Unpredictable. Unfocused. Just like life.

I don't have a daughter, but if I did I'd certainly be using Mr. Yoest's Ten Simple Rules for Dating My Daughter.

Tip of the hat to Hugh at gapingvoid.

A few days ago I'd never heard of Jacquie Lawson. While we were visiting my parents' house over Christmas, my father showed me several Jacquie Lawson flash e-cards that friends had sent him for Christmas. He explained that they had paid $8 for a yearly membership to do so. In this age of everything free on the internet, I was intrigued that people would do that, but several certainly had.

alarm:clock has a bit more on Ms. Lawson.

Arif opened his copy of the latest Coldplay CD to find a note telling him what he couldn't do with the CD. In fact, there doesn't appear to be anything on the list that he CAN do.

The note even lists several devices (9 different classes actually) on which the CD might not play.

Let's not forget, this what record companies do to people who pay for their music.

Intel is changing the logo it has used for 37 years:

Intel Corp., whose marketing made its computer chips a household name, is changing its logo for the first time in 37 years.

The dropped ``e'' in Intel will be shed in favor of a swoop around the company's name with the tag line ``Leap Ahead.'' The ``Intel Inside'' phrase, a fixture since 1991, will be dropped, Santa Clara, California-based Intel said yesterday.

As the Business 2.0 Blog points out, Intel has the fifth most valuable brand in the world. "Intel Inside" was a well done and often imitated brand. I'm not sure why they would give that up for "Leap Ahead", which sounds so generic that it doesn't say anything at all to me.

Joel Spolsky, he of the definitive blog on software development, isn't happy at all with the state of Computer Science education these days. And his biggest complaint is aimed at schools that teach only Java:

Instead what I'd like to claim is that Java is not, generally, a hard enough programming language that it can be used to discriminate between great programmers and mediocre programmers. It may be a fine language to work in, but that's not today's topic. I would even go so far as to say that the fact that Java is not hard enough is a feature, not a bug, but it does have this one problem.

I was educated as an electrical engineer, and had only the most rudimentary of computer science courses, but before I went to university I worked for a while for a computer company writing software. This was before PCs, and I learned a fews different assembly languages, some proprietary languages, and C. What I did learn, I had to learn on the street, without formal training. I was fluent in binary, hexadecimal, octal, and powers of two. So university just built on that.

I always had a desire to know what was going on under the hood, so C was perfect for me. But there are times these days when Java fits the bill nicely, especially when I want to work on more than one platform. And sometimes other programming languages are the answer.

Joel may go overboard a bit, but he has an excellent point. If you don't the fundamentals, then you can't make the best choice of language or structure to use in a particular situation. Sometimes C is the right language to use.

After all, somebody who has only learned Java will be unable to make use of any new platforms that appear until someone else writes a Java Virtual Machine for it. They'll never know the joy of making hardware bend to their wishes by writing a device driver. And they'll never be able to squeeze every last drop of power and capacity from their machine.

Then again, it is nice now and then to have Java take care of everything for you. It would be nice to forget about buffer overruns for a while.

Jeff Jarvis points out two views of the same event; Jeremy Hermanns view from inside the Alaska Air flight that depressurized and was forced to land, and a news story about it.

The news story reports the event in a straightforward non-emotional fashion. Jeremy's account is very graphic and emotional and talks about his experience of the incident and how he feels about it. He even comments on the fact that the accident was caused by a non-union baggage handler:

The enraging fact is that a non-union baggage handler ran into the side of the plane moments prior to take-off … and that it was never reported.

There is a reason these two accounts are different. News is news. But Jeremy's account is news plus editorial. He gives us information as the news story does, but he goes further and adds opinion. He says the parents were confused, as fact that the news story can't include without the comments of a confused parent. He adds his feelings; for example we know he is pro-union.

Perhaps that is the difference between bloggers and journalists. Journalists may try to avoid bias yet fail to do so, but at least they tried. Bloggers are driven by their passion to report information, and their reports are colored by that passion. The difference is the passion that drives them.

