Monthly Archives: September 2007

| Montreal

Arresting the homeless doesn’t cure homelessness

Kate points me to this Hour story about the increasing pressure placed on homeless people in this city. Banning dogs from parks. Banning people from parks overnight. Ticketing people for sleeping in the metro.

At the end of the article is mentioned a new tactic being used: forcing people who have been arrested to sign a document promising to stay out of the area as a condition of their release. The problem, of course, is that services aimed at the homeless are right there. (I’ve seen this technique used for other annoyances the police can’t get rid of legally: They tried to make activists Jaggi Singh, Samer Elatrash and Yves Engler sign  agreements that he wouldn’t participate in protests.)

I passed a woman begging at a metro station today. A friend gave her some spare change, despite it being clear from the woman’s behaviour that she was a drug abuser and that the money would probably go to feeding her habit. I didn’t. I don’t give money to beggars for exactly that reason.

But for crying out loud, let these people sleep in peace. If you’re worried about crime and drug use, put more police officers on duty and arrest people who are breaking the law. But nobody should be declared illegal just because you find them icky. And so-called “loitering” laws (loitering means “doing nothing”, which is the one right above all others that nobody should take away) should be done away with.

Our government is failing its poorest citizens. That’s an issue that needs to be tackled directly, not swept under the rug in the hopes it becomes some other borough’s problem.

| In the news, Media

Get your overpasses straight

Well, the Quebec government has started inspections on those 135 structures it says are “at-risk”. And of the 20 they’ve inspected so far, nine require major repairs or complete replacements.

Now here I was all eager to update my map of crumbling Quebec overpasses and bridges using this CBC Montreal story. It lists two bridges that will be replaced and eight more that will need major repairs. (Yeah, I know that adds up to 10 and not 9, but journalists don’t do math.)

It didn’t take long before I started having doubts about the list.

First of all, I can’t find out where they got it. The transport ministry’s website doesn’t have it in any of the documents related to their inspections of the first 20 structures, and no other news organization has any specific list of structures.

Secondly, their descriptions are vague. One of the overpasses needing “major repair” is “Highway 10 overpass in Marieville.” That’s great and all, but there are four overpasses on Highway 10 in Marieville on the list of 135 structures under review.

Finally, some of it is just plain wrong. One of the two listed for demolition is “Route 104 overpass in Franklin, Montérégie.” But Route 104 doesn’t go anywhere near Franklin. The western tip of Route 104 (in St. Jean sur Richelieu) is 59km away from the town. It was probably just a typo (there’s a Route 202 overpass in Franklin on the list), but it’s kind of important to get these things right, and without any other sources to back this already-faulty information up, I can’t use it. (UPDATE: LCN uses the same faulty description, so I guess it must be the transport department that got it wrong)

And that makes me cranky.

On the plus side, I found this proprietary (read: sucky) Google-Maps-style atlas of the 135 structures under inspection. Sadly, it doesn’t give any information about the status of the evaluations of the individual structures. But I’ll use it to pinpoint the location of some of the bridges I couldn’t map exactly.

And I’ve updated the list of City of Montreal-run overpasses which needed inspection to show most of them have reopened to heavy trucks.

| Business, Navel-gazing, Technology

I can’t pay my bills, and I’m cranky

So I’m trying to pay my monthly bills tonight, and boy is it needlessly complicated. You see, I tried going to my bank’s website and logging in like I do every month, but they’re having “internal server problems”, so I’ll have to wait.

So I went to the Rogers website, where my cellphone bill has to be paid by tomorrow, and tried to login there so I can pay by credit card or something. But the site wouldn’t accept my password, and then locked my account. I tried calling them to have the account unlocked, but they’re experiencing a “higher than normal volume of calls” (at 11:30pm!), so I gave up after a few minutes.

So instead of paying my bills, I’m going to criticize Rogers on their email policies. And since I’m particularly cranky, I’m going to be harsh.

Last month, I was forced to sign up for online billing because that’s the only way Rogers will provide me with a log of what calls I make. (Actually, they don’t. Every time I try to download this log, it shows me a blank page.)

