You may have noticed a rather sudden dearth of reader comments in this space of late, presumably resulting from a decision I made about a week ago to restrict comments to “registered” readers only (registration is free and relatively painless, but still a barrier).

I put up this reg-wall simply to deal with a flood of comment spam that regular mechanisms in place to prevent it – the reCAPTCHA and the Akismet – were no longer sufficiently capable of holding back. It seems that dedicated “fleece blanket” and UGG boots sellers are willing to pay people to make somewhat-reasonable-looking comments – “Great post… I too am interested in Tim Horton Donuts nutritional information” – and jump through the reCAPTCHA. Matt Haughey has more on this phenomenon; it’s annoying and something that I imagine someone is hard at work building tools to try to help combat as I write.

Feel free to register to post comments until I come up with either the energy to spent 10 minutes every day doing battle with the fleece blanketeers or to implement another defensive system (What about peiCAPTCHA? Commenters have to ask a question the answer to which only Prince Edward Islanders would know – What did Boomer wear on last night’s Compass? or If you drove up east to go to the beach would you be more likely to run into Leo Cheverie or Leo Broderick?).

In the meantime, thanks for your patience.

Early in February during our trip to Halifax for the weekend, I stopped in at Chairs Limited in Dartmouth, a local independent maker of office chairs.  I liked their products and approach so much that when we got back home I immediately placed an order for a “Dolphin Series Tilter Chair.”  It arrived today.

I’ve got 30 days to try it out to ensure it’s the right chair; as soon as I’ve had some solid working time in it, I’ll report back as to how it’s working out.

Regular readers will recall my distaste for investing in the stock market, something that has left me, for as long as I’ve been an RRSP contributor, earning around 1% interest in deposit receipts at our local credit union.

This has meant, in part, that our yearly trek to the credit union – usually on the last possible day to make contributions for the year – has involved some apologetic sidestepping when the friendly credit union staff bring out the “investment vehicle” brochures and start talking about index-linked mutual funds and the like. “Oh, we’ll just keep it in a deposit receipt for now and think about it later.” 

It seems that this combination of amateur ideology and procrastination has finally come around to being in vogue: at last night’s annual credit union visit our friendly staff-person as much as suggested that credit union deposit receipts were as good as any alternative, at least for the time-being. It wasn’t a ringing endorsement of my philosophy – the S&P-linked index fund brochure was still on offer – but it’s close as perhaps we’ll ever come to being “normal.”

As such I was happy to read the following in a recent New Yorker profile of economist Paul Krugman:

The crisis should have been a lesson to people not to rush into investments that they didn’t understand, but Krugman suspects that it wasn’t. “It hasn’t been the searing experience,” he says. “A lot of people got burned, but I’m not sure that they’ll remember. You really have to have a Depression mentality to say, ‘I’d rather have cash or Treasury bills that yield almost nothing, rather than this product that my banker assures me is perfectly safe and yields two per cent.’ So, unless there’s a lot more regulation, we could do this again.”

Which, I think, means that I have a “Depression mentality.” Which is not such a bad mentality to have, all things considered.

There is no more brave an act, in the world of e-commerce and design, than agreeing to try to use your own website. With the camera rolling.

And that’s just what Bruce MacNaughton agreed to do on Tuesday morning: to, as they say, eat his own dogfood, and walk me through the process of placing an order on the Prince Edward Island Preserve Company website (spoiler alert: it didn’t all exactly work as planned).

While usability testing by regular everyday people is a useful part of every web project, trying to use your own website is also a useful exercise, and something that we all forget about much too often.

We went through this exercise not to rip the website apart, but rather to see how it looked like from “the other side” and to try to develop a set of eyes that would allow future developments to incorporate that view.

Bruce deserves a lot of credit for agreeing to go through this, and for not blanching at the prospect of publishing the experience for the world to see.

Note to future video producers: make sure your subject doesn’t leave his credit card on camera (hence the “redacted” smudge over the video for a few minutes midway through).

