A Funny and Brave Politician? Is There Such a Thing?

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I don’t think much of most politicians; integrity seems to be a foreign word to most of them. I happened to click on a link in the signature of a Pocket PC Thoughts community member who posted in my thread about WiFi (boy that’s generated some interesting commentary across my network!) and I ended up at the Web site of one of his projects: a Web site for Ken Gordon. I’d just finished the article about my New York trip, so I was rewarding myself with 5 minutes of mindless Web surfing (something I don’t do often). What caught my attention on the Ken Gordon sight was this image:

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Could it be? A politician with the stones to get into a tank with sharks? Yup! There’s the official 30 second TV spot showing him in the tank, but the really funny one is the no stuntman used video – I can’t believe how close some of those massive sharks got to him and he never flinched. I don’t care how satiated or “tame” those sharks might be, there’s still a certain level of danger and it’s not something you’d likely find me doing. He further demonstrates his sense of humour in another video spot, and some added bravery by jumping tandem out of a plane.

I don’t live in Colorado, and I definitely lean more toward the right politically, but if I could I’d vote for this guy – if he has the guts to jump out of a plane, be in a tank with sharks, and turn down $100,000 in contributions from special interest groups, he’s got more courage (on multiple levels) than 99% of the politicians out there. I hope he wins his election!

Canadian Dollar Continues to Surge, We Continue to Get Ripped Off at Retail

One of the realities of living in Canada is that we’re closely tied to the USA – we consume their TV, movies, books, music, etc. 99.99% of Canadian popular culture is identical to American popular culture. In other ways, we’re a curious mix: I think of height in inches, weight in pounds, but speed in KH/h and temperature in Celsius. As the Canadian dollar continues to surge past the value of the US dollar (this morning my bank Web site tells me that buying one Canadian dollar would cost $1.09 USD) the price disparity of many commercial goods becomes more glaring (and I become more depressed every time I see a US cheque with my name on it). You see, when we buy a book or magazine in Canada, there’s a price in US dollars and one in Canadian dollars. It never really changes, and all Canadians know they’re paying more than the currency difference indicates they should. But lately of course, things have flipped and now it’s just crazy to pay $9.99 CAD for a book that has a price of $6.99 USD on it. This is an email I sent to Amazon.ca this morning:

“I was wondering, now that the Canadian dollar is significantly stronger than the US dollar, when will Amazon adjust the prices of it’s products to reflect that? Especially books of course, because those have the highest pricing disparity. Canadians have been being ripped-off for years on the Canadian pricing of books, it’s only now that the disparity is so severe companies are being forced to act. When will Amazon?” 

I think to some degree Amazon has started to react to pricing: I checked the price of a few best-sellers, and Stephen Colbert’s “I Am America and So Can You” is $16.19 USD on Amazon.com but only $15 CAD on Amazon.ca. On the other hand, the book “You: Staying Young: is selling for $15.60 USD on Amazon.com, but $18.89 CAD on Amazon.ca. Other Canadian companies are starting to act: Indigo announced a 10-20% discount program, although that doesn’t seem nearly enough when the cover prices of books were already 30-40% off the true dollar value.

Anyone in Europe is no doubt already familiar with the realities of locally-adjusted pricing: the Euro and British Pound have been stronger than the US dollar for years, yet the prices of technology items rarely, if ever, reflect that. The VAT issue clouds the waters somewhat, but I doubt I could find a European happy with the prices they’re paying when they know how much it costs for an American to buy the same thing.

There’s a massive opportunity here for US companies: START SHIPPING TO CANADA. For years many US companies have refused to ship to Canada, but now that our dollar is kicking ass and taking names, companies that previously haven’t shipped to Canada (NewEgg for instance) or haven’t shipped certain products (Amazon.com won’t ship electronics to Canada) should be falling all over themselves to service the 30 million Canadians who now have a stronger dollar and are eager to shop for US products in US prices. Come on, bring it!

