Monthly Archives: May 2007

| Montreal, On the Net

Are you a Tremblay fetishist?

Then you’ll love the MICU’s new website.

Wait, let’s back up a step. The Montreal Island Citizens’ Union, Mayor Gerald Tremblay’s party, has changed its far-too-long name to simply “Union Montreal”, and has a new 70s-throwback logo.

The big part of this is the party’s new website, which still carries the micu.ca domain. And that’s just the start of its problems:

  • The mayor’s face appears on its homepage at least seven different times. I realize he’s the centre of the party and all, but isn’t this just a bit of overkill?
  • What used to be a cardinal rule of web design: Don’t start playing audio until you’ve been asked to, is broken. So those of us who forgot to mute our audio will hear Tremblay welcoming us to the party’s new website. (Just what does that do for us anyway? And won’t anyone who wants to consult the site on a regular basis get fed up of that pretty quickly?)
  • “Arrondissements”, which is rightly plural, becomes the incorrect “Borough” in English. Below that it says “to acess your borough”. Further down you see the incorrect “Maisonneuve Street” instead of “De Maisonneuve Blvd.” You’d think they could hire a proofreader.
  • Video clips are provided with no captions whatsoever, leaving us to guess based on a tiny screen capture what they’re all about.
  • The site is entirely unusable if style sheets are removed. It is far too heavily dependent on Flash and images.
  • The “news” section hasn’t been updated in a year and a half.
  • The “cultural communities” and “youth”, proudly linked to at the top of every page, contain nothing more than a phone number for the person responsible for that portfolio.
  • Clicking on the “Pierrefonds/Roxboro” borough gets me a video greeting from the mayor of Lachine for no good reason, and it’s at the bottom of the page, forcing me to hunt for it to kill the audio.
  • The “become a member” page still uses the old name for the party.
  • Filling out the “become a member” page and submitting your information (unencrypted — fortunately they’re not asking for credit card numbers) results in a 404 error.
  • In fact, everything in the “getting involved” section is just another form. The website doesn’t actually provide any information on how to get involved.
  • Clicking on “Ahuntsic/Cartierville” gets you a video greeting from the right mayor, but only in French. Ther, mayor Marie-Andrée Beaudoin asks us if we knew that the borough’s northern border is on Rivière des Prairies. Really? Wow.

I could go on, but I think I’ve made my point. This website is nothing to be proud of.

Elsewhere in the blogosphere: “Brand New” (The Other Bloke’s Blog)

| In the news

Swift move, captain

There was a letter in yesterday’s Gazette from a “retired captain” (one assumes a captain involved in air travel of some sort) complaining that the Supreme Court’s decision to release cockpit voice recordings from Swissair Flight 111 was “unproductive”.

Except the Supreme Court did no such thing. First of all, the Supreme Court wasn’t the body that issued the ruling. It was the Federal Court of Appeal that did. The Supreme Court merely decided not to hear the government’s appeal of the case, which led to the Transportation Safety Board releasing the tapes (you can hear them here), which provided some nuance to the already released report on the accident.

The more egregious error is that the cockpit voice recordings were not what were released. Though the cockpit voice recorder was eventually found and studied, it was determined that the recorder failed six minutes before the plane crashed. And in Canada, CVR transcripts and audio are not made public.

What was released were the air-traffic-control tapes, which contain transmissions between ATC and the aircraft. Besides the fact that anyone with a scanner on that night could have easily recorded the transmissions, and that anything transmitted via radio signals in Canada can by definition not be considered private, the transcript of the ATC tapes had already been released quite a while ago. There really wasn’t anything new here, which makes the government’s reluctance to publish the tapes even more curious.

Far from unproductive or irresponsible, the courts’ decisions made perfect sense.

| Blogosphere, My articles

Blork Blork Blork

Ed Hawco’s Blork Blog (coolest name ever!) is the subject of this week’s blog profile. I figured it was about time since the interview I had with him via email happened way back in January.

There’s also an article on the same page (B2, no link because apparently nobody uploaded it to their website) about art in the metro from Expo 67. It features a picture of Metrodemontreal.com’s Matthew McLauchlin (and trust me, he looks absolutely adorable in that picture) in front of paintings at Berri-UQAM that were featured at Expo’s opening.

| Public transit

The STM transit strike is over (for now)

STM maintenance workers are voting to approve an agreement in principle, ending Montreal’s strike after four days. The union’s executive has ordered employees back to work immediately. Service will resume slowly, with partial service tonight (they’ll get as many buses out as they can) and full service expected to resume tomorrow morning.

CBC Radio crack reporter Catherine Cullen is flirting with Bernie St-Laurent at the union meeting and reports the following:

  • No deal has been reached on a contract. In fact, both sides are still at a stalemate, so the agreement only covers ending the strike and sending everyone back to work.
  • The STM would reimburse transit users $3.50 ($2 for reduced passes) on their September passes to compensate for the reduced service.
  • Montreal Museums Day is still on for Sunday and will have the free shuttle provided by the STM, however there will be only one transfer site at the Journal de Montréal on Frontenac.

Meanwhile, an hour after the strike was declared over, the English online media is still silent, despite the thousands of Montrealers who need to know how they’re getting home tonight (and couldn’t care less whether the government falls tomorrow, unless it’s through a coup). The CBC.ca story sits unchanged since 3:25, and The Gazette and CTV (can someone get them a copy of WordPress so they can build a real website?) still say it’s a deal in principle but the strike isn’t over.

Of course, it’s all an academic point I suppose. Everyone knows Fagstein is the city’s most trusted source for STM-strike-related information.

| Media, TV

EXCLUSIVE: My opinions on celebrity news programming

So ET Canada tonight had an “EXCLUSIVE” interview with American Idol winner Jordin Sparks followed by an “EXCLUSIVE” interview with George Clooney and Brad Pitt.

Meanwhile, Access Hollywood tonight had an “EXCLUSIVE” interview with American Idol winner Jordin Sparks followed by an “EXCLUSIVE” interview with George Clooney and Brad Pitt.

Time to watch The Simpsons.

| Media, TV

I’m obligated to tell you about today’s budget

So apparently the Quebec budget was released today. Again. You’ll remember we had a budget back in March, but then we had an election and now everything has changed.

Among the highlights that anyone could care about: A $1 billion tax cut that would mean between $100 to $1000 per family. And that’s basically it. They don’t have a plan for education, other than forcing students to pay more. They don’t have a plan for health care, so they’re starting up a task force to give them one. They don’t have a plan to control the debt, which will rise despite/because of the tax cut.

So really the only thing worth watching on the 6 o’clock news was the cool headset being worn by Todd Van der Heyden on CTV as he reported live from the National Assembly.

The CBC’s Amanda Pfeffer (“The Pfeff”) meanwhile, doesn’t have the cool headset. She’s standing on a street. Nowhere near as cool.

P.S. For some reason CTV is referring to this as “Day 4” of the transit strike. It’s Day 3. Three days. Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday. I know they’re trying to be bleeding-edge, but there are limits.