Back in January, I wrote about the iTrip, and then later, in May, I wrote about problem with my iTrip order.

Well, I’ve had my iTrip for a couple of months now, and I’ve been generally impressed with it: it’s a compact, functional piece of technology with an ingenious design.

But I’ve also had problems: when the iTrip is plugged into my iPod, and I’m driving along in my car, and I hit a a bump, sometimes the iTrip goes wonky on me, and strange Star Trek-like sounds start coming out of my radio. Often I’ll go over another bump, and things will jar back to normal. From my laymen’s chair, it sounds like a loose contact inside the unit or something.

So I emailed Griffin Technology and got back the following reply:

What kind of 4 wheelin are you doing Peter? Road rally in the Rockies? Actually it sounds like you have a faulty iTrip. I will be glad to swap it out for you. Did you buy it form us directly? Tell me where you bought it and what your shipping address is and I will be glad to exchange the unit. Let me know and I will make it happen. For faster service you may want to give us a call as the e-mail thing can take a while to get to.

This reply has it all: humour, honesty, and good customer service, all rolled into one.

So today I called, as they suggested, and talked to another chap, explained my problem, and he agreed to do the swap. When he found out I was in Canada, he said it would cost me a lot to return the faulty unit, so told me to simply “destroy it in some creative fashion,” and send them a photo or QuickTime movie of the process.

A replacement iTrip is on the way.

So here’s another example of where “bad” customer service — a faulty product — can turn into amazing customer service — the kind of service that I will take 10 minutes out of my day to write about, tell all my friends about, etc.

So here’s my question: what’s the difference between Aliant, my personal quality purveyor of shitty customer service, and Griffin Technology? What does Griffin know that Aliant doesn’t? Where does Griffin get their good employees, and how do they encourage and allow them to be real, reasonable people? And how does Aliant capture employee souls and suck them out so effectively? I really want to know.

$2,000 budgeted for flashlights and batteries for the City Police. Coincidentally, the same amount is budgeted for ammunition. These are the things you can learn from the 2003 Annual Estimates - City of Charlottetown.

The wonderful thing about the City of Charlottetown’s budget is because municipal government is relatively small, and concentrates on solving practical problems, their budget documents can actually be understood and grasped by real people.

The numbers are large, but no so large as to be incomprehensible.

Note to concerned citizens: the City spent more in 2002 on the Smart Communities project (about $205,000) than it spent for heritage preservation (about $88,000).

A German blog has picked up my Weblogs.com Ping Cacher in PHP story (from the Reinvented Labs site).

When we named “Baby Male Miller” Oliver, we had people tell us that Oliver was “very big in Germany” as a baby name. I am simply following suit.

From my mother comes this suggestion:

• Go to Google.com
• Enter search term weapons of mass destruction
• Click the “I’m feeling lucky” button

CafePress has announced their new CafePress Publishing system. You create a book as a PDF, upload it to their server, and they print and bind copies of your book, on demand, for as little as $4/book plus 4.5 cents/page.

This means there’s no longer any entry barrier to print publishing: no start-up costs, no inventory, no publishers.

Will we take advantage of this?

Does anyone else find it disturbing that the City of Charlottetown, in its RFQ for Design/Development of Public Interface to Historical Information [PDF] says:

The web-based heritage application is to be built with Macromedia’s Spectra product, a ColdFusion-based web portal framework. Therefore, the web development vendor selected by the City must have formal training and/or project experience in both ColdFusion and Spectra.

This despite the fact that Macromedia announced, in May 2001, that they are discontinuing support for Spectra and converting to an open source product that has yet to be released?

Clearly the City, through Town Square, backed a dead horse of a product. They should cut their losses and proceed with the adoption of proven, tested, mature open source technology that doesn’t involve vendor lock-in.

The RFQ goes on to say:

During the development and implementation of the site, the vendor will be required to work in conjunction with Island Telecom’s Spectra team as they have the overall responsibility for the maintenance of Town Square2.

With the double whammy of a dead product, and having to deal with Island Telecom, I would sooner cut off my nose than have anything to do with this RFQ. As would any web developer worth their salt.

I fear the result of all of this is that the we citizens are going to be saddled with another ugly, non-functional colossus of a website.

This story about emergency brakes on subways from Dave Winer made me think of something that happened in grade seven.

Every morning on the public address system at Flamborough Centre Senior School they would announce student and teacher birthdays. To be announced, you either had to submit your own birthday, or somebody had to do it for you.

Don Searls sat at the back of Mrs. Keast’s class with Simon Coles and I. He was a tall kid, and looked a lot older than the rest of us. He might even have had a mustache.