Don’t Take My Order for a Product You Don’t Have

There’s nothing worse for the perception of your company than when a customer of yours feels cheated or tricked – it’s hard for your brand to recover from that. Case in point: on October 1st I was (as always) keenly following Dell’s Days of Deals and they happened to have a Sony Digital Voice Recorder on sale for $69, a full $40 off the normal price of $99. Sometimes I have do to interviews for my Web sites and I thought it would be a decent solution for the price. I placed the order on October 1st at the special price. On November 1st, a full month later, I still didn’t have the product. I had been checking my order online every week or so, expecting it to say it had shipped, but no such luck.

Today I phoned Dell, and 35 minutes, one customer service agent, and one pause-prone (is that a cultural thing or a Dell sales thing?) Indian salesperson later I was told that the product was going to be back in stock in seven to ten business days. So if I’m lucky, it will be somewhere around the six to seven week mark after ordering that my product will show up. Seven to ten business days sounds suspiciously like a generic “I don’t actually know” answer, but I suppose it’s better than what the customer service agent suggested I do: cancel my order and re-place it, trying to get the same discount from online says.

I’ve seen Dell deals be sold out before, which is why I always check them first thing on the morning when the Day of Deals are on. If Dell didn’t have the product in stock, why take my order? It’s certainly not normal for Dell to take a month to ship products – the last product I ordered I received the very next day. I had been hoping to use this voice recorder when I went down to New York (I figured I had 20+ days for it to show up), but Dell betrayed my trust when it never arrived. Come on Dell: you’re supposed to be the master of the supply chain, can’t you show “out of stock” on a promotional deal when you don’t have any more to sell?

Data Plans From Rogers: Stop The Insanity!

[This was originally published at Pocket PC Thoughts and Smartphone Thoughts, but I want to get it out to as many people as possible, so I’m publishing it here as well.]

While researching the HTC Touch that Rogers is releasing today, I came upon something that made my jaw drop: the “special” data plan pricing that Rogers is offering their customers.

In case you went blind looking at the sheer ridiculousness of the prices there, let me recap: the cheapest monthly fee is $15/month (keeping in mind $1 Canadian is about $1.05 USD now) and that gets you 2 megabytes. 2 FREAKIN’ MEGABYTES. What can you do with 2 MB of data? Perhaps if you stick to short, plain-text email messages, and you browsed WAP sites from 1999, you might be able to live with that.

Oh, if you go over, you’ll be charged $10 per 1 MB that you use. If you’re willing to pony up $60 per month, Rogers will graciously extend to you 30 whole MB of data transfer, and only charge you $7 per 1 MB over that amount. Isn’t that nice of them? If you want to get their biggest and best plan, $80 per month will get you a whole 200 MB of data, and if you go over you’ll only be charged $5 per 1 MB. Gosh! Golly! At those prices I can maybe even receive a few HTML messages or attachments per day on my Windows Mobile device.

Digging deeper, I looked at their data plans page (which renders horribly in Firefox I might add) and realized that Blackberry users are even worse off: $60 a month will only get you 25 MB of data. They have a Windows Mobile data plan page here as well, and I was baffled to see only one option offered, a new plan I had heard about a month or two ago: $65 per month for 1000 MB of data, and $1 per addition MB. What a minute…that’s almost (but not quite) reasonable. They recommend this for “tethered laptop use”. It’s certainly a massive cost savings when compared to the $80/200MB plan, but is it enough? No, not by a long shot.

Rogers, like most North American carriers, is constantly being battered by subscriber churn (a customer leaving for another wireless company) and desperately wants two things: to keep their customers from leaving, and to increase their ARPU (average revenue per unit); meaning the amount of money they make off each subscriber. Current data plans are a way to get a lot of money out of a small number of people. What Rogers and most of the carriers don’t seem to grasp is that there’s more money to be made overall if much larger numbers of users had less expensive data plans. Rogers seems content with charging 1000 people $100 a month instead of getting 10,000 people on a $20 a month plan.