So this month, instead of a letter in the mail with my bill, I got an email that looked like this. Here’s the problems:

  • The shortcuts for “forget your password” and “forget your id” are www.rogers.com/forgot and www.rogers.com/forget respectively. And that’s not a mistake. A past-tense forgetting is about passwords, and a present-tense forgetting is about IDs.
  • The first link, to check out your bill, says www.rogers.com but actually links (in the email) to a page at www.shoprogers.com. A link that gives one domain and actually leads to another is a textbook example of a trick used in email fraud. How am I supposed to know shoprogers.com is owned by rogers.com?
  • The email does not use your name or any identifying information about you other than your email address and an internally-generated 9-digit account number.

This doesn’t inspire confidence.

| In the news, Montreal, Public transit

Hybrid buses coming

The STM board of directors have approved a plan to buy new hybrid buses from NovaBus and run them on some routes next year.

The list of routes (66, 80, 103, 105, 162, 165, 166, 535) seems a bit biased toward Cote-des-Neiges and NDG (only one of the routes doesn’t travel through that borough), which also happens to be the home of Tremblayite Snowdon city councillor and STM vice-chair Marvin Rotrand. But we probably shouldn’t read too much into that.

Instead, let us celebrate the awarding of a new contract to NovaBus, a company that loves to create lemons when experimenting with new designs for buses, confident that because they’re the only Quebec company in the business, gross incompetence won’t stop the customer from coming back for more.

| Business, Technology

Here’s your moment of Zen

A small brief tucked away in the business section rewrites this press release announcing that The Gazette has reached an agreement with a company called ZenData Marketing.

Never heard of them? Neither have I. They’re a local company whose website is high on the marketing-lingo-to-useful-information ratio (“dedicated to excellence”, “Integrated e-relationship marketing strategy (working in synergy with other elements of your marketing mix)”, “implementation of technology solutions”, etc.). Their staff seems to consist of two guys and a computer, and they’ve issued a whopping six press releases since they began a year ago.

The agreement (at least as much of it as my non-marketing-educated puny brain can decipher) will make ZenData responsible for spamming our inboxes creating “e-relationships” via email, and generating “return on investment” for the paper, as well as automating some processes I’m shocked aren’t automated already.

Hopefully this will mean I don’t get angry emails and popups every month angrily telling me my subscription has expired and to buy a new one when I have it set to automatically renew every month, and then a day later getting a thank-you email telling me my subscription has been renewed.

| Uncategorized

Student lobby groups need a reality check

You gotta love student politics in Quebec. We have the lowest tuition fees in Canada, the highest taxes, and Montreal has the highest number of students per capita.

Yet this province seems to be the largest battleground for student protests in North America. They protest tuition fees, which are too high because they’re above zero (some protests involve CEGEP students, whose tuition fees actually are zero). They protest government cuts to loans and bursaries. They protest the colonial capitalist imperialistic racist empire bent on … evil of some sort.

And, of course, they protest each other.

Five student associations from Concordia, McGill and Dawson are suing each other over control of the Quebec chapter of the Canadian Federation of Students. Concordia’s graduate association is planning to pull out of the organization over this dispute which has seen two competing executives appointed. (UPDATE Sept. 13: The Concordian — yeah, I know — has a detailed story on what’s going on)

“Regional” (read: not Montreal or Quebec City) groups at UQTR, UQO and UQAR are threatening to leave the Fédération étudiante universitaire du Québec (FEUQ) over their concerns the group is too Montreal-centric, and create their own lobby group to represent just their interests.

Currently there are three post-secondary lobby groups in Quebec. In addition to FEUQ (considerd the grown-up group because they sit down and negotiate with the government) and CFS-Q (considered almost renegade by its parent national organization and with little weight in Quebec because it only represents the two anglophone universities and an anglophone CEGEP), there’s ASSÉ, the Association pour une solidarité syndicale étudiante, which is a newer, more militant group that accepts nothing short of free education for all.

To give an example, the Concordia Student Union has been a member of all three organizations over the past few years, paying student money to three redundant organizations. They recently dropped ASSÉ (which was the cheapest of the three but also the most ineffective), and now pay money only to two.

