And so his death inevitably leads to some kind of diffuse fear about the future. Does it signal the beginning of a new technological dark age? Who else is there in this world who has even a fraction of his vision, of his perfectionism, of his drive? Certainly, when I look at all the non-Apple technology that I am forced to use in my daily life, from my idiotic microwave oven to my stupid satellite TV PVR to the lousy controls of my car, I cannot help but wonder whether things are not bound to get worse, much worse, now that technology is back in the hands of people whose idea of user-friendliness is so clearly inferior — if they have one at all.

The latest example comes from Forkbombr and is titled “Markdown is the new Word 5.1.” Here’s an excerpt:

Microsoft Word 5.1 came out in October of 1991. It was the culmination of six years of Mac Word versions (version 1 and 3; there was no Word 2 for Mac because it skipped version numbers to match up with the DOS version), a minimalist interface with just enough window chrome to let you align text, pick a font, space your lines—do the simple things you need to do when composing a document. No multimedia here, no fine-grained control over typeface features (if only because there weren’t any fine-grained typeface features), no nothing that didn’t need to be there.

The author even provides a screenshot:

And to me, this screenshot is particularly telling. Do you see anything in this user interface for easy access to paragraph and character styles? In fact, I am pretty sure character styles didn’t even exist back then. All character-level formatting was manual. (There is a single menu for accessing paragraph styles, in the toolbar. Changing/viewing styles requires multiple clicks.)

Do you see anything to access such essential features as Space Before and Space After, or Keep With Next and Keep Lines Together? (There is a single toolbar button pair for 12-pt increments of Space After. That’s it.)

To me, these are all essential features in a modern word processor, not “fine-grained” stuff for fussy perfectionists. Word 5.1 provided only rudimentary access to them. How does this make it the perfect word processor?

The author then goes on to argue that John Gruber’s Markdown is the new Word 5.1. I love John Gruber’s writing and I read his blog every day. But I don’t use Markdown and I don’t see what the big deal is. Why? Because it only provides a bare-bones syntax for basic manual formatting options. Here again, there are no options for the web equivalents of user-defined paragraph and character styles, which are block-level and span-level CSS styles.

Correct me if I am wrong, but isn’t one of the main attractions of web-based publishing the ability to apply markup to one’s text in a smart way? As far as I can tell, Markdown encourages you to treat all occurrences of italics formatting as emphasis, and all occurrences of bold formatting as strong emphasis. But italics and bold formatting can be used for many other purposes. With CSS styles, you can define different character(span)-level styles that all looks the same (italics, or bold) but actually mark your words with references to different style names, associated with different meanings.

You cannot do that with Markdown. The way I see it, Markdown dumbs down web publishing by erasing the differences between the various meanings of italics or bold formatting, and by not providing easy access to other, user-defined character styles. And it also fails to encourage web publishers to use paragraph(block)-level styles other than the basic ones (headings, blockquotes, etc.).

So basically, while modern standards give us tools to apply markup to our documents in a smart way, a solution such as Markdown restricts the use of markup to a very limited set of elements. Sure, they might be the most common ones, but they also assume that writers do not want to bother to apply smarter, more fine-grained markup to their documents. They assume that writers still use their computers mostly as glorified typewriters.

To give a specific example, when I use italics in my own writing, the italics formatting can have multiple meanings:

• emphasis
• reference to a French word as word
• reference to a English word as word
• reference to a word in another foreign language as word
• Latin words or phrases
• document title in French
• document title in English

And that’s just some of them. In Pages ’09, I have a different character style for each of the above. Visually, they all look the same: they are all rendered in italics. But behind the scenes, I want my markup to distinguish between these various meanings of the italics formatting, because I want to be able to use spell-checking tools that will check French words against the French dictionary and English words against the English dictionary (and ignore other foreign words) and because I might want to have the option of being able to change, for example, the formatting of document titles to something other than italics further down the road, without changing other occurrences of italics formatting at the same time!

And of course I also want to have easy access to other user-defined character styles that I might use for specific purposes. In this blog, for example, I have different span-level CSS styles for references to UI controls, computer code, file names, etc. I couldn’t edit my blog posts using Markdown, because it wouldn’t let me easy apply all these in a user-friendly way.

