The Stop Online Piracy Act is a bill before the Government of the United States of America that proposes — in a general sense — a series of rules and penalties in an effort to eradicate online piracy. At a high level, it certainly seems like a reasonable request. In fact, so reasonable that anyone not spending time reviewing the details of the bill might very well have missed some of the more draconian measures being implemented, allowing — in effect — individual companies to disable outright any website they believe to be infringing on copyright without right of trial, so long as said website has some dependency on US-based services (which a tremendous percentage of websites have).

In effect, a US company can shut down your otherwise legal operation because they’ve told their government that you’re the bad guy.

Sound unfair? It should. But this, dear reader, is also where things get more sinister.

The authors of this bill are members of the American government, but that’s not who is really driving it. The backers? Big media. Notably, the same companies who have been engaging in a futile, misguided, and often grossly misdirecting effort to have laws enacted to protect their business models. Companies represented by the RIAA and MPAA, and a host of old companies who don’t want to change.

They’re flailing, and failing. They’re unable to grasp the concept of digital media. They’re used to their physical world — one book to one person, one CD in one CD player, one VHS tape showing on one tube-based television set. The new world allows a single copy to be copied, cut, remixed, and displayed on millions of devices simultaneously. The media companies chime: “Show me the money.”

But instead of adapting, they cry foul. They cry piracy. They claim that they’re losing money hand-over-fist, and they will expire without the assistance of new laws. Yet, they’re not losing money. In fact, many of the music labels are making more than ever, largely in part to Apple, who strong-armed them into making music cheap, and — to absolutely no surprise to any armchair economist — removed the barrier to entry, and sold music in such quantities that the music industry was very likely saved from imminent death.

Hence, SOPA. And while the White House chosen to not sign the bill, there is no reason to believe it won’t be back in some other odious form.

Beyond the American government, I have reason to also fear this bill because of the efforts of my own government. The Canadian government has thrice shown to be spineless in its resistance to these same groups lobbying for ridiculous legislation in Canada that would put our own culture and identity as unwarranted in terms of content ownership. Our politicians, who had in decades previous been those who stand only for its own people, now show to be bowing to massive foreign conglomerates, leaving its own people to suffer as a result.

SOPA, and bills like it must fail. Because they are flawed in their consideration of evolution, because they fail to take digital commerce into account, and because they will unnecessarily bind our children into false agreements and behaviours that will haunt them their entire lives.

If you are an American, please write your congressperson. If you are Canadian, please write your MP. In either case, don’t let your government become party to Big Media’s insanity, don’t let our future be dictated by corporations. Learn more at AmericanCensorship.org.

Content yearns to be free. Not free as in ownership, but free as in freedom, free as in life. Let content live.

Adding to all of this are, new to this run, a number of social media-style services all helping to add “information” (and likely being more like more noise to the signal) to help people align themselves with the political party of choice. I came across one, recently, and suddenly realised that despite the fact we have five major political parties vying for seats, they’re really only divided two ways.

Which means you either vote Conservative, or you don’t.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not advocating voting Conservative. Frankly, I have serious misgivings of how they’ve been running things the last few years, and I would very much like them deposed from the throne. The reason I say you either vote one way or the other really boils down to a graphic presented by the Centre for the Study of Democratic Citizenship at McGill University, the CBC/Radio Canada, and the Department of Social Sciences at the University of Toronto.

It’s part of a service they created called Vote Compass, and it strives to help people understand our political parties. It’s important, because some of the parties are awfully darn hard to differentiate in a meaningful way. With some of the issues, it’s quite easy to see which party you should look towards. But with others, it’s more like splitting hairs. That’s why the service ends up providing 35 questions (30 general ones, 3 regarding the parties’ leaders, and 2 about the parties themselves), which ultimately determine what your best political party would be.

And that’s really the key thing — your local candidate, regardless of how awesome they are, ultimately contributes a seat to the overall picture, allowing a party to rule. Your individual candidate, unless they become a Cabinet Minister, is little more than a hand raised during votes and can only hope to offer changes via private member’s bills. Remember, your party has already chosen its leader, and the one leading the winning party automatically becomes prime minister. (On a cynical note, I also strongly believe that anyone voting Conservative is therefore directly a supporter of Stephen Harper.)

At the end of your questions, Vote Compass produces … well, a compass, showing you which way you lean, politically-speaking. Mine (currently) looks like this:

(The checkmark is me, incidentally. Yes, I’m socialist. I believe very strongly in Canada’s history of helping others, including ourselves.)

See the split? See how the Conservatives are in one corner, and the other four parties are up in the other? (Given, the Liberals are much more centre, but still…) This is what I mean by “you’re either voting Conservative, or you’re not”.

“But,” you say, “that’s not true! I vote for my non-Conservative party! What’s wrong with that?”

Allow me to rephrase my point slightly, then. You either cast a vote for the Conservatives, or you cast your vote against them into a diluted pool.

This has also been my primary gripe with the “ABC” campaign (“Anyone/Anything But Conservative“) that has been popular in parts of Canada since the 2008 federal election. Sure, don’t vote Conservative … but now you’re spreading out a vote amongst (up to) four other parties, reducing the potential power of those votes so much that…

…drum roll, please…

…you end up with minority governments. Two of them so far, as a matter of fact, and from what I’ve seen, we’re likely looking at a third. Which means another call for a coalition government, which will likely be nearly as useless with all the in-fighting.

This is one of those few times when I look to the American two-party system and admire its simplicity. You go one way or the other. (‘Course, really, they’re all the same, just one tends to more open and honest about liking guns than the other.)

What I would like is for one of the other four parties to stand out from the others, and really make themselves out to be a strong contender to the Conservatives. Although the NDP seems to be gaining some serious ground this time out, they’ll have to do something about the Prairies if they hope to make a serious run. Which, really, leaves the Liberals who don’t look to have recovered from Chrétien’s era (nor show any signs of such).

Or better still, have organisations/movements like ABC pick a party. Just one. Please. The message should be “don’t vote Conservative, vote for …” so long as it’s focused. Lack of focus equals lack of success. That’s about as simple a rule as it gets, however it gets applied: in school, in business, how my kids clean up their toys. Focus, please.

T minus 9 days. I actually fear for my country.

Already, the various political parties are … well, failing. I’m rather stunned how fast that happened, actually. You’d think they’d actually try to get out a message first, but they stooped to mud-slinging pretty much out of the gate. Yeah, real positive way to foster respect and attract voters, folks…

So I feel that, as a Canadian with some significant sense of civic duty (and certainly more than enough know-it-all-ism), I need to offer up some suggestions to our so-called “leaders” (read: I choose not to lay insults as they are neither interesting nor constructive) if they have any hope of inspiring Canadians to vote for them … if at all.

Let’s start with the New Democratic Party…

So far, to be honest, I haven’t heard much out of you. Not here in the west, anyway. Yes, you need to acknowledge that we exist. Hate to break it to you, but if you have any hope of beating out either the Conservatives or the Liberals for a seat, you need to be seen. Guess whose ads I’ve yet to see plastered all over TV? I had to Google them, Jack. That required action: a vested interest. You want an audience? You’ll need to go to them. Maybe all the pick-up trucks scare you off? I don’t know. But I do know this: First basic rule of marketing — unless you’re highly visible, you won’t be remembered.

Checking out your website is kind of informational, but you’re stooping to attacking your opponents right away. Your message? A little hard to see past the oh-so-thinly veiled attack on Ignatieff. (Look, if you want to question something he may or may not have done, get some facts. Nothing kills off a campaign run like a damn good scandal. A mere question will go unanswered, and will not sway anyone.)

And the bit about more doctors and nurses? Hey, great, that’s awesome! What about the people who support the doctors and nurses? What about the hospitals for them to work in? And can you provide the details on how you’re going to prevent new grads from going elsewhere (like the States)? A few details will help prove that these are more than words. Remember, most Canadians will not shlep down to the local candidate to have a discussion. The internet will help, but only if your message is complete enough to convince someone beyond a simple belief.

And for the love of pete, can someone in your IT group make sure that your website works for both “ndp.ca” and “www.ndp.ca”? That’s a pretty low bar, and you’re tripping over it…

Next up, the Liberals.

Iggy, can you actually go a day without saying the word “Harper”? I don’t think you can. I’m actually beginning to fear that you have no actual message at all, other than to oppose the Conservatives. I’m not kidding — on your website alone, there are over 6,400 mentions of “Harper”! Exactly whose side are you on?

You talk about Accountability on your website. How about some examples? Goodness knows that your BFF has offered you countless examples upon which you can found your statements. But despite being the only party willing to post your policy points — you skimp over the details like a cheap restaurant that uses watered down tomato sauce and passes it off as pasta al fresco.

Or how about your digital policy? You offer up a mere three paragraphs, and nothing else? Have you not paid a single shred of attention to all the C-32 and UBB nonsense? Might I remind the lauded Liberals that there are many Canadians who have a very vested interest in what plans you say you have, and would likely keenly vote if they made sense. Cough, cough. You might also want to chat with Mr. Nenshi…

Here’s a free I’ll throw you: “a Liberal government will not allow corporations and/or regulatory agencies to restrict Canadians access to critical resources through uninformed and/or falsified statements regarding resource use, either as a result of profit or security” as a broad statement, backed up by a list of proposed bills you intend to introduce to Parliament in your first 100 days. Just saying.

Oh, and Iggy, if your party is going to hold up Laurier, Pearson, and Trudeau as the models for Liberal leadership, you might want to consider finding your own identity so we can pick you out of the noise.

As for the Conservatives…

I’ve seen your ads. They’re wonderful, truly. They’re masterful of propagating the fear that right-leaning political groups love to instill in the populace. There’s nothing quite like creating an identity of evil for you to gain trust. (Hey, it worked in the church — nothing like the Devil to steer you straight, right?)

Here’s a thought: you’ve gone two elections without winning a majority. (With me so far? Good.) See a problem? Here’s a hint: it’s not that you didn’t win a majority. Let me spell it out: your tactics haven’t changed — it’s still about fear. The way I see it, you’re not going to get much further, as you’ve scared all you can. It might have worked a couple of years ago when the economy was going through the grinder, but since we’re on the recovery and things are generally looking decent … well, you haven’t really got much, do you? Another problem: highly-educated people tend not to frighten easily. You want the rest of us to vote for you? You’d better come up with something more intelligent than mere propaganda.