Michael Geist highlights a poll on Canadian attitudes toward copyright sponsored by the Canadian Recording Industry Association (CRIA). The poll makes the following claims:

• 91 percent of Canadians believe that artists should be protected by copyright
• 55 percent view copyright as an election issue
• 68 percent want stronger copyright laws
• 32 percent would vote for a party pledging to establish stronger copyright laws (17 percent would not and it would not make a difference to 44 percent)

He makes excellent points about the questions they didn't ask. For example:

What percentage of Canadians would say that the law should protect consumers against the secret installation of copy protection programs that threaten the security on their computer? What percentage of Canadians would say they should be entitled to view a store-bought DVD in their homes regardless of where it is purchased? What percentage of Canadians would say that they should be entitled to make a copy of their CDs to listen to on their iPod?

The article doesn't explain the questions asked or the methodology so it isn't clear how those polled may have been prompted to give their answers. However, I would be very surprised if more that 10% of Canadians actually gave a thought about copyright, let alone consider it an election issue.

I'd bet that most people don't give copyright a thought until it keeps them from doing something they want to do. I was explaining the Broadcast Flag to my father, who said he agreed with that. I then explained that it meant that his very expensive new VCR would become useless and he would be unable to record a program the same way he always had. Suddenly he felt very differently.

Just before Warner Music went through their IPO, the band Linkin Park threatened legal action, ostensibly because they claimed that the company did not have the resources to promote them. Privately though, it seemed that the band just wanted a cut of the stock sale proceeds.

Now that Warner have offered a bunch more money and a higher royalty percentage, Linkin Park has re-signed with them:

Less than eight months after issuing a stinging, public vote of no-confidence in its record company, Warner Music Group, the multiplatinum rap-rock act Linkin Park has signed a lucrative new pact with the recording giant. The six-member Los Angeles band and its management company, the Firm, last week reached a deal with Warner calling for an estimated $15 million advance for the group's next album, executives involved in the contract negotiations said. The pact provides the company's Warner Brothers Records unit with an option for up to five more albums from the band, one more than had been called for in their original deal.

Warner also agreed to increase the musicians' royalty rate to an estimated 20 percent. The next Linkin Park CD, still untitled, is expected to be released as early as mid-2006.

It's hard to take these people seriously when it becomes obvious that their principles can be assuaged with more money. And it seems that contracts increasingly mean nothing. Linkin Park seems to not realize that they are just employees, albeit lucrative ones. They signed a contract that did not provide a share of any potential stock sale. That doesn't mean that they can just tear it up when they don't like the terms. Nor should sports stars, though they often seem to get away with it.

People constantly amaze me. The day after Christmas, my sons and I went to Starbucks and the bookstore. It was next to a big box electronics store, so we thought we would glance in and see what kind of sales they had.

The store was jammed with hundreds of people, so much so that we couldn't even be bothered looking around.

A day after the biggest gift giving day, people are still looking for more.

Why do we assume that because search tools can find occurrences of words on the web, that they can divine what we intended when we entered the term?

Seth Godin posits that search is hard, because when he did a Google image search for 1964, one of the images was Soaring magazine. He doesn't mention that it is a picture of the November 1964 issue of the magazine.

If I walk up to you, never having met you before, and say "1964" to you, what is the first thing you would think of? My brother was born in 1964, so that's the first thing I would think of, though you may think of something completely different. Now what are the first ten things you would think of? That's a pretty reasonable analogy of what you are asking of Google.

Now add into that the fact that Google has only the words on the page to work with. No understanding of what the pages mean, or relations between them. Google can only work with the content it has available to it, and the relative number of occurrences of that content. With that, Google does an admirable job of returning images about and related to 1964.

Search is easy. Given the term "1964", Google easily returns about 735,000 images. It may not return exactly what we are looking for, but that is a problem of understanding - the understanding of what we were looking for. It simply is not reasonable to assume that a single word search can discern what we want, when humans couldn't do it either.