Markdown does not help me do anything beyond basic manual formatting and is therefore useless to me (as are most other web publishing tools). And I find it paradoxical that someone like John Gruber, who seems to be such an ardent promoter of web standards, offers a tool that effectively dumbs down web publishing.

In that sense, yes, I suppose that one could say that Markdown is the new Word 5.1. Just like Word 5.1’s UI put the emphasis on manual formatting at the expense of style-based formatting, Markdown puts the emphasis on dumb HTML tags at the expense of custom CSS-style-based formatting.

But it does not mean that this is all that writers need. This is all that writers who do not want to bother to apply smart markup to their texts need. I have always been strongly attached to the use of smart markup, be it in word processing or in web publishing. I have yet to see a word processor that actually encourages its users to use smart style-based formatting. Pages ’09’s UI for styles is better than Word’s, but it still suffers from some severe limitations, such as the absence of support for hierarchical styles (styles based on other styles) and the absence of built-in support for keyboard shortcuts for styles (other than the very limited F1-F8 option).

I am not saying that designing a good user interface for smart, fine-grained markup is easy. But Word 5.1 certainly wasn’t the holy grail in that respect.

The other thing that Word 5.1 nostalgics seem to have forgotten is that document corruption already existed back then. I distinctly remember writing a whole chapter of my master’s degree thesis in Word 4 and finding myself one afternoon completely unable to open my Word document. I was faced with the prospect of having lost two weeks of hard work. I was eventually rescued by my local Mac shop, where some kindly technician took pity on me, took my diskette with my damaged document, disappeared in the back of the store for a few minutes and came back with a repaired copy of my Word document, which he was obviously able to produce with repair tools that I didn’t have access to.

Without him, I would have lost two weeks’ worth of hard work — and all because Microsoft’s software was already crap back then and was already able to create document corruption beyond the user’s control. And that was even before Word 5. I highly doubt that Word 5 was, somewhat miraculously, a corruption-free interlude between other versions of Word.

The one good memory of Word 5.1 that I have is that it was indeed fast. It could scroll through dozens of pages without a hiccup and I don’t remember ever having to wait for the word processor to catch up with my own typing — which still happens today in Word 2011, on hardware that is more powerful by several orders of magnitude than the Mac SE that I was using at the time! (The problem tends to happen especially in tables and text frames in Word 2011, but it also happens in certain larger documents, even outside tables or frames.)

It is truly embarrassing that Microsoft is unable to make a word processor that performs acceptably on a powerful machine such as my 2009 Mac Pro. And, while Pages ’09 is generally faster, it also suffers from performance issues sometimes, with documents containing tables in particular.

But for anything other than the performance, I am not particularly nostalgic for the days of Word 5.1. I was already hoping, back then, for a better, smarter word processor that would actually make it easy to compose smart documents — and I am still hoping for such a word processor today, twenty years later. I gave up on Microsoft a long time ago, and I have been much happier since I switched to Pages ’09 as my main word processor. But I have yet to find a truly great word processor for my Mac, and I certainly don’t see how anyone can claim that something like Markdown is a great tool, even in the more limited field of web-based publishing.

At the time, I wrote that I was having pretty serious signal reception problems and that the problems were eventually fixed by repairs completed over a 7-day period.

What I didn’t mention in my initial story, because I didn’t think it would be a problem, is the following.

When the first (partial) repair was completed, on January 11, the repairman asked me to sign a “Work Order” form. I saw that he had written two items on that form: one “service call” with the expected $75 charge, and another one titled “mileage 200 km,” with a charge of $100 plus tax.

Right there and then I became suspicious. I asked the repairman about this second item, and he said that I didn’t have to worry about it, that it would be covered by Bell.

Just to make sure, I phoned Bell the next day, and the representative I talked to also assured me that the $100 charge would be covered by Bell and told me that, if there were any issues on my next monthly invoice (where the service call charge would appear), I just had to call them back.

When the repairman had to come back the next week, and said that he would replace the entire cable and the dish itself, I asked him if it would cost me anything extra, and he said that it wouldn’t, that there was a 3-month warranty on any repairs and so the cost of this second repair would be covered under the warranty for the first repair of the week before, for which I could expect to be charged $75 plus tax on my next Bell invoice.

Once again, once the work was completed, he made me sign a “Work Order” form, and once again, he had included two items on the form: one “warranty repair” with no charge, and another one titled “mileage 200 km,” with a charge of $100 plus tax.

