Monthly Archives: June 2007

| In the news, Montreal, Public transit

Kitty Metrovese

For those of you following the buck-passing on metro security passing the buck, we’re getting some interesting and, of course, contradictory reports from all sides. The STM says it never ordered anyone to stand by and laugh do nothing while some guy beats up on his girlfriend. The security workers union spokesperson says the police told them not to intervene while calling it “absurd”. And the public safety minister wants an investigation.

A few comments from the peanut gallery here. First, why is nobody talking about the report that the employee in the ticket booth refused to call 911? That doesn’t require putting anyone in danger, yet for some reason it was apparently refused. It’s unclear if that led even in part to delaying police arrival (they came 17 minutes later), but if it did I would expect that to be an even more serious story.

Second, why didn’t anyone do anything? There were plenty of ordinary people around who had plenty of time to bark at the metro employees. Why did they not intervene? The guy didn’t have a weapon. You could argue that putting people in harm’s way like that is dangerous, but if so why are these metro employees who don’t have arresting power, don’t carry firearms and are not supposed to intervene in these cases expected to do so?

Finally, with over a hundred police officers patrolling the metro, why were none in the system’s busiest station? Or the library or bus station next door? Why did it take police 17 minutes to get there?

UPDATE (Sept. 6): An “error in judgment” but no disciplinary action.

| Montreal, Public transit

Da-ba-dee-da-ba-da da-ba-doo-doo-doo

Starting this week, the blue line of the metro will be running at six cars at all times.

This is yet another step in the slow rollback of an idea that started many years ago to cut the length of trains during off-peak periods. The blue line would drop to three cars, and the orange and yellow lines to six each. The orange line plan was quickly reversed, and the yellow line is staying at six cars throughout the summer as people spend more time outside and those crazy students aren’t going to school.

While the train-shortening idea does have its advantages, mainly the savings on power, the drawbacks are also annoying: the time needed to split trains up for the weekend and reconnect them afterward, the installation of mirrors and other equipment in the stations, and the problems associated with a train using only part of a platform, for blind people for example.

Of course, for me, the one thing I’ll miss most about the shorter trains is watching people run after them having not realized that they were standing in an unused area of the platform.

| Montreal

Ewww. Gross.

Hey, remember that St. Henri apartment that was found last week to be a giant garbage dump with half-dead cats?

Now that workers (who are hopefully getting a huge tip) have cleaned out most of the garbage, they got to open the fridge, to find another 43 dead cats inside.

And if you thought that was weird, apparently the couple who rented the apartment spent thousands of dollars on veterinary expenses. The Gazette suggests it was a mental disorder, which seems to be the only rational explanation for all this.

| On the Net, Technology

Online privacy needs more than crappy videos

ISIQ, the Institut de sécurité de l’information du Québec, sent me a message (I guess I’m real important now) pointing me to their new campaign to educate Quebecers about personal information online. Their press release (unfortunately only in PDF form) is in English, which is nice to see from a Quebec government body, and it promotes their video campaign to teach … children I guess … how to safeguard their information.

The videos leave much to be desired. They’re grammatically incorrect (it’s “The Greens” not “The Green’s”), and they’re dubbed in badly-accented English.

I suppose I shouldn’t complain too much about the dubbing. I know francophones have to endure far more bad dubbing of stuff they see on TV. But couldn’t they find people who speak English well enough to do it?

Of course, a bigger problem is that while everyone must do their part to protect their privacy, it’s not just the users’ fault that this stuff is happening:

Social networking sites, especially Facebook, simply don’t allow anonymity. Facebook requires you to use your real name, which is great for all those high school classmates looking to find you, but is horrible for privacy protection. Even 12-year-olds know not to use your full name online. Facebook does provide some privacy protection (though not by default), but it still relies on sharing even the most mundane information to keep its users interested.

Wireless Network configuration is perhaps the most unnecessarily complicated procedure I have ever seen in my life. WEP or WPA? Or WPA2? A hex key or ASCII passphrase? Or password? Oh, but it has to be exactly five characters. Or 12. I’ve given up on them, and I have a computer science degree.

Phishing is something that fortunately is being worked on. Perhaps the fact that people actually lose real money in this is what has woken everyone up. Spam filters are being strengthened to weed out suspicious emails, phishing sites are being shut down, websites are improving their security, browsers like Firefox come with built-in phishing warning systems, and companies that involve money like banks and auction sites make it very clear they won’t email you out of the blue with threats to suspend your account if you don’t log in.

There’s still much to be done on this issue, and for that reason I’m glad the ISIQ is trying to get their message out. Hopefully their next campaign will be a little more professional-looking.

| Montreal

Feeding parking meters voluntarily?

Itinéraire parking meter

L’Itinéraire, the community group that’s trying to come up with innovative ways of supporting the poorest people in the city, is announcing a new idea today: take those old coin-operated parking meters that the city is about to have a giant surplus of, repaint them green and ask people to dump their change in it voluntarily to help the poor.

On paper it sounds like a fantastic idea. It’s reusing equipment that would otherwise have been trashed, with a minimum of modification, and it gives people something to do with their change instead of handing it over to squeegee-kids and panhandlers.

But in practice, with how much Montrealers hate parking meters in general, will many of them be motivated to dump money in a symbolic representation of their hard-earned money being taken away by the government?

UPDATE: Gazette intern Ryan Bergen has the story. He notes that the meters will cost $750 each to refurbish and the information that goes with them will be in French only.

| Uncategorized

Just call me Paula

PQ leader-in-waiting Pauline Marois has a campaign press release opinion piece in today’s Gazette, which I’m sure she wrote herself. In English.

