Unpredictable. Unfocused. Just like life.

Having read about Google Gears here and here and here and here and here and... well you get the point... I decided to try it out.

Some of the beta code is broken. It tells you to rename the manifest file and put that and some other files onto your website, but the files actually refer to the original tutorial manifest file and a go_offline_files subdirectory. So once I fixed that I was able to take my blog offline fairly easily.

However, Google Gears doesn't infer anything. My blog is http://larryborsato.com, and the default web page is http://larryborsato.com/blog/index.html. The blog should always default to index.html anyway, but Google Gears doesn't get that. The only way I can view the blog offline is if I enter the complete url http://larryborsato.com/blog/index.html into the address bar. But it does let me read it offline then. I'll need to take a look at the JavaScript to see if there is anyway to fix that.

Anyway, it was fairly easy to set up and use once the little details were worked through. Pretty good for the first day of existence really.

This is everything you always wanted to know about (and a lot of stuff you really don't care about at all) the price of gas.

Of course if you are in Canada you should also tack on a hefty tax premium - about 33% of the cost is composed of various taxes.

Kent Newsome suggests that blogging has helped him to meet people who wouldn't have met him via something like Facebook:

There are other reasons why Jay's line of demarcation sometimes breaks down. Take connecting with old friends, for example. Very few, if any, of my real world friends even know what Facebook is. None (to my knowledge) use it. As a result, I will have a much better chance connecting with people I know by nurturing my web site and waiting for people to Google me.

I've found that to be the case too, but I've also noticed that for me anyway, tools like LinkedIn and Facebook seem to be good for re-establishing old relationships with past co-workers or friends from school.I am starting to get friend requests from people as far back as elementary school from Facebook, and coworkers from as much as 15 years ago via LinkedIn, even people I might not expect to know about stuff like Facebook.

While blogging has helped me to meet new people and land work as well, social networks seem to serve a complementary purpose, and they seem to be becoming more commonplace and accessible to the average person. A friend of mine told me the other day that her family uses MyFamily.com to keep up with each other, but she bristled at my suggestion that she was a blogger.

I was wrong. She is just somebody that wants to keep in touch with her own social network - in this case her family - and this kind of tool just makes it that much easier. Actually whether you blog or use Facebook, it all comes down to making yourself more accessible and findable.

Maybe we just all want to be part of something.

The editorial "War Without End" in today's Times contains this observation:

It’s upsetting to think that Mr. Bush believes the raging sectarian violence in Iraq awaits reigniting, or that he does not recognize that Americans’ support for the war broke down many bloody months ago. But we have grown accustomed to this president’s disconnect from reality and his habit of tilting at straw men, like Americans who don’t care about terrorism because they question his mismanagement of the war or don’t worry about what will happen after the United States withdraws, as it inevitably must.

Yet an article on the front page says this:

There is one matter on which American military commanders, many Iraqis and some of the Bush administration’s staunchest Congressional critics agree: if the United States withdrew its forces from Baghdad’s streets this fall, the murder and mayhem would increase.

You can't have it both ways folks.

On page 3 of today's New York Times there is a Barneys ad for a boxed set of six Berti steak knives with ox horn handles, handmade in Italy, for $1092 - a Father's Day suggestion.

I like steak, but what dad really needs a $182 steak knife?

If this is really just a case of showing off how successful you are then they really need to make the set bigger so that you can invite more friends over at the same time.

Commenting on an opinion piece on the future of newspapers in the Wall Street Journal by Andy Kessler, Doc Searls suggests that being in print is actually a huge advantage for newspapers, and that their model is backwards:

In addition to Andy's excellent suggestions, I'd add the ten I listed here in March (along with what Dave Winer added). The first of those was Stop giving away the news and charging for the olds. Sure, daily papers make advertising money by selling inventory on the free Web versions of the papers that subscribers pay for. But by doing that they're also dissing both those subscibers and their legacy franchise. Put more simply, they're competiting with themselves while cheapening their main product.

