Unpredictable. Unfocused. Just like life.

Somebody at Microsoft seems to be bent on coming up with more ways to frustrate users, including this plan to charge users $1.50 to download the Office 2007 beta:

"Since the end of May, Beta 2 has been downloaded more than 3 million times...That's 500 percent more than what was expected," the spokeswoman said. "The fee helps offset the cost of downloading from the servers."

So because people are stupid enough to download the software and test it, Microsoft is planning on recouping a measly $1.50 from each user.

I'm doing my part to help out by not downloading Office, and running OpenOffice instead. That also cuts down on Microsoft support requirements. I'm trying to do my part by using less Microsoft software, so that I won't be contributing to their problem of too many users.

Tip of the hat to MasterMaq.

I spent the day telling Rick that his problems could be solved by getting a Mac. He generally replied with increasingly vocal negativity along the lines of sticking my Mac somewhere.

So it was perfect timing to read how you can emulate the security of the ever forthcoming Windows Vista using an Intel Mac:

More than a few analyst have made the connection between Vista's UAC and the long-available security and rights model used by the Mac OS X (and Unix and Linux). On the Mac, for example, you're always running as a limited user, but at times -- like when you're installing software -- you have to provide an administrator username and password.

If Vista's UAC is a copy of Mac OS X's approach, why not stare in the horse's mouth.

It means a new computer -- and Apple's Intel-based Mac minis, iMacs, MacBooks, and MacBook Pros are not cheap, no matter what Apple's fans say -- as well as another licensed copy of Windows XP and some virtualization software, but it could be the best of both worlds.

If what you want out of Vista is its enhanced security, then you don't really have to wait any longer.

I've been in Los Angeles for week finishing up a product for a pretty serious customer - the kind of company that can really put a startup on the map. I can't talk about it yet, but it is pretty cool.

It's one of Rick Segal's portfolio companies, so I've had the pleasure of seeing Rick's happy (and occasionally not so happy) face across the desk from me for about the past eight hours. Rick's a guy that takes the customer very seriously, and he let me know pretty clearly yet politely when I wasn't keeping the best interests of the customer at heart. I'm pretty careful, but he caught me a few times. So I figure if Rick says it's good enough to ship, then he's comfortable with customer perception of the product.

Inserting sanity into the mix was Wendell Hicken, who is about the most serious guy I know when it comes to music, and someone who can still display an amazing sense of humor after eight hours of testing and bug fixing. He really does need to blog more though.

The verdict? Ship it.

We decided that it was good enough to go to the customer for this pass. And good enough that I'll be stretched out on the beach tomorrow.

I've eschewed Starbucks this week in favor of a little place called Bean Town in Sierra Madre, California, right at the foot of the mountains. It's a local hangout, as eclectic as you can possibly imagine, where people are as friendly as can be. Furniture consists of a few old kitchen tables and couches indoors, and a few tables outside. The typical denizens are either chatting, reading, or absorbed in their laptops - predominantly Apple and it suits the place. And both the coffee and the wifi are excellent.

So I'm sitting there right now on a Friday night, and a band is playing in the corner, tables pushed aside to accomodate a small stage that hosts a folksy/bluesy quintet. A night's entertainment for the price of a cup of very good coffee. And while it would be nicer if my lovely wife was sitting here beside me, it still is a pretty nice place to spend and evening. Or a few evenings.

It's funny, but I ended up in Sierra Madre by accident the first time so long ago. So I guess it's accurate to say that you don't find Sierra Madre, it finds you.

Interviewed by USA Today, John Chambers provided his view on Net Neutrality:

Q: What about the argument that we'd wind up with a two-tiered Internet and start-ups won't have the same ability to reach consumers as wealthy companies such as Google?

A: I wouldn't expect companies to pay for high-speed access — consumers will. If I want to watch a ballgame from multiple angles and perhaps telepresence across the country with my brother ... to expect that free of charge is not realistic.

Note that he doesn't actually answer the question.He throws up an example of a different kind of service - something not currently available - and says that you can't expect that for free. But that isn't what the discussion is really about. It is really about access to a choice of any kind of service, like search for example. And that's exactly what people like Ed Whitacre intend to charge more for:

The Internet can't be free in that sense, because we and the cable companies have made an investment and for a Google or Yahoo! (YHOO ) or Vonage or anybody to expect to use these pipes [for] free is nuts!

It isn't about charging more for better services. It's about charging more for what you already have.

It's about the fact the these services made the internet valuable, and the telcos want their cut, even though they already get paid for their services.

It's about extortion. You wanna provide services to customers? You're gonna have to pay up first.Only, as John Chambers points out, the customers are the ones who are being extorted.