I signed the form, kept my two customer copies of the signed forms in a safe place, and waited until the next regular Bell TV invoice.

This invoice arrived a couple of days ago, and apart from the usual items, it had one extra section titled “Adjustments,” with a single charge dated January 28 (10 days after the second repair was completed) for an item labelled… ”Additional mileage per km,” with a cost of… $100.

There was no charge for a service call/repair, just this one charge for additional mileage.

It was time to get on the phone. I first talked to a basically clueless representative who kept going through his files saying he could find copies of the work orders, and then asking me to hold while he went to talk to a supervisor. After half an hour of this, he finally said that he had to escalate the issue to a customer service representative and transferred me to this other representative.

She immediately started going on about the fact that these mileage charges were not their responsibility but the responsibility of the “installation provider,” which was another service over which they had no control.

I kept repeating the following points:

1. At no point during my initial conversation when we set up the first repair was there any mention of any additional charges beyond the $75, which I was perfectly willing to pay.
2. When I had mentioned the mileage charge to the repairman, he had told me that it would be covered by Bell TV.
3. When I had called Bell TV the very next day, a representative had once again assured me that the mileage charge would be covered by Bell TV.
4. I was perfectly willing to pay the $75 charge, but I saw no reason why I should pay anything beyond that charge.

She kept going on about the fact that they (Bell TV) had no control over the “installation provider,” which was a separate company, and that it was normal to have additional travel costs for anything beyond a radius of 50 km from the location of the installation provider’s local office.

I kept saying that this was news to me, that I was never told about this charge, that I would never have agreed to have the repair done by Bell if I had known about this. (We have a local electronics store called The Source that couldn’t have taken care of that repair for me, without outrageous travel fees.) She kept saying that the installation provider should have told me about the extra charge, which they never did. When I asked her how it was considered my fault that the installation provider had not told me about the extra charge, she had no answer.

I said that this was no way to conduct business, that blaming things on a third party was a typical evasive procedure, as if they were not the ones who were contracting with this third-party provider to do the installation/repair work. She said that she and her service were located in Montreal and that they had no way to tell how far a customer was from the local office of the installation provider. I asked her if she had ever heard of something called a map of Canada.

She repeated again and again that they had no control over the installation provider, that this mileage charge was something that couldn’t be reversed, etc. I kept saying that they were the ones who were contracting with this provider and that I didn’t see how it could be my fault if the provider was not doing its job of informing its customers properly. She tried to say something about the fact that I should have read about this on their web site and known about it beforehand! (If you’ve ever visited the Bell Canada web site, you’ll appreciate the irony of this even more.) Things started getting really heated.

I finally started threatening to take my business elsewhere, saying that this was no way to treat a customer that had paid his bills without failure every month for the past 13 years, and that I thought it was outrageous that she seemed willing to cause her company to lose such a long-time customer who had paid them thousands of dollars over the years over a mere disagreement about $25.

She went silent, and then simply said that she would give me a $25 credit. She was obviously too proud to admit that she was wrong, and too much of a lousy customer service representative to recognize the long-term value of treating one’s customers fairly and courteously, especially loyal ones.

I basically hung up on her.

Less than an hour later, I got an automatic e-mail notifying me of the $25 credit (she obviously neglected to reimburse me the 15% sales tax as well, but I am not going to go back on the phone for that). I also soon got an automatic call from Bell asking me to rate the service I had just received. I don’t need to tell you the kind of rating I gave this particularly customer service representative.

The bottom line here is that Bell Satellite TV clearly has an agreement with their installation/repair providers that they can charge mileage costs to any customer beyond a 50 km radius from their local office, and that the customer is supposed to pay for these travel costs. It is rather outrageous, and made even more so by the fact that it is not communicated clearly to the customer. Like I said, if I had known about this extra charge, there is no way that I would have agreed to have someone come all the way from Greenwood, NS (a 2-hour drive) to do the repair job, when there is a local store perfectly willing and able to do it, which just happens not to be the “official” installation/repair provider for Bell.

I guess all this stellar service that I received from Bell Satellite TV in January was just too good to be true. It was high-quality service, but there was a hidden price tag attached to it, and that is simply not acceptable. As a business, either you have to be upfront and perfectly clear about the charges that you or the provider you have contracted will be billing, or you have to apologize for the lack of communication and correct the situation. Bell did neither, and this has rather dramatically changed my opinion of the company.

