• Have a voice-recognition system that does its best to direct you to the wrong department.
• Have each department ask you for your account information before they realise that they cannot help you with your problem.
• Have the proper department in a call centre that has as shitty a connection as possible, so that only about 23.72% of sounds produced by the support technician can be understood.
• Solve almost no problem so that the customer can go to your website
• The website should be confusing, unclear and downright self-contradictory about certain things.

I would like, then, to award Rogers a prize for performance in excess of the minimums outlined above, for a truly piss-poor customer experience system. Congratulations!

I would not say it was really either a ‘minor’ thing — those happen pretty much every week — but it’s not really mind-blowing either. I spent a couple of evenings changing my theme. While the current layout used as a starting point my old theme, DarnSlick, I feel the number of tweaks and changes, complete with icon redesign where applicable, warrants it that I call it my own. PUREtext is it’s name, aimed at simplicity and clarity to permit focus on content rather than anything else.

Let me know what you don’t like. I keep tweaking things anyway, but I’m more than curious to see what breaks in your browser and what breaks your focus when reading. I have tested in Safari proper, WebKit nightly, Firefox 3ß5 and Opera 9.50. One of the reasons I started changing things was to try and get a fluid theme, so it should scale on most resolutions (granted, it will generally look weird below 1024 x 768, but not broken from what I can tell). More importantly, however, I wanted to do something that will make content self-obvious.

[P]lease note that this online survey is hosted by Survey Monkey, which is a web survey company located in the USA and is subject to the US Patriot Act. All responses to the survey will be stored in the USA.

From an e-mail received from my school’s IT department. I appreciate the fact that they are giving students this warning but, really, was there no way to avoid the US altogether?

I’m seeing a lot of comments about Apple’s decision to silently install Safari on Windows as an update to iTunes. The move has been declared as almost malware-like, considering the practice. And this hurts Apple more than they realise.

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Anya is considering, today, the matter of fairness. The fairness of incomes where they are not based in the education required to get to a certain position, but some other, should-be-unimportant factors. And, I would venture a guess, the fairness with which our respect hierarchies are built.

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Dictionary redefined: theBigWordProject.com sells words for $1 a letter. You make that word’s definition be a link to your site. Great advertising technique, methinks, but definitely a better way to spend your money than others I have heard of.

Yes, I got myself one :)

With all the colours and emoticons that most chat software comes with nowadays, I long, quite often, for the simplicity of text. The strength of ideas coming from text, not pictures and sounds and photo-sharing and let’s-play-together gizmos. No. Just text.

This is probably why I’m so drawn to Jabber and IRC. Sure, you can slap video over XMPP if you want, sound too¹, but the basics revolve around text and interoperability. No need to be stuck on one server with just one provider - take your ID and leave, if you want. Talk to people on GTalk, soon enough people on AIM - freedom, as it were. And no useless graphics and themes and crap - beautiful interfaces highlight the content, they don’t try to dress it up and hide its imperfections.

IRC has been around for so long because there are still a lot of people that don’t care for more than just text. And it is precisely because I’m one to say that form is function² that I praise text so much. Sometimes I think even this blog’s theme is too busy - maybe I’ll look into it.

I think Petter is with me on this one.

1. ooVoo does this; my review will be coming in soon [↩]
2. Not in the ‘equals’ sense, but rather to mean I think they should not be thought of separately in most contexts [↩]

It is the second time in a week’s span that a threat has been made on the UBC Vancouver campus¹:

For the second time in a week, our Vancouver campus community has received a threatening message.

In this second case, an unspecific threat has been made for Wednesday. The threat does not specify a time, a location within the UBC Point Grey campus or the method of doing harm.

Neither the Police nor the President’s office give details about the nature of the threat, however considering last week’s steps in handling the issue - as taken by the RCMP - one can only speculate that someone might have hinted at bringing a gun to school. Both of these threats have been made in advance, which merits a few thoughts.

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1. Yes, this is where I study [↩]

The COM link on the sidebar (besides RSS) will now let you subscribe to the comments feed for a particular post if you click it from that post’s page, if for some that’s more convenient than getting e-mail updates. The global comments feed is reachable by clickingthe same link from the main page.

Hacking on this reminded me I’m not a PHP developer =)

While it will not get you a degree or even course-credit, some of you that just enjoy reading and learning about a random thing here or there - and maybe wish to take a different avenue than simply crawling Wikipedia - should find MIT’s OpenCourseWare a very useful resource.

Certainly this is not news for many, but I’ve forgotten all about said great site. It offers lectures, slides and videos up for grabs, and there are a variety of courses in many disciplines made available¹. I believe having some direction in terms of what to study is nice, and the added freedom of at-your-leisure perusal should make this an enjoyable experience for many.

Michael Geist also wonders why academic institutions in Canada do not take part in OCW to a larger extent.

1. Not only MIT material, as the list of contributors is ever-expanding [↩]