Ed Whitacre, CEO of SBC Telecommunications, is against net neutrality because he doesn't want anybody using his pipes for free:

How do you think they're going to get to customers? Through a broadband pipe. Cable companies have them. We have them. Now what they would like to do is use my pipes free, but I ain't going to let them do that because we have spent this capital and we have to have a return on it. So there's going to have to be some mechanism for these people who use these pipes to pay for the portion they're using. Why should they be allowed to use my pipes?

Well it seems that even with a neutral network, people are paying Bell South to use their pipes. In fact, they're paying them a lot more:

BellSouth Corp.'s second quarter profit grew 11.6 percent, boosted by Cingular Wireless' performance and an increase in Internet business. The Atlanta-based telecommunications company said it earned $887 million on $5.2 billion in revenue for the quarter, up from a $795 million profit on $5.1 billion in revenue in the second quarter the year before.

Since it's clear that these folks are getting a return on the capital they've spent, and a growing one even with the status quo, shall we assume that the real motivator is just greed?

Paul Thurrott provides some screenshots of Microsoft's Windows Genuine Advantage tool warning him that his copy of XP may not be genuine. This most hilarious line is this one:

You may be a victim of software counterfeiting.

Please repeat after me.

Microsoft doesn't give a damn if you are a victim of software counterfeiting. They just want your money.

After all, you don't have any problems do you? Everything works just fine on the supposedly counterfeit software.

Clicking on their link will take you to a screen where you can pay them for Windows XP license. They aren't about to refund anything you already paid for a non-genuine copy of Windows.

It's interesting to contrast their concern over not being paid for a copy of Windows with their concern for the amount of time you've wasted as a result of having to deal with the poor security inherent in Windows, manifested in viruses and spyware.

A year ago I had four laptops running Windows, but this is yet another reason why I'm about to buy my third Apple laptop in a year.

I'm a voracious reader, so much so that on a typical trip I have to carry two books because I'll get through 400-500 pages on a flight to Los Angeles, and the same again on the way back. And that's even taking time out to watch the movie.

I even frequently read several books simultaneously. There are two on my bedside table, and two more in my bag for my flight tomorrow. My wife enjoys reading as well, and I've even noticed my kids reading for enjoyment.

So I was stunned to see these statistics from the Jenkins Group:

One-third of high school graduates never read another book for the rest of their lives. Many do not even graduate from high school.

58% of the US adult population never reads another book after high school.

42% of college graduates never read another book.

80% of US families did not buy or read a book last year.

70% of US adults have not been in a bookstore in the last five years.

57% of new books are not read to completion.

These and many, many other related statistics have been collected by Dan Poynter. They provide an incredible, and disturbing, peek into the business of books. I would never have imagined that over 50% of adults never read a book after high school.

Tip of the hat to Jeff Jarvis.

A woman in Canada has filed a Human Rights complaint as a result of the fact that Weight Watchers fired her for not complying with their dress code - that requires her to wear a skirt and pantyhose:

Wendy Moger, who has multiple sclerosis, started wearing pantsuits about a month ago after having an electronic walking aid fitted to her leg.

Then, after nine years as a meeting leader with the weight-loss organization, the 50-year-old was let go June 30 because she wasn't able to adhere to the dress code.

My first reaction was to ensure that the year was actually 2006 and not 1956. It has been acceptable for women to wear pants for my entire life, and it is ridiculous that any organization would even begin to suggest such a ridiculous dress code. And that isn't even considering the fact that the woman has a perfectly valid medical reason as a result of a medical condition.

They seem to have no problem showing a woman in jeans on their website, even though that would also violate their dress code.

So they now come off as not only trapped in the past, failing to acknowledge how career women have changed, but also appear insensitive to the disabled, and inflexible to the changing needs of employees.

Frankly, the fact that this got as far as a human rights complaint just makes them look dumb.

I just booked a flight at the Air Canada website. After they happily took my money, they offered to let me select my seats. I did so, only to find that there were no available seats on one leg of the trip. Concerned about that, I called their web help line, and spoke to a person named Smith. I told him that I was concerned that the flight was overbooked. He merely dismissed my concern and told me that my seat was guaranteed.

So I took a look at Air Canada's Overbooking Policy:

Overbooking: why it happens and how it affects you

• You may want to know if your Air Canada flight is overbooked. At any time, this information will be provided upon request.
• In Canada, customers who are denied boarding on an Air Canada flight due to overbooking are eligible to receive compensation in the form of travel voucher or cash. In other countries, customers who are denied boarding on an Air Canada flight are eligible for compensation subject to local rules and legislation.
• Customers who are denied boarding an Air Canada flight due to overbooking will be booked on the next Air Canada flight with available seats.
• When appropriate, Air Canada will provide denied boarding customers with meal vouchers for airport restaurants.
• In the case of overnight delays, Air Canada will provide out-of-town customers who are denied boarding with meal vouchers, hotel accommodation and transportation to and from the airport.