How exactly is this not a waste of time and space? Does Marois really think Gazette readers will vote for the PQ in a general election, to say nothing about supporting her in a party leadership “race”?

Nevertheless, she makes her point:

First of all, the population isn’t ready to reopen a debate on the whole issue of Quebec sovereignty, nor does it want to get locked in a sterile discussion concerning the date, time, hour or mechanics of a referendum.

Holy crap. You mean voting against separation in two massive referendums has actually sunk in?

Marois goes on to make two demands recommendations for the future: promote sovereignty like it’s a Virgin Mobile cellphone plan to gain popular support before putting it to another vote, and start updating their social democratic platform (read: swing more toward the centre-right like the Liberals and ADQ).

Well, good luck with that.

| In the news

Presidential campaign song selection 101

In a world where perception is everything and hollow sound bites win over serious thoughtful discussion, the selection of a campaign theme song for a U.S. presidential run is very important. With that in mind, there are a few small rules to follow when making this vital selection:

  1. Choose a popular song that everyone can recite the lyrics to from memory. It doesn’t matter if they don’t understand what the lyrics mean. In fact, it’s probably better if they don’t understand what the lyrics mean.
  2. Choose a song whose chorus means something politically motivating. “Born in the U.S.A.”, “Born to run”, “Change the World” etc. “Money for Nothing” will never be a campaign song, unless the campaign is a parody. Yes, we all know the song’s chorus is nothing more than a metaphor for your last relationship, but take it literally.
  3. Choose a song by an artist who isn’t in jail, accused of murdering someone, or otherwise in disrepute. Stay away from Michael Jackson songs.
  4. Make sure the artist won’t be pissed off at your song selection and start campaigning for the other candidate (see Bruce Springsteen link above).
  5. This one would seem self-evident, but choose a song by an artist who is a citizen of the country you’re running to lead. Choosing a song by a Canadian (and a French Canadian like Celine Dion) might give the wrong impression.

Then again, maybe I’m wrong. Nobody seems to have pointed this out yet except in passing. And only a few blogs are pointing out the silliness of Hillary Clinton using an old Air Canada theme song for her campaign.

UPDATE: The Gazette gave it front-page treatment, so I guess some people are noticing here at least.

| Blogosphere, In the news, Media

Zeke’s Gallery scandal explained (UPDATED)

UPDATE: Tremblay speaks out.

The local blogosphere is abuzz with outrage over the situation affecting the Zeke’s Gallery blog, whose posts have now all disappeared. I wrote about the case in The Gazette last week.

There’s some misinformation and faulty assumptions going around, so I’m going to do the best I can to explain what exactly happened here, in chronological order.

Continue reading →

| Media, On the Net

CBC.ca redesign: copying everyone else’s mistakes

CBC launched a new website yesterday, with a new layout and I guess new features (I can’t find any obvious ones so far). The redesign affects the CBC.ca homepage as well as CBC News and CBC Sports websites.

Unfortunately, the new websites just copy everything that’s annoying about these Web-2.0 designs:

  1. An irrational fear of serif fonts, even for large blocks of text where such fonts would increase readability
  2. Rounded corners and gradients
  3. Overreliance on Javascript for navigation with no HTML backup
  4. Flash-based tickers and other changing content

Most importantly though, and the reason I dislike it so much, is that the layout makes no sense. There’s no structure to it. No easy-to-understand way to figure out what the purpose of each section of the page is. To illustrate, let me list the sections on the CBC.ca homepage by their section title:

  • Online video and audio
  • Top searches
  • CBCNews.ca
  • CBCSports.ca
  • Arts & Entertainment
  • Preschool
  • Words at Large
  • Music
  • CBC Inside Media
  • CBC Digital Archives
  • CBC Radio
  • CBC Television
  • Your Local News
  • Regional news, features & program information
  • Your comments
  • Most blogged stories
  • Most viewed stories

The CBC News website has even more sections than that. The sections are all of different sizes and styles, have no whitespace or lines to separate them from adjacent sections, and no logical order or structure to them. Instead of spending two seconds navigating to what you’re looking for, you have to spend minutes searching through each section of the page to find it.

That business story I was looking for, for example. Is it in Money, or Consumer Life? Or On the Money?

The sad part about it is that CBC has great content and good technology and can do a much better job than this. To compare, let’s take a website that isn’t affected by CBC tinkering: CBC Montreal.

  • News is easy to find and clearly categorized. It’s all in the middle column. Top stories first, followed by the sections.
  • Only one sidebar of miscellaneous material, and its “features” all have the same layout, indicating that they’re all part of the same section.
  • It’s just the basics. Program listings, program websites, contact information and everything else is on easy-to-access subpages. All you have here is what you need: News, weather and a couple of popular links (like “listen live” and the nightly TV newscast)

Hopefully as CBC goes through its “tweaking” process, it’ll make its website’s structure a bit simpler and easier to understand.

| Technology

Bah. Who needs search? (UPDATED)

There are five things wrong with this “Search Results” page. Think you can spot them all?

Search results

UPDATE: My readers are quick:

  1. It says there are four results but shows only three
  2. It says “Displaying 1-10 of 4 results” which makes no sense
  3. “List of the 30 days Archived & Search” makes no grammatical sense
  4. None of the search results contain the search terms or have anything to do with them
  5. The stories that contain the search terms don’t show up in the search results
| Business

Some tales of customer service woe

Roberto Rocha’s Your Call is Important to Us series is off to a … start. His blog has received five comments so far, and all but one are about Bell. He even has a cute little video explaining how the series will work for those with ADD who can’t read the article or blog posts.

In honour of the series, here are a couple of tales of my own about recent experiences with customer service:

Continue reading →