I will not switch to another satellite TV provider right away, simply because the technical problem is solved for now, and the service offered by the single competitor in Canada is not particularly impressive either. But it will not take much more to make me give up on Bell, despite the inconvenience and the lack of adequate competition.

It turns out that, while the repair that the technician completed on January 11 did indeed fix the most obvious aspect of the problem (I had no signal at all) by restoring the ability of my system to receive a signal, it didn’t fix the less obvious reception problems that I had been experiencing for several weeks. Even after the repair, I still had far too many cases of temporary signal loss or degradation, resulting in all kinds of undesirable pixellation and video and audio drop-outs.

So a few days later I had to get back on the phone with a tech support representative and attempt to describe the problem and explain why it was not acceptable. The representative agreed that there was a problem, but since it only seemed to affect some of the channels some of the time, he asked me to do more recording and TV watching on those channels to confirm that there was indeed an unresolved problem.

And so by the following Tuesday morning, I found myself on the phone again with a long list of occurrences of the problem on various channels at various times of the day. At first, the representative that I talked to attempted to deflect my requests for help by saying that, since the technician had done a repair, it was possible that there was another problem elsewhere in my system, for example in the HDMI connection between my PVR and my amplifier. While I agreed that we couldn’t totally rule that out, I did stress that it was highly unlikely (since the HDMI connection had been working just fine for years) and that it was too much of a coincidence that the problems occurred around the same time I had this problem with the crack in the cable leading to a leak and rust around the cable connection coming from the dish.

When I stressed that the problem was not just occurring with recorded events but also when I was watching TV live, and that I did at some point experience not just pixellation and video and audio drop-outs, but also a dialog box indicating a actual loss of satellite signal, then he agreed that there was indeed something still wrong with the signal reception. And so he agreed to send a technician again. Just at this point the phone call was abruptly cut. I figured that there had been some problem with their phone system and that the representative would call me back. It took a few anxious minutes, but he did call back eventually and apologized, saying that their whole system had broken down and that he called me back as soon as it was back up.

I asked and he confirmed that I wouldn’t have to pay for a second service call, since there was a three-month warranty on service calls. This time again, just like the previous week, the whole process was extremely efficient. The representative gave me a confirmation number and said that I would be visited by a technician that same afternoon. He also told me to ask him to replace the whole cable this time!

Less than half an hour after I had talked to the technician, I got a call from someone at the regional office. And he confirmed that the technician would be there some time in the afternoon. In fact, the technician called me while on the road around 10:30 am and told me he would be there in half an hour.

He turned out to be the same fellow who had come the week before. We discussed the problem and I showed him some recordings with the signal reception problem (which was not occurring on the live programs at that particular time). He said that he would indeed replace the whole cable and check the other end, on the roof, to see if maybe the rot had spread from the crack to the other end of the cable, or if maybe there was another leak up there.

A few minutes later, he called me in my home office to tell me that he simply wouldn’t not be able to climb up to the top of the roof where the satellite dish was, because of the treacherous conditions. (It’s a steep climb, and there was quite a bit of snow and ice on the roof.) He said that we had two options: either we could wait until the weather conditions improved and the roof was clear, or he could install a brand new satellite dish much lower on the roof. The original dish was installed way up high because 12 years ago, when we moved into this house, there were many very tall trees in the forest on the south side whose foliage might block the satellite signal. Since then, however, we’ve lost most of these big trees, because they were just ordinary spruce trees that had all grown spontaneously when the land that our house was built on was turned from a grazing field for livestock into a residential property 100 years ago (the house was only built much later) and they all reached the end of their natural lifespan around the time, dropping like flies whenever there was a big wind storm. And so, with these trees all gone now, there was no longer any need for the dish to be way up high on the roof.

Given that we are in the middle of winter here and that there is no telling when the weather will improve enough to make a repair at the top of the roof possible, I felt that the new dish option was a much better one. Besides, it would ensure that all the physical components were brand new and conclusively eliminate corrosion or other weather-related issues as potential causes if the problem decided to persist. And the technician could do the whole thing under my 3-month repair warranty. It would then just be up to me to hire a carpenter later on in the spring to remove the old dish and fix the roof properly to avoid any leaks.