Nik Cubrilovic knows what will happen once Microsoft Outlook integrates RSS - aggregator companies will fade into history:

The aggregator developers (all of them) are going to have to do something extra special in 2006 if they plan on surviving as stand-alone businesses. They have competition on two fronts, the open source tools (parsing RSS is not complicated) and then the big end of town giving away aggregation on top of existing tools and applications that have a respected and recognised market share.

As Nik notes, something else is going to happen too. Millions of Outlook users are suddenly going to start looking for RSS feeds, and the awareness of blogs is going to shoot up, which is a good thing.

The downside is that IT folks will suddenly be hit with higher bandwidth demands as everyone starts checking their feeds several times a day (shades of Pointcast from years gone by). And nervous executives will be concerned about productivity lost to blog reading. This will likely lead to the wholesale banning of RSS feeds in the office, a poor knee jerk response that will demonize blogs, and keep users from realizing the valuable range of information available to them.

Sadly. Microsoft making RSS feeds commonly available may be the event that casts blogs in a negative light for the corporate world.

Did MySpace actually block YouTube links and videos in their user pages?

Apart from the stupidity of offering people a place to call their own, and then limiting what they can actually do with it, this bodes poorly for the future of user generated content. Will social software providers start telling users just how social they can and can't be, and whose sites they can link to and whose they can't?

This also limits the value of any content created because it limits the creativity and freedom of that content. That might reflect badly on a company looking for investment.

Tip of the hat to Supr.c.ilio.us. Om Malik comments as well.

And a Happy New Year!

Pito Salas wonders if the preponderance of free software is bad for innovation:

Whatever the reason, I worry about the chilling effect this can have on innovation in our industry.

How many great new innovations have died on the vine because there was just no way for the creators to pay the rent while building the Next Big Thing? Even after a year, two years of development, the prospects for getting users to somehow compensate for the value delivered were small to none.

So just what great stuff aren't we seeing? Well we really have no way of knowing. But we are seeing a lot of pretty cool applications. While some developers may not be able to pay the rent, a lot more seem to be doing stuff just because they can, or because they see a problem to solve.

And these free projects have paid off in other ways - reputation enhancement and jobs for the creators in some cases. In some cases that is the business model for the free software. And some of these free products seem to have had no problem getting funded.

I've been working away for the past while on a blogging client, because I wasn't happy with what was available, and because I could. It will be free too. And for me, it's just a cool project.

Via David Weinberger.

Tim Harford, a Financial Times magazine columnist and a former World Bank official, thinks that people buy Starbucks coffee because they are commuters desperate for caffeine:

Rush-hour commuters are so desperate for caffeine, they're practically price-blind. And when every precious minute of the commute is at a premium, why waste any worrying about paying $4.50 for a grande cinnamon spice latte?

Now really, if every minute of the commute is at a premium, then why would they choose to get coffee at a place with no drive-through, where they have to get out of their vehicles and wait in a long line for a beverage that is comparatively slow to prepare? It would be much faster to go through the drive-through and Dunkin Donuts for a regular coffee.

He also thinks that the vast number of Starbucks locations is a sign that they are desperate:

They have same thing as everyone else. It's a sign of weakness. It depends on location; they don't trust you to go out of your way to buy their coffee. Starbucks has to pay for the location by renting or buying property. The people who are really profiting from the coffee are the property owners. The location is scarce. If you've got the best location, that can't be duplicated. That's where the money is.

Starbucks is focused on customer service. When a location becomes inundated, they open a new location. And people come to Starbucks in droves. Perhaps Starbucks proves that location isn't always important.

Via Starbucks Gossip.

I can't believe that my Christmas shopping is all done. Usually I'm shopping on Christmas Eve.

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Ok, not all books. But there is no point to printing a book about technology.

When I started writing Java code again, I briefly considered buying one of the myriad books available, and was looking at one for about $70. As I started writing the code I used Google to find information, and I realized that the book would be a complete waste of money. Even the most expensive books still seem to leave out the stuff I most want to know.

