Item 1: don’t make your customers tell you where they live until they need to, nor what sort of services they’re interested in. Case study: Rogers, a purveyor of wireless phones and other telecom services. The first screen you see at rogers.com makes you choose between residential and business services. If you click business, it assumes you live in Ontario. If you click residential, you then have to tell it which province you live in. Every time I pay my wireless bill online, I have to go through the same rigmarole. Can’t they figure out some way of giving people the basic information and then letting them choose which subset of the site they want? Telus (another telco) does the same thing, you have to tell them which province you live in before being allowed into the site. Bell Canada (a competitor) does this better. Not perfect, they have this weird dialog box floating in space, but it’s better. The login for people with accounts who want to pay them quickly is right there on the first page, unlike for Telus or Rogers. Maybe they should spend five minutes some time and figure out who uses their sites? Or make their executives try to pay their own phone bills online?

Item 2: assume that some people will be lazy, and not want to type the “www.” all the time. Case study: Shoppers Drug Mart, a Canadian drugstore/pharmacy. If you go to www.shoppersdrugmart.com, you get to the site. If you type shoppersdrugmart.com into your browser, you get “Unable to connect” as the server rejects the connection. This strikes me as bizarre and lazy; it’s not that hard to set up a server to accept both types of address, and user-unfriendly to not do so.

Item 3: if you run a store, setting up a web site, advertising it, and then putting no content on it is a waste of time. If you can’t think of anything else to put on your web site, put your phone number, your location, and your opening hours. A few words about products and/or services you provide wouldn’t hurt either. Case study: too many, and they all make me wonder why they bothered.

Norm was one of the reasons I was happy to join Sun; I’ve always thought his intelligence and integrity, along with his depth of knowledge and good humour, reflected well on any company that employed him. Norm, I wish you all the best at Mark Logic, they’re lucky to have convinced you to join them.

If I were to use the Asus a lot, I’d need to figure out a few different applications; for a few days while travelling or otherwise not working I can cope with checking feeds through browser-based applications (after all, that’s how many people actually do check feeds, if my log files are to be believed) and funnelling my personal email through GMail, but eventually I’d want something better. Learning the keyboard shortcuts does help, so maybe it would just be a matter of getting used to those less-rich interfaces. Or maybe they’d get more annoying over time?

I’d also want to tweak behaviour (move icons around in the tabbed windows), and add useful extensions. For example, I use the CoLT extension on Firefox to copy the link and text, which is really handy on the small keyboard. And I’d need to learn more usability tips from sites such as the eee user forum, such as the one about moving big dialog boxes around by keeping the Alt key pressed while dragging from inside the window, so you can get to the buttons. I’d probably want to tweak my blog’s stylesheet as well; in fact I’m thinking about how to do that anyway, having seen what it looks like on the small screen.

The Asus may not quite be what Roger’s talking about in his manifesto for the walkaround-web tablet, but it does fill a definite niche.

And I haven’t seen too many bugs, although I’ll close with the amusing picture I snapped after leaving it in suspend mode for a while…

Looking at various manufacturer’s web sites shows you who’s prepared and who’s sticking their heads in the sand hoping it will all blow over. In the prepared category, Rubbermaid gets full marks for having a clear page listing all the products with and without BPA. Nalgene (made famous in Vancouver when MEC, a major local store took all the bottles off its shelves because of BPA) states they’re phasing out BPA and promises to have new non-BPA products using tritan instead of polycarbonate in the stores starting next month. I don’t have any of their bottles, but I know a lot of people do. Camelbak points out on their web site’s front page that not all #7 plastics contain BPA (true), but ignores the fact that there’s no way a consumer can tell which ones do. They’re also introducing a line that uses non-BPA tritan. I gave a friend one of the Camelbak bottles for Christmas and will replace it once the tritan versions come out.

In the middle, since they don’t use BPA, but don’t tell people that on the web site are Medela, who make various breastfeeding pumps and accessories, including bottles. The Brita water filter company has a horrible flash web site with no search button anywhere. The pitcher doesn’t look to me like it’s made out of polycarbonate and that was confirmed from this post. It would make sense for Brita to add that information to their FAQ.

On the unprepared side, Gerber loses points for not even mentioning the issue anywhere on their site; the baby bottles I have from them are number 7 and other sources say they have BPA, so out they go. Tommee Tippee (a U.K. brand for baby bottles ad sipyy cups) has a page from January 2007 in which they say BPA is perfectly safe and that they use it in some products, without mentioning which, so I’m not sure what to do about the ages-old hard plastic sippy cup I have from them. It isn’t polycarbonate, but does it have BPA in it? No idea. Avent is another baby bottle manufacturer that admits they use BPA and say it’s safe. Tommee Tippee isn’t available in Canada anyway, but I guess the other two are going to have some problems in the next little while, as are the retailers that stock them.

There are lots of blogs out there with listings of products that have or do not have BPA (e.g., this one). As with many health issues it’s hard to know how to far to go without going overboard, particularly with various health administrations seemingly differing in their views of what the risk really is. I find it ironic, however, that the manufacturers of products mostly used by adults, where the risk is smaller, seem to be more responsive than those of products used by the infants who are most susceptible.