Mathew Ingram disagrees:

Okay — maybe not totally wrong. I think he is right that some people will always want to hold a paper in their hands, just as some people want to hold books, or listen to radio plays. But the number of those people is dwindling. As I mentioned on my friend Kent Newsome’s blog, I think Doc would probably like to return to a happier time when newspapers ruled the world. So would I. But that’s not happening. And to say that newspapers should charge people for the news and give away their archives is — sorry Doc — one of the dumbest things I’ve ever heard. Almost as dumb as the guy Jeff writes about here.

Isubscribe to my local paper and the New York Times. I do enjoy reading the paper on the front porch, though I also read news online. But my kids will likely never subscribe to a newspaper.

The only reason I subscribe to the local paper is for local news and events. And that consists of a couple of locally written stories combined with a lot of AP content. Their national and international coverage consists of stuff I can read anywhere else. If there was any other decent source of local information I wouldn't be a subscriber. And frankly. I'd have better luck actually achieving time travel than finding an item from their news archive.

So if newspapers were smart, they would try to maximize the value of being a local information portal since they already have the feet on the street. Of course, as Mathew recently noted, that may escape the kind of people who would outsource the coverage of local Pasadena news to Mumbai. In the meantime, sites like Five One Nine (519 is the local area code) have already popped up to meet the needs of people like my kids.

Fewer and fewer people read newspapers and while it used to be an excellent medium for reaching people that is no longer the case. Newspapers need to reverse that trend and dispel that idea. Otherwise with the readers go the advertisers, and then why would you need a newspaper at all?

Angry in the Great White North exposes more of the environmentalists' "do as I say, not as I do" mentality, this time concerning David Suzuki:

Quadra Island is home to 2,550 people. It is 410 square kilometers in size. That comes out to 6 persons per square kilometer. Not bad if you are looking for some peace and quiet from the raging chaos that is Kitsilano, a neighbourhood in Vancouver:

David Suzuki: I love Kitsilano and Vancouver, but there are too many people and too many cars. I think we can have greater density if we made the city much more hostile to cars. The cars have made our city unattractive, and thus I like to spend more of my time in a smaller place at Quanta [ed, Quadra] Island where we also have a home.

Kitsilano is home to about 40,000 Vancouverites, living in 6 square kilometers of space. A lot more crowded than Quadra Island.

People like David Suzuki want you and I to live in densely packed urban centers, while they live in sparse suburbs.The same sort of sprawl that Mr. Suzuki says must be stopped:

“The time to address this critical issue is now,” said David Suzuki, a Canadian scientist and broadcaster. “The more cities sprawl outward, the more we damage the environment and our health. We need to design communities so that the people who live in them use their cars less and have a much lower impact on the environment, and a better quality of life in return.”

Of course those rules only apply to you and I, not Mr. Suzuki, who detests too many people and too many cars.

Back when I was a kid, before the dawn of videogames, DVDs, and computers, we played marbles. We just played games like that. We didn't need a seminar to figure out how. Today things are different:

He can thank Michael Cohill, a toy designer and enthusiast, whose marble seminar Joseph attended at a youth fair a few weeks ago. Mr. Cohill considers himself something of a pied piper of the game, having taught it to thousands of children at schools, parks and scout meetings. “They have the exact same experience kids did with marbles a hundred years ago,” said Mr. Cohill, 52.

Well, not exactly. Back then, children didn’t need to take seminars to learn to play a no-tech, simple game. In the era of micromanaged play dates, overstuffed after-school schedules, cuts to recess and parents terrified of injuries, lawsuits and predators, many traditional childhood games have become lost arts, as antique as the concept of idle time itself.

But lately, a number of educators like Mr. Cohill, as well as parents and child-development specialists are trying to spur a revival of traditional outdoor pastimes, including marbles, hopscotch, red rover and kickball. They are attending play conferences, teaching courses on how to play, and starting leagues for the kinds of activities that didn’t used to need leagues — just, say, a stick and a ball. They are spurred by concerns that a decline in traditional play robs the imagination and inhibits social interaction, by personal nostalgia, and by a desire to create a new bridge to connect generations — a bridge across both sides of the Nintendo gap.

Finally child development experts are concerned about children's imagination and social interaction, but they still don't get it. Starting leagues and controlling the play isn't an improvement.