Not only was it a pain to carry around, but no matter how recently it had been published, it was already obsolete. There were several rows of books about technology, most of which are poorer that I can find through a single search online.

While a book on philosophy might be perfectly reasonable, there will be no more books on Java for me.

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The head lemur is not Googling happily today, and he explains why:

It is not just this morning. I have found that Google is no longer the best search engine in terms of relevance for basic information, but has turned into the Internet Shopping Channel. Look for motherboard drivers and you will get results for forums and bulletin boards that mention the object of your search, that usually show the same question that you are asking, then usually require registration to see any answers, (like you really need to join yet another pointless forum site whose information makes Wikipedea look like holy writ) whose utility is questionable at the best of times, but do have the advantage of being a site having wait for it, AdSense which is the other half of the Google unique selling proposition and the major income source for them.

Living in Canada, in the town where RIM is based, there is only one view or the RIM versus NTP battle. NTP is a greedy patent troll who doesn't deserve a thing because they never created anything. And RIM is a wonderful company that created great technology that helps everyone. There is simply no sense of balance.

That's why it is such a pleasure to read comments by Dan Taylor, or the Mobile Enterprise Alliance. Dan has very reasonable in trying to explain both sides of the situation, though he notes that he is increasingly receiving hate mail from Canada as a result:

Lately, and with increasing frequency, I've been getting my fair share of hate mail from Canada. From the appearance of this mail, there are a number of Canadians who see this potential injunction against RIM as an American corporate conspiracy against a successful Canadian enterprise.

This is especially ironic given the fact that RIM's entire astroturf communications campaign against NTP has been based on the critique that NTP is too small to deserve a patent. The public logic of RIM's supporters is that - since NTP never itself commercialized its patents - then those very patents shouldn't be enforceable.

NTP may be a company of lawyers, but they are protecting intellectual property that belonged to one of their founders, the inventor of that property. The patents were granted in the early 1990s, before the patent system exploded with software patents. The amount they are seeking may be questionable, but they have passed every legal hurdle, while RIM has lost every appeal.

RIM is a Canadian success story, and it is to be expected that Canadians would be protective of them. But they have their own intellectual property which they guard ruthlessly. Jim Balsillie's argument that RIM invented the BlackBerry independent of the NTP patents is immaterial. RIM is still responsible for action when notified by the parent holder of a potential infringement, though they have fought it every step of the way.

Those that live by the patent system also die by it. This is no conspiracy. Dan Taylor does an excellent job of explaining the real issues behind the case, without the hype.

According to Boing Boing, if you want to print a color file from your disk at Staples, be prepared to pay their $2.49 per file virus scanning fee.

Since it obviously doesn't cost anywhere near $2.49 to virus scan a file, the best plan might be to avoid this ripoff and go somewhere else to print the file. Or if you have a few pages, just but yourself a cheap color printer. You'll probably spend less.

Alice Marshall comments on Tracy Kidder's Soul of a New Machine:

It tells the story of how Data General brought a new computer to market. Written in the days before the PC, to story of writing software must have seemed an unlikely subject for the general public. But readers were fascinated.

There is a lesson there are about the appeal of enterprise computing stories for publications that would heed it.

I read the book when it first came out, and I think that beyond the enterprise computing story, the real interest came from a human story of competing to be the first and the best, somethat that transcends the particular technology involved.

I've heard a lot of marketers say this, and Robert mentions it as well:

I love these strange customers! They are standing in line to fork over $400.

No customer is standing in line to give you money. They are standing in line to get something that they value, for which they will pay.

As a customer, I'd rather have you think of me as someone you want to impress, rather that just a wallet.

Seth Godin comments on squidoo:

Last month, after months of working on it, my team launched squidoo, a web 2.0 innovation that we're very proud of.

How exactly is squidoo a "web 2.0 innovation"? It looks like About.com 10 years later. About had channels; squidoo has lenses. About had guides, squidoo has lensmasters.