The Air Canada representative would not tell me if the flight was overbooked, even though I requested that information, a clear violation of this policy. And the policy also makes it pretty clear that my seat is not guaranteed, but that I am eligible to receive compensation, and they will book me on the next flight with available seats.

I booked the flight because I needed to be somewhere. A later flight won't work for me. So though they happily took my money, they provide no actual guarantee for my travel schedule. Clearly it is their convenience that matters, not mine.

So I sent a note to their Customer Care people, and got this response:

The reference number for your question is '060720-000243'.Thank you for your email. We endeavor to respond within 3 business days.

Breaking down the code, mine is request number 243 today. And they'll try to get back to me in 3 business days, meaning by next Tuesday. For some reason I don't feel better.

Travel is strenuous enough. Worrying that you'll actually get the seat you paid for doesn't make it any easier.

As Jerry Seinfeld said:

You know how to take the reservation. You just don't know how to keep the reservation.

The always insightful Rob Hyndman comments on yesterday's Microsoft-Nortel partnership announcement, and asks the question I was thinking:

Whenever I see anouncements like the Microsoft-Nortel JV announced yesterday, I pine for an online book that would keep a running tally of the odds that the market places on successful deal execution. Later on, we could all look back and - for purely scientific purposes, of course, and not at all to have a good laugh at the fluff and bluster that these announcements generally trot out - measure success (does anyone keep a tab on PR releases and how often their happy proclamations come to pass?).

Well it didn't take much searching to find this announcement from 1999:

Microsoft, Nortel, HP and Intel Collaborate on NT Telephony

PBX systems were traditionally developed as proprietary, closed systems by vendors such as Mitel Corp. (www.mitel.com), Nortel Networks (www.nortelnetworks.com) and AT&T Corp. (www.att.com). Only recently have PBX solutions begun to trickle into the open systems arena. With the announcement of a technology partnership between PBX stalwart Nortel Networks and open systems giants Hewlett-Packard Co., Intel Corp. and Microsoft Corp., the era of PBX-type solutions on Windows NT may be close at hand.

In mid-March at the Technology Museum of Innovation in San Jose, Calif., Nortel Networks, Microsoft, Intel and HP detailed an initiative to develop communications solutions for enterprise customers by integrating voice technology into Windows NT-based telephony systems for enterprisewide communications.

It seems that VoIP technology has bypassed the need for integrated voice technology in Windows NT-based - or whatever Windows you're using now - systems. So I would guess that partnership wasn't much of a success. We'll probably have to wait another seven years to determine the success or failure of this new partnership.

The internet provides a conundrum for marketing folks. On one hand the cost of reaching people with your message has been lowered phenomenally. On the other hand, everyone knows every mistake you make, captured for all eternity.

(Disclosure: I was a Bay Networks employee who, because of an acquisition, became a Nortel employee, but only for a short time - not enough to do any damage. I left in 1999.)

When you are shopping for vehicles, aside from color, number of doors, and other options, you can always definitely compare their engine power based on the horsepower specifications. It allows customers to understand how one car stacks up against others.

So why after 25 years of using PCs, is there no similar definitive comparison measurement?

A friend of mine just called me up to ask me if a particular PC he saw for sale was a good value. I looked at the specs and took a guess. Now mine is an educated guess, but what about all those poor folks trying to buy a PC who don't have that knowledge?

The PC industry is built on constant change, quasi-interchangeable options, and subtle hardware differences that make it impossible to compare anything. Coupled with salespeople who really don't know any better that their customers, it's a recipe not only for disaster, but for poor customer value.

There have been measurements in the past like Winstone tests. Why is there not standardized test that determines the "horsepower" of a machine, so that customers can compare the value they are getting for the money?

Bob Parsons, founder of Go Daddy, has listed his 16 rules he tries to live by. My favorite is #15:

Don't take yourself too seriously. Lighten up. Often, at least half of what we accomplish is due to luck. None of us are in control as much as we like to think we are.

I'm going to have to sit down and think about the rules I try to live by, but two come to mind immediately, in no particular order:

• Do something every day. Don't let a day go by without accomplishing some task, no matter how small. And then some days, go wild and accomplish lots of tasks.
• Learn something every day. It doesn't have to be work-related. The other day I learned, from Martha Stewart Living, that adding a half cup of vinegar with your towels in the washer will make them more absorbent if you've been using fabric softener on them. Every little bit of information can be helpful.

Via Lifehacker.