Speaking of which, I went to your website to look for what you’re bringing to the table. The only thing under “Policy”? The 2011 Budget. That’s your policy? Nothing about Aboriginal rights? Nothing about the Environment? Not even Corporation support (which, we know, you do so very, very well)? You’re not really offering much, here. Your tax cuts aren’t offering much, either, since they don’t really fit the bill of Canadians’ needs. Yes, we do need more doctors … but we don’t need billion-dollar warplanes. Subtle hint.

Yes, I know I’m missing out on the other parties out there: The Bloc Québécois (hint: give a crap about just one person not from Quebec), The Green Party (you need to distance yourself a bit more from the granola crowd), and a retinue of other parties — all of whom have a ways yet to go. All have a similar problem: appealing to the masses. Canadians, as a whole, are generally accepting, but historically-speaking, generally only vote for Conservative (right) or Liberal (centre). You don’t fit into those mentalities, you’re effectively fringe, at least at the federal level.

So, to those who are leading the charge into our electoral fray, can we please dispense with the bull? Can we drop the mud, please, and actually have a real dialogue? It would be nice to know that there is more to our political system than mere bitching.

I dunno what it is, but we Canadians seem to really love to not rock the boat. We don’t want heavy-handed politics, but we also want our cake and eat it, too. We want our health care, dammit, but we don’t want to pay for it. We want to leave our lights on 24/7, but please don’t raise our energy bills. And above all, we still want to be the “Nice” people in North America.

Let’s face it, folks, we’re a bunch of pansies.

Yes, you. I’m talking to you, Canada. Yes, you who hasn’t voted in several elections, you who doesn’t vote because you’re convinced your area only ever votes one way, even you who voted last time (and has done so since eligibility) because it was the right thing to do, but you didn’t actually spend any time to figure out who you should vote for — you just marked the person in your area whose sign you saw last.

The last previous two elections have created, for all intents and purposes, a lame duck Parliament. Minority governments, at least in this country, are less effective than a eunuch in a Red Light district. Everything gets argued, nothing gets done. Meanwhile, budgets inflate, services break, money gets wasted, and the bitching about it all goes on unabated.

What this country needs is a majority government. Yeah, they’re usually fraught with some sort of bullshit that’s common with power — some idiot who forgets that he’s there to service the people (not the other way around) and makes a few deals that sweetens his pocket. Next thing we know, we’ve got scandals, Royal Inquiries, and more than a few newspaper headlines about how so-and-so did such-and-such, and boy wasn’t that a bad thing. And no-one pays any attention to the dozens of other things that the same ruling party managed to accomplish, and suddenly Canada is itching for that next election to vote the offending party out so we can have something “better”.

Well, “better” is our current problem. Right now, you’ve got (really) three options:

• Conservatives: Right wing, business-focused, tax-raising, and money-spending. They’ve been bought by American interests to push through horrible copyright policies that do not reflect Canadians‘ interests, allowed Canadian companies to push through billing practices that hurt the majority of us, want to buy warplanes (and somehow, this is a good thing), and the environment is about as important as a rapidly-covered-up pimple.
• Liberals: Led by someone who should know better, all the Liberals have managed to do for the last five years is (effectively) state how bad Stephen Harper is, how much better than Stephen Harper they are, boy isn’t Stephen Harper a bad example for Canada, Stephen Harper Stephen Harper Stephen Harper. The Conservatives should really pay the Liberals for all the free advertising — it would only be fair. It would be far nicer if the Liberals stopped whining and actually sounded like Pierre Trudeau again. Yeah, Trudeau might have been a pompous ass from time to time, but he still reigns as one of the best and most influential politicians from the last century.
• NDP: I’d love for Jack Layton to be a stronger leader, I really would. I would also love the NDP to have a fiscal policy that had more of a balance; they lead almost as far to the left as the Conservatives do to the right. It would also be nice for them to recognise those of us who don’t have the luxury of working in a union, but are (generally) worked far harder that unions for far less payoff. Support the working person, and not just the few organised groups, and the rest of us would appreciate it immensely.

The Bloc? Quebec doesn’t have the population to win Federal control from the Rest of Canada. (And if, by some freakish miracle, they did manage to get the minority control, you’d see a Coalition struck up that would make even the most jigsaw Frankenstein reel in sheer horror.) The Green Party is so much more left that the NDP look Liberal; Canada would need a serious slide back into socialism for Green to gain any significant footing.

Guess what? We’re looking at another minority government. Because of what I said above, and you know it. There is no clear choice, and I don’t care who you are, where you live, or what you do. If you sit down and truly think out the options (not just rote spit out your default answer), you would see that we’re basically screwed. You either choose a party who wants Canada to be America (for all intents and purposes), or you choose one of two groups who, frankly, have no message worth listening to.

What this means — I hate to say it — that we’re going to vote for status quo. We’re not going to take a stand in our federal parliamentary democracy (constitutional monarchy notwithstanding) and demand of our elected (or want-to-be-elected) representatives to stop acting like bickering children. We won’t take the responsibility to properly vet out the people we send to Ottawa, ask them the hard questions that prove they’re capable, and call them out when they do wrong. Because, in the end, we’re all spineless and just want things to be simple and easy. We want to have a few people make the real decisions, cast our vote in acquiescence, and reserve our right to bitch about it afterwards.

Want to rant back at me? Leave a nasty comment? Don’t waste my time — you want to prove me wrong, show up for your MP’s sessions (elected or nominated) and demand to know where they stand. Hell, record it so when they vote opposite of what you wanted, you can post it on YouTube for the world to see. I’m not your audience — you are. Your family — your children and theirs — depend on you making the right decision. (And no, I’m not going to tell you who to vote for — I may generally vote Liberal, but unless Iggy gets his head of out Harper’s ass, I’m not going to lining up for a red shirt this year.)

This is going to be a bad election. I’m hoping — nay, praying — for a miracle that something truly significant happens. But I’m betting it won’t, and we’ll be right back where we’ve been, slowly rotting away under ineffective leadership from all sides, who want nothing more than to climb to the top of the dirt pile and claim that they’re the King of the Castle.

Oh, Canada…

We moved to Telus. Not solely because they’re really the only other option in town, but partly because the new Optik service had proved highly appealing (nicer interface, and free PVR with long-term contract), and a very lucrative introductory offer combined with Shaw’s epic failure really cinched the deal.

Not that it’s gone completely flawlessly…

If you followed the link above, you’ve already read that the install didn’t go according to plan. In fact, thanks to Telus’ internal systems, it didn’t go at all. Telus was almost painfully apologetic about the incident, and has made strides to make up for the oversight. Nearly a month after calling, they did finally arrive, on the 29th, to set us up with brand-new service.

The installer, Glenn, arrived just after 9:00 and proceeded to make sure he knew where everything was, notably the TVs, and the Telus phone panel. The TVs, easy to find. The panel? Not so much. Over the course of renovating the basement and a year and a half abroad, our phone panel had gone missing. And, equally inexplicable, the Telus line outside the house was completely cut. (We had a second cable, yes, but apparently both were Shaw — Shaw told us one was Telus.)

Glenn had to run all-new wiring, which I viewed as a good thing. Sadly, for simplicity’s sake, it also meant running along the wall outside, since there was no easy way for it to enter the house where the Shaw line went in. It’ll be something we can live with for the time being, and when we do proper renovations upstairs, we’ll move it.

Once inside, Glenn set to work removing the Shaw hardware (which is headed back to Shaw tomorrow — I wanted to wait a bit, and you’ll see why in a moment), and hooked up the DSL router (quite literally, a black box) and the Telus wireless router (a special one that allows TV signals to be routed as well). He then set up the PVR in the living room, and the set-top box in the bedroom. The two are networked via the cable and the wireless router (though I can’t see them on the network — the HDPA part of the network is invisible, sadly).

Telus quoted four hours. Glenn was done in under three. Barely before he was out the door, I’d already set up the PVR to start recording every episode of MythBusters and Dirty Jobs. I also lobbed in a setting to start recording some of Monkey’s favourites, the ones Alex and I use when we need 30 minutes of peace.

In theory, this should have been the ultimate end of Shaw. But knowing my luck, I opted to hang onto the Shaw stuff, just in case something else went wrong.

Which it did.

Two days after install. Suddenly, the TV and internet signals were gone. (The phone, now a hard-wired landline, continued unabated.) Alex called Telus, and after a short wait, was told to reboot both the DSL box and the wireless router. Boom, TV and internet were back.

Problem solved, right?

Sunday evening, same thing. Rebooted both DSL and router again, without calling Telus, and all was well. One time, I could understand. Two was beginning to look like a pattern. I swore that if it happened once more, I was calling Telus. Which I did, on Monday evening.

I was talking to a human within five minutes. The problem was already flagged in their system as “reoccurring”, which apparently immediately afforded me a lot of attention. The first tech (yes, first) and I went over the scenario, and reset the system before he transferred me (and did the introductions) to the next guy, who worked with the hardware group. We proceeded to check the router settings and make sure that it wasn’t the problem.

Which, he felt, it might be. Here’s where the Telus setup has a flaw: unlike Shaw, where you provide your own internal router, Telus has to provide one in order to deliver the TV service. The router, made by D-Link, has custom firmware to allow all the fancy stuff (namely the TV signals embedded in the DSL channels, and the PVR network). Part of that requires a bridging of wireless and wired networks. In theory, this is transparent to the user, and you’d never know. In theory. In reality, there’s a weird behaviour where wireless devices (notably Apple devices) are unable to see wired devices. Sort of like, say, an Apple TV trying to wirelessly sync with a wired computer.

I discovered this through the wonders of the internet a few nights earlier, after I became unable to sync the Apple TV. This drove me to re-enable my Linksys router to serve the Apple TV, and routed the desktop computer appropriately. Boom, problem solved. But the second tech thought this could actually be a problem, where the two wireless routers were now fighting, and the Telus router might hiccup and hang. Odd, yes, but D-Link stuff (at least in my experience) has always been a bit “odd”, so I wasn’t surprised.

Telus wireless disabled, and we moved on in life. Which meant tech #3, who worked in the networking group. He wanted to send out a tech to verify that the lines were okay. He felt it might be an issue. Seemed perfectly fine to me, so we set up an appointment. Total call time? Nearly 90 minutes. Very little of it on hold. I’ve been on short calls that had me really, really angry. After 90 minutes, you’d think someone had just given me a million dollars, I was so happy.