Time and time again, I’ve had friends and family express interest in Windows Mobile devices, only to have them be scared away by the cost. And we’re not talking the cost of the device – it’s always the cost of the data plans. People are much more willing to spend $500 on a nice piece of hardware than spending $60 a month on data, year after year. Windows Mobile adoption is being crippled by the expensive data rate plans of Canadian carriers, and until they address the pricing issue, they’re not going to see Windows Mobile smartphones selling as well as they could be.

When Digital Devices Are Stupid

I have a big phone on my desk with a big screen. It has a big clock on it. Over the years I’ve had this phone I’ve become quite accustomed to looking at it to see what time it is, even more so than looking at the clock in the system tray of whatever PC I’m looking at. The problem? It has a built-in time adjustment for daylight savings time – which would normally be helpful – but since the US of A decided to change DST, and Canada followed along, my clock has been one hour slow since the old DST date. If I change it manually, it changes back to what it thinks is the correct time. There’s no option to override this, there’s no way to change it. And because it’s landline phone, there’s no firmware update to fix this problem once and for all. That’s a stupid digital device. I’ve heard so many pros and cons about DST I don’t know who to believe any more, but I do know that it’s frustrating to have a clock that’s been giving me the wrong time for a few days now. 😉

Companies That Want Feedback Rock

I spent nearly 90 minutes on the phone today with the folks at ACD Systems, the makers of the awesome ACDSee. I’ve been using ACDSee since 1998 or so, and always upgrade to every new version (though to be fair the upgrade process has been free lately because I’m a member of “the media”). Why would I spent 90 minutes on the phone with them? I’ve been giving them direct feedback here and there about their product via email for a little over a year now, and they suggested a phone call to talk about my ideas and suggestions for their product so I obliged.

There was a product planner, a developer, and a marketing person in the room, and they let me open up my brain and dump all the ideas, fixes, improvements, and concepts I had for how I thought ACDSee could be made even better. I feel very passionate about computer hardware and software that I use, and am always looking for opportunities to improve it. That’s partially out of a desire to have a better tool for my own needs, but it’s also because when I pick a product I tend to stick with it – I have a very strong sense of loyalty, like a sports fan to his home team, so I want to see the product I’ve picked “win” in the market.

The folks at ACDSee are great – they listened intently, engaged me on many levels to drill down into my ideas, and were genuinely enthused to listen to me talk about how I’d like to see the product improved. The next version won’t have everything I asked for of course, but I bet I’ll see quite a few of the little things addressed.

Any company that’s willing to engage deeply with their customers is a winner in my books – more companies should do it, but most are afraid of their customers and try to keep them at arm’s length.

Now I just need to find a way to make money doing this… 😉

Why Is WiFi Less Stable Year by Year?

I swear that WiFi overall as a technology is less and less stable every year. Back when it was only 802.11b, I don’t remember having nearly as many problems as I have lately. I’ve owned D-Link, Belkin, Netgear and Linksys routers – all have been replaced in my hunt for a fast, stable router that works with all of my equipment. The past month or so has been particularly hair-pulling; I’ve been in wireless router hell.

A couple of weeks ago my still-quite-new D-Link 802.11n router (a DIR-655) flaked out on me. I spent an hour thinking it was my cable modem, eventually narrowed it down to the router, then wasted an hour on the phone jumping through D-Link tech support hoops just so I could get an RMA and get the router exchanged. It took talking to three techs before they’d admit there was a hardware problem with the router. From the beginning the router had compatibility problems with my wife’s iPAQ 1950, even with the latest firmware on both devices. It’s embarrassing in a geeky way when my wife has to Exchange sync over WiFi at work because the home network is never functioning. I bought the iPAQ 1950 to replace the previous iPAQ that had trouble connecting over WiFi, hoping that the newer model would be more compatible with modern WiFi. It’s not. I don’t believe the compatibility problems are due to a hardware failure – I think the DIR-655 just has poor compatibility with WiFi devices, which is a common issue I’ve seen with routers over the past two years.