And yet despite this, Jean Charest was returned to power with the clear intention of raising tuition, and fees are going up. FEUQ is threatening strikes, but they’ve already lost the battle. The public voted for tuition increases, and a few hundred students choosing to waste their money by not going to class isn’t going to get anyone to change their mind.

All three groups need to take a moment to figure out why they’re losing (even many students don’t support their positions — though I don’t see too many of them lining up to donate money to the universities), and change their strategy before they become even more irrelevant than they already are. Once that happens, student unions will start pulling their funding and the Quebec student activist movement will implode.

UPDATE (Sept. 25): A judge decides to keep the offices off-limits to both groups until the issue can be reviewed further. The SSMU is happy, while the CSU is not.

| Blogosphere

I’m not a cheap date either

Michel Leblanc has a post about offers he gets to “participate in group blogs” which he rightfully translates as “give away your content freely and maybe get a link back from a blog with less traffic than your own”.

I’ve contemplated participating in group blogs. Metroblogging Montreal and Midnight Poutine are always looking for more bloggers. Some make vague promises of compensation once the owners are rich beyond their wildest dreams.

But Michel is right. Group blogs want a free lunch so they can make some money off your content. It’s not that they have bad intentions. I fully believe these organizations when they say they’ll share any profits with contributors (I also believe them when they say these projects are losing money). And if the organization is a good one with a good cause, I might consider providing them with some free content.

But when an organization run by people I’ve never met want to offer me the “opportunity” to work for them for free, I’ll have to decline. When someone searches for something I’ve written about online, I’d rather drive traffic to my blog than theirs.

Only I can hire me for free.

| Media, Video

Newspapers’ online video ventures are still lacking

The Globe has a video by Anastasia Tubanos about couples who do video podcasting. Of course, no such list would be complete without Rudy and Casey of Galacticast, who are interviewed in it.

The video is somewhat typical of the state of newspaper-produced video. Since they have no clue what they’re doing, and don’t want to spend any money building a web media infrastructure, they leave everything to the individual producer, from the credits to the music selection. Videos range in quality from atrocious cellphone-quality badly-framed talking heads to semi-professional packages with unnecessarily-long credits.

The quality of content, of course, is always more important than presentation. So I can forgive the tinny audio or inconsistent lighting, especially when producers don’t have sound or lighting technicians. But I can’t shake the feeling that this is all just a gimmick to them, that the newspapers are feeling around in the dark and hoping they can get by without knowing what they’re doing. And independent producers, without formal training or direction from editors and managers, are doing the same.

| In the news, Montreal

Benny Farm: cold and mouldy but environmentally sustainable (kinda)

Kazi Stastna has a report on Benny Farm’s building problems which are pissing off its residents and has already helped kill one.

The problems fall into a few very familiar categories: Finger-pointing when more than one organization is involved, low quality from a low bidder, and experimentation with new technologies that inevitably fails half the time.

It’s what happens when you make guinea pigs out of low-income families.

| Media

Familiar story in the Globe (UPDATED)

An email on the CAJ listserv pointed me to a Globe & Mail Facts and Arguments piece called “The English Assignment“. It’s by freelancer Sharon Melnicer of Winnipeg, who’s written for dozens of publications.

The story is about an assignment she says was handed to students in her class in the 1990s to have them write a story together, each alternatively writing a paragraph. The result is a story that radically changes direction in each paragraph as the two writers attempt to wrestle control from each other, and it eventually degenerates into profane name-calling.

The problem: This story has been circulating around the Internet for a decade. That story has the names changed (including the name of the teacher who assigned it), but the story is otherwise exactly the same.