I worked with About.com when it was still the Mining Company. The idea was to create communities of interest where the guides would get a piece of the ad revenue they generated. So where is the innovation?

Of course, squidoo does have tags.

An interesting discussion at Marketing Begins at Home:

Son - “Daddy, can we see The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe again?”

Me - “We can wait until the DVD comes out.”

Son - “When will that be?”

Me - “In a few months.”

Son - “Why?”

When my kids were young and we took them to see a movie, they almost always wanted to see it again. If a DVD was available at the time, there would probably be a better that 75% chance that we would buy it on the spot, and probably at an undiscounted price. Now that might cannibalize theater showings a bit, but many parents like myself would just wait until the video showed up in stores.

When the movie showed up at Blockbuster, even if we'd seen it, we'd probably rent it again. Then a couple of months later, if it was a really good movie, we would buy a previously viewed copy. If we just decided to buy the DVD when it was released, we would buy a copy at a discounted sale price. Meanwhile, the studio has paid for two marketing campaigns - one for the movie and one for the home DVD - a mere two months apart.

Why wouldn't they just want to take more of my money when I was willing to spend it?

Om Malik asks how much bandwidth do we really need:

Can your eyes tell the difference between a web-page loading in one second or 0.27 seconds. I guess not. If you can download a music file in 1.08 seconds, does that really mean you will be buying music all the time. No you perhaps will be buying better quality, and perhaps marginally more music. There is the other option, but its just easier to pay! Sure at 30 Mbps you can download DVD quality The Bourne Identity in 11 minutes, but its still going to take you 2 hours to watch it. These are analog questions in an increasingly digital world.

I'm running at about 8 Mbps and I rarely notice a delay in downloading. It is typically a problem in DNS resolution or overloading at the source site that cause me a problem. After all, the fact that the last mile (or thereabouts) runs at 8 Mbps means nothing when the speed from source to destination is wholly dependent on the weakest link. If the site at the other end is connected at 512 Kbps I'm still going to waiting no matter how fast my connection is.

Robert Scoble thinks that the need for bandwidth will be driven by HDTV:

If you want one of the new IPTV boxes that’ll deliver four simultaneous channels of video to your house you’ll need a 30mbps line. The problem is that the first systems will be setup in 2006, but it’ll probably be years before even a decent percentage of people have IPTV ability in the home.

I already have 300 or 400 simultaneous channels of video to my house. I have cable in a system that is designed to do that. Just because you can do something doesn't you should. We already have a couple of systems - satellite and cable - that move multiple streams of video to my house. They aren't interactive, and they aren't internet-enabled. But I'm willing to be that for 90% of the population that will be more than enough for some time to come.

We seem to be stuck in the paradigm of having to get the file (download it) before we can use it (i.e. watch the video). But to be usable, the download just needs to stay ahead of where I'm viewing. After all, we still view video in real time. It's the same way that we watch TV. The movie is essentially streamed to us, which is why we can't fast forward current TV. Even TiVo records in real time.

Om's chart shows that even at 6 Mbps I can download a DVD quality movie in less than one hour, approximately half the length of the movie. Which means that even four HDTV streams over IP would be able to stay ahead of where I'm watching.

Now if Robert wants to grab four movies to take with him for at trip I can see the desire for 30 Mbps, because even then it will take the better part of an hour. But for the segment of people that want to watch IPTV, better streaming tools are probably a pretty good solution. Of course for Robert to see any benefit, the site he is watching will need to be running at 30 Mbps just to service him, and every link from source to destination has to be providing the same flawless low latency bandwidth.

It's easy to provide more bandwidth at the edge of the network. It's a lot harder to guarantee that quality of service along the entire path.

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A radio station I was listening to today was talking about a site called futureme.org, that promises if you create a message they will email it to you some time in the future. The announcer mentioned that they suggest you set it for 30 years in the future.