I then switched to my backup router, also a D-Link (DI-624). It kept dropping my connections, both wired and wireless, so I swore I’d never buy another D-Link router. I went out and bought a Belkin 802.11n router, another brand I’ve had trouble with in the past and never wanted to buy again – but there are only so many choices on the market. The Belkin router worked perfectly when I swapped it into place, but now my Fujitsu P7020 laptop running Windows XP refuses to connect to it regardless of which mode I put it in (WPA, WEP, no security, 802.11n/g, or 802.11g). The HTC Touch won’t connect to it either – it can’t even see the network. The AT&T Tilt locked up the Wireless Manager trying to connect to it, so I reset it. Trying to even remove the wireless network setting locks up the wireless manager on the Tilt. When I did manage to get it to connect to the Belkin router and prompt me for the WPA password, it would try to connect for a few seconds, then come back and show me a list of networks again. My Dell XPS M1330 can connect to the Belkin router if it’s in 802.11g/n mode, but not if it’s in 802.11g only mode. I’m in wireless hell.

The ultimate frustration here is that whenever I can’t get wireless working properly and I’m in desperate need of a connection, I always connect to a neighbour’s unsecured network called “default” – and almost every device can connect to it (the Tilt can’t however). I’m tempted to go knocking on some local doors to see who’s router it is, and ask if I can buy it – because clearly whatever old, unsecured hardware they’re using is superior to all the modern, expensive routers that I keep buying.

Make Marketing Surveys Worth My Time

I received a phone call yesterday where the caller said he was from the Royal Bank of Canada (the bank I use) and they had a customer survey for me. I had a million things to do, but I asked how long it would take – I could spare a couple of minutes. He said the survey would take 10 to 13 minutes on average. I asked if there was some sort of incentive for doing the survey (maybe a month of no-fee banking?) and he sheepishly said no. I politely said that my time was worth something and declined to answer the survey. He seemed stunned that I wasn’t willing to give up 15 minutes of  my time (I tend to be rather…expressive when asked for my opinion) for nothing. I suspect that the majority of the people they get to answer these surveys are the kind of people who feel special when asked for their opinion – which would typically be the kind of person who’s not in any sort of leadership position at work or home life. I’d say even your average frazzled home-based mom with kids wouldn’t want to give up 15 minutes for no good reason. So who are the people who the Royal Bank is going to get their results from? Not a good cross-section of their customer base, that’s for sure.

If you’re doing a phone survey without any perks for the person answering the questions, it should be a short, under-two-minutes survey. If you want someone to give up 15 minutes of their time, give them something…ANYTHING…to make it worth their while.

A July Sunset

In mid-July (yes, I’m that behind on processing some of my photos) I spent a little over an hour chasing one of the most beautiful sunsets I’ve ever seen. I shot over 120 photos because I just couldn’t stop – every few minutes the light changed, and a new version of the sunset would appear. I shot from three different locations until the sun went down past the mountains. The beauty of creation was never so brilliant! The whole gallery is found here.

The Quick New York Trip: Day One

[I’m now at home, and didn’t manage to get this published while in New York, but I figured since I’d written it I might as well publish it!]

Preparation: it’s been about a year since I’ve had a flight last over 90 minutes, so right at the last minute I realized I should have loaded up some DVDs or TV shows to watch on the 4.5 hour flight. Managed to get one ripped DVD onto a USB flash drive before I headed out the door, but that’s it. My wonderful wife got my suitcase packed and off to the airport.

