, it would seem. Downside: all the signalization in the world won’t keep you from getting run over by a quarter ton truck that chooses to ignore the signals.

About five years ago [[Catherine]] bought me an L.L. Bean winter jacket for Christmas, an olive green (officially “dill”) Gore-Tex shell with a warm removable lining and a pleasant array of zippered pockets. Warm enough for the coldest Prince Edward Island cold, I wore it faithfully from late fall to late spring every year. It was a good coat.

Except that the zipper never worked: some small defect at the bottom of the zipper prevented it from fully “meshing,” and so, unless I zipped the jacket up carefully and with some degree of magic finesse, I would often find myself with a jacket unzipping from the bottom on my way out the door.

I liked the jacket so much, though – and had nothing to replace it with – that I just put up with this problem and continued to wear the jacket year after year.

Until last Friday.

I found myself sitting on the on-ramp to Route 128 North in Burlington, MA faced with stop-and-go traffic all the way to Boston when I remembered that there’s an L.L. Bean store south of the highway in the Wayside Commons. I pulled off the highway to wait out the traffic and went jacket shopping.

I tried on a lot of jackets, including one, the Weather Challenger, that was very close to my old jacket, but I ultimately settled on the Bigelow model, a little less “outdoorsy” looking than my old jacket and with a better fit. And a much, much better zipper system.

Up at the cash register I noticed the “100% satisfaction” guarantee displayed prominently, and so I told the cashier the tale of my zipper. I was honest about my situation: I loved the jacket, had been wearing it for many years, and would have happily kept wearing the jacket should the zipper have worked. I showed her how the zipper unzipped itself. I told her that I wasn’t 100% satisfied, but I was certainly, say, 85% satisfied. I would have been happy if she’d knocked $25 off the cost of the new jacket.

But before I really knew what was happening, she’d accepted my old jacket as a “return,” looked up it’s original retail price, refunded me the entire amount, processed the sale of the new jacket, and handed me the new jacket along with a gift card for the difference owing me because the new jacket was less expensive and on sale.

So I walked out the door with a brand new jacket with a working zipper and an $86 gift card.

That is amazing customer service, a true implementation of “100% satisfaction,” and L.L. Bean deserves to be commended for standing behind its products and its guarantee.