Now I should point out that Glenn actually left us his card, with instructions to call if there were issues. In my (crappy) defence, I saw that only as a nice token, and that real work wouldn’t get done unless I called Telus. This was, after all, how Shaw has treated me for the last nine months — why should Telus be any different, right?

J.P., the next service tech, came out and looked the place over. He did a couple of trivial things, checked the lines (and spent an hour doing so), and all seemed to be well. Emphasis on “seemed”. Sure enough, boom, the TV and internet dropped again. We tried calling J.P., but for some reason, we could never connect. Fortunately, Telus was very nice to set up a call for Saturday. Lo and behold, Glenn came to the door.

Glenn was fairly well-briefed with the situation, and having already been to the house, was familiar with the setup. His thought? The card at the other end — the part that our line eventually plugs into to access the Telus network. He swapped it, and that was pretty much it. In my view, this makes sense — it was the DSL modem locking up, and if it was losing sync with the network because the card was faulty, it would explain why we were having trouble. That was almost five days ago, and we haven’t had a single issue since.

And because so many people have asked, here’s how I net out Telus’s offering thus far:

TV: Mildly irritated that I have to get the next package up to get my MythBusters, but the extra channels are kinda nice. The ability to search for a TV show is the killer app, here, and the only real improvement would be to allow recording for a given show across any channel, not just one.

Internet: Po-tay-toe, pah-tah-toe — roughly the same as Shaw, and I’m in no screaming need for insanely fast internet. I just don’t (ab)use it enough at home to need it. 15 down, 1 up is plenty for my needs.

Phone: Landline. Enough said.

Service: Here’s the real deal-breaker, kids. So far, Telus is lightyears beyond what Shaw had offered me. They’ve actually reestablished my faith in the telecommunications industry, and make me feel like they’re listening to my concerns and have a genuine interest in repairing my problems. The issues cropped up two days after install, and were resolved just over a week later (I hope). Telus’s staff have treated me with dignity, kindness, and respect (even talking techie with me once they realise that I do know what I’m talking about), and have been very good with promptness and callbacks. And the two-hour window (opposed to Shaw’s five-hour window) makes planning life a lot easier.

So far, I’m glad we switched. I hope it stays that way…

Some nine months later, I’m ready to heave Shaw out the door like a long-overstayed houseguest, and welcome in a new tenant: Telus. Since our last major investigation, Telus has rolled out a new television service (which, at least from reports, is quite good) and is taking on Shaw toe-to-toe to steal and cajole whatever marketshare they can. In theory, it’s a buyer’s market.

There’s only one problem: both of them have serious service issues.

For those of you following me on Twitter, you know I made this decision to change back at the beginning of the month. This was a result of the last service fiasco with Shaw, after our internet and phone (Shaw implements a VoIP system that goes over the same cable as the TV and internet) up and died without warning at the end of August. We went on vacation, unable to call Shaw (we were literally leaving the next day, and no-one would have been here to resolve the questions), with a faint hope it might be resolved while we were gone. Hey, it could have been a line issue.

Yeah, and my grandmother was a Chinese fighter pilot…

Not unexpectedly, the phone was still out when we got back. This precipitated some of the most infuriating conversations I’d yet had with Shaw. Okay, in their defence, I was calling during a long weekend. That’s fair, and I’ll grant them the lower staff/higher call volume than usual. But Shaw has no message telling you how long you’re going to wait, and their “scheduled callback” service was never presented as an option.

First call, I waited about 30 minutes to talk to someone. The tech calls this a “recurrent issue”, and says we get to jump the queue a bit. I think: Fantastic! We’ll get this resolved quickly! Only problem: They have to check for when someone can come, but will call me back.

There’s no call the remainder of the day, or the following morning. At 11:20, I call Shaw again to find out when/if we’re going to see someone. The tech says that “a message was left”, and that we’d see someone between 8 and 12. That morning. Oh, did I mention that we were not at home at the time? The tech says that they guy hadn’t come yet, and would be arriving closer to noon. We flew home, only to find the lovely green ticket that says: “Sorry we missed you.”

It should have said: “Sorry, we’re idiots”. I called Shaw again, just short of spitting fire. Wait time? Nearly 45 minutes.

Shaw Tech: We left you a message!
Me: How? We have no phone!
Shaw Tech: (Silence, while checking) Confirmed, sir, we left  you message at 403-XXX-XXXX.
Me: (Stunned silence. The phone number they gave me was my old cell number, disconnected in 2008, before moving to Costa Rica. This is a new Shaw account. I have no idea how the hell they got that old number.) That number hasn’t existed in over two years.
Shaw Tech: (Silence) I’ll put in an urgent request. Someone will call you with a time.
Me: At what number?
Shaw Tech: 403-YYY-YYYY. Oh, that’s your home number. It doesn’t work, right?
Me: (Gumbling.) Correct.
Shaw Tech: Do you have another number we can call you at?

At this point, I’m continually reminding myself that I once had this guy’s job years ago, when I did computer tech support, and had to deal with people as irate as I was acting. But, still, there’s a certain amount of logic that’s just not being followed. Of course I have another number — how the hell do you think I’m calling you?!

The next day, still without any update on time, we’re in Garrison Woods running errands. I’ve taken the Monkey and Choo Choo down to the playground, a good 10-minute walk from the car and Alex. Which, of course, is exactly when Shaw calls me to tell me that the technician will arrive at our house sometime between 12 and 5 … which is in just over 15 minutes.

A 15 minute warning. Thanks, Shaw, for recognising that people never leave their houses, and are always available for when you decide to get around to showing up.

I abort all activities, resulting in the Monkey crying all the way back to the car, embarrass the hell out of Alex (who’d arranged and pre-paid for Monkey’s haircut, and now had to get a refund), and break a few laws trying to get back home before the Shaw technician arrived. (Which, incidentally, wasn’t for a couple of hours.) Thanks for that, Shaw. I love torturing my family to support your asinine business practices.

The technician gets to work, and after a while pronounces things fixed. The first thing he says: “The last technician didn’t know what he was doing.” Funny statement, that — it was the same thing the previous three technicians told me, almost word-for-word. Which says to me to believe that a) Shaw hires people who don’t know what they’re doing, and b) are missing massive opportunities to win confidence with their customer base.

Example: (Shaw, you paying attention?) Every time I called Shaw to ask what was wrong with my internet, they’d tell me how they could see that the modem had been “flapping”. Well, here’s a thought, Shaw — if you have the ability to see the flapping, maybe you should write a few programs to check for flapping modems and preemptively schedule service calls so people think you’re paying attention, preventative, and not constantly trying to clean up after yourselves.

Oh, and I really hate the underlying message of all that, too: “It’s not my fault. Don’t blame me.”

After that, I was done. Past done. The very next thing I did was call Telus. (It also helped that we had a card from Telus with a really-hard-to-argue introductory offer, which would save us a lot of money over the first year.)

And this, folks, is where I thought things would get better. I really should learn not to be an optimist — it just sets you up for disappointment.

Today, we were to have a new Telus installation. But by noon, there had been no installer, and Telus had promised a window between 8 and 10. I called Telus, and was left with a poor woman who bore the brunt of my rapidly-rising frustration.

Telus: There was a problem with the order, sir.
Me: A “problem”? What does that mean?
Telus: We couldn’t put the order through. We have to cancel it.
Me: Cancel? What? Why didn’t someone call me?
Telus: I don’t know, sir. We have to cancel it.
Me: (Feeling very forlorn, and thinking I’ll have to stay with Shaw.) So I don’t get the pricing deal?
Telus: You still can have the pricing, sir. We just have to re-enter the order.
Me: (Forlorn gone. Frustrated again. I go on a rant about my little experience.)
Telus: I’ll escalate this to a manager, sir. They’ll be able to help you much more easily. You can expect a call in about four hours.

So I wait. Four hours. I’ve already waited nearly two weeks, because Shaw requires seven business days to release the phone number (we’re porting it over). Four more hours, and a bit of hope that before this weekend is out, I’ll have a hard-line I can trust again. I tweeted my experience, since I know a few people have been following this little escapade. I get a response from @TelusSupport. I like these guys — they helped me with my cellphone problem a couple of months ago. End result: have to wait for the manager to call.

When the manager calls, I receive an apology for the trouble that actually sounds sincere. She explains what happened — a breakdown in their internal systems that caused part of the order to fail, but didn’t raise any alarm — and immediately offers to correct the situation, along with sizeable credit on the account. There’s two more calls, the net result of which has a new install date, on 29 September.

Why the wait? Well, there’s still that 7 day wait period with Shaw, and because of the internal kafuffle, the entire order has to be restarted. It’s going to be nearly a month from start to finish. “Frustrated” doesn’t begin to describe how I feel. I made sure the manager also knew that using the word “cancel” with a customer was a poor choice of word, regardless of Telus’s internal terminology, and even offered a replacement.

And then I went on a rant with the poor woman.

Okay, so here’s the deal, Telus: you’re on a short leash. You’ve screwed up pretty badly, and are catching the brunt of my troubles with Shaw, to boot. Don’t make me angry. You won’t like me when I’m angry. (And yes, there are places to go beyond you.)

The average person who just installs and starts using WordPress right away won’t ever see this. It’s only when you try to move the installation to another domain name (such as if you moved your blog from “www.mysite.com” to “blog.mysite.com”), or if you move to a new service provider (and the internal file paths change) that it becomes painfully visible.

And, although I do love you WordPress, this is something that’s gotta change.

Maybe it’s years of having application transportability being drilled into me (and drilling it into others), or the fact that I develop things on temporary URLs (often patterned on “http://localhost…” or “customersite.[my company's domain name]“, and in a few cases on some wacky TCP port that’s not 80. In any of those cases, WordPress remembers what I did.

Don’t believe me? Delve into the wp-options table in your WordPress database. You needn’t go any further than rows 1 and 37 (bearing the option_names of siteurl and home
). That URL is used by WordPress to fully qualify every page in your site. Change those values (or change your hosted domain), and the site stops working.

Now, don’t get me wrong, WordPress, I know why you do that. I just think, especially given how you’re positioning WordPress to be a more serious small-scale CMS competitor, you might want to take developer approaches into account. It would make life a little easier for those of us using WordPress as a solutions framework. And frankly, if you’re providing your own extensive instructions on how to move a blog, you might want to rethink the approach.