Growing up all we had was friends and our imagination. We hung out, we played games, we made stuff up, we played together for hours at a time. Just kids, no adults.Sometimes kids just need to be left alone to play with their friends, occasionally even outside in the fresh air without the aid of technology.

Somewhere along the line - and I blame my own generation for this - parents suddenly decided that they needed to protect their kids from all the terrible things that happened to them as children. But they must remember things much differently than I do. Because my childhood was pretty good, and I hope my kids were able to experience even half of what I did.

We ran. We rode bikes. We played. We fell. We got hurt. And yet we survived. Sometimes we won. And yes, sometimes we lost, which is a good life lesson to learn. And we had a great time. With just a few marbles.

Paris Hilton's upcoming jail sentence has been reduced from 45 to 23 days for good behavior:

Paris Hilton's jail sentence for a probation violation has been reduced.

An LA County sheriff's spokesperson says it was shortened from 45 days to about 23 days due to "good behavior."

Apparently, several factors were considered in reducing her stay in jail, including the fact she appeared at her latest court date.

The spokesperson says Hilton will spend her time in a cell separated from the general inmate population.

Showing up for a court date, mandatory for the average person, is considered good behavior for a celebrity, if you can call Paris Hilton that.

Her parents must be so proud.

The Canadian Radio and Television Commission (CRTC) has decided to shut down over-the-air analogue (or analog is you aren't from Canada) television signals as of 2011. The reason:

Some Canadians who use rabbit ears and live close to the U.S. border can already pick up digital and high-definition signals from broadcasters there. The CRTC said the main reason for killing off over-the-air analogue was to spur Canadian broadcasters into developing advanced services to prevent viewers from getting hooked on those U.S. signals.

Right. If I watch Canadian television then I will be able to see great Canadian shows like Survivor, The Amazing Race, and Grey's Anatomy. Wait, those are just American shows simulcast on Canadian networks.

So what they're really saying is that they don't want Canadians to get hooked on American advertising, since all they're really getting is the equivalent of US signals with Canadian advertising inserted. Which is exacty what the Canadian cable companies are already allowed to do.

Bruce Willis is irritated by outspoken actors:

Bruce Willis is fed up with listening to outspoken actors - and believes their opinion shouldn't mean "jack s**t" to the general public. The Die Hard star understands some of his colleagues want to do good for various causes, but wishes others would keep their thoughts to themselves.

He says, "I don't think my opinion means jack s**t, because I'm an actor. Why do actors think their opinions mean more because you act? You just caught a break as an actor. There are hundreds - thousands - of actors who are just as good as I am, and probably better. Have you heard anything useful come out of an actor's mouth lately?"

The much trumpeted scientific consensus that global warming is man-made seems to be unravelling if indeed it ever really existed:

Following the U.S. Senate's vote today on a global warming measure (see today's AP article: Senate Defeats Climate Change Measure,) it is an opportune time to examine the recent and quite remarkable momentum shift taking place in climate science. Many former believers in catastrophic man-made global warming have recently reversed themselves and are now climate skeptics. The names included below are just a sampling of the prominent scientists who have spoken out recently to oppose former Vice President Al Gore, the United Nations, and the media driven “consensus” on man-made global warming.

The list below is just the tip of the iceberg. A more detailed and comprehensive sampling of scientists who have only recently spoken out against climate hysteria will be forthcoming in a soon to be released U.S. Senate report. Please stay tuned to this website, as this new government report is set to redefine the current climate debate.

To quote Richard Lindzen, a professor at MIT’s Department of Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences:

"With respect to science, the assumption behind the [alarmist] consensus is science is the source of authority and that authority increases with the number of scientists [who agree.] But science is not primarily a source of authority. It is a particularly effective approach of inquiry and analysis. Skepticism is essential to science -- consensus is foreign," Lindzen said.

Tip of the hat to Kate at small dead animals.

Mark Pilgrim is ashamed of having filed a patent when he was at IBM:

My name is on a software patent. It happened during my brief tenure at IBM. The patent is not yet issued (as I understand it, issuance may take years) and does not show up in USPTO or Google Patent Search. But it will, someday.