Airport Check-In: Air Canada’s slogan should be “Giving you the longest lines since 1959”. They’re the worst when it comes to getting people checked in fast. They’ve added electronic check-in, but guess where the machines are located? About 20 people deep into the line for the human-powered check-in. Why wouldn’t they be outside the main line? And when you use the machine, people pass you, so if the machine doesn’t work for you, you’ve lost your place in line. The process was very slow, but it did manage to get me checked in ok. I took my printed boarding pass and went through security, where my D200 camera in my carry-on bag managed to get flagged for a bag search. “Keep smiling even if they’re looking at your underwear” is my motto at security.

Airport Waiting: I think all airports should offer free WiFi. They charge so many damn taxes, the least they could do is provide something useful like WiFi. The Calgary airport has WiFi powered by Telus, our local overcharging-happy communications company, and it’s pretty expensive so I skipped it. I ate some fast-food lunch because the much healthier Jugo Juice is on the other side of the security glass. It’s lame that once you get past security you have to be “partitioned” off.

Technology On The Plane: I don’t know what kind of Air Canada plane I was flying on (it’s either a B777 or a refurbished Beoing 767), but it looked and felt quite new – and it actually had some very cool technological features. A first for me on a North American flight was having laptop power. And we’re not talking some funky airline-only power plug (which is what they normally are), we’re talking a simple three-prong power jack that any North American laptop power supply can connect to. The only problem is that it’s tucked away below the seat, so I had to practically get down on the floor in order to plug my laptop in. There’s also only one port, so I guess if two people had laptops you’d have to take turns. It was mostly for fun anyway, because my Dell XPS M1330 with the extended battery lasts about five hours (I still miss the 10+ hour battery life of my Fujitsu P7010). Strangely enough they’re still using the old dual-prong audio plugs – you can use regular headphones if you don’t connect the jack all the way and find the stereo connection, but a slight touch will put the headphones back to mono. I have an adaptor but never remember to bring it.

The plane also had a 7 inch wide-ratio LCD screen on the back of every seat. It had a touch-screen interface, so I could access movies, TV shows, music, etc. Screen quality wasn’t that good, but it resisted sunlight wash-out quite well. I watched most of Die Hard 4, but the experience was less impressive than it should have been for two reasons: the movie was in a 4:3 ratio, not a wide-screen ratio, and even though I was watching the English version (I confirmed it twice) there were Chinese sub-titles through the whole movie. It also looked overly compressed and mushy. The last cool tech feature was a USB port to the left of the screen, used for recharging any USB-based device (MP3 player, PDA, phone, etc.). That’s an awesome feature that all planes should have – kudos to Air Canada for having it! The only thing missing was connectivity, although sometimes it’s nice to be disconnected for a while. If all planes I flew on had the technology features that this flight had, flying would be much nicer.

Service On The Plane: As impressive as the technology was, the flight was Air Canada all the way. In-flight drinks were served a couple of times, but even on an almost five-hour flight, they served no food. Not even a 25 cent bag of pretzels! They will sell you food, but I’ve always felt it was a rip-off to pay for an expensive flight and not have any food included. Charge $5 more for the ticket and give everyone some basic food. No one will remember saving $5 on a ticket, but they will remember being hungry on a flight. Buying food on a plane has the psychological barrier of seeming expensive, and it’s a hassle to carry cash (they always ask for exact change). At least the flight attendants were nice.

From Airport to Hotel: Because of the looming taxi strike, I called a town car company named Carmel and booked a car to and from the airport in advance. I had only my carry-on bags, so I was ready for car pick-up pretty much as soon as I got off the plane. They told me where to stand so the car would find me, but after 15 minutes of waiting (they said 5 minutes) I phoned to ask where my car was. While I was on hold with Carmel my town car called and asked where I was. I said right where they told me to be and he said “Oh, ok, I’ll be right there”. A few minutes later the driver arrives, and it’s a blue mini-van. Town car my ass. 40 minutes later I arrived at my hotel. I now remember what a noisy city New York is – you can’t go 10 seconds without hearing someone honking at someone else. It’s sure a city that feels alive though!

Continue reading The Quick New York Trip: Day One