(And before anyone starts harping on how WordPress isn’t sufficient to the task, and I should be using a proper CMS like Drupal, Joomla, Sharepoint, Interwoven, bla bla bla, I stand by WordPress as a perfectly valid option for simple, small needs. It’s simplicity and limitations are an asset when you don’t want to worry about the larger needs of a full-featured CMS.)

But.

It doesn’t need to be this hard. Really. It’s not like this information isn’t freely available through existing PHP methods. The $_SERVER is filled with this information — it is trivial to initialise global variables using that as a base, eliminating the need to store that information in the database (and worse, hard-code it to all the URLs).

And while we’re at it, create a global variable listing the base filepath for the install. Again, this is easily handled through something as simple as dirname(__FILE__).

Am I being naive? Maybe. I’ve done enough reading to suggest that perhaps I’m missing something. But on the same note, I haven’t seen anything to suggest a concrete reason why it’s the way it is.

For now, though, I’ve found an interesting workaround (dare I suggest, “hack”?) that overrides WordPress’s database settings in the config file. A far better option, at least in my opinion, because you just sometimes can’t get to the database easily, and having to rewrite the SQL import by hand just seems so very, very wrong. I haven’t tried it yet, but my next foray into WordPress development will be putting it to the test.

I now return you to your regularly scheduled day…

The events of the last few weeks have been extremely tiresome to say the least. Far too many people and groups have been prognosticating the future of personal computing, and there’s been far too little in doses of reality. The future is coming, but it’s not coming nearly as quickly as everyone thinks it is, and rushing to meet the future will likely only harm the present. A little rational thought would be appreciated.

Okay, let’s address the elephant in the room, first. Steve Jobs hates Flash. There, I’ve said it. Now let’s move on.

I’m not here to argue about openness or stability, or any of the claims/counter-claims made by anyone. There’s no point, since a large part of it is highly subjective. Apple will do whatever Apple wants to do, regardless of any other company’s desires, intentions, or abilities. And while Apple might be on the right path to the next major shift in personal computing, we’re still quite some time from critical mass.

Right now, in the industry, we have a need for rich, engaging experiences. These experiences are the things that help capture attention and keep people using a website or service long enough for that website or service to deliver its message and achieve its function. It could be easily argued that a much simpler user interface can do the same thing, but I can also easily argue that there is a wide gulf between utility and ubiquity: I love the simpleness that comes with pure utility, but the ubiquity of “fun” is what wins the day.

As a result of Apple, a lot of people are starting to tout the death of Adobe (formerly Macromedia) Flash. It’s doomed because Apple said so, or at least that’s the narrowly simple version of the story. A longer version introduces the up-and-coming HTML5 standards, which start to blur the lines between what Flash does now and what could be done without Flash. That’s what a lot of the major players (Google and Apple being the two most obvious) are moving towards, and there’s no reason why their direction shouldn’t be taken as the final chapter on Flash, right?

Right?

To the best of my knowledge and five minutes on Google, there has never been a technology that has up-and-vanished overnight (even figuratively-speaking) merely because one company said so. While I have a significant amount of respect for Apple and their attention to detail, and I nearly worship at the Altar of Google, I’d be quite the fool to be agreeing to abandon Flash.

Yes, you heard me. Dropping Flash is a foolish idea.

I know, I know. Don’t I hate Flash? Aren’t I the one who railed against it for years and years and years. In a word: no. I’m technology agnostic. I’ve been agnostic for a almost a decade. I learned a long time ago that ignoring a solution merely because you don’t like it immediately cuts you out of possible success, and you end up reinventing wheels. I don’t hate Flash — I hate inappropriate use of a technology.

Flash, as a platform for providing a rich media solution, has a place in our industry. For today, tomorrow, and the foreseeable short-term future (I’m saying at least two years, personally), any company pulling support for Flash is being extremely short-sighted. It’s like ditching your extremely reliable car at the side of the road to climb into an open chassis that has no doors, no roof, the colours and interior are still being decided, the engine periodically doesn’t work properly, and you’d better hope the dang thing has brakes.

Yes, you can do a lot without Flash right now. A number of websites (the site for new Nissan Leaf, the HTML5 presentation, HTML5 video, HTML5 audio funkiness) have proven that you can use these new standards quite effectively, and move away from Flash. And to that end, I say “congratulations, I hope you do well”. You’re going to need a lot of help, and pray that you can get away with it.

Why? Well, guess what folks, the HTML5 “standard” isn’t complete — It’s still a working draft. CSS3? Not finished, and not properly/fully supported by any browser. Video? Well, as much as Apple has tried to say that H.264 is the de facto standard, it’s patented, and the license fees will kick in at the end of 2015. Google’s bought On2, with the widely-held hope that they’ll release the VP8 codec openly. Firefox is only supporting Ogg Theora. And lest we forget the Browser That Just Won’t Die: Internet Explorer 6 will make your life a living hell.

Anyone remember the standards fights from the late 1990s? Does any of this look at all familiar?

Okay, so let’s assume that you can develop to some standards. How many authoring tools are you going to need? How many libraries? There’s no one consistent authoring tool, and your developers are going to need some seriously good (and seriously expensive) skills to make it all blend together smoothly.

Now let’s add in the added complication of rights management. Try find that little detail in the HTML5 specs. Go on, take a look, I’ll wait. Didn’t see anything? That’s because it’s not there. Big Media (read: Dinosaur Media) needs this in their vain attempt to keep their archaic business models creaking forward. They need DRM. They need encryption. They need the stuff built into Flash to keep their delivery systems operating. If for that reason alone, Flash has a long life ahead of it.

I’m not dancing around here with rose-coloured glasses. Flash is dying, of that I have no doubts. As a plug-in solution, its days are numbered. More than likely, it’ll morph into a development system not unlike Microsoft Studio, where it will be a rich media solution system. What it generates as a final product will depend on the need, supporting different outputs is definitely a possibility.

But for now, I’m sticking with Flash. It’s helpful, it’s handy, and it works.

One thing that regularly amazed me, however, was how often a client’s internal IT group seemed to have non-trivial input on almost every aspect of an initiative, from the way it was hosted right down to the specific use of a given image. I often found myself watching our best-laid plans being eaten away to the point of delivering something I was less than happy with. The repeat experience led me to focus on one inexorable fact:

IT departments should never have any input on the marketing website. Ever.

Before the IT folks all try to kill me, please understand something — I’m on your side. My background is technical — I have done corporate IT in my previous lives, and am well aware of the implications and consequences of a haphazard platform rollout or a half-baked application install. I know why Sarbanes-Oxley creates havoc every quarter. And yes, I too have denied people hardware upgrades merely for the reason that I didn’t see the need. I know where you’re coming from.

To over-simplify things, it’s the men and women problem: they’re both human, but communication and understanding sometimes comes in very short supply. Hence the book, and the numerous parodies thereof. (Though why women got stuck with the toxic atmosphere planet remains a mystery to me.) In my view, IT and marketing are on equally distant worlds, with the same challenges to understand given needs.

This is not about just mere communication. This goes past communication to perceptions, politics, policies, and also budgets. The resulting confounding confusion ends with uncertainties, namely: who actually is responsible for the website, who owns the website and its operation, and who pays for it. (Yes, IT and marketing work for the same company, but each has their own budgets.) This is where the tug-of-wars start, and why IT tends to get sucked (or shoved) into the website space.

Like I said, IT, I’m on your side. And believe me when I say this: You do not want to handle the trouble of the marketing website.

Simply put, a marketing department’s purpose is to sell a company’s products or services. As the adage goes, you have to spend money to make money. In the world of profit/loss, a marketing department is almost entirely loss — they spend the money to raise awareness and encourage sales of their organisation’s wares.

An IT department’s purpose is to support the organisation’s internal operations through implementing technology standards, ensuring stability and control over technology infrastructure, and assisting when things go awry. Like marketing, internal IT is entirely loss as well — it is the traditional form of a “cost center”, meaning it doesn’t even feed directly into a revenue chain. That also means that it’s a constant focus of cost control.

The two departments also (typically) report up through different executives as well, with marketing going to a marketing-oriented office (such as a Chief Marketing Officer) and IT going through the financial/administrative office (such as a Chief Financial Officer). This means that messages provided to each of them are different, the directions given to them are different, and their are told to focus on different things.

Which means, of course, that when the marketing department asks for something, the IT department will think it means something else.

In my experience, this usually arises when a company’s web presence is the point of discussion. This is the ultimate tug-of-war: marketing needs the freedom to do what they need to do to their job, and IT sees this as something they need to own and support. Almost invariably, it ends up getting messy, and the marketing department ends up subservient to the IT department.

Now, before all you geeks out there cheer for this apparent victory, this is a bad thing. As alluded to above, IT departments do not understand marketing needs. What IT departments see is a need to keep things in line with supported standards, and keep costs to a minimum. This misunderstanding has been lampooned many times in cartoon, often sending those in the industry to nod their heads sadly at the truth.

Consider the following scenario: Marketing has a project that will raise awareness for a new product. Their budget allows for about two weeks of work, and will have a one year lifespan. They want to really reach out to Gen Y as a primary audience. When Marketing and IT see these rough requirements, they’ll each see something different:

There’s two places where IT falls short: understanding the creative aspect of marketing, and the need for flexibility. Marketing campaigns are highly creative, by sheer necessity — remove the creativity, and all you have is a message without hooks. The flexibility allow marketing to react to need, as well as attempt strategies to better broadcast a message. Such flexibility flies in the face of most standards, which strive for stringent consistency.

In other words, marketing is not something an IT department should ever want to understand. I assure you, it can make your head hurt.

So what are we left with? In my view, keep IT doing what IT does best: supporting the internal infrastructure of a company, and staying out of the website game.

As for the website, it should never live with the company (unless the company itself is geared utterly around its website, but that also changes the game entirely). The website should live at an external location with a third-party hosting vendor. There are thousands to choose from in all sizes, shapes, securities, and softwares. You do this because you don’t want to have to deal with the infrastructure of a website that supports your business (either directly or indirectly), and because it allows a marketing department to do things that would scare the bejeebus out of an IT team.