From today's editorial, The real problem with parole for lifers, in The Globe and Mail:

Some crimes are so severe that they merit a life sentence, but it would be inhumane to jail a man or woman forever without hope of release. (Life without parole, a feature of the U.S. justice system, would not pass muster in Canada.)

How is it that someone can permaturely end a life, or in the case of serial killers, several lives, yet it is inhumane for the killer to spend their life in jail?

Why should the criminal have more rights than the victim; in this case a choice the victim never had?

My wife was doing some shopping at Victoria's Secret.com today. She couldn't remember my account information, so she left her shopping cart until I was available. When we got back to it a couple of hours later her shopping cart had been discarded.

Frustrated at having wasted her time, she set out to reselect the items. Once she had done that, she proceeded to the checkout, receiving the following purchase summary:

Merchandise Subtotal	$172.95
Shipping and handling	$20.95
Subtotal	$193.90
Tax	$59.23
Total	$253.13

Now I've never seen shipping and handling included in the taxable subtotal of a purchase before, but the really strange part is the tax, which at $59.23, is over 30% of the merchandise + shipping subtotal, and over 34% of the merchandise subtotal.

Now taxes are high in Canada, but 14%, not 30%+, and they don't generally include shipping. What should have been a simple transaction was made inordinately painful by a poor website.

So the website that should have reduced the requirement for higher cost telephone interaction, is forcing me to call to straighten this out. And we get to waste even more of our time. Concern for the customer is clearly not in evidence here, especially given the higher average shopping cart value associated with such premium products.

Seth Godin and Mark Evans are both talking about measurement.

Seth says:

Measurement is always tricky, because people believe what they want to believe and find the numbers to back it up. In both cases, we're seeing how advertisers and media companies are complicit at weaving a story that doesn't really hold up. How many "hits" did your web page get last week? And what, exactly, does that mean?

Mark says:

Yahoo's sites lead the way with 128.6 million unique visitors in the U.S. (out of a total online population of 172.9 million) while MySpace lags with a still very impressive 52.3 million. Google's sites attracted 102.8 million visitors (fourth) while the New York Times was the leading "media" site with 38.1 million visitors (ninth). So what do the comScore numbers mean? It's like accounting or polls: you can presents things in a variety of ways if you use different tools, techniques or methodologies.

Hits. Unique visitors.Both measures of quantity. But does quantity really matter?

My wife uses Yahoo! as her primary email address, so she visits Yahoo! a couple of times each day, but I can guarantee that she doesn't notice the ads at all. However, she uses Google to search and frequently clicks on Google ads related to her search.

So she is counted in the number of unique visitors to each site, but the quality of her visit to Google is clearly much higher than that of her visit to Yahoo!. And given the vast number of properties that Yahoo! owns, with only a 20% lead over Google, Google is clearly more efficient at attracting visitors on a per property basis. And this provides no insight as to how long a typical visit was at either site.

So from that point of view, even if myspace has fewer unique visitors, they clearly spend more time on the site, of a much more interactive nature.Doesn't that mean that a myspace hit has a much higher quality, and is therefore worth more?

I wonder, in today's climate, would any network dare air a special suggesting that global warming was not entirely caused by humans? Is there any room left at all for the possibility that this theory might not be absolutely true?

The Discovery Channel on Sunday is airing a Tom Brokaw special, “Global Warming: What You Need to Know”, which once again posits that "the majority of scientists agree":

“Now, a vast majority of those scientists believe global warming is real, and it's having a dangerous impact on the planet we inhabit,” reports Brokaw, the former NBC News anchor.

And if a scientist happens to disagree, they've been paid off: Brokaw does ask one of the many scientists interviewed why “a persistent minority” refuses to believe that humans are playing a major role in the warming of the Earth. Some, says the researcher, just find it unbelievable, and “there are some people who have a financial interest in not believing.”

The clearest statement I've seen about global warming comes from Molten Thought:

What you need to know is this:

We don't know what is happening. We don't know what the weather will be like next week, much less 100 years from now. We don't know what causes climate change. We don't know how to control the weather.

The same article points to a dissenting Wall Street Journal op-ed by Richard Lindzen, Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Atmospheric Science at MIT, that lists these conclusions:

So what, then, is one to make of this alleged debate? I would suggest at least three points.

First, nonscientists generally do not want to bother with understanding the science. Claims of consensus relieve policy types, environmental advocates and politicians of any need to do so. Such claims also serve to intimidate the public and even scientists--especially those outside the area of climate dynamics. Secondly, given that the question of human attribution largely cannot be resolved, its use in promoting visions of disaster constitutes nothing so much as a bait-and-switch scam. That is an inauspicious beginning to what Mr. Gore claims is not a political issue but a "moral" crusade.