Now the internet is just slightly older than 30 years itself, and email has only been common for about 10 years. What is the likelihood that you would have the same email address in 30 years? In fact, will email as we know it even exist in 30 years? Will we look back on that archaic email address and laugh?

At any rate, the site claims to have been around since 2002, and boasts only 138149 letters written, so people aren't rushing to email themselves in the future. The real value may be reading the public entries and seeing what people actually send to their future selves.

Microsoft is killing off Internet Explorer for the Mac:

In accordance with published support lifecycle policies, Microsoft will end support for Internet Explorer for Mac on December 31st, 2005, and will provide no further security or performance updates.

Additionally, as of January 31st, 2006, Internet Explorer for the Mac will no longer be available for download from Mactopia. It is recommended that Macintosh users migrate to more recent web browsing technologies such as Apple's Safari.

Ok, it doesn't really bother me that much, since I'm more than happy with Firefox and Safari. Honestly, I didn't even realized IE for the Mac still existed.

Yesterday while I was working my Mac started acting funny. There were duplicate items in the Apple Menu, and a black rectangle began appearing somewhat randomly on the current window. I looked at the tasks that were running, noticed a strange one, and Googled it.

It seems that I had accidentally turned on a feature called VoiceOver, an accessibility tool that reads aloud dialog boxes and explains what icons are for. A really neat feature, and one that was easy to turn off once I knew what it was. Everything is back to normal now.

I just realized that since I switched to the Mac a month ago I've been using my own blogging client exclusively to post, as I have no other posting tools installed on the machine. Of course that means that when you've broken the build you don't get to post.

Of course the fact that I am posting now means everything is copacetic again.

I call it a watershed. Some people call it an a-ha moment.

When you're working on something, eventually you come to the point where you just get it. Where suddenly everything is working, and you can't put it down. You want to do more and more of it, and you just can't get enough.

A product I've been working on hit that point a couple of days ago. Things are just flowing, and I can't add features fast enough. I have to force myself to close the computer and go to sleep.

This is when you know you're really having fun.

Heather's comments about spell-checking your resume brings to mind something a friend of mine used to say:

I've never seen a resume yet where spelling didn't count.

And while I'm on the topic, missing years on the resume and not knowing the year in which you graduated from college have always been big red flags for me.

I've just realized that moving my blog and updating the software has caused all previous links to break, which was clearly an unintended consequence. The former archive links were based on post numbers. They are now text, and won't break again.

So if you were gracious enough to link to me before Tuesday, September 13, 2005, you may find a broken link when you come to my page, but rest assured that the post is still there.

Sorry for any inconvenience.

Andrea Learned points out something so few people understand - the fact that people will be more comfortable with your product if it speaks to them in language and terms they understand, rather that language and terms you understand. She uses and example from Intuit:

One particular section of Tischler's article on the design of Intuit's Simple Start accounting software struck me, because it started with this sentence: "The designers followed more customers home." Among other things, what the designers changed after they did this, included: "Terms such as 'aging reports' and 'invoicing' were edited out, and the designers drew on the experience of the SnapTax division, which had hired an editor from People magazine! [Andrea's emphasis here, not Tischler's] to help translate accountant-speak into real world language. Accounts receivable became 'Money In' and accounts payable, 'Money Out.'"

People versed in solution selling would call this situational fluency, but it's easier to call it empathy. If we talk to people in their own language they will be more comfortable, and able to hear and understand more of what we say.

I've done this all of my life. When I was younger I would explain to my mom, who wasn't computer literate then, what I was doing. Now I do it for my wife. She in turn translates her adventures at her daycare center from complex sociology and psychology into terms I can understand.

Yet software companies are particularly bad at this, not only in the product itself, but especially when writing the copy for their marketing literature. What would you rather see?

Improves the efficiency of your cheque reconciliation process.

Balances your checkbook faster.

Michael Geist dissects a letter from a Canadian member of Parliament on the subject of copyright reform, and finds that the government views the problem as an imbalance:

Bulte frames copyright reform as seeking to address an imbalance - in her view, insufficient protection for creators - with the solution that they obtain greater protection, while users obtain access to new business models based on technological protection measures (TPM).