So, dear IT friends, do yourselves a favour: if someone ever tries to suggest you take on the task of managing the company’s website projects, do yourselves a favour: run. And leave behind a note with the five hosting sales reps who cold-called you last month.

A few years ago, the “hybrid” car was introduced, a shining new example of how to make vehicles more efficient, and spawned a new movement of environmentally-aware manufacturing. Today, Nissan stands ready to finally release the first mass-market all-electric vehicle, amping up the competition to become the centre of the environmentally-friendly transportation universe. I, for one, welcome the arrival of the electric car, long overdue from formal acceptance in North America. At the same time, however, I also curse its arrival because it doesn’t actually address a primary problem.

The electric car strives to perpetuate a bad idea: that we all need a car.

World War II changed the world in so many ways that it’s hard to keep track of them all. It ushered in our nuclear age, brought computers out of the closet and into our common perception, and brought about a new sense of prosperity and demand that the world had not previously witnessed — especially in North America.

The message was clear: prosperity through purchase. North Americans were told through the power of the media that they had to live the “American Dream”: own a large home in the suburbs, the newest appliances, fancy clothes, a television, and no home was complete without at least one car.

It was the car that became the shining star of the American household, and a symbol of freedom. No longer were you tied to others’ schedules — you were free to go where you wanted, when you wanted. The Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956 gave birth to the Interstate Highway System, and forever sealed the dream in the minds of Americans, and the neighbours to the north (because, let’s be honest, as much as we Canadians want to be different than America, we want to play with the same toys).

Long-distance travel changed. It was now about driving long distances in cars. It was driving into the city. It was driving to the local store. Drive-through restaurants, drive-in movies. Driving.

The automobile as we know it — an individualistic vessel of identity — encourages people to live away from their daily lives. Instead of living in tall buildings, we live in spacious suburbs. We thrive for neighbourhoods with only houses, and drive to expansive commercial malls. We want industry away from our little edens, and don’t want to our daily grind anywhere near our castles. When we have to go to other places, we want to do so on our terms.

All of this has come at an expense: fossil fuel consumption never seems to stem, nor does our energy use to allow us to live apart and at a distance. Our land use spirals, allowing some of our cities to resemble single-celled protozoa that expand to consume what’s near them. Calgary, in particular, has been listed as an “ecological disaster” on those very terms. I would be very curious to see a comparison with Manhattan, which I think it is likely the most efficient places in the world: over 27,000 people per square kilometre (most of them don’t own a car), hundreds of thousands commuting by public transit, and elevators use less energy than a refrigerator.

In our strive to achieve, we have forgotten the need to preserve.

Slowly, thanks to decades-long efforts and a few more mainstream mentions, the world is becoming attuned to alternative energy, with a notable focus on electric. It’s been a slow adoption, but the ever-present call to heed environmental changes and the need to act more responsibly has brought about mass demand for something beyond burning fossil fuels.

To be fair, there are three types of electric vehicles floating about. We have seen the parallel hybrids (Honda Insight and the Toyota Prius, to name a few), the very long overdue series hybrids (notably the Chevrolet Volt), and the pure electric (the failed EV1, and the up-and-coming Nissan Leaf). We have latched onto these vehicles as the saving graces for our obsession with the automobile. All of these have problems:

• Parallel hybrids are an awkward mish-mash of traditional gasoline power and electric power, where the gasoline half is still largely in control, and even the slightest press of the accelerator can throw off your mileage
• Series hybrids wisely disconnect the gasoline engine from the wheels and use it only to charge the battery when it starts to get low; diesel would be a far better choice for fossil power, though it is highly unpopular in North American-made passenger vehicles due to memories of the 1970s
• Pure electric vehicles try to come off as the greenest options, but conveniently side-step the question of power source — unless you obtain your electricity from solar or wind, you’re getting it from falling water or nuclear (slightly less green), or from burning fossil fuels (electric is cheaper, no question, but you’re still burning)

And none of them address the original fundamental problem: they all perpetuate the bad dream. All of them remind us that if we don’t own a car and a big house, live in a nice suburb, and drive wherever we like, that — somehow — we’re not successful.

Meanwhile, public transit withers. Yes, for all my bitching about my local public transit, I still find it a far preferable alternative to a car — at least when the public transit offering is well-handled. However, therein lies the problem — all over North America (which, really, is the biggest problem in the world), public transit organisations have to reduce service and inflate prices to keep themselves afloat. Long-distance train travel has gone from our primary form of inter-city travel to mere tourism. The long-distance bus services are now regarded as “last ditch” options when you can afford nothing else.

You think public transit is awful? It’s an inconvenience? Talk to the millions of people who float in and out of major cities on a daily basis through buses and trains. Talk to your average Londoner, who is fined if they try to drive their car into the core of the city. Talk to anyone living in Japan about the difficulty not only of owning a car, but trying to drive it. Public transit remains the best option for moving large numbers of people. And yes, it is rather easy to adapt to a known schedule and not have it wreck your life.

While one dream lives on, another one dies. The dream of a utopia where people live quietly and closely, where automobiles are rarely seen and heard. That dream started dying a long time ago, and save for a few dedicated efforts to preserve the utopia, there are few places in the world the car has not touched. The utopia will one day be merely a thought, a vague entry in our collective memory, passing into the distance like a car into the fog.

I propose April 1st be “IE6 Dies” Day. It’s time that IE6 be shown the door. But we’ll need help.

This isn’t the first time people have called for IE6 to go away. But previously, these were developer-led challenges, all of which met the same problem: we’re not the ones who get to make that decision. All a client needs to do is pull out a report from their stats engine to prove why they need it. (Or simply open their company-issued laptop to show the IT-mandated browser.) Going against this kind of weight, we’re lost.

We need to go the other way. Not to the browser makers (they’re on our side), but to the people offering services that people want to see. Want to punish a child? Take away its access to its toys.

We need to call out to the Big 3 search engines. Google, Bing, and Yahoo: Block access to IE6. And I don’t mean provide a subtle hint page, I mean block it entirely. With a big, bold page that says:

We’re sorry, but your browser is no longer supported. Please upgrade to one of the following [insert browser list here]. If necessary, please contact your IT department.

Google’s already on this path. Microsoft has encouraged upgrades to IE8. Yahoo hasn’t really said anything yet, but I imagine they’ve thought something similar. Take these three pages away, and you cut off a primary tool that millions of IE6 users go to daily. With these unavailable for no reason other than a browser update, it should help drive that final spike into the heart.

So why April 1? Well, there’s the obvious reason: IE6 has been “fooling” us for far too long, and it’s time that we prove that we’re not fooled any longer. But a bigger reason is time: Namely, give companies some warning. The upgrade cost can be significant, and companies need time to get things in place. Frankly, they’ve had enough, but a sudden stop without warning can cause some pretty major headaches. (I may be a jerk, but I’m not without sympathy for IT teams, having some good friends who do IT, and having enough IT to respect the problems they solve.)

I can’t do this alone. For this to work, we need as many people as possible to spread the message. Tweet/retweet this message as much as you can (please use the hashtag #ie6diesday, if possible). Send them this message:

Dear Search Provider,

Due to the on-going security and support problems with Internet Explorer 6, I would like to suggest that you consider April 1 “IE6 Dies Day”, and block IE6 from accessing your search engine. There are many other options and alternatives. http://bit.ly/bZTUej

Sincerely,

[Your name here]

Here’s some quick links to get you started!

• Yahoo: http://help.yahoo.com/l/us/yahoo/search/indexing/webmaster-01.html and http://www.ysearchblog.com/
• Google: http://www.google.com/support/contact/bin/request.py?bdpg=1&hl=en and http://googleblog.blogspot.com/
• Bing: https://feedback.discoverbing.com/default.aspx?productkey=bing

Spread the news. Let’s convince the search engines that it’s time for IE6 to die, once and for all.

Greed kills innovation.

It’s short, it’s simple, it’s sure to raise the ire of a lot of people, but it’s also a major problem we’re seeing lately, especially in internet technologies. It’s a problem that’s dogged humanity for generations. And it’s getting worse.

It’s getting worse because of the pace of technology. There was a time, roughly my current lifetime ago, when there were only a handful of companies engaged in developing technology. They made hardware, wrote the software, and generally all of them hoped things would work.  People took ideas from one another, all hoping that they could make it into a better idea. Witness how Apple and Microsoft flourished on an idea from Xerox…

But things changed. Today, we look back on Xerox, and we think: You yutz! You should’ve sued Microsoft blind! Why? Because we all got greedy. It’s not about making things better, it’s about making money.

Patents Gone Wild! See them on the streets of Silicon Valley, beating up struggling entrepreneurs trying to make something good. Or in the Northwest, terrorising established companies for no valid reason. Bringing down entire corporate communications, regardless of impact. Not being able to display a video because the cost is too high.

My problem with all of this isn’t that it’s illegal — it’s not. A patent holder is allowed, by law, to defend their patent against encroachment. My problem is that it happens with increasingly dangerous frequency, often initiated by people who, frankly, have no business holding a patent.

The laws in North America have bred a two-tiered system: those who patent to protect their business, and those who license patents (and quite often end up in big name lawsuits). I know many people in the first group whose companies have pushed them to file patents, to ensure that their business is protected. And we’ve all seen the prolonged battles of the latter.

I fear we’re entering an era when innovation — real innovation, not incremental one-upmanship — will become stifled. The fear of lawsuit and the yawning chasm of bureaucracy needed to protect an idea will become roadblocks. People who might have done well on their own will look at the challenges and say: No, thanks.

Imagine if Steve Wozniak had said that. No, thanks, I don’t want to sell this computer kit to anyone. Or if Henry Ford had looked at his dream of consistently templated automobiles and thought: Who’s waiting around the corner with a lawyer? Page and Brin might have looked at Yahoo! and said: Y’know, what’s the point?

Maybe I’m too altruistic. Maybe because I’ve grown tired at seeing the petty bickering over hundreds of millions of dollars, while reading headlines about mass suffering around the world. Maybe it’s because we’re a decade behind having a viable electric car in widespread use anywhere in the world. Maybe I just want the frickin’ jetpack we’re all supposed to be using now.

In time, a phrase was born: The sun never sets on the British Empire. Great Britain’s influence extended far beyond its native shores, its power unquestionable. A few thrived under the colonial system, but the majority — the people living under colonial rule — were marginalised as being little more than the ignorant masses; significant numbers suffered horribly.