Lastly, there is a clear attempt to establish truth not by scientific methods but by perpetual repetition. An earlier attempt at this was accompanied by tragedy. Perhaps Marx was right. This time around we may have farce--if we're lucky.

Much is made of the fact that recent years have been warmer than those that preceded them. I just heard on my local news that the temperature was cooler this year than last. If warmer years prove global warming, then do cooler years prove that the danger has passed? Well, only an idiot would predict 100 years into the future with only one or two data points, now wouldn't they?

It is clear that the earth's climate is changing. I would certainly welcome some serious debate about what is happening. Claiming that the majority of scientists agree and skeptics are "on the take" does nothing to foster any understanding about the situation, and frankly assumes that average person is just too dumb to understand what politicians, anchormen, and celebrities do.

Here are the lyrics for Beverly Hills by Weezer:

Where I come from isn't all that great My automobile is a piece of crap My fashion sense is a little whack And my friends are just as screwy as me

I didn't go to boarding schools Preppie girls never looked at me Why should they? I ain't nobody Got nothing in my pocket

Beverly Hills That's where I want to be Livin' in Beverly Hills Beverly Hills Rolling like a celebrity Livin' in Beverly Hills

That'll be $5 please.

Gracenote, the company that provides listings of CD contents (and charge outrageous license fees for the privilege), has now obtained licenses to distribute song lyrics as well:

"When we first approached the publishers with this, they were excited. They thought lyrics had been an untapped resource for them and there's quite a bit of lyrics being taken for free on the Web," Ross Blanchard, Gracenote's vice president of business development, told Reuters in an interview.

Yes, the fans who paid for a CD, or downloaded a digital music file, will now have to pony up cash if they want to know the lyrics to the songs they've already paid for.

I also foresee a round of Cease and Desist letters going out to those silly fan sites that post the lyrics of songs from the bands they love. You know, the fans who buy the music and pay ridiculous prices for concert tickets. I'm sure they won't mind. After all, the publishers and the songwriters must receive compensation for their work.

Wait a second though. Shouldn't the City of Beverly Hills receive compensation as well? After all, the song wouldn't exist without them. So aren't they entitled to a share of the royalties?

Via Furdlog.

Yesterday I saw an ad for a new movie - John Tucker Must Die. From the ad the movie didn't strike me as that remarkable, but it was interesting to see that it pointed not to the usual dotcom domain, but to a myspace user - johntucker.

I quickly googled (hey, it's in the dictionary) 'john tucker' to find the movie and the myspace space as the top two hits. In fact, if your name is John Tucker you're going to have a hard time breaking the top ten.

The myspace site is clear better designed than the average for myspace, with clips and downloads, but you can become John Tucker's friend and post in the forums. It's obvious that this is a far better way to build some buzz and community around a movie than by having a one way website.

I'm not sure how successful it will be though, as most of the posters get the fact that it is just advertising:

Thus why the movie production company most likely hired a couple people to coordinate this. Hiring someone wouldn't possibly be a loss of money to them. The revenue from this advertising scheme will most likely be phenomenal considering the traffic that pours through MySpace.

Why would the actors/actresses waste there time with this.

No less a publication than Information Week is suggesting that you don't really need Vista; you can be perfectly happy with Windows XP:

When Windows Vista is released, the computing world will change forever, leading to a PC-based Nirvana in which system crashes are a thing of the past, productivity magically skyrockets, and a new era of world peace is ushered in.

Bah, humbug!

The curmudgeons of this world know that every new operating system brings with it at least much hype as benefits, and more often than not means spending lots of money in pursuit of the ever-elusive goal of making life at the keyboard perfect. And so they'd rather fight than switch.

Of course, you may have already switched to OS X or Linux. Personally I'm about to but a MacBook, my third Mac laptop purchase this year. So I won't be switching to Vista.

Via Lifehacker.

Bell Globemedia, owned by Canada's largest telecom carrier, in turn owns CTV, one of Canada's two private networks (Global is the other, and CBC is a public network), 21 broadcast stations, 17 specialty cable channels, and The Globe and Mail, Canada's national newspaper (competitors are the National Post owned by Global, and The Toronto Star).

Today they announced a $1.7 billion bid for the Chum Limited, owners or 12 broadcast stations and 21 specialty channels. Bell Globemedia president and CEO Ivan Fecan had this comment:

"There is a unique strategic fit to our operations that can make the united company a stronger national champion in broadcasting. We intend to maintain and build the valuable CHUM brands and develop more opportunities for Canadian programming."

All Canadian channels are approved by the Canadian Radio and Television Commission (CRTC), so they don't have all that much competition currently, and this consolidation will substantially decrease the variety available:

In late June, a Senate committee reported on the state of Canada's news media and warned the concentration of ownership in some markets had reached levels that few other countries would find acceptable.

