Tag Archives: bad ideas

| Montreal

Monument to a scandal

Mike Boone suggests in today’s Gazette that part of the plans for using new space at Park and Pine should include a statue of Robert Bourassa, because he thinks the man still needs to be honoured in this city:

I know. Our revered mayor doesn’t deserve a consolation prize for the ham-handed and ultimately aborted plan to rename Park Ave. But the controversy shouldn’t obscure the fact that Bourassa was a brilliant politician and visionary premier who deserves some substantial form of commemoration.

This is true, but in a rare moment of stupidity on the part of the Boonester, his suggestion would do nothing but guarantee that the controversy obscures the commemoration. People won’t remember the statue without thinking about why it’s there, and this is a controversy that Bourassa never asked for and doesn’t deserve. Let’s find somewhere else on the island, not on Park Avenue, to honour this man.

Either that, or at least wait a while so the two aren’t so closely connected.

| Montreal, Web design

Good ol’ pageid 4397,6375618

The City of Montreal has unveiled a unified portal for its libraries, and just look at its easy-to-remember URL:

http://ville.montreal.qc.ca/portal/page?_pageid=4397,6375618&_dad=portal&_schema=PORTAL

Now, I know what you’re thinking. “Really, 4397,6375618? I would have thought 4397,5431618.”

But the city’s web design people, they have their quirky labels. And pageids, and dads and schemas (all of which are required values).

| Blogosphere, Video, West Island

How to drive like an idiot

Adrian points us to a video on YouTube (among other places) called “Late for Work” of a young driver zigzagging through light traffic on the West Island. There’s a second video out there (I won’t link to it because it’s on a porn site) called “Late for School” of a similarly dangerous trip down Highway 40 in St-Laurent. Both videos are sped up, but it’s clear from the rest of the traffic that this guy is going fast.

What gets me about the video is not so much that some idiot is filming himself doing this, but the route he takes in it:

Late for Work route

Google Maps says the logical route above would take 11 minutes, which sounds about right. The video is about 3 minutes long. Assuming it’s sped up at about 5 times normal, that means not only did he act like an idiot speeding, but he also lost time.

Idiot.

| Media, On the Net

Canoe.ca: Look at our new mess

Canoe.ca has undergone a redesign. And it still sucks.

The French version, especially, is a vast improvement over its disaster of a “portal”, but for some reason they’re following the same mistakes everyone else is making in trying to “go Web 2.0”, not knowing what the heck Web 2.0 is all about:

  • Headlines in blue-grey Helvetica bold, and a complete ban on serif fonts for no good reason
  • “Rotating headlines” which, in addition to sucking up your CPU time, force you to play a cat-and-mouse game (or is it mouse-and-mouse?) to click on it before it’s replaced with another one. (Did someone send out a memo somewhere giving people the impression that this is what “dynamic content” is all about?)
  • Everything portals that include thousands of links (OK I exaggerate, there are only 339 links on the homepage).
  • Pages that scroll down forever. Every inch down, an entirely new layout style appears with its own rules and logic, guaranteeing as much confusion as possible on where to find things.
  • Three separate horizontal menus.
  • Space wasted begging people to use this page as their homepage, instead of offering a page anyone would want to use as one.
  • Inside pages so jam-packed with ads you’re searching for the “print-friendly” link (pages of course don’t simply include print-friendly stylesheets) so you can just read the story in peace.
  • Duplicate links to sections like News and Sports just a few pixels apart.
  • Separate “narrow” and “wide” versions, because your monitor is only 800 or 1024 pixels wide, no matter who you are.
  • Each section page has a different brand, a different layout, and a different way of finding things.

Look for another massive redesign in a year or less when the folks behind Canoe.ca realize their layout sucks and nobody can find anything.

| Uncategorized

Boys will be boys

Cecil Humphries, the principal of Pierrefonds Comprehensive High School (my alma mater) is getting raked over the coals over comments he made that bullying is a “conflict” which is a “natural occurrence”.