[...]

Later I really did quit, but only after I secured another job, and not because of patents. I’m told that once the patent is issued, I’ll get another $500, even though I don’t work for IBM anymore. Issuance takes anywhere from 2 to 7 years. By then, IBM will have filed tens of thousands more. It’s an institutionalized form of madness, outrageous, all-consuming, and incurable. I’m ashamed to have been a part of it.

My name is on several patents. I'm not ashamed. We created great technology and then we filed patents for it.

Patents weren't always used by patent trolls to shakedown competitors. Most legitimate companies, including mine at the time, build patent portfolios to barter with if they were accused of patent infringement. We would get to use the other company's technology, and they would get to use some of ours. Simple. No litigation. No multi-million dollar royalties. No threats. And therefore no shame.

Of course I never expected a reputable company like Microsoft to become a patent troll. So I guess there is a danger in the patents I created. But that seems to be the last resort of a dying company, one that is afraid of its inability to compete on a level playing field.

Has Microsoft really sunk that far? And does that mean than any company could descend to that level?

Yes it is the busiest day for the post office, the phone company, ever restaurant you try to go to, and pretty much for flower shops as well.

Happy Mother's Day!

Bob Zitter, HBO’s Chief Technology Officer, is tired of the term "Digital Rights Management", or DRM. He thinks it needs a new name:

That changed on Tuesday, when HBO’s Chief Technology Officer, Bob Zitter, suggested at an industry conference that DRM needs a name change. Zitter’s suggested name: Digital Consumer Enablement, or DCE.

The irony here is that “rights management” is itself an industry-sponsored euphemism for what would more straightforwardly be called “restrictions”. But somehow the public got the idea that DRM is restrictive, hence the need for a name change.

As in digitally enabling your customers to be screwed when they try to use what they've paid for?

Just suppose for a second that your car stalled everytime you got on the freeway because you car manufacturer decided that you needed a different license for the freeway. How would that work for you?

Tip of the hat to Ed Felten at Freedom to Tinker.

Waterloo Region, where I currently live, is having problems with its buses [link will evaporate tomorrow]:

Grand River Transit is stranding some passengers at bus stops because so many buses have been taken off the road for repairs.

When buses show up late they are sometimes overcrowded.

"It's not a reliable service right now," said Rick Lonergan, of the Canadian Auto Workers, representing bus drivers and mechanics.

"An awful lot of people are upset out there, naturally. They're late for work, etc. etc., and the drivers are taking real flak over this."

Local politicians insist the the solution to traffic and transit problems in the region is a light rail transit line that runs from one end of the city to the other, at a cost (estimated in 2004) of $260 million. Buses will then carry riders from that central corridor to their intended destinations.

That still leaves the buses as the weakest link in the proposed system. If they can't even keep the buses running currently, how will spending an additional $260 million on an LRT make it better?

LostRemote notes a story about a substantial decline in the number of television viewers:

Quoting now from an AP story today: “In TV’s worst spring in recent memory, a startling number of Americans drifted away from television the past two months: More than 2.5 million fewer people were watching ABC, CBS, NBC and Fox than at the same time last year, statistics show.” Everyone has a theory: early start to Daylight Savings Time, poor measurement of DVRs, boring TV shows and broader availability of video online. All of these likely have an impact. The bottom line is that these declines will have a significant impact.

I've noticed this myself.I used to be a television addict. I'm talking 5-8 hours per night. Sure I was doing other things at the same time, but the television was on every night sometimes until 2 or 3 am while I worked.

But this year things have changed. I don't enjoy reality shows, haven't watched Lost, and gave up on Jericho when it become to difficult to follow. There have been entire months of reruns interspersed with the occasional new epidode, to the point where I now only bother to plan to watch television on Mondays and Thursdays. The rest of the time TiVo captures shows for me so that I can watch them when nothing else decent is on, which is frequently.

If they can alientate me, a ridiculously insistent viewer, then what hope do they have to keep the more fickle viewer? People now realize that they have a lot more control over their entertainment and when and how they get it. That means that the networks can't assume that people will sit back and take what they dish out.

