Note to New Webloggers

Hi there new webloggers.

I’m speaking here of people like Rob, Cynthia, Matt and Nils.

I have a humble request for you from the blog intelligentsia: please stop using blogspot to host your blogs. Yes, it’s free, and easy. And free.

But it is also (a) ugly and (b) inflexible and (c) unlikely to be of much use to you as you want to expand the breadth of your blog and (d) doesn’t support the cool web standards like RSS and FOAF and Trackback that we in the blog intelligentsia obsess over.

My suggestion? Use TypePad. It suffers from none of the above, and while it’s not free, it’s only $4.95 a month for basic service, which is very, very cheap.

You will get a more beautiful, flexible, cool, standards-rich weblog, with lots of room for expansion. You’ll also be eligible for much better seating at the meetings of the weblogger elite.

There’s a free 30-day trial of TypePad from their website.

Disclaimer: I have no relationship with TypePad, other than a respect for their products. I don’t use TypePad myself, preferring to use a less-capable, theoretically more flexible homebrew system that I’ve grown addicted to. But people who I know and respect are big TypePad fans. Should the sarcasm be lost on anyone: there is no weblog intelligentsia.

Am I a real person?

In the continuing drive to understand more about the traffic to this website — who’s reading, how often, and where from — I’ve started to send out (and read back) a cookie called RealPerson. Because things like Google spiders, and other automated robots [probably] don’t support cookies, this will allow me to separate the wheat of real people from the chafe of the automated. The cookie is anonymous: it’s just a unique 13-digit number. Once I’ve developed enough of a log to draw some conclusions, I’ll post the results.

Runaway Jury

The movie Runaway Jury has an interesting, capable cast, and a clever, intriguing plot. The first act is well constructed, the second act is occasionally thrilling, and then

Aeroplan: have a dream? Too bad.

Aeroplan miles are generally considered, in my little circle, akin to gold. We may snicker at the lowly collectors of Club Z, Airmiles and Esso Extra points, but Aeroplan miles — that’s the real stuff.

I don’t believe my friend Don the Dentist has paid for an airline ticket in 10 years: he just puts the 45 gallon drums of dental amalgam on his Aerogold Visa, and, blamo, gets enough points to fly himself and his burgeoning family to Katmandu and back. Or at least to LA.

So after years of being a casual collector of Aeroplan miles here — 500 here, 500 there — I decided to jump in with both feet, bite the $150 bullet of the yearly card fee, and get Aerogolded. Of course my purchasing is limited, mostly to the occasional fountain pen ink cartridge and the odd floppy disk, so my accumulation isn’t anywhere near that of those that buy MRI’s and Jeep CJ’s on their card. But I’m clocking in about 2000 a month these days, and my lifetime, as-yet-to-be-redeemed Aeroplan mileage total is about to hit 100,000.

So you think I would excited to be entering a “world filled with an ever-expanding array of opportunities” (says Aeroplan).

But I am not.

Aeroplan reality, at least for my travel planning habits, is far less alluring than Aeroplan dreams.

Let’s say, for example, that Oliver and I want to go to New York City next week (a modest dream, but a dream nonetheless). We want to leave on Friday, and come back on Monday.

Well, first off, there are no Aeroplan seats available for a Friday-Monday trip. The best they can offer is a Tuesday departure and Friday return. Fair enough.

The Tuesday departure is reasonable: leave Charlottetown at 4:35 in the afternoon, arrive La Guardia, via Montreal, at ten minutes to nine that night.

But the Friday return leaves New York City at 7:50 a.m., flies to Ottawa for a 9:11 a.m. arrival. Then there’s a three hour wait in Ottawa for a noon flight to Halifax. Then one is forced to overnight in Halifax, returning to Charlottetown at 8:20 a.m. the next morning. That makes it a 24 hour trip from airport to airport.

The stuff that dreams are made of?

But perhaps my plans are too soon: maybe it’s unreasonable to dream so quickly? So I check for a Friday-Monday trip in January.

For a mid-January weekend in New York, Aeroplan’s availability would have us leaving Charlottetown at 7:40 p.m., arriving in Halifax shortly after 8:00 p.m. Then — sheesh! — overnighting in Halifax and leaving Halifax for Montreal the next day at 4:00 p.m.. Final arrival in New York City is ten minutes to seven. Making it another 24 hours journey.

And that’s not all: other routings, for other dates, have us landing at JFK and leaving from Westchester County Airport, which is 27 miles from New York City.

Obviously my dreams and Air Canada’s dreams a different.

Makes me realize why Aeroplan’s competitors are so intent on advertising their “fly any time on any flight” policies.

When Java fails, it fails with verbosity…

Here’s a screen shot of the CBC Prince Edward Island website at 5:00 p.m. today. In the place of exciting news, we are treated to an exciting 17 page (well, okay, it’s only one page) Java error message.

Screen Shot of CBC website showing horrible Java error

Far be it for me to, in my big glass house, throw stones at anyone for having their website show error messages. I simply wish to point out that Java error messages appear, at least to my completely Java-illiterate eyes to reveal absolutely everything but useful information about what went wrong.

I’m just off the phone with Mitch Cormier, the local web maestro, and he says the “web operations guys are on the case.” I hope they have a front end loader to help lift that error message from their brains.

This makes me wonder if what’s kept Java from being adopted by anyone other than weird space-alien like people is simply the fact that it’s so completely divorced from reality. In other words, has Java failed because it has bad error messages?

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