A reader, Heather, writing from Orilla, writes the following:

I would like to know when the “Blizzard” was introduced to Canada.

To which I replied:

Do you mean the tasty Dairy Queen ice cream treat, or the snowy conflagration?

To which she replied:

By “Blizzard” I meant the tasty Dairy Queen treat. The snowy conflagration was around long before Dairy Queen, I believe.

A quick call to Dairy Queen Canada in Burlington reveals the answer: the Blizzard was introduced to Canada in the spring of 1985.

Nutritional sidenote: a medium chocolate chip cookie dough Blizzard, according to this Dairy Queen chart, contains 950 calories, and 36 grams of fat. This might explain why when, in the midst of my gallbladder winter, having a Blizzard almost killed me. Another nutrional factoid: the Crispy Chicken Salad, which some might look to as a “healthy alternative,” contains 700 calories, and 51 grams of fat. Contrast this to the Grilled Chicken Salad, which has only 230 calories and 9 grams of fat. It’s all in the details.

JetsGo has positioned themselves as a “discount” airline. But I’ve found, in the two times I’ve flown with them, that their service is better, faster, friendlier than Air Canada’s.

In light of that, here’s an interesting comment from my travel agent:

It seems that everyone is finding Jetsgo better than AC, their fares most of the remainder of the summer seem to be higher than AC and they are still getting the bookings. Hope the momentum carries them through the winter!

JetsGo’s genius, then, is having the perception of being cheaper with the reality of being better. Air Canada can’t compete with that: they have the perception of being more expensive with the reality of offering poorer service.

First there was Viva’s, then the Formosa, and most recently Interlude.

Now comes Out of Africa, a new restaurant about to open on University Avenue across the street from the Dairy Queen, next to QuickDraw signs. They advertise “African” cuisine.

We’re becoming a multi-ethnic food paradise here!

Stay tuned for opening news.

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.