Tip of the hat to Rob Hyndman.

Toronto City Hall has banned Facebook for their employees:

City Hall has banned Facebook.

As of yesterday, local government employees can no longer access the wildly popular social networking site from their office computers.

Councillors will be exempt from the ban.

"It's a matter of asking, 'Is this something city staff needs to have access to?' " Brad Ross, a spokesman for the city, said. "There's a potential for staff to spend an inordinate amount of time on a site like this."

There are many things on the internet on which staff could spend an inordinate amount of time. So why single out Facebook?

And if it is so bad for staff, then why are councillors exempt from the ban?

A Toronto, Canada city councillor wants to levy a 30 cent tax on coffee cups, a 25 cent tax on plastic bags, and similar taxes on styrofoam containers. Glenn De Baeremaeker has a good reason:

Keeping nearly three-quarters of the city's waste out of landfill -- not collecting extra cash -- would be the goal of the levies, Mr. De Baeremaeker stressed.

He would insist the money collected be shovelled back into recycling program and other efforts to reduce the amount of Toronto trash that winds up trucked to a Michigan dump.

"In no conceivable way could these taxes and these proposals in any ways address any of the city's fiscal challenges," Mr. De Baeremaker said. "The idea, for example, to tax plastic bags isn't to make money, it's to send a signal to consumers that you are consuming precious natural resources and let's reflect the true cost of doing that."

The only way to have less trash in the form of coffee cups is to have less people buying coffee, so it seems that Mr. De BaereMaeker is proposing an experiment in social engineering to force people to buy less coffee. I don't think people are about to give up their daily fix of Tim Horton's coffee, but the will certainly grumble over a tax that hits lower income folks disproportionately.

The overall impact on the volume of trash will likely be miniscule, but Toronto, with a voracious appetite for cash, will just be generating more tax revenue under the guise of being "green".

Prompted by a recent report on the subject, Om Malik asks if the replacement trends of PCs and TVs are reversing:

This is what he wrote: “In the past, consumers replaced their PC’s every 3 years and their televisions roughly every decade. Is this trend poised to reverse? Hint: Yes.”

It's always delicate to speculateon trends where the technologies involved are changing so rapidly. Right now PCs are pretty much stagnant, except for the introduction of Microsoft Vista and the rise of the Mac. And their prices aren't really coming down; they are just staying the same with the addition of more features.

TVs on the other hand are now just reaching the price poing where it is reasonable for the average consumer to move to LCD or plasma flat-panel screens - really the biggest wholesale change in decades.

So right now people are replacing their TVs, a trend that might continue for a year or three. I may buy an LCD screen myself this year. But people are waiting to see what happens with PCs. I for one have no interest in buying a new PC with Windows Vista though that seems to be the only thing available in stores now. Though by next year I will be buying another Mac.

I wouldn't bet on the trend reversing just yet. I think in a couple of years people will have passed through the move to flat panel TVs and we'll see that decade long replacement cycle back again. TVs just don't change that much. Not that there is that much to watch anyway.

The price of gasoline is increasing, and it is being blamed on less than optimal refinery output:

Refinery output in the U.S. has been below normal for several months now, after fires and other accidents combined with longer than normal maintenance shutdowns, hurting production.

Peter Beutel, an oil analyst at consulting firm Cameron Hanover, noted in a recent report that refineries have not operated above 95 percent capacity since Hurricanes Rita and Katrina in 2005. Before 2005, the refineries, clustered around the Gulf coast and badly damaged in the storms, routinely operated at over 95 percent capacity.

So if you do the bare minimum to keep your refineries up, and if a problem occurs the price of your product, and therefore your profit, rises. Why would you bother to spend any money on maintaining your refineries?

In fact, you probably wouldn't even mind the occasional problem occurring.

Imperial Oil in Canada, having suffered a fire that caused severe gas shortages to many of their stations and pushed the price of gas in Canada up by 80 cents per gallon, just reported a 31% jump in profit for the quarter.Again, why bother maintaining your refineries?