The way I see it, there are three explanations for this:

  1. Sharon Melnicer is the original source of the Internet legend, and the names were changed before the story was disseminated online. I find this unlikely because the Globe story says students were supposed to communicate exclusively via email, and email simply wasn’t in widespread use in 1997. (UPDATE: The Snopes page has been updated to reflect Melnicer’s claim as the source of the story, based exclusively on the article.)
  2. Sharon Melnicer’s students read the story on the Internet and decided to plagiarize it. That doesn’t really make sense either (and would you send your teacher profanity like that if you wanted her to grade the story and forget about it?). But if true, she should have caught it and certainly not given these students full marks.
  3. Sharon Melnicer’s students never submitted this story, and she simply rewrote one she found online claiming it happened to her. I’ve read a couple of other stories she’s written and none are obviously plagiarized from other sources. I find it hard to believe a seasoned freelancer would throw her career away over a Globe Facts & Arguments piece.

I’ve emailed Ms. Melnicer to ask her about the story. I’ll update this post when I hear back from her.

I’m sure it’s all just a misunderstanding.

UPDATE: The Globe apparently is saying it’s #1, and that she just sat on the story for 10 years after presenting it at a workshop for teachers in 1997. Plausible, but still strange.

UPDATE: Her response:

Yes, it is indeed a coincidence and not one I’m very pleased with. This is the fourth time I have “met myself” on the Internet after penning and submitting an original piece. I didn’t realize my essay had been posted on <snopes.com> until it was published in ‘Facts & Arguments’ on Tuesday and generated a response like yours.

The following response to your comment is being given to readers like you who wonder why they’ve seen the piece before and how it’s come to be so widely circulated.

Regards,
Sharon Melnicer

Dear F&A reader,

Thank you for your e-mail re the essay of Sept. 5.

The essay writer, Sharon Melnicer, tells me she first presented this article at a province-wide workshop for Manitoba English teachers in 1997. She says she had found the idea ( ‘Writing a Tandem Story’) as explained in the essay, in a professional journal . The first part of a sample tandem story (the “Outer Space” theme) as well as the teacher’s instructions for students were provided in the article. Ms. Melnicer says she tried it out with Grade XI and XII students, as her essay describes, then wrote up what happened and presented it at the workshop. Copies of that paper were distributed to the 50 or so participants who attended. Nothing further happened regarding publication of the piece until she picked it up again after retiring, did some revisions, and submitted it to F&A.

Ms Melnicer says she knows plagiarism is a serious offence, and not one she would commit. I have no reason to doubt her.

Moira Dann

Editor
Facts&Arguments

| In the news, Navel-gazing

Oh Kurtis

I had an uncomfortable conversation today with a good friend. She said she had some bad news.

“Did you read the front-page story about the fire?”

I hadn’t, since I was still reading Saturday’s paper. I quickly looked it up and scanned it.

“It was Kurtis’s cottage. Kurtis died in the fire.”

I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t know Kurtis Hansen very well (I wasn’t sure until today what his last name was), but we’d hung out together many times when we worked at the Gazette. He was an evening security guard who would join the editors in the smoking room late in the evening to gossip. (I quickly learned after joining the paper that important social networking happens while people have cigarettes.) We’d discuss everything from the relative attractiveness of female staff at the paper to his women troubles.

He was our favourite security guard, because he had a very easy-going style and the kind of dry, wicked sense of humour that only copy editors can appreciate.

He left his job at the paper last year to work at Telus, which offered him more money and less boredom. I didn’t expect to see much of him again. But now the absence is permanent.

It won’t affect my life significantly, but I can’t just dismiss it.

What’s worse is the horribleness of the death itself. His two sisters are also gone, as well as two family friends. His father, who tried to drag him to safety and failed, now has to live with the loss of three children, assuming he even recovers from his injuries.

It sucks. Which is why those of us who knew him will be getting shitfaced later, in his honour.

The Gazette’s Katherine Wilton has an obit, which includes some quotes from his former boss. The cause of the fire is still unknown.

UPDATE (Sept. 5): Today’s Day 2 stories concern Kurtis’s 15-year-old stepsister who also perished, and a story about propane safety (even though no cause has been determined for the fire). The latter includes a “test yourself” quiz about propane safety, which like most government safety quizzes is insanely simple to anyone who graduated elementary school (you mean I should light the barbecue after I start the gas? Wow, thanks, because I’m a complete moron). Besides those issues, I’m not crazy about publishing a light-hearted quiz game as part of the coverage of five violent deaths.