I talked to my wife on the phone to confirm that she wouldn’t mind having a slightly more visible dish lower down on the roof, and then I told the technician to proceed with the installation. It turns out that the technology has improved since our dish set-up was last upgraded, and that you no longer need two cables coming from the dish, with one of them connected to a power supply, in order to get proper support for all SD and HD channels from both satellites. There is now an “all-in-one” component on the dish itself, with a single cable running from the dish to the receiver, and this cable no longer needs a power supply. So effectively the set-up is now as simple as it used to be at the very beginning with Bell Satellite TV (then called ExpressVu) in the mid-1990s, before the introduction of a second satellite and HD channels.

The installation was pretty quick, and soon enough I had a fully functional system again, with even better signal reception on most transponders for both satellites. He told me to try and test various channels while he was finishing the job outside (stapling the cable and cleaning up). I didn’t see any problems with any channels. Of course, that was no guarantee that the problem was effectively fixed, since it was an intermittent one. But the signs were good. And this time we knew that, if the problem occurred again, it would not be due to anything physical in the set-up outdoors.

I offered the technician a cup of hot coffee and we chatted for five minutes, while monitoring various channels to try and confirm that there were no glitches of any kind. It turns out that his employer is a family business located in Greenwood, Nova Scotia and that his own dad is the owner. The business is obviously hired by Bell Satellite TV to do repairs in the whole of southwest Nova Scotia. I congratulated him again on their efficiency and thanked him for coming back again so promptly, at the same time saying that I hoped I wouldn’t have to see him again for a while!

Today, after several days of regular use, I can confirm that the problem appears to be completely gone. I haven’t had a single incident of signal loss, even though it’s been snowing and occasionally the wind has been blowing quite strongly. So it’s looking good. I am also glad I have a whole new hardware set-up outside, which should last at least a few years without requiring any new repairs due to normal wear and tear. (The weather eventually takes its toll even on the most sturdy pieces of equipment.) An added bonus is that I can now easily reach the dish myself with a ladder if I ever need to clear accumulated snow, which can happen sometimes when there is no wind and the snow is particularly wet and heavy.

While the past few weeks have been frustrating at times because of the intermittent but persistent nature of the problem, I must say once again that I have been impressed by the quality of the service offered by Bell Satellite TV and in particular by the promptness of the processing of service calls and the availability of a technician on site so soon after the end of my calls to the company. Canada is a big country and distances in rural areas are often an excuse for delays of several days before anything gets done. It was not the case for Bell Satellite TV and I really appreciated the effectiveness and efficiency of their service.

(I am an avid football/soccer fan, and so these changes affected me directly, and I also used to watch the “Nothing But Trailers” show on HDNet on a regular basis. Now I am forced to download the HD trailers on-line, which is not great with my limited bandwidth and which prevents me from playing them on my TV.)

That said, the only competition (Shaw Direct, formerly known as StarChoice) does not look particularly impressive either. They might have some of the channels that Bell Satellite no longer carries, but as far as I can tell from their web site, they don’t carry Setanta HD yet. In addition, their PVR receiver offerings are decidedly underwhelming, just like Bell Satellite’s offerings. After many years, we are still stuck with the same hard drive capacity (maximum of approx. 30 hours of HD recordings), no Sling support, etc.

The problem appears to be that there simply isn’t enough competition in Canada, either between the two satellite providers or with cable TV.

Still, today I thought I would also share some positive news, regarding Bell Satellite TV’s customer service.

A couple of weeks ago, we had a major wind storm here in southwest Nova Scotia and we experienced some significant degradation of our satellite TV reception, to the point that some shows we had wanted to watch were unwatachable. I though it was just a one-off thing, but then over the past couple of weeks I started noticing occasional signal hiccups, especially with HD channels, even when there were no significant weather conditions outside.

Then last week-end we missed a couple of important soccer games because the recording failed repeatedly. We had about half an hour of each, and then the rest simply was not there, even though the PVR said that the recording had the expected length. At some point, playback would just stop and then we would get the screen indicating the recording was over. The weather was somewhat windy again, but really not to the point that it should have any impact on the satellite signal.

Yesterday, I turned the TV during to day to program something and got the dialog box saying that the PVR was desperately trying to acquire the satellite signal, and obviously not succeeding. This time, there was no wind, rain or snow to explain the situation. I tried the usual troubleshooting steps (hold Power button to force a hard reset, run “Check Switch” routine to force a thorough check of the signal reception, power-cycle the dish power supply) and got the usual error messages, with no indication of what the problem was. Then after one more hard reset all of a sudden things started working again. So I thought it was just a temporary satellite glitch.