But he notes that content creators don't seem to agree that this is the problem, based on their current response to TPM:

Moreover, Bulte' s vision of what creators want is at odds with the creators themselves. If artists are so anxious for these technologies, why are they now apologizing to their fans for their label' s use of copy-controls? Why did they start replacing store-bought CDs even before the rootkit story broke? Why is Sony rushing to replace the products of a new business model that just happen to pose a privacy and security risk?

It seems that the government view is really about protecting one particular group who benefit from TPM - the record companies:

Of course, there is one group that wants to use such protections to effectively create a wedge between creators and users. That group, whose multinational members are only responsible for ten percent of Canadian releases each year, is the same one that coined the phrase "products of the mind", which Bulte chose to emphasize in her letter.

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My blogging client is coming along quite well, but today one of the folks testing it had a problem posting. Fortunately I was testing an automated image upload at the time and I happened to try posting an image to Blogger, using the standard <img> tag.

Lo and behold, that seems to fail - every time. The Blogger Atom API will not accept an image, and fails consistently with an IO exception. Of course like much of the Blogger Atom API, this too is undocumented.

I'm not sure how we plan to build a better web when the components we are using are poorly documented, and yield unexpected results.

Working on a blogging client, I've been able to watch the inner workings of posting and pinging and I frequently receive a failure response from Technorati when I ping after posting. The response looks like this:

Technorati ping failed: You just sent a ping, please only ping when you update

I'm not updating frequently, and I only ping when I post, so why is it that Technorati fails to accept a ping so often? How many pings are they actually missing, and how does that affect the accuracy of the service?

When you're looking for work the world is like a ghost town with tumbleweeds rolling down the street. When you aren't suddenly people are pounding down your door.

As it was getting close to Christmas I decided to take a break and just work on some software I'm writing. But suddenly people are calling me and opportunities are popping up left and right. I'm busier that I was when I was working.

Ironic, isn't it?

My local paper, The Record, which normally hides itself behind a pay firewall, has jumped into the world of blogging with an Election 2006 blog covering the ongoing Canadian federal election. And even though the page doesn't advertise it, it's a Typepad blog so it provides RSS and Atom feeds.

Matt Walcoff is the reporter doing the posting and, as an American, he has an interesting take on the campaign:

Perhaps the most-surprising thing about the election campaign so far to me is how easy it would be to ignore it.

Unless you read the papers or watch the news closely, you easily could have missed Stephen Harper's two trips to Waterloo Region over the past two weeks. On Friday, Harper visited Cambridge MP Gary Goodyear's campaign office. On Dec. 1, Harper spoke at RIM Park in Waterloo. Even when the prime minister visited Eastwood Collegiate in Kitchener six weeks ago, it hardly interrupted our daily lives.

In the U.S., a presidential campaign stop in a small town is something people remember for decades. When Al Gore visited Warren, Ohio during the 2000 presidential campaign, a local resident would have had to have been dead not to be aware of it. Highways closed for the vice-presidential motorcade. Waving fans lined the streets. Secret Service snipers occupied rooftops. When Gore finally arrived at Courthouse Square for his speech, he was greeted by a crowd estimated at up to 30,000. (Only 300 people showed up for Harper's Waterloo speech.)

Indeed, Canadian leaders do not seem to have the same stature as American leaders. I went to see Stephen Harper speak at that RIM Park stop. I went at the last minute, and didn't even have a problem finding a parking spot. It wasn't overly crowded. I've seen a Mayors' debate draw a bigger crowd. I've even bumped into former Reform Party leader Preston Manning in an airport restroom. These people just seem like average folks.

Yet I've met Jesse Jackson, merely a presidential contender, in an airport and he drew a huge crowd around him. And I've throngs of people around the White House just to catch a glimpse of President Clinton.