It’s really no wonder that the Empire collapsed under its own weight.

Flash forward now to our present, a world where corporations, not governments, run the world. Oh, sure, we see the laws passed by governments in the interests of its people, but it’s not the governments creating them. It’s lobbyists, working on behalf of the corporations. It’s the corporations funding political careers through donations (legal or otherwise). It’s the corporations funding large-scale advertising campaigns placing candidates more friendly to their needs into office.

It is these corporations directing the current colonialism: copyrights. Think of these not as the legalese that they are — instead, think of them as land claims, which were a significant part of the British Empire. A land claim meant you had title to earn money from people who worked your land, and the power to treat them however (un)fairly you wished. If anyone tried to take your land, you were obliged to defend it with as deadly force as you could muster.

Copyrights have been with us — and have been a controversial topic — ever since Thag copied Zog’s cave painting, and Zog hit Thag over the head with a rock. Interestingly, that form of retribution hasn’t changed much in the roughly 45,000 years since. It’s been a battle for recognition of ownership, of artistry, and for “what’s right”.

One of the biggest problems is that copyright enforcement hasn’t been particularly consistent over the years, either. Zog was lucky enough to avoid a complex judicial system. Until the early 1990s, we had to rely mostly on physical presence (namely, you had to buy an actual piece of art). Software copyrights existed, but were poorly enforced, even within large law-abiding corporations. The advance of technology broke the physical barrier, gave people the ability to access materials on their behalf … and shortly afterwards, gave corporations the ability to know who was breaking their rules.

We saw the first signs of the new colonialism at the turn of the 21st century, when one of the corporations — the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) — launched what would be come the first of many public and painful lawsuits. Metallica brought the battle into the public eye when they effectively offended the then-denizens of the internet, decrying the “fair use” belief held by many (the legality of said perspective notwithstanding). It was the first shot fired in the new independence, the first time that people showed to the world that they wanted things on their terms, not someone else’s.

The weapon wielded by groups like the RIAA and the MPAA (Motion Picture Assocation of America) was not a battle axe or a howitzer, but the Digital Millennium Copyright Act — the DCMA. This law, enacted in the United States of America, implemented two of the treaties agreed upon by WIPO (World Intellectual Property Organization) in 1996. This is how we came to know DRM (Digital Rights Management). They used it to guilt us to not copy, and then slaughter us when we did. The corporations had found legitimacy for their battle through governments.

In theory, this should have worked entirely to the corporation’s wishes. Within their own borders, the laws were clear, and things went (mostly) according to plan. But they weren’t so effective in the international reality. Not all countries recognised, or even seemed to care, about other country’s laws — and certainly not about the ones that enforced copyrights. Governments were engaged again to help enforce the corporations’ will.

When you have to go up to the biggest kid in the schoolyard and ask for your toy back, all you can do is whine. I imagine “aw, come on!” was heard a lot when the United States asked China not to copy software, movies, or CDs. But China opted to give only a token of acceptance — sort of like giving back only one of the wheels from the Tonka truck. China can do that, because it owns a huge portion of the United States debt, and provides the United States with cheap imports.

Where were the WIPO and the World Trade Organization (WTO) in all of this? Someone’s got to run world court, right?

But the rules started changing. In the last two years, Canada had to improve its own copyright legislation, also based on DCMA, and driven by the industry — the corporations — and not by the people whom the government should represent. The sledgehammer just fell on Costa Rica: fix your copyrights, or the United States will stop importing sugar (note that coffee and bananas were excluded from the ban). Lo siento, Costa Rica, but CAFTA/TLC won’t help you here — remember, the United States wrote the core of it to benefit themselves.

Costa Rica and Canada are not alone. Dozens of countries are now working on ACTA — the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement — a virtually secret pact designed to do only one thing: enforce a DCMA-like mandate worldwide. Governments don’t want to talk about it. The corporations? They’re smiling like buddhist cows.

Colonialism was best defined when the powerful centre took after its weaker neighbours and opponents. You either fought them, or you joined them. The colonists in all of this are us, the people. We’re the ones being handed the royal decrees without benefit of democracy, the ones getting taxation without representation. We’ll be the ones held in stockades, heads put on pikes, and held up as terrorists to the state (covering for the corporation).

Now lest anyone thing I’m against copyrights, I’m not. I respect the creativity needed to make something new, and the need for that artist is duly compensated for their efforts. But I’m against the inappropriate use of copyrights (and patents, for that matter). When copyrights are flaunted by corporations and not by the artist, it becomes a debate of what’s more important — stockholder dividends, or protecting the artist’s needs?

‘Cuz from what I’m seeing, another war for independence is coming. But this one will cross nearly every border, involve almost everyone, and probably install a new form of class structure in the process. Suddenly, that remote cabin in the mountains looks a lot more appealing…

Schedules change. No-one can predict the future. No-one can see the out-of-left-field problems, the people unable to work due to sudden illness (or worse), or the sudden changes in project direction. When a project’s schedule starts to go sour, time management rapidly becomes extremely important. In a world where deadlines are fixed and resources are limited, one of the most common solutions is to work overtime.

However, overtime is not a solution. Overtime is a problem.

Let’s be honest, “overtime” is easy to say. Overtime is so easy to offer as a suggestion, but people don’t always know what it means right away. I personally find using overtime sort of like going through the five stages of grief:

1. Denial: The project doesn’t need overtime. We can achieve the goal without it.
2. Anger: Why is someone else demanding that I or my team work overtime?
3. Bargaining: What can we do to minimise the amount of overtime?
4. Depression: Shit.
5. Acceptance: We have to do overtime.

In the end, overtime can only achieve a partial success. It can never achieve a complete success, because the use of overtime ultimately masks the original problem: something went off the rails. And because of that incomplete success, it remains a problem.

Overtime is not a problem in mere logistics. The act of asking (no matter how difficult it may be), accounting for the overtime (most operations dealing with overtime have tools to track it), and payment (at least where applicable — our industry often ignores this aspect of overtime) are trivial. The impact of overtime, however, is substantial.

First, overtime ignores the original problem. In my experience, better than 4/5 of the issues stem from the project scope: poorly-defined, insufficiently investigated, or simply allowed to accumulate without recognition of additional time (simple reality: adding even a single edit beyond the previous accepted work incurs more time).

I’m guilty many times over of scope-creep. One little change becomes 10 little changes, becomes 50 little changes. That’s why it’s called “creep”. It’s a gamble: you hope your changes have little or no incremental affect on delivery time. Sometimes you win, and the work blends in well. Other times, your schedule mysteriously extends by days, or even weeks.

Second, overtime places additional stress on those who now have to spend the extra time. Even if someone is willing to work overtime (especially in cases when there will be compensation), there is the additional mental and physical toll. Over short periods of time, the effect is within reason. However, over longer periods of time (even as little as a week), stress can mount quickly and the effectiveness of that extra time will decrease significantly.

In my career, I have worked countless thousands of hours of overtime. And I have paid for that overtime with weight gain, blepharospasms, cavities (from too much Coca-Cola), an inability to sleep, issues with personal hygiene (showering at the office isn’t always possible), which ultimately led to mistakes in my work.

Finally, overtime goes beyond to affect others beyond the company: families, friends, and social circles. That person (or people) often has others who depend on them for a variety of responsibilities, even if as simple as reading a bedtime story to a child. When a person is not present due to overtime, it can lead to other difficulties beyond the office. Sadly, these are the effects most frequently forgotten or ignored.

So how do we avoid overtime? Therein lies the ultimate dilemma: in most industries (not just interactive marketing), you can’t.

Western society, and especially North Americans, have an inherent inflexibility when it comes to altering deadlines. Even slipping as little as a few hours can cause significant issues in terms of money, and often has a ripple effect that can extend far beyond a single person. But even in situations where no dependencies exist, people are loathe to accept flexible end-dates for fear of the never-ending project.

Truth be told, I’m both against and for overtime (in that order, I might add). As a father, any time spent away from my family (including the average work day) is difficult. Working additional hours only acerbates the situation. As such, I avoid asking for overtime, as I cannot ask of others what I cannot ask of myself.

However, as a company man, I look to overtime to solve the inevitable problem of scheduling: somehow, a specific deadline must be met, and I know that merely adding people to a project does not allow a project to move more quickly (it can be quite the opposite). The basic formula is simple: overtime means project delivery; project delivery means happy clients; happy clients means more work; more work means more money to keep people employed.

Contradictory? Darn right, it is.

Ultimately, overtime is still a Bad Thing™ that should be reserved for critical situations. It’s a “break glass in case of fire” sort of thing that should never be wielded casually, and always treated with the utmost seriousness and respect. And in all cases, anyone calling for overtime should recognise exactly why overtime is needed, and recognise what could have been done differently in the past to have avoided it, so the same mistake isn’t made twice.

Well, it would make things easier if we could actually set things up properly. Therein lies the problem — it’s not that easy to do! Especially when it comes to the Holy Trinity of communications services: phone, internet, and TV.

The term “rocket science” comes to mind…

Thanks to me blabbing my big mouth a few weeks ago, we have electricity, gas, and water services ready to start. (Thank you, Enmax. That was the most painless process I’ve experienced in … well, about 18 months.) We’ve even signed onto Greenmax in an effort to support alternative energy programs.

Insurance? We just called our existing agent (we needed some form of house insurance while we were out), and that was handled in a single email. (The car insurance is another issue. We have to buy a car first.)

Now let’s get back to the Holy Trinity. Calgary is a bit of an annoying place to try to set things up. Thanks to a whole host of weird half-collusion, half-competition amongst the major communications companies (notably Shaw, Telus, Rogers, and Bell), there’s a mixed bag of services that you can get. It breaks down like this, at least if you live in Alberta:

* Wireless internet, provided either by USB stick or portable wireless modem.
** Wireless internet, provided by USB stick
*** VoIP service, instead of traditional hard-wired service
**** Is actually Bell’s service, rebranded (Bell even does the user support!)

Okay, this makes it a little “clearer”, at least in that you can see where some vendors are falling short. It also shows that — for all intents and purposes — there is really only one vendor that truly provides everything. Considering that I’m not looking for a landline phone, that brings it to two vendors.