"We're not saying that big is bad," said Sen. Jim Munson on June 21. "We just feel that the public has a right to be heard when big gets even bigger."

Fecan said new technology means his firm is competing with companies all over the world. "It's better to have strong Canadian companies than not have strong Canadian companies," he said.

Actually companies outside Canada face substantial hurdles to doing business in Canada, on the pretense of protecting Canadian culture and "telling Canadian stories".

Interestingly, the CBC had this tidbit:

CHUM said it plans to cut 191 full-time and 90 part-time positions across the country as it undergoes a complete reorganization of its television operations to "increase focus on service to local viewers."

The moves include switching Citytv stations in Calgary, Edmonton and Winnipeg from one-hour evening newscasts to a daily half-hour local news magazine show.

In addition, a morning show at a CHUM-owned A-channel station in Victoria will be discontinued. Citytv Vancouver will cease its traditional newscasts and add resources to Breakfast Television.

It seems that focusing on service to local viewers also includes cutting back heavily on the news, if not getting rid of it altogether. Is this a response to declining news viewership?

Andrew Coyne ruminates on the fact that a one cent cut in the federal sales tax is treated as meaningless by the media. He calls it a 1% cut; it is actually a 14% drop. He suggests the reason:

This remarkable waving away of what would otherwise appear to be a sizeable windfall for consumers is in part a variant of Easterbrook’s Law, named for the American journalist Gregg Easterbook, who first conclusively proved that all economic news is bad: all news means change, and all change, no matter how broadly beneficial, makes some people worse off -- who are invariably the focus of media attention. In the case of the GST cut, troublingly, there are no losers, so the media instinctively switched to the next best thing: the winners don’t benefit as much as all that.

The previous post referenced an article about Canada falling behind - the article says almost last - in the wireless revolution. And there is one very good reason why that has happened - the fact that Canadian wireless carriers are intent nickel and diming their customers to death, for unspectacular service.

Most residents of Canada live within 100 miles of the US border, and those residents are overwhelmingly clustered in three major cities - Vancouver, Montreal, and Toronto. I'm about 45 minutes west of Toronto in a fairly dense suburban area, but if I go 10 minutes out of the city I get the dreaded "searching for network" message. In fact, a couple of years ago, the service was spotty in my residential area of 500,000 people. So it isn't as if they are going bankrupt putting towers everywhere for excellent service.

Yet the service in Canada is far, far more expensive than that offered right across the border in the US.

For example, Cingular's cheapest plan is $39.99, and offers 450 anytime minutes, 5000 whenever minutes (almost 3 hours per day per month), unlimited mobile to mobile minutes (when I call another Cingular Wireless customer), voice mail, caller id, call waiting, call forwarding, with no long distance or roaming charges.

By contrastthe basic Rogers plan only offers 100 minutes plus 1000 evening and weekend minutes for $27. But my plan provides a better comparison, though it doesn't come close to the Cingular basic plan. My plan provides 350 anytime minutes and unlimited evening and weekends (from 9 pm to 8 am) for $55. On top of that I pay $12 for voice mail and caller id. And all Canadian carriers charge a $6.95 System Access Fee. On top of that there is 14% of federal and state tax. For a fair comparison we'll leave the tax out though. And I also pay any roaming or long distance charges as well.

So to get close (350 minutes versus their 450) to the Cingular minutes and services they provide for $39.99, I pay almost $74, or nearly double, plus any long distance charges.

With carriers charging like this, is it any wonder why wireless lags in Canada?

The Globe and Mail, a Canadian newspaper, occasionally includes a glossy technology magazine called Backbone. Today's edition has an article entitled Big mobile potential, little uptake about how Canada has fallen behind in the wireless revolution.

Talking about the fact that people prefer to pay $0.99 cents for an internet music download rather than $1.99 plus 50 cent download fee per track, somebody came up with this ridiculous quote:

"What is the iPod? It's a way to circumvent the cellular carriers."

Yes, because the iPod was designed to take business away from cellphone downloads, even though it predated MP3 phones by several years, and lets you download music from the internet, or even use your own music, as opposed to having to get everything from your carrier. Yeah, that's the same thing.

What is really ridiculous is that anyone at all would pay to download a song to their phone.

Seventy million. That's the number of computer users that are apparently satisfied running WIndows 98. And why not? It still works just fine. My father dual boots a PC with WIndows XP and WIndows 98, because he says there are things he can't do on XP as well as he can on 98.

That means that approximately 1 in 10 PC users (no Windows users) are still using Windows 98.

And Microsoft plans to discontinue support for those 70,000,000 people.

