Year: 2008

Good Support

In the online and soft­ware world, there’s “sup­port”, and then there’s sup­port. I’ve dis­covered my host­ing sup­pli­er for this blog, Cana­dian Web Host­ing, offers the real type of sup­port. And at a decent price, too. 

I run two Word­Press blogs, this one and a craft­ing blog, and had a prob­lem that showed up on one and not the oth­er. They dug around, sent sug­ges­tions to try things out, and gen­er­ally made a great effort to help fig­ure out what was going on (I’ll post the gory details once I have a bit more time to make them under­stand­able). That sup­port coupled with a decent price ($8.95 per month if you pay upfront for 1 TB band­width per month, 125 GB stor­age, lots of add-on domains, and SSH access) means I recom­mend them to any­one who needs host­ing. If you’re in the mar­ket for a new host­ing sup­pli­er, you could do a lot worse.

Blossoming in the Sun

In a city like Van­couver in the depths of winter, when we’re so used to rain, rain, and more rain, to the extent that even the loc­al paper prints “this is get­ting bor­ing” as the weath­er fore­cast, any sun is appre­ci­ated. So today’s glor­i­ous sun­shine, even though accom­pan­ied by cold frosts in the morn­ing, was extremely wel­come. Every­one is out walk­ing, people are vis­ibly relax­ing and enjoy­ing the sun, their faces remin­is­cent of blos­som­ing flowers, rather than scur­ry­ing along under umbrel­las scowl­ing at the grey skies. Many are delib­er­ately not look­ing at the weath­er fore­cast, pre­fer­ring to enjoy the weath­er as it is rather than be cast into des­pond­ency over the rain that is undoubtedly just over the hori­zon. Even the trees seem to be smil­ing, and the cats are out­side cat­ting around rather than hibernating.

Some­how even work­ing in the base­ment seems easi­er when the sun is shining.

One-Stop Shopping

I see that Paul Ked­rosky is talk­ing about a resur­gence of depart­ment stores, based on the fact that lots of people want one-stop shop­ping rather than going from store to store. Fun­nily enough, Wal­mart has been meet­ing pre­cisely this need for years; I gath­er one of the major demo­graph­ics for Wal­mart is har­ried moth­ers with chil­dren in tow who also don’t want to schlep from store to store. Now, if depart­ment stores would actu­ally make it more pleas­ant to shop in them, and more effi­cient, they’d get more of my busi­ness as well. Effi­ciency to me means a reas­on­able selec­tion of products, not only cloth­ing, organ­ised in a way that means I can find what I’m look­ing for (or find out they don’t have it) in a short peri­od of time. People to help in the pro­cess would be a def­in­ite plus, but some logic in where things are would make up for that. Rolling carts for people push­ing strollers or bug­gies would help as well.

‘Tis the Season to be Frazzled

If I have a New Year’s Res­ol­u­tion, it’s to not let next year’s year-end become as stressed. And to get enough sleep. Both of these hold a longer story that I don’t have the energy to tell right now. Tim pos­ted some; in the last couple of days oth­ers have got sick (there seems to be a gastroenteritis/norovirus epi­dem­ic in Van­couver) and the tod­dler hurt her hand and is sleep­ing even more poorly than usual.

As a con­sequence I haven’t had the energy to blog (or do any­thing much, to be hon­est), and it will take a few days before I do.