Generally malpractice is claimed when a patient is injured of dies as a result of some sort of medical intervention. But suppose the patient is told that they are going to die, and they don't:

A British man misdiagnosed with terminal cancer who lived his life as if there was no tomorrow is now asking for financial compensation after doctors admitted they were wrong.

John Brandrick, 62, was told two years ago he had terminal pancreatic cancer. He decided to spend his remaining time in style, quitting his job and spending his life savings on hotels, restaurants and holidays.

Brandrick even gave away his winter clothes to the Red Cross because he didn't think he'd need them come November, according to the Daily Telegraph. He and his partner, Sally, lived lavishly, expecting he wouldn't last long, said the paper.

Clearly the doctors were wrong, having admitted that they made a mistake. And clearly the patient suffered financial injury as a direct result of an incorrect medical diagnosis, doing something that most people in his situation would likely have done.

If he was told he was fine and then died he would have a case. So why wouldn't this be malpractice as well?

I wrote the other day about my problem with the laces of my Rockport shoes. Being generous and only counting business days it took them about 99 hours to answer my request (they promised a maximum of 72 hours). And what did I get for all that extra waiting? This:

Mr. Borsato, thank you for contacting The Rockport Company. We are sorry to hear that you are experiencing difficulties with your Rockport shoes.

Your information was received at our Rockport Customer Service office in the United States. Unfortunately, we can only assist with issues within the United States.

We recommend contacting our representative in Canada to assist with your inquiry. Information to contact our Canadian representative is listed below

1.800.668.1800 (English)
1.800.387.5736 (Francais)

Thank you again for contacting Rockport.

So they can't help me because I'm in Canada. And they couldn't have figured that out sooner? Even though I went to their web page and specifically selected "Canada" and then chose "Contact Us", they can't help me. And apparently there is no email address for Canada so I will have to phone them.

I especially loved this little note:

We will assume your issue has been resolved if we do not hear from you within 24 hours.

They can take 99 hours to get back to me but I have 24 hours to respond or they close the case. Wow! Customer satisfaction is clearly not a big concern for Rockport Shoes.

I'll update this after I see what happens when I phone them but I'm not really expecting that much.

This Forbes article loosely defines DRM and gets it wrong:

Other online music retailers say they're worried that following Apple's lead will confuse customers who may already be baffled by a crazy quilt of restrictions that envelop the industry. And on Wednesday, executives from major music companies speaking at an industry event said that getting rid of "digital rights management"--mediaspeak for rules that limit how many times users can copy music they've bought--isn't high on their agendas.

They should talk to the people who bought music for their Microsoft PlaysForSure-certified devices - since Microsoft's own Zune player won't play the music they paid for because it uses different DRM:

Microsoft's Zune will not play protected Windows Media Audio and Video purchased or "rented" from Napster 2.0, Rhapsody, Yahoo! Unlimited, Movielink, Cinemanow, or any other online media service. That's right -- the media that Microsoft promised would Play For Sure doesn't even play on Microsoft's own device. Buried in footnote 4 of its press release, Microsoft clearly states that "Zune software can import audio files in unprotected WMA, MP3, AAC; photos in JPEG; and videos in WMV, MPEG-4, H.264" -- protected WMA and WMV (not to mention iTunes DRMed AAC) are conspicuously absent.

So it isn't only how many copies you can make; it is your ability to even enjoy what you paid for at all. It is this absolute misunderstanding of DRM and its inherent problems that allows its continued existence.

Tip of the hat to Kuro5hin.

For Earth Day, thousands in Montreal and 250 in Toronto marched in support of the Kyoto Accord: Thousands of people marched through the streets Montreal today in support of the Kyoto environmental agreement. Bloc Quebecois Leader Gilles Duceppe was among the protesters demanding Ottawa cut Canadas greenhouse gas emissions in line with the Kyoto protocol.

Yestererday a Marijuana march in Toronto drew 20,000: About 20,000 people took part in a pro-marijuana rally and parade Saturday in Toronto — many of them openly smoking the drug.

Polls constantly tell us that Canadians want the government to support Kyoto, but it is easy to answer a poll question with what you think is the "right" answer. Perhaps feet on the street are a better measure of what Canadians really care about.

