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{ Category Archives } Rants

Rants about politics or other issues

Syncing Google Calendar and Tungle

I came across this weird prob­lem recently, where my Tungle account (tungle.me/laurenwood) was only syn­chron­iz­ing some of the events on my Google cal­en­dar. I checked they were set to the right cal­en­dar (yes), marked as busy (yes), and still couldn’t find the answer. This is an issue that quite a few people have had. Apparently […]

2011 08 23 Technology Comments (0)

Problems Importing Into Canada

I’ve often wondered why so many U.S. online com­pan­ies won’t sell to people liv­ing in Canada. It’s a smal­ler mar­ket, to be sure, but not trivial, in fact big­ger than most U.S. states. I’ve recently dis­covered a large part of the reason — Canada’s import pro­ced­ures and tax laws. Tim’s blog costs a reas­on­able amount to […]

Tagged
2009 08 18 Comments (13)

DVDs and Regions

I admit to find­ing it amus­ing that Barack Obama’s gift to Gor­don Brown of 25 clas­sic Amer­ican movies ended up illus­trat­ing one of my hot but­tons — Mr. Brown couldn’t watch the Region 1-encoded DVDs on his Region 2 player. Here’s TechDirt’s take on the story (link from Volker Weber). I have been in many […]

2009 03 20 Family Comments (1)

Contributing

Tim has a post where he advises developers to con­trib­ute to open source pro­jects so that hir­ing man­agers will look favour­ably on them. I have some prob­lems with this, as do many of the com­menters on his post. First off, I agree that con­trib­ut­ing to open source pro­jects is admir­able and to be encour­aged. There are, […]

2008 10 29 Family
General Comments (1)

Company Websites 101

I’m not in mar­ket­ing, so I’m not going to pon­ti­fic­ate on how com­pan­ies should design the look and feel of their web­sites, nor on what they should say on their web­sites. But there are some really basic things that com­pan­ies should do to make their web­sites more usable, at least to a first degree. Item […]

2008 05 07 Technology Comments (0)

Market Choice

Here’s a fas­cin­at­ing piece dis­cuss­ing how fixed prices on books in Ger­many was actu­ally push­ing prices down (con­trary to eco­nomic the­ory), while sup­port­ing a wide range of book­sellers. When I was last in Ger­many, apart from my usual beef about Ger­man book­sellers not tak­ing credit cards, I found no reason to com­plain about the range […]

2007 10 25 Books Comments (0)