UPDATE (Sept. 6): A Facebook group has been setup in his honour. And as he would put it: There’s some fine honeys there.

UPDATE (Sept. 9): Noah Sidel talks about Kurtis in his Off-Sidel column in the Westmount Examiner.

UPDATE (Oct. 6): The Gazette runs a belated obituary notice for Kurtis Hansen, Kelly Hansen and Heather Edelstein. It includes an online guestbook.

| Montreal, Public transit

Bus plans have good ideas and stupid gimmicks

The Gazette’s Linda Gyulai has a good run-down of the city’s transit plan for buses. Bus routes aren’t sexy like trams, metros and bike lanes, but they get the job done, transporting more people than any other method of public transportation.

Broken down, the measures fall in three categories:

Adding more buses

  • Increasing the fleet from 1,600 to 2,100 buses (which means a lot of bus-buying if they’re going to replace the death traps currently on the road)
  • Adding articulated buses on busy major routes (that don’t involve too many turns)
  • More express buses
  • Extending rush hour. This one just makes sense: How many times have you had to rush to make the last rush-hour bus of the day, or decided to travel during rush-hour mainly because wait times would be at their lowest? Making rush-hour-style service available all day will take pressure off rush-hour service.
  • Smaller buses for smaller areas. Currently they use a minibus in Ste. Anne de Bellevue (251) because the streets are so small.
  • More buses to the West Island. (Let’s just start with an all-day shuttle to the metro, and then take it from there.)

Making buses run faster

  • “Bus Rapid Transit”, basically a cross between an Ottawa-style transitway and a regular reserved bus lane. Right now they’re just talking about this on Pie-IX Blvd., where the old reserved centre lanes and stations on the median still stand unused.
  • More reserved lanes on major thoroughfares like St. Michel, Beaubien, Rosemont, Notre Dame, Sauvé/Côte-Vertu, St. John’s and Pierrefonds, where traffic is high and buses take a lot of passengers
  • Introducing special limited-stop routes (the article says they would be marked with an X like 67X, which would be confusing because such numbers are already used to indicate short-stop and school extras)
  • Reserved lanes on highways (badly needed for buses like the 211).

Cool technology and gimmicks

  • GPS technology on buses which will allow announcements on the bus and displays at bus stops to show when the next bus will arrive in real-time. (This sounds great and all, but considering this isn’t even done in all metro stations yet, maybe we should start there?)
  • Redo seating arrangements on buses to “create more room”. I guess this means more standing room, with fewer seats, which I think is a bad idea to encourage transit use.
  • More bus shelters
  • Free transit for university students. Funny, we usually hear this one from students trying to get elected. It usually involves imposing a huge tax on all students (regardless of whether they’d use public transit) that’s less than the cost of the passes to make up for the revenue shortfall.
  • More “seniors” buses, which have already proven a stupid idea.
  • A “shuttle service to Mount Royal Park”. There is one already. It’s called the 11. Problem is it only runs every half hour.
  • Biodiesel and “ecological driving” for the PR points.
| Web design

Concordia’s new website fails to improve

Concordia University is changing the design of its homepage. Again. The new website, currently in beta testing, has some laudable goals: create a uniform look across the dozens of departmental websites, and introduce new features.

So far, the new website falls flat. Here’s why:

  1. The website pushes news, which was the big selling point of their current design, down the page and into a corner in favour of static content.
  2. The immensely-useful “quicklinks”, to things people actually want to reach like the student information portal, program calendar, class schedule etc. are moved to the bottom of the page or taken off the homepage entirely.
  3. The tour touts the page’s accessibility features, including the ability to increase text size (which is already available in most browsers, but they also change the stylesheet to fit too). Unfortunately, the style sheet breaks at larger font sizes and the page looks ugly.
  4. Giant header image pushes all content down.

It looks more “Web 2.0” in all the bad ways. And since it fails at the most basic test: whether it’s better than the site it’s replacing, I’ll give it a C- (assuming that their content-management system actually makes it easier for departments to make websites, which has not yet been proven).