Yes I understand that at some point you need to move on; that you can't support users on old software forever. So this is an entirely reasonable decision.

But this shows just how poorly Microsoft has done in convincing users of the benefits of upgrading their Windows software. Keep in mind that the bulk of Windows XP users run it by virtue of having purchased a new machine with it installed. In fact it's likely that the majority got it that way. Now of course Microsoft still got paid, but just how many users have they convinced to make a conscious decision to pony up the cash for a new version of Windows?

Those 70,000,000 customers have a lot more choice than they did just a few years ago. I wonder how many will decide that Windows just isn't the way to go for them?

There is a wire story on the front page of my local paper, The Record, about a Canadian soldier killed the other day in Afghanistan. The headline reads:

Fallen soldier wanted out, friends claim

But the only "friend" quoted in the story is the soldier's girlfriend's father:

Family and friends of the 21-year-old soldier, who died Sunday in a firefight west of Kandahar City, said Boneca was so desperate to return home he contemplated telling an army priest he was suicidal in the hopes of being discharged.

"He expected to be on patrol, not fighting a war for someone else,'' said Larry DeCorte, father of Boneca's girlfriend Megan.

"He wasn't ready for that,'' he said.

He seems to be the only friend quoted in the story in what would certainly best be classified as hearsay; the only person actually, other than a reference to a comment by an uncle that his nephew "was demoralized".I'm also not sure what Mr. DrCorte is suggesting about "fighting a war for someone else", since the Canadian government sent the troops to Afghanistan. The use of the plural "friends" and the arms-length quotes seem to be reaching a bit to provide otherwise nonexistent support for some sort of point, placed as they are against government quote.

Surely there is some good that the Canadian military is accomplishing in Afghanistan, yet one would never know it from reading the papers. There is just a constant diet of bad and worse news.

It's almost as if the media had some sort of agenda.

It seems that customer-created commercials are all the rage these days.

First GM announced their Chevy Tahoe commercial contest, in which they allowed people to click and drag some things together to create a commercial. That didn't work out too well.

Now Coke, having shown little interest in recent experiments by customers with Mentos and Coke, suddenly wants customers to create videos for them.

And this morning I caught an add for Hellmann's Mayonnaise (Canada only apparently - heavily Flash-based so look under Contests and Events) announcing a content for customers to create their own commercials for the product.

Everybody seems to be jumping on the free content bandwagon.

Via Smalltalk Tidbits, Industry Rants I found this MediaDailyNews article:

ABC HAS HELD DISCUSSIONS ON the use of technology that would disable the fast-forward button on DVRs, according to ABC President of Advertising Sales Mike Shaw, with the primary goal to allow TV commercials to run as intended.

"I would love it if the MSOs, during the deployment of the new DVRs they're putting out there, would disable the fast-forward [button]," Shaw said.

Yes, and why not just disable the channel button as well?After all, why bother with what they viewer wants? Heck, just disable the whole DVR.

There's more:

Shaw said it's crucial for ABC and networks to hold these discussions with MSOs while DVR penetration is still in its early stages. DVRs are at around 10 percent of U.S. TV households. "It's in our interest and the MSOs' interest to figure out something that works for the two of us," he said.

Something that works for the two of us. Yes, I'm just the dumb consumer. My view is of no consequence.

I have a better idea. I'm going to use the technology I already have to disable the ABC button. If they want to sell my eyeballs to advertisers they're out of luck.

I doubt I'll miss much.

There's what, something like 5 million TiVo users, which probably accounts for about 5% of television viewers in the US. Forrester Research says the about 12% of US households have DVRs. Adverstisers are getting very concerned, and they are trying things like five second ads to beat TiVo, since viewers are able to skip the ads:

"As you're getting right back to the show's content, (the DVR) does that little jump-back feature which grabs you a few seconds back into the commercial," says Tim Spengler, national broadcast director for Initiative Media, which came up with the AOL ads to run at the end of commercial breaks. "That's fertile ground for advertisers because it's TiVo-proof."

Ad critics suggest that maybe there are too many ads:

"People have TiVos because they're fed up with ads," says Gary Ruskin, head of watchdog group Commercial Alert. "These mini-ads are just going to make people more annoyed and drive more people away.

"Short ads, he says, are "part of how the advertising industry is its own worst enemy. They can't seem to show respect for consumers."

I didn't get TiVo because of the ads, though that is a pleasant benefit. I got it because I was tired of the network putting the few decent shows on television in exactly the same time slots. In the increasingly rare occurrences when there are new shows and not reruns anyway. And I love the fact that it just does everything for me, and even suggests stuff I might like. And it lets me program it over the web, and download shows to my pc.