But it’s not that easy…

When you start digging into the realities, you start running into roadblocks. I want to deal with one vendor, here. I don’t want to receive a whack of bills from different companies. I also want to get a package deal, knocking a few bucks off the service. Seems logical, right? It’s a shame I’m the only one who sees it.

So, let’s go with the following as a baseline (knowing full well that once you wade into wireless contracts, especially when considering more than one phone, data plans, and rates, the numbers become effectively meaningless):

• Blackberry on a 150 minute local plan, 5 “favourites”, and ~500 MB data
• Digital TV (not HD), with one step up from basic programming
• Internet with 3 MBPs download (or better)

Here’s what we get on the vendors:

* Wireless, allows more than one computer
** The Bell rep I talked to said it’s possible, but Bell’s website shows no bundles for Alberta
*** Voice plan + data plan (there seems to be no combined plan that I can find)
**** Only works on one computer, device cost is extra, plus contract data plan
***** Does not include TV
****** Does not include wireless services in the bundle

Talk about a freaking mess. There’s no clear winner here, no matter what you do. I really begin to understand why there are people why say “screw it, just gimme the landline and I’ll use dialup”. This is way more difficult than it should be. Neither Rogers or Shaw deliver a complete service to me in Alberta, so they’re out. That leaves only Bell and Telus as one-vendor destinations.

My biggest problem in all of this is that Bell does offer great bundles … if you live in Ontario. If I go through their bundle there, the price is about $136, which is roughly comparable with Telus in Alberta. (Of course none of these prices include taxes and all the absurd service fees that go along with it all.)

If I bundle the best of the bunch? Bell wireless, and Telus internet and TV, for example? $125. A whole whopping $5 less than if I just choose Telus across the board. So, seriously Telus, why is your company so poorly organised that your Telus Mobility division is kept that separate? There seems to be no rhyme or reason for it. (By the way, I’m also a stockholder, so an explanation would be nice.)

No easy way to avoid this one, it seems…

The hope, particularly around the web development world, is that this upswelling will finally put nails in the coffin of IE6 and eliminate the bugger from the software world, thus heralding in a new era of (near-)web standards.

There’s only one problem: Web 2.0 companies don’t mean jack to Corporate America.

Here’s the sad and very-painful reality. Only about 25% of IE6 users can change. The remaining 75% of users — let’s say, about 10% of the entire browser market (yes, I know numbers vary wildly) — can’t. Why? Because corporate IT won’t let them. And frankly, as a corporate IT person myself, I can relate. Telling them that you can’t see your favourite social networking site garners no sympathy, ‘cuz you’re probably not allowed to view them during work hours, anyway.

The major problem with most web use in the workplace is that it’s very risky. Perhaps you haven’t noticed, but the internet isn’t exactly a safe place. Aside from the relatively-innocuous stuff like porn and spam, there’s lots ways for people to infiltrate corporate and government computers through what could be construed as regular “innocent” use. A simple download can ruin your IT team’s day. (I’ve been there enough times, I know.)

Okay, for small businesses, this is less of an issue. But for Big Business — and I’m talking Fortune 50, here — this isn’t just an issue. It’s an opportunity for widespread panic.

Several of my clients have requirements to support IE6. Not so much because of their customers, but because of themselves. That’s their corporate standard. That’s what they have installed on all their computers. Which, incidentally, are almost assuredly Windows XP SP2 systems under very tight administrative control. In many cases, they don’t even have Flash (or if they do, they’re at least a couple of versions behind).

Why?

Control. Pure and simple. Corporate IT can be run ragged even at the best of times. A single virus infection can throw an entire company into complete chaos. And when it takes down groups, or even whole departments (never mind the entire company), the amount of money lost due to halted productivity runs into the hundreds of thousands of dollars per minute. And with the advent of Sarbanes-Oxley, it’s often just plain easier to lock down everything and ignore the resulting boo-hooing.

If you think that upgrading IE6 is as simple as upgrading software, you haven’t accounted for the potential cost if something goes wrong.

And that single “if” is why IE6 is still here. And won’t be going away quickly. It’s all fine for Web 2.0 companies to drop IE6 support (and really, should drop it), but unless something business-critical to the Fortune 50 drops IE6 (and is weighty enough to force an IT change), it will remain.

I don’t like it better than you do. As a developer (or more correctly, a development manager) spending a lot of time “fixing” IE6′s web standards support (and especially PNG support) is not only wasteful, it tends to create more problems than it solves. I would love to see IE6 disappear, and eliminate a major headache. But it won’t. Not until something changes.

So what needs to change?

Perception of cost. Namely, what cost is larger? The cost to migrate from IE6 to a better browser (and no, I’m not going to say which one — there are enough options), or the cost to support IE6. And let’s keep in mind that the cost to support IE6 goes well beyond initial development, folks. Maintenance adds on heaps of cost as well, especially if design tweaks persist.

Here’s a way to start approaching this:

• Project X has a budget of $5 million. (I work in big budgets. And frankly, if you’re working with Fortune 50, you pretty much always work with big budgets.)
• Project X has a development budget of $1 million (once you account for time to planning, designing, and revisions).
• The price to support IE6 is nearing 25% (at least from the numbers I see). That means either losing 25% of core development to supporting IE6, or adding on additional budget. But let’s say $250,000, just for laughs.
• That means 5% of your entire original budget is now being used to support IE6. And I’d like to think of that as very conservative.

That’s just initial development. That gets you to launch. But remember folks, we like to look past launch. Because big budget projects generally tend to have long lives — you want to get your investment back, after all.

• Project X has a $2 million annual maintenance budget (again, just a rough number, but these budgets cover new campaigns, updates to existing campaigns, microsites, etc. ).
• Development costs typically gain a larger percentage during maintenance cycles as the original high-level thinking is already done. So let’s say 40% goes to development. That’s $800,000.
• Supporting IE6 still requires as much work — that part never gets any easier. Your IE6 support cost? About $200,000. Per year.
• That means nearly 10% of your maintenance budget goes to one browser.

Assuming a four-year lifespan of Project X before it incurs another major overhaul, you’re looking at (again, example numbers) $850,000. For one browser.

If you want to kill IE6, consider taking this to your client. That $850,000 could be far better spent on other items, and is — effectively — a loss to their company. Using a smaller percentage to upgrade IE6 to something else would likely allow greater flexibility by the IT department, and eliminate it as a support item.

In short, don’t plead to the IT team. That won’t get you far. Hit your client’s pocketbook instead — that’ll get the needed attention. Just make sure you use your budgetary numbers, not mine.

Why did you build it that way?

It seems like a simple question. But it belies it’s true meaning. What they’re really saying is:

We wouldn’t have done that. This design is bad.

It’s a completely valid point. And you know what? I probably already thought that same thing.

I’ve been in the interactive marketing industry over 10 years. Over a decade. That’s a long time to see a huge spectrum of problems and their solutions. And in those 10 years, I’ve never seen the same solution come up twice.

Yes, I said “solution” and not “problem”. The same problem will rear it’s head many times over. But the solution will likely always change, for reasons of education (namely what you learned from the last time the problem came up), technology (newer and better ways to create the solution), and skill (your developers will change and their skills will improve). And frankly, you won’t always be the architect of the solution — some else might take that role.

When that solution comes to fruition, it’s a natural behaviour to look back on what was done, and rip it to shreds again. This is the act of any responsible developer — to analyse the work for what was done right, and what could have been done better. Learn from the work that you’ve done and ensure that the next project benefits from that education.

And yes, ladies and gentlemen, you’ve read into my next point: There is no such thing as a perfect solution.

I’ve heard this before, many times. The idea of a “perfect solution” is purely textbook. It doesn’t exist in the real world. There are defined approaches to problems, but the mere moment that a human brain is involved with the analysis of a problem, you’ll immediately enter into a world of subjective opinion. It’s unavoidable. And it should be encouraged whenever possible.

It’s simple: Ask 20 different developers how to solve a problem, and you’ll probably get 40 different answers. (A good developer will often give you multiple options.) Now take those same 20 developer and show them a completed project. Mayhem may result.

Hindsight is always 20/20.
- Billy Wilder

Anyone can look back on a completed project and poke holes in it. But being able to see the project in its complete detail belittles the difficulties that had to be surpassed, the learnings that were acquired, the barriers that got in the way, and the decisions that were made for reasons you’re not even aware of.

It’s not just cheating (not unlike getting the answer grid to that nasty math exam in high school), it’s unprofessional. Any development team who is picking up a completed project from another team should never expect it to be perfect, or even consider demanding such. The expectation isn’t just unrealistic — it’s bordering on impossible.

I’ve lost count of the number of projects I’ve helped deliver over the last decade. (It’s been a lot.) And at the end of each and every single one of those projects, I’ve looked back and said exactly the same thing: We could have done it better. Especially the ones I’m most proud of. It’s for the very same reasons I mentioned above: education, technology, and skill.

So if you’re going to come to me, and critique my solution, then you’ve just given me the right to do it to yours as well. Consider that for a moment — is your solution bullet-proof? (And I’m specifically targetting those in interactive marketing, here.) It’s a tired adage, but it fits:

Judge not lest ye be judged.

Microsoft, to their credit, has seen this petition and has authored their own response: The Power of Word in Outlook. The sad reality is that, even though written by William Kennedy, Corporate Vice President, Office Communications and Forms Team, that team has completely missed the point of the petition.

And it raises the question: Why is Microsoft — yet again — refusing to listen to the people who know best? Not the developers of a system, but its users.

Web Developers world-wide have contended with Outlook and is continually-degrading ability to render even the most compliant of HTML for emails. Given, Outlook is not alone in this criticism, as some other email clients are even worse (listen up, Lotus Notes). HTML emails have had their problems over the years, and JavaScript was (wisely) dropped by most vendors some time ago.

The cries from developers are clear: Why, oh why, are we not able to render HTML properly, and use CSS to style it?

Because, for some strange reason, Outlook uses the Microsoft Word engine to render its HTML. (And why Word has an HTML renderer separate from Internet Explorer remains another question.) Microsoft views this, however, as a good thing. To read their post today, they point out:

However, there are a number of fallacies with their logic. Which is deeply concerning, as it strongly suggests that the Outlook development team is out of touch with the industry (odd, considering they seem to follow Twitter).

There are a few points in their introductory paragraphs to which I take objection. I’ll quote them so we can address them more specifically.

The Email Standards Project, which developed the website that promotes the current Twitter campaign, is backed by the maker of “email marketing campaign” software.