Elizabeth May, leader of Canada's Green Party, one week ago:

Elizabeth May, the federal Green party leader, is standing by her comment over the weekend that condemned Stephen Harper's stance on climate change by comparing it to "a grievance worse than Neville Chamberlain's appeasement of the Nazis."

Elizabeth May, yesterday:

The Green Party will offer Canadians a broad platform in the next federal election without resorting to smear campaigns or fear tactics, Green Leader Elizabeth May said Saturday.

Because mentioning a political party in the same sentence as Nazis isn't really a smear, is it?

When I worked in Silicon Valley we celebrated Cinco de Mayo. And we've just migrated the celebration to wherever we were living at the time. I'll admit that Canada is a bit of a stretch but I have been hearing more and more Spanish spoken here so maybe not that much of a stretch after all.

Lately I've been expanding my cooking repertoire into more Mexican family style meals given that there are exactly zero Mexican restaurants in Canada (and no, Taco bell does not count), so this is a good excuse to have some great Mexican food, and a lot of tequila.

Given the latest political fight over a remark a hockey player might have made it may be politically incorrect here to celebrate Mexicans defeating the French, but I'm celebrating anyway.

Happy Cinco de Mayo!

I have purchased several pairs of Rockport shoes over the past few years. In every case, the shoelaces have broken very quickly, and it is almost impossible to find new laces.

I bought the most recent pair in early February. The laces didn't even make it past mid-April, all of two months later. So I went to their website and sent them the following complaint on May 1 at 12:40 pm:

I purchased my most recent pair of Rockports in early February of this year and as usual it wasn't even two months before the laces broke. Will Rockport be remedying this problem? Are there any places in Canada where I can find Rockport shoe laces?

I received the following response:

Your question has been received. You should expect a response from us within 72 hours. If your issue remains unresolved, please update this question at http://rockport.custhelp.com/...

So it is now May 4 at 7:00 pm, over 72 hours later, and I guess I have a pretty good idea about how much Rockport cares about my repeat business. Or there are just so many other problems that they couldn't get around to me. Fortunately I am very happy with my Sperry Top-Siders.

Is your company failing to respond to customer issues in a timely fashion? Are you driving customers to your competitors? Over something as small as a $2 pair of laces on a $100 shoe?

Mark Evans asks why nobody has come up with a biodegradeable grocery bag:

You figure with all the “green” technology being developed, someone would come up with a bio-degradeable plastic bag, and that large grocery retailers would champion their use. It’s good to see more businesses become more environmentally-conscious but there’s so much more they could do.

Shopping at home in Boston the standard question by the cashier was "paper or plastic?"and you had your choice of either type of bag at no additional cost. We most often used paper. That same choice is never offered in Canada, though many stores will sell you reusable bags, which you then have to bring back to the store with you.

Now we do reuse our plastic bags for storage and other things, but there comes a point where you can't reuse them all. Often when buying one or two items I won't even use a bag. But the choice of a paper bag would be nice.

For all the talk of conservartion in Canada, it seems that there isn't actually much actually being practiced. At my local Home Depot in Nashua, NH, there was an entire aisle of water-saving gadgets for taps and toilets and things - flow restrictors, dams, and things like that. When I moved to Canada there was nothing like that at all.

The same goes for compact fluorescent bulbs. In the United States there are indoor and outdoor bulbs, as well as bug lights, spotlights, floodlights, and numerous colors. Yet in Canada there just seem to be the standard indoor versions.

This can only suggest to me that there isn't yet a demand for environmentally friendly and conserving devices as there is in other countries. Though perhaps that is starting to change.

Who knew that peak helium would become a problem before peak oil did? It seems that the world is experiencing a shortage of helium:

A global scarcity of a highly valued commodity has driven prices higher, forced suppliers to ration available resources and sparked calls for conservation.

As the shortage enters its tenth month, the warnings are dire: Unless new sources can be found, the bright, helium-filled balloons that now populate birthday parties could soon be extinct.

And who knew that New Year's is the biggest balloon day of the year?