It seems that politics, politicians, and the mechanics of government just aren't that important to the average Canadian. Perhaps that's why they seem to run off the rails more frequently in Canada. Not only does Canada lack the checks and balances of the US; it also seems to lack a strong watchful public eye.

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It's bad enough that you can't say the name of the holiday that we all get vacation days for in the month of December, but Kathy Shaidle notes that Queen's University in Canada is now recognizing imaginary holidays [pdf]:

Festivus is a new celebration, created in 1966 and popularized on a Seinfeld comedy
episode in 1997. It seems to be growing in popularity as a simple, secular, seasonal day of
celebration.

I've finally switched around my domains so that Techorati now gets my pings properly. I've also upgraded to the newest Movable Type software and cleaned up by blogs at the same time. Hopefully now everything will work fine and look pretty too.

The hot news today is that HarperCollins is going to start digitizing 20,000 books from their catalog and make them available to all search engines. I've said it before, and I'll say it again - aren't these things in digital form already?

Surely these books existed in a word processor at some time in their lives. They weren't manually typeset. So why do they have to be "digitized"?

Is it realistic to agree to set tougher targets for the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions when most countries that signed on to the Kyoto Accord have missed their current targets, with emissions that are actually increasing?

Even Patrick Moore, a founding member of Greenpeace, disagrees with Kyoto:

Moore noted that many of the industrialized nations that ratified the treaty limiting greenhouse gas emissions are now failing to comply with those emission limits. Moore, who currently heads the Canadian-based environmental advocacy group Greenspirit Strategies helped found both Greenpeace in 1971 and Greenpeace International in 1979.

"Canada signed [Kyoto] and said, 'Oh yeah, we can do that,' and then it merrily goes on its way to increase CO2 (carbon dioxide) emissions by even more than the U.S.," Moore told Cybercast News Service.

[...]

"I think this whole Kyoto process is a colossal waste of time and money," said Moore, who rejects alarmist predictions of human-caused 'global warming."

Technology Review reports that Microsoft has released a tool that helps to put important email at the top of your inbox so you don't miss anything:

Microsoft Research released one such program on November 30. The free download is called SNARF, for Social Network and Relationship Finder. It runs alongside Microsoft Outlook (2002 and newer versions), poring through e-mail histories and following chains of communications to ferret out the unread messages it deems most important.

SNARF measures a sender's importance based on two key factors: the number and frequency of messages sent and received. The program then sorts unread e-mails into three fields: messages where the user is listed in the To or CC fields, group e-mails, and all messages received in the last week. SNARF lists messages by senders, rather than subject lines, and puts a user's most important correspondents on top.

Ah but the fact that I correspond frequently and profusely with someone - my manager for example - doesn't mean that all messages from that person are important. In fact it may be that one single time sensitiive message from someone I don't correspond often is far more important. Or the single message from the CEO, who may never correspond with me, but certainly expects me to read this one.

Beyond mere assumptions, which are admittedly useful, such software should also allow me to define broad classes of people or subject matter that is extremely critical to me. Rules aren't enough for this because I am currently forced to define a separate rule for every item of interest. Perhaps there could be class rules for people (i.e. customers) or subject matter (i.e time-sensitive patent filings) that are important to me. Combined with automated tools this would really help me organize my inbox. This would also allow corporations to prioritize their internal email for their users.

Technorati: email

del.icio.us: email

Scott Reid, director of communications for the Canada's Prime Minister Paul Martin, actually said that parents can't be trusted to make child care decisions:

Scott Reid, Prime Minister Paul Martin's director of communications, says there's nothing in the Harper plan to make sure that cash allowances intended to pay for day care would actually be spent for that purpose.

Reid says parents could take the cash windfall and spend it on anything they want -- including beer and popcorn.

Apparently only the government can be trusted to spend your money.

Nicholas Carr quoted a line from the new Business Week:

"For today's wired youth, there is no distinction between virtual and physical reality."

My kids are pretty wired, but when it comes to girlfriends and parties, they're pretty quick to choose the physical reality.