Here’s a nice historical photo of the Port of Charlottetown my friend G. found in a pictorial book from 1984. The photo was taken after Harbourside was constructed, but before the Delta Prince Edward hotel, and well before the oil tanks were replaced by Confederation Landing Park.  When we arrived in Charlottetown in the winter of 1993, the port looked more like this than how it looks today; there’s no arguing that there’s been a dramatic improvement in this area over the last 17 years.

Here’s a contemporary photo for comparison (thanks to Dale for sending this along, and to the City of Charlottetown for permission to use it here):

Charlottetown Vision Centre has a nifty new gizmo that takes high-resolution photos of patients’ eyes.  It costs $18 to have done, but that’s a small price to pay for a photo that, in essence, “looks the other way” at the eye.  Indeed, trying to think about the fact that the eyes in the photos are the eyes that are looking at the photos is hurting my brain.

My Left Eye

My Right Eye

If you’re at all interested in customer service, new media, body image, or just simple humanity, you owe it to yourself to listen to SModcast #106. Especially if you’ve only followed the “Southwest Airlines affair” from stories like this. If you have delicate sensibilities you will likely be horrified by the experience, but bear with it, as the underlying ideas are profound. Although far less entertaining, Southwest Airlines’ part of the conversation is also a worthy read.

Regular readers will recall a series of photos taken at the annual New Year’s Day Levee with Pat Binns, then-Premier of Prince Edward Island. Well, the tradition continues: I received my photo with now-Premier Robert Ghiz in the mail last week (another miracle of Prince Edward Island-ness: I never gave anyone my mailing address – they just figure it out somehow).  Here it is, with photos of me and Pat Binns below for comparison. 

I think you’ll agree that, although it was completely be accident, I scored a colour-coordination win this year. Notice as well that every year I seem to be getting a little closer to the Premier in the photo (in 2004 I appear not to notice that he’s standing beside me).

2010

2006

2005

2004

Esse quam videri means “to be, rather than to seem to be” and that’s how Bruce MacNaughton started off this week’s “Conversations with Bruce” taping.

With a somewhat distracting Michael Buble album playing in the background at Casa Mia Café, this weeks conversation was more wide-ranging than in previous weeks, but we circled around the same general subject matter: what’s the best way to engage the Prince Edward Island Preserve Company community in the digital realm.

Our conversation starts off with a drawn-out question from me prompted by an advertisement for Dauphin Kaffee in a recent issue of Monocle.  The ad led readers to this landing page to register (or perhaps “apply”) for a free sample of their high-grade coffee. I was intrigued by the notion of replacing “everyone in the world” as a potential audience with “only a select few” and using the filter of “having visited the Preserve Company in New Glasgow” as a filter.

From there we jumped off to conversations about shipping rates, strawberry supplies, webcams on farms, the scenery in New Glasgow, an email from Sue in Australia, and “social media.”

Apologies for overuse of the word engage, the annoying buzz that kicks in at 03:30 (it was a cooler across from us, I think). And apologies to Bruce for using the goofy hands-at-ears thumbnail for the video, but I couldn’t resist.

Last week I accidentally set up our phone system here at Reinvented HQ up in a way that has accidentally worked out quite well.

We have a main business number that’s a regular old analog telephone line. It’s listed in the phone book, and is the main point of contact for our business. As a result, I get a combination of distracting “can I speak to the person responsible for your telecommunications services” spam calls, calls reminding me of physiotherapy appointments, and calls reminding me to come home for dinner … the kinds of calls I can either safely ignore, or at least get back to later.

We also have another number that I set up a few years ago for the convenience of our colleagues at Yankee Publishing. This line, which is a virtual VOIP line, is a local number in Dublin, New Hampshire.

My “accidental” configuration change was to shunt all calls to the main business number to voicemail, but to route all calls to our New Hampshire number directly to the phone on my desk.

The result: much less distraction from the background noise of everyday regular telephone communication, but instant access for our client when they need to talk to me.

It’s working out quite well.