Yes, the Email Standards Project might have started this effort, but they do not stand alone in the petition. There are thousands of other developers in this industry who are also asking. We’ve been asking for a long time, too.

[We] believe it’s the best e-mail authoring experience around, with rich tools that our Word customers have enjoyed for over 25 years.

Um, what? Seriously, do you folks have a different set of software that I’ve worked with since 1989? Again, Mr. Kennedy (and Microsoft), you’re missing the entire point: It’s not the creation of the email that’s the problem. It’s the viewing — the important part of the communication process. The HTML renderer in Microsoft Word is so utterly broken that it can’t even render a simple HTML email without forcing us to violate every standard we know, and write HTML that makes most professional web developers want to hide in a dark corner.

But for the sake of argument, people who create HTML emails professionally do NOT want to use Microsoft Word as an editor — we barely tolerate it as a tool to display our source copy decks. If you honestly “believe it’s the best e-mail authoring experience around”, you clearly have not tried to support emails on multiple email clients at once.

And yes, Word has been around for 25 years. This is not necessarily a good thing. May I remind you that Microsoft Word was originally just a word processor? Then you turned it into a (seriously flawed) desktop publisher? Shoe-horning HTML editor support was a complete joke in Word 95 (even considering how bad most HTML was back then), and has barely improved since.

(And you probably have 25-year old code in there, too. Maybe you should clean it up a bit?)

But even those don’t hold a candle to the insipidity of the “examples” of why Word is a great HTML email editor. They offer:

• SmartArt
• Drawing and Charting Tools
• Table and Formatting Tools
• Mini Toolbar for formatting

When I read these, I just about had an apoplectic seizure. SmartArt?! Who the hell are you trying to kid, Mr. Kennedy? As a Corporate Vice President, you should make sure your advisers are providing accurate information about what the industry is doing, and where they’re having the most pain.

We in the interactive marketing world will never use any of those features. Why? Aside from the fact that they are gawd-awfully ugly (and keep in mind this is coming from a programmer, not an artist), the use of these tools creates HTML that is incompatible with almost every non-Microsoft email client (including HotMail, I should add). Please do not get me started on the drivel that comes out to recreate a table.

We understand that e-mail is about interoperability among various e-mail programs, and we believe that Outlook provides a good mix of a rich user experience and solid interoperability with a wide variety of other e-mail programs.

Last I checked, Outlook really only worked well with Exchange. (And don’t get me started on Entourage.) As a communications tool, it’s a useful program — I use it all day, every day. But it’s not a good authoring tool. Authoring is best done in other applications. And heaven forbid you developed your HTML outside of Outlook — the import and send never works. Never. We have to use something like Thunderbird to get a decent result.

There is no widely-recognized consensus in the industry about what subset of HTML is appropriate for use in e-mail for interoperability. The “Email Standards Project” does not represent a sanctioned standard or an industry consensus in this area.

(Their formatting, not mine.)

No, it does not. But, you know, there’s this little group called the World Wide Web Consortium. Remember them? No, they don’t specify a subset of HTML that is “appropriate for use in e-mail”. And that’s the point. There isn’t one, nor should there be one. You’re the dumbasses who started restricting things for no particular (or good) reason. HTML is HTML, and it should remain that way.

So, please, Microsoft: Extract your head from your ass, stop looking at your face in the mirror, cease whatever self-obsessed activity you’re currently engaged in. Actually go out into the industry, do some fucking research, and start making software people actually want to use.

Hint: There’s a reason Apple is doing so well right now.

It’s been a year of utter chaos, extreme stress (I now look back at what I used to think was stressful, and have realised a tremendous amount of new strength), and unbelievable challenge and testing. It’s been mixed with wondrous discovery, gorgeous vistas (even though we’re hours from a beach), many new friends, and a truest definition of experience: skills and memories that can’t be acquired any other way.

Yes, I can already hear you asking the question: So it’s been a year in. What do I think after all this?

It’s been a tough ride, and the ride is far from over. We’ve had to learn a lot to work down here, we’ve had to work with a lot of people, and those aforementioned unbelievable challenges have made life interesting down here. That, and until a little while ago, Murphy lived in my broom closet.

I’ve bitched about a few things that have driven me crazy, and I’m happy to say that some of them don’t bug me as much as they did. It’s a form of acceptance / complacency, I suspect, but some of it is also understanding more about how things work here and not trying to force my way of thinking onto them.

Well, that, and I’ve got a few people who know shield me from having to deal with some of those things day after day.

I still feel like an outsider, though. Simple reality: I’m gringo, and I don’t speak serviceable Spanish. I can get by in simple situations, but I find myself often asking for people to repeat things, and I get stumped easily when trying to give even simple instructions. Reason? Lack of practice. I default to English too easily, so I never get to reinforce my own habits.

It’s, as the saying goes, all part of the fun. (Though I will say that not everything has been fun. See above note about extreme stress.) It’s all part of experience, and education, and being someplace that’s not as familiar as home.

Above all else, it really helps me appreciate how things are in North America. For all the trivial complaints that I hear from my friends (and used to have myself), I now realise how good things really are, and that most North Americans have no idea how good they have it.

Sure, you can go on vacation to far-flung places in the world and see things you’d never see at home. But you’re a tourist in all senses of the word. You’ll never experience what it’s like because you know, even in the back of your head, that you’re going home. There’s escape (most of the time). But when you’ve moved to a new country, it doesn’t work the same way.

Do I miss Canada? Well, does a Hoser drink beer? Same answer. Of course I miss my birth country. There’s so much about nearly every part of Canada that I miss. Being in a tropical country is hard for many reasons, not the least of which is language and temperature (I’ve been wearing shorts and sandals for a year — I’m uncomfortably warm most of the time). But it’s also the distance from family and our friends.

I don’t have any friends outside of the ones I work with down here. The internet is there to keep me connected with friends both home and abroad, but the reality is that here I often feel very alone. That’s a part of the last year I’ve struggled with nearly every day. When things go horribly wrong, when you’re stressed beyond reason, when all you want to do is rant about how things are, that’s when a friend helps most.

Slowly, things change. Things get better. And things will get better.

Sadly, the music industry hasn’t quite figured this out yet. They’ve been fighting blindly to retain the status quo, and failing miserably. RIAA take note: suing your core audience for using your content, thus alienating them and their sphere of influence from future purchases is not good business acumen. Where did you get your MBAs, from Sally Struthers’ International Correspondance School?

It’s high time you accepted that you are no longer in control of your own future. Your audience is.

This is the way it’s always been, actually. The audience — those who support your business — will ultimately shape it. If they decide that something is no longer worth time (and especially money), are you going to keep that part of your business running? I think not. No businesses are that stupid. (Okay, almost no businesses.)

They way I see it, we’re going to see two classes of artists emerge from the Old School of Music: Creators and Performers. Together, they will help retain the creativity we’ve come to expect from our music industry, but will bring more depth and more options. Music might even take on more importance in terms of its creation and distribution, and the music industry will continue to thrive if it figures out where the revenue stream will be. (Subtle hint: pay attention to the rest of this article.)

Okay, first the Creators. These are the people you’re already familiar with: the artists and bands who create the music, record albums, and play concerts. In the future, they might continue doing these very things. But some of them might change. Like The Beatles in their Studio era, some Creators might decide only to focus on recording music (whole albums might even go away), and spend the time and effort to get them absolutely right.

Oh, and a note to The Beatles, while we’re talking about you. (I love you guys, I do. You created beautiful music and you will likely forever remain as the most adept composers and performers in the rock genre.) You and/or your Estates need to get the hell off your high horses. You’re good (still), but saying that your music is worth more than those sold for $0.99 on iTunes is the height of arrogance.

There’s a reason the $0.99 price point works well. First, it’s psychological — it’s less than a dollar (or pound, or euro — you get my point). Most people don’t think twice about something that costs less than a dollar. Doesn’t matter if it’s exactly one dollar (hence one teeny, weeny cent more) — that decimal point will immediately turn buyers away. Also consider economies of scale — the less something costs, the more likely you are to sell that item. In an era where piracy is being held up as the industry’s single largest threat, you should really consider that you’ll not only increase sales but decrease piracy if one of the factors for theft (the cost) is reduced.

Not that I haven’t already ranted about those very concepts before. Not once. Nuh uh.

“Okay,” you say, “if Creators are only making albums, how do they make any money? All the big money is in concerts these days!”

Yep. That’s where the Performers come in. Not every Creator will want to perform. Some of them, like The Beatles, will want to only create music. But then there are people who aren’t as interested (or even capable) of creating music — they’d rather perform. Want some examples? Look at most of the pop artists out there — they don’t write their own stuff.

The catch here is that the rules change a bit. Think “cover bands”. There are bands out there — you’ve seen them — who play the dingy bars and office parties of the world who don’t have an original note to their credit, but can play Baba O’Riley better than The Who. The Performers excel at creating a show, a spectacle of music that can come from one or many different Creators (even themselves, if they also create).

Yeah, I know that happens already. But this is the difference: They don’t ride for free. Right now, artists only receive royalties when a song of theirs is recorded by another artist — not when it’s played live in concert. Music becomes licensed for use, and any Performer can apply to use a given piece of work in a performance. The copyright laws already support such a model, just that this loophole exists.

A Creator could do very well if a license fee is paid for each song that’s played on a concert tour. The fees could easily be set per venue, where a small venue might garner only $20, but a large venue could net thousands. Per showing.

Yes, this could create a chaos where there are dozens of Britney Spears clones running amok. But similarly, it could also create multiple Cirque du Soleils. And since the prices of live shows would likely rise as a necessary result (since you’re paying for an experience), Performers would be competing to create high-quality shows to gain the most audience (and hence, most profit).

The music industry? Who do you think orchestrates contract negotiations between Creators and Performers, who helps organise the album sales, who helps set up concerts and takes a slice of those profits? No, the profits won’t be as large as they used to be, and artists will likely end up with control (if not complete, then certainly partial) of their own work, but the music industry can certainly support the efforts. The key thing is that it will still be smaller than it is now. That much is inevitable.

This model is, in my opinion, already emerging. It will have arrived when we finally see something new: a successful Performer who plays only music made by someone else. Quite literally, a Top 10 cover band. They’re definitely coming, though. It’s just a matter of when.