Category: Rants & Raves

With shipping charges like that, it’s no wonder people are losing interest in using eBay. I find myself using Kijiji more lately to sell things, and I’ve bought less and less from eBay – largely because of sellers who gouge people with insane shipping charges.

“Amid fears that Canada’s culture is being drowned in a sea of online video from around the world, federal regulators are looking at setting up a $100-million fund to support homegrown programming on the Internet. The controversial proposal, which is aimed at staking out a more distinct national identity online, has pitted the television production community against Canada’s Internet service providers, who may ultimately have to foot the bill, or pass those costs onto customers.”

I can hardly believe what I read in this article. For the non-Canadians out there, the CRTC is the Canadian Radio-Television and Telecommunications Commission. They’re the regulatory body that’s made some very unpopular and rather questionable decisions over the past few decades. Canadian radio stations, for instance, have to play a certain percentage of Canadian content – which means we tend to hear a lot of the same songs over and over. There’s a lot of good Canadian music out there today, but forcing it to be heard is ridiculous in my opinion. Though I understand the concept of having the Canadian voice be heard, I believe that good music floats to the top of the refuse regardless of where it’s from – and that it’s not the job of government or my tax dollars to enforce that. It’s no different for Internet video – I’m a Canadian who makes videos and posts them online, but I don’t need or want my government to somehow “encourage” my fellow Canadians to watch my content. My tax dollars should be going toward health care, defense of this nation, and other government-run areas. Keep your hands off the Internet CRTC – this is one Canadian who doesn’t want your help!

Do you ever have those days when, at the end of the day, you wish you could have just skipped the day? Yesterday was one of those days for me. This is my therapeutic write-up about it. My day starts out with a quick check of my email, and I have a message from a major gadget site chastising me for a story we ran which quoted too much of their content and for not indicating the quoted material was from their story. I check the story, and sure enough, we did quote more than we should have – but the story was so short, it was hard not to. But I know what it’s like when another site takes more of my content than they should, so I write back to him and apologize, adjusting the story. Our headline linked to their story, but it didn’t have the name of the site in it, so I add to to the story. OK, no biggie, but not a great way to start my day.

Partially because of dealing with this, I end up leaving my house later than I wanted to – I had to head down to the local CBC radio office because I was invited to be a guest on a nationally-broadcast show called The Point. I second-guessed the directions I had in my head on how to get there, so I missed the turn and ended up having to make up my own route for getting there. On the way there I stopped at a stop sign and had some wicked sun glare to my right, so I couldn’t see that there was a car coming until I had already started to pull out – and I didn’t have the right of way. Honk honk goes the other driver – yeah, sorry about that, my fault. As I’m getting closer to where I think I need to be, I had to pull a U-turn on a major road, just as the light was turning green to let traffic start coming my way. The turning radius of my car wasn’t quite enough to allow me to to the U-turn, so I had to throw it into reverse when I’d turned as far as I could, back up a few feet, then get going forward again. I didn’t stop traffic, but I still felt like an idiot because when I see people doing that I usually think rather unkind things about them.  Continue reading I Shouldn’t Have Gotten Out of Bed Yesterday

I’ve been using Twitter pretty heavily for the past few weeks, and I’m definitely grasping why some people really like it – but I also see some of the typical social networking abuses I see elsewhere. Take RSS feeds for instance: I un-friended some people on Facebook when they started pulling in their gadget blog feeds. If I’m interested in being Facebook friends with someone, I’m interested in them as a person – not necessarily in their gadget blog. I can read their gadget blog via my RSS reader – cluttering up a Facebook feed, which is supposed to be about people, with technology news is counter-productive, at least from my point of view. The exception to this is if they’re importing the RSS feed from their personal blog – again, since I’m interested in them as people, seeing what they’re writing on their personal blog is an extension of that.

I’m seeing the same thing happening on Twitter – people I’m following are importing their tech blogs so I get alerted whenever they post a news item to their blog. I’m sorry if this sounds rude, but if I’m following you on Twitter, it’s probably because I’m interested in what you, the person, are thinking/doing. Getting a steady stream of RSS updates just adds noise into the equation. Odds are good I’m already following your tech site via RSS, so getting alerted twice whenever you publish something is a waste of my time and attention.

I think the solution as far as Twitter goes it to have a Twitter feed for your technology site(s), and one for yourself. That way people who want to get Twits when you post a new story to your site can get that, and people who want to connect with you as a person can follow your personal Twitter feed…until they stop following you because you’re Twitting every 5 seconds about really inane things. But hey, no system is perfect.

Yesterday morning I put up a few items of IKEA furniture on Kijiji. I’m always amazed at how quickly I receive responses for the things I list – I’m either selling things too cheaply or have a super-compelling pitch style. 😉 I received a message from someone yesterday – they were the second person to express an interest in the item, so I wrote them back saying that I’d keep them informed if the first person bailed on the purchase. This was the response waiting for me this morning:

“i will like to purchase the item out rightly,I am willing to offer you $1400 for it and i will be paying you with my credit card via my PayPal account,I will also like you to send me your paypal details(PayPal e-mail address) including your phone # so i can effect payment to you right away and make sure you get back to me so that i can arrange for pick up as i will like the item to be picked,so no shipping included.i will appreciate if you can get a PayPal Bank account to make things more easier for both of us. NB:Honestly, I do not know the actual worth of this item because I’m always busy sailing. If my offer is not ok, Let me know so i can shoot up abit or bring it down as the case maybe. Thank you for your understanding, while i await your urgent response.”

So they want to pay $1400 for items that I listed for $250? And all because they’re too busy sailing in the land-locked provice of Alberta? Gosh, what a deal for me! I’d better hand over my PayPal email address and my phone number on record so I can get all that extra money! Sheesh. I’m not sure what sort of scam they’re trying to pull with my PayPal email address and phone number – I suspect some sort of identity/account theft, though if PayPal’s security is that lax, that concerns me a bit. Regardless, it’s good to remember that if something seems to good to be true, it is.

“Keeping up with Plaxo, LinkedIn, and Facebook is bad enough, but I now sense that really ugly things are happening to those platforms making them less and less useful to me. It’s the rise of the social networking application. You know what I am talking about, those applications that are built by third-party developers to take advantage of the social network ecosystem the companies are so proud to create but we all come to hate over time. My friend Ira is a Facebook whore. He signs-up for every cause, group, or application sent to him by, well, anybody. Then what’s even worse is he expects me to sign-up too so he can send me whatever crap is the specialty of that subgroup. I love you, Ira, but I just can’t do as you ask.”

I really couldn’t have said it better myself – check out Robert Cringely’s full article. What’s going on now with social networking sites/applications is similar to what happened with email. The signal to noise ratio is rapidly becoming more noise than signal, and it’s frustrating to watch happen. Let’s take Twitter for example: like any form of communication, it has it’s uses for some people, but like most new forms of communication, it gets abused at first – kind of like when your mom first gets email and she spends the first year forwarding you jokes and urban legends. I think we’re at the high-water mark of Twitter abuse and maybe 2009 is the year when people stop twitting everything they do/see. Or maybe Twitter will just die – they have no business model after all – and this will all be moot.

Back to Facebook: I went through my “friends” list and removed about two dozen people. I thought I could be all clever and create a list and move some of my business contacts into it, but it seems with lists you don’t get much control over what they see…so it seems that putting people into the limited category is still the only option if you want to have your real friends see what’s going on in your life, and your business acquaintances see a simpler, more sanitized version. I can’t be the only one that wants to share more of my life with my friends than with people I know in a professional capacity, but Facebook sure doesn’t seem to understand that.