Simon and I sensed a loophole in the morning birthday announcements: there didn’t appear to be any verification process in place to ensure that a birthday submitted by a third party was, in fact, the intended’s actual birthday.

So one fine morning Simon and I anonymously submitted a special “12th birthday” announcment for Don Searls. Now at the time, Don was probably 13 or 14, and this is an age where even being a year younger than everyone else was a social catostrophe. And it wasn’t even actually Don’s birthday.

The announcement got made, Simon and I shared a private laugh. Don Searls got angry, told the Vice-Principal it wasn’t his birthday. And from the next morning onwards, there were no more morning birthday announcments at Flamborough Centre Senior School.

Simon and I pulled the brake on the subway. The school shut down the subway in response.

Back when we were all crazy over noise, Ritchie Simpson asked the most important question of all:

I must ask the question of you Peter “Were it Fred Eaglesmith, amps at 11 in front of the masses, would you be so churlish?”

I’ve been thinking about this for a couple of weeks, and I’m afraid to admit that Ritchie’s got a point: if it were music I actually liked, I probably wouldn’t have minded the crazy noisefest.

As such, I think the rest of my arguments are either invalid, or at least severely compromised.

I am hypocritcal old fart who doesn’t understand those young kids and their rock and roll. Ignore me.

I followed up with Aliant technical support this afternoon regarding my DSL woes this weekend. I wanted to know why their remote reset of my DSL device didn’t fix the problem, and I had to enlist someone to actually physically unplug the device to get it working again.

The technician told me that although a remote reset and a physical power-reset are similar, there are some problems that can only be solved by a power-reset. He suggested that this is all a result of the DSL device “getting out of sync” due to “an electrical charge on the phone lines changing.”

I’m not really sure what that means.

In any case, if you’re in a situation where you need to rely on connectivity to your home base from a remote location, it looks like Aliant’s DSL service isn’t a good choice, because you will, as I have two or three times, find yourself 1,000 miles away from home with a technician instructing you to “just unplug it.”

I asked the technician what Aliant could offer me as an alternative, more robust solution, and he could only offer “a T1, but that would obviously be more expensive.”

It amazes me that we have had consumer Internet in one form or another on Prince Edward Island for almost 10 years, and we still don’t have a rock solid technical solution for static, permanent, low-bandwidth situations.

For the past 5 years I’ve been a devoted fan of the HylaFax system. HylaFax uses a computer’s fax/modem to send and receive faxes; it’s the UNIX equivalent of something like WinFax on a Windows machine, but far more powerful.

Here’s how I’ve put HylaFax to use:

The Enhanced Farm Weather Forecast Program faxes detailed local weather forecasts to farm clients across Prince Edward Island early every morning during the crop season. The program is now in its 6th year. The first year of operation, a Windows-based solution for faxing was developed in-house, and was extremely problematic. For the past five years, a Linux-based system we installed has used HylaFax, and has proved rock-solid. We send out about 15,000 faxes a year, and we’ve never had a problem.

From a technical perspective, here’s what happens: every morning Environment Canada emails 5 weather forecasts to the server, each in a separate email, with the forecast as a MIME attachment. The forecasts are parsed out of the email, and then each forecast is faxed out to a list of subscribers for that local area. We created a web-based system to allow the subscriber list to be managed, and the fax queue to be monitored.

At Yankee Publishing, we use HylaFax to fax out proofs and invoices from an internal web-based Classified Advertising system. When a new proof or invoice needs to be sent, the web system calls a HylaFax client running locally to talk to a HylaFax server on another system about 200 miles away which, in turns, sends out the fax. Again, this system has proved useful and reliable.

Finally, we use HylaFax internally to send and receive faxes for Reinvented Inc. When you fax something to (902) 892-1513, you’re actually talking to an old Motorola Voice/Fax modem in our basement which, in turn, hands off the fax to HylaFax. We then use a fax-to-email gateway to send a PDF of the fax to our corporate email address for viewing and, if required, printing. To send faxes (which we do only rarely), we print from whatever application to a PostScript file, transfer this file to the server, and use the HylaFax client to send manually (there are Windows-based clients that do this automatically through a Windows printer driver, but, so far, nothing analgous for Mac OS X).

Over three HylaFax installs, we’ve found that the single most important choice to make is the fax/modem to use. There’s a lot of information on the HylaFax website, including a voluminous mailing list that’s searcable, that can help with this selection; in all three cases we’ve set up, we’ve used very cheap, generic external fax/modems that have costs less than $75, and each has proved up to the task.

HylaFax is one of those nice pieces of software that, once you install it, just works, year after year, fax after fax.

Highly recommended.