It’s not an isolated case. Schools everywhere consider bullying to be not their problem, and as long as nobody dies they freely ignore the psychological trauma inflicted on these kids. And the government, which cuts education funding every time they can find a new gimmick to throw money at for votes, isn’t helping anything.

But seriously, don’t deny it exists.

| 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.

| 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.

| 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.

| In the news, Montreal

I’ll settle for getting my doorknobs installed

A pair of articles in The Gazette today, side-by-side, about slum landlords getting targetted by more inspectors, and a slum tenant couple whose apartment became a giant garbage can.

The way the slum inspectors thing works is this: Right now, the city has 80 inspectors across all the boroughs inspecting buildings. Surprise, surprise, this is woefully insufficient to keep track of the tens (hundreds?) of thousands of buildings on the island where people live and pay rent.

The most obvious solution would be to hire more inspectors, and to the city’s credit that’s exactly what they’re doing. But instead of taking on the eight new inspectors (a 10 per cent increase) to the already existing departments, they’re creating a new “task force” that will “work with the boroughs”.

In other words, another layer of bureaucracy. Create a new department to cover up the fact that you’re too cheap to properly fund an existing one.

Government by gimmickry. Doesn’t that make you feel safer already?

| Uncategorized

Anastasia’s Law wouldn’t have helped Anastasia

Anastasia De Sousa’s parents at least seem happy about a new gun control bill passed in the National Assembly. It would restrict people from carrying guns onto public transit (people could carry guns onto public transit?) and oblige authority figures all over the place to report people with guns to the police.

In other words, it would do absolutely nothing to prevent the exact same situation from happening again. Kimveer Gill used a car to get to Dawson, and by the time anyone saw him with a gun there, he has already begun firing on students.

The Gazette’s James Mennie (among others) rightly criticizes the bill for having no teeth. In a sense, it’s hard to blame premier Jean Charest, since gun control is a federal jurisdiction. But they called it Anastasia’s Law, trotted out her family, and pretended like this will do something to stop gun violence (though they admitted it wouldn’t have stopped De Sousa’s murder).

Only time will tell if this makes a difference.

| Business

More quid-pro-diploma at Concordia

Concordia University has released its list of honorary doctorates for this year. As usual, it includes some genuinely noteworthy members of the community who should be recognized for their work: Howard Alper, research chemist; Cardinal Jean-Claude Turcotte, archbishop; Grant Munro, filmmaker.

But, sadly, the list also contains people who are on there mainly because of their financial contributions: André Desmarais of Power Corp, who has given quite a bit to the university; and Donald McNaughton, who was a major fundraiser for over two decades.

It’s not that I think people who give their time and money to Concordia shouldn’t be honoured for it. Despite what some conspiracy-theorists may think, this is still mainly a selfless, altruistic act. But shouldn’t we be separating those who have done important things in this world from those who have so much money to spread around that they can buy an honorary degree?

I think it’s time to come up with some other method of honouring those who contribute financially to universities.

| Uncategorized

Mr. Prime Minister! OMG! The Quebec unions don’t like how we’re treating the Palestinians!

I’m not one of those people who thinks musicians should just shut up about world hunger. I believe everyone’s entitled to their opinions.

But there’s a difference between a single person expressing an opinion on a subject they’re not well-known for, and a group expressing an opinion on behalf of its members, on a topic that’s completely irrelevant to the group’s function.

So why are Quebec’s unions taking a hard-line stance against Israel in the Mideast debate? Surely there are people in unions here who disagree with this position, and yet have had it thrust upon them.

It’s things like this that give unions (and union management) a bad name here.

| Montreal

Ben’s is dead. Long live Ben’s?

Taking “a day late and a dollar short” to its extreme, there’s plans for a protest next week to keep the Ben’s deli building out of the hands of developers.

Now, you might say “but the building isn’t architecturally interesting at all”, and you would be right. It was only built 50 years ago. You also might note the minor details that the restaurant closed months ago, the building has already been sold, and nobody cared about it when it was in business.

I went to Ben’s once in my life. I went in with a friend, looking to get some breakfast. We left 20 minutes later, still hungry, because nobody came to take our order.

Good riddance.