It isn't TiVo that is killing commercials. Most people are by now capable of ignoring them. It's the networks themselves. Today's shows are barely watchable, yet they are jammed with more and more ads. There are innumerable reality show, loaded with product placements. We are being assaulted constantly by ads.

Why blame TiVo for a problem you created yourselves?

Regardless of all of the laments and predictions of the impending death of newspapers, I still enjoy reading them. In fact I typically read three dailies - The New York Times, The Record (local paper in Waterloo, Canada), The Globe and Mail (which just keeps getting delivered for some insane reason as I don't subscribe) - a local weekly, and the Westford Eagle weekly from Westford, Massachusetts.

I still find them more convenient to carry around than using attempting to find a WiFi connection wherever I happen to be. And their content, as I've said before, is serendipitous and filled with stuff I might not otherwise have seen, even if it isn't as fresh and timely as the internet.

However, there is one corollary to that. I like to sit on the porch and read the paper, but the slightest breeze makes it impossible to keep the paper steady. You can fold it up into sections to make reading a bit easier, but it's just a bother.

My computer, on the other hand, isn't really affected by the wind. And it never blows away when it put it down to answer the phone.

On Tuesday I turned down a job. And not just any job. Vice President of Software Development for a pretty stable company.

When I've been unemployed in the past and looking for work, I never thought I'd be able to do that. But the other day I realized that I was having fun doing what I'm doing now. And I realized that I didn't want to stop doing it. The money wasn't even a tangible factor.

I just followed my heart.

Fortunately I have a very supportive wife and family who let me do that. They just told me to do what makes me happy.

I worked non-stop all day, and you'd think I'd be tired of it, but you'd be wrong. Because since Tuesday every day has been a great day.

There's nothing quite as nice as being able to write this while I sit out on the patio enjoying a nice latte, with just a slight cool breeze, listening to the animated conversations around me, with the sound of cars passing in the background. I was going to listen to my iPod, but the ambient noise is entertaining enough.

The worst piece of Microsoft software I've seen seems to be the Visual Studio 2005 Deployment Tool, which provides very little configuration possibility, and even worse documentation. Attempting to find a way to close an application before I installed a plugin for it, I attempted to find some information on Deployment Conditions, which led me to the Windows Installer Conditional Statement Syntax, and this message:

Even more frustrating is the fact the all of the examples seem to use Visual Basis, which I don't, and the steps describing what to do simply do not work for me.

There is no way this tool could be used for anything but the most basic of installers, and then only by somebody willing to painstakingly guess at how it works. To imply that it is an enterprise, or professional tool, is laughable.

Sadly it seems to share the same poor overall quality of Visual Studio 2005, a tool that seems to have been rushed out the door with little testing, and probably should still be in beta. I still find myself depending on VC 6.0, a decade or so after its release.

You are a major movie studio and The Movie Blog is fawning over your soon-to-be-released movie, telling their million or so readers how the movie is a must-see. Do you?

A.	Give them more tidbits to distribute, increasing viewer desire to see the movie.
	or
B.	Force their hosting provider to take the site down for 8 hours without notifying them of any problems.

The PR folks at Paramount have managed to do three things:1

1.	Make millions more people aware of The Movie Blog.
2.	Make millions of people realize just how dumb a major movie studio can be.
3.	Generate plenty of publicity for Paramount - all bad.

Not only are studios having trouble dealing with new business models; they can't even get the current ones right.

For all the negative connotations of organized crime, they at least have the honor to never welch on a bet. Their business is built on trust after a sort, and it seems that there is honor among thieves.

Not so it seems for government-run casinos. Two men won a computer Keno game worth over $200,000, at a casino in Winnipeg, Canada, but the casino refuses to pay, saying that it was merely a software error:

Two men from Manitoba have hired a lawyer and are threatening legal action after a Winnipeg casino refused to pay out more than $209,000 in slot-machine winnings.

The men were playing a computerized version of Keno last week when they matched all five numbers on the screen.

The machine said the win was worth a jackpot of $209,716.40. The casino said it was a software error.

The casino is run by the Manitoba Lotteries Corporation:

Manitoba Lotteries Corporation (MLC), as a Crown corporation of the Province of Manitoba, owns and operates Club Regent and McPhillips Street Station Casinos in Winnipeg; owns and operates the province's Video Lottery Terminal (VLT) Network and distributes and sells tickets for lotteries operated by the Western Canada Lottery Corporation (Sport Select, Lotto 6/49, etc.).

[...]

Net revenue from MLC operations is directed back to the Province to support programs in health care, education, community and social services and economic development - over $270 million in 2004-2005.

They should simply pay out the bet, and fix the software, which likely isn't really bad anyway. If they have no problem taking the bet and collecting on a loss, then they shouldn't have a problem paying when somebody wins.