As I was walking home I realised I must have looked more than a little weird in my jeans and a nondescript winter coat, with a floppy sunhat pulled down around my face to minimize the light getting into my stressed eyes, despite the cloud. Not that anyone seemed to notice of course, this being Vancouver.

What happened was, we had a display case built into our dining room wall. I stained it and varnished it, and wanted glass shelves. To cut a very long story short, the holes in the walls for the shelves were the wrong size for the shelf supports I wanted, and I got various things from Lee Valley to try to get the supports I wanted to fit in the holes. That didn’t work, so I ended up with other shelf supports and a bunch of stuff I didn’t need any more, that was unused apart from a “try it out” test run on one support.

Fast forward two years or so; when you have a baby who doesn’t sleep well, returning stuff within the three-month deadline doesn’t always happen. So I called up today and asked if I could return it anyway, even though I’d lost the receipt. The woman on the phone said to come in and talk to the sales person (Lee Valley does not have self-service - they have showrooms and catalogues and you talk to a real person about what you want and whether it will work, and they fetch the items for you out of the back room). So I did that at lunchtime today. Explained to the guy what had happened, gave him my customer account number, and he disappeared into the back room to look up when I’d bought the stuff and how much I’d paid for it, so he could do a full refund (no restocking charges, yay!). It turned out that some of the stuff was from 2 years ago, the rest from 2002 - but they still refunded what I’d paid, cheerfully.

Yep, they know where I live and what I buy, and they use that information to send me catalogues on related subjects, and to give me refunds 6 years after I bought the stuff and lost the receipt. That’s a reasonable trade-off to me, and good customer service to boot. Of course, I promptly bought another couple of useful items - I defy anyone to go into their showroom and not find something useful for house, workshop, or garden. So their reasonable policy also has benefits for them.

It was a brief call, an automated system claiming to be from Visa, saying they had a charge for $1000 for perfume “for my stinky armpit” (no joke, that’s what they called it). The automated voice told me to press 8 to accept the charge, or 9 to decline it. I hung up instead (I’ve had real calls from my bank about unauthorized charges, so I know what they sound like). Hunting around on the web showed a bunch of people claiming that pressing 9 allows the person to make long distance calls from your number somehow; Snopes says that’s only partially true. Other people also say the dial 9 scam isn’t a scam, although the latter link points out “some companies have indeed used deceptive practices to trick recipients into making premium rate calls”, which could add up, I guess. Seems like a lot of effort to go to for little reward - maybe it was an elaborate April Fools’ Day joke after all. Anyone want to ‘fess up?

Oh yes, the deadlines…

If you want to speak at Balisage or the Preconference Symposium on Versioning, you need to submit your full paper by April 18th, using the supplied tag set. If you want to attend, advance registration closes on August 1st, so you have time for that. Hotel reservations must be made by July 1st if you want to stay in the conference hotel. The conference should be fun and mind-boggling at the same time, at least if XML-related theoretical musings are your idea of fun.

¹: this means XML is one of the subjects discussed there, and most of the others are in some (albeit tortuous) way related to it.

Which raises some interesting questions - why would personal bloggers come to a conference? I can think of a few reasons:

• to learn more about techniques, e.g., how to podcast, or how to embed video
• to get ideas for content
• to learn how to write better, to express ideas better
• to meet up with people with some related interests

I guess there are a lot of people who blog who would never come to a blogging conference because what and how they blog is enough for them and they don’t see any need to change anything. But there are also people who don’t do well in crowds, so one issue I see is how to encourage people who are less comfortable at conferences (even small ones), how to make them more comfortable. I don’t know what the answer is; I’m an introvert but it seldom stops me going places, so although I sympathize with those for whom it’s a problem, I’m not sure of what to do to help. If, indeed, anything can be done at the conference organizing level to help.

I got the 4G version, and had the RAM increased to 2 GB in the shop so the warranty is still valid. Just in case. Not to mention which, it cost all of $15 and 5 minutes for them to do it, and it would probably have taken me longer to find the right screwdriver.

First impressions: it’s cute. The “easy desktop” is mostly useful, and the selection of applications reasonable (Firefox, Thunderbird, Skype, Open Office, Pidgin). I’m trying to restrain my inner geek and see how much I can get done with the easy desktop before I revert to type and install the full desktop. Some things don’t change though; one of the first things I did was find where to update software (add/remove panel) and update everything. You get this weird message for some applications, such as Skype, saying that you can remove the package after updating, without saying whether that’s just to clean up the package remains after they’ve been installed, or whether it really does remove the whole thing. Given you can’t remove (most of?) the default software, I’m assuming it would actually uninstall those applications that can be removed; maybe when I have time to do the delete/reinstall cycle I’ll try out that assumption.

I’m not sure how far I can get without installing and configuring some extra stuff. Some of the instructions and scripts the on Absolute Beginners Wiki look useful so I’ll probably break down and try them out. Part of the reason for restraining myself on this is curiosity - what does a Taiwanese company think that “housewives, office ladies and students” need in a mobile internet device? Part is also to figure out whether I can recommend this sort of device to non-technical people I know, or whether I’ll also have to tell them to do X, Y, and Z to make it usable.

More later, after I’ve played with it a bit more.