Things worked fine for the rest of the evening and I had some recordings scheduled to take place during the night.

This morning when I went to check one of the recordings (the Black Keys performance on the David Letterman show, which I was looking forward to), I saw the dialog box saying that the PVR was desperately trying to acquire the satellite signal again, and I also saw that the Black Keys recording was completely missing, and that a movie recorded earlier in the night was missing its second hour entirely, just like the failed soccer recordings of the week-end.

At that point I thought that something was definitely wrong. I did the hard reset and Check Switch again, but to no avail.

But that’s where the good news starts. I called Bell Satellite TV’s support line and got an annoying automated system asking me to go through multiple irrelevant steps, but quickly found that I could skip them by pressing 0. I was then put on hold for barely a minute and got a live representative from Québec. He mumbled his introductory phrase to the point that it was unintelligible, but after that he was very courteous and didn’t force me to go through the usual useless troubleshooting steps. He immediately agreed that there was something wrong with my satellite signal and that it required a visit by a technician.

Much to my surprise, he told me that he could send a representative to my house this very morning. I was expecting a wait of at least a day or two, simply because we are far from any major urban centre here and technicians don’t travel down our way every day.

Less than an hour later, I got a call from the local office (still a 2-hour drive away) confirming the appointment and saying that someone would be there between 8 am and 12 pm. (On days like this, it’s quite useful to be someone who works from a home office!)

I then got an automated call half an hour later asking me to rate the performance of the tech support representative. Since I was in a good mood, I actually went through it and it was relatively painless, without too much voice recognition involved — although I did notice a couple of glaring anglicisms in the text recorded by the Québécoise girl (partager and finalement, the usual suspects).

Around 11 am, I got another call from the local office to apologize and say that the technician would be a bit late. I told them it was OK. The technician eventually showed up at 1 pm. He was very friendly and courteous and our combined forces were quick to identify the problem: the inside of the end of the cable that plugs into the small adapter box in our living room was completely rotten/rusty. The question was: How could this have happened? It’s not like we had a flood or any kind of leak inside the house. We then went outside and quickly discovered a crack in the cable’s plastic sheath near the location where the cable enters the house (through the wall), which obviously allowed some rain to seep through and, somehow, travel all the way to the end of the cable inside. (I suspect that there is some weird phenomenon involved here linked to the low electric voltage in that cable.)

He snipped the outside cable and replaced the defective portion with a new junction, and he replaced the end of the cable and the small adapter box inside, and sure enough that fixed the problem entirely.

It took less than 20 minutes and I just had to sign a form confirming the repair job. (Of course, my years-old system is no longer under warranty, so there’ll be a $75 CDN charge.)

Still, I thought that it was quite impressive that less than 5 hours elapsed between the time I first picked up the phone to communicate with Bell Satellite TV and the completion of the repair process at my house. It might be a level of service that people are accustomed to in big cities, but it’s a pretty amazing performance in our neck of the woods.

Maybe I was just particularly lucky, but the technician did tell me that they seemed to be working on improving the customer experience. My experience certainly appears to confirm the improvement.

I also managed to sneak in a couple of questions to the technician about future developments. Of course, as a lowly technician, he only knows what he knows, but he did tell me that they were planning on launching yet another satellite this year that would further improve the overall strength of the existing signal. He wasn’t able to tell me anything about new PVR receivers with bigger hard drives or the long-promised switch from MPEG-2 to MPEG-4, however.

I guess we’ll just have to wait and… watch.

After surviving for ten years (until 2006!) on dial-up and then having to bite the bullet and acquire an expensive satellite-based service, we had to deal for three years with a change of ownership (from Aliant to Xplornet), unreliable service (bad weather, defective parts, and so on), and unacceptable restrictions (bandwidth throttling, limited access to certain specific sites, etc.) that we had to put up with simply because we didn’t have any choice.

The reason we didn’t have a choice was that our specific neighbourhood, while not far away from the area along the main highway that is served by both the phone company and the cable company, was geographically too far for the phone company to provide DSL service and had never been equipped with the cabling required for cable service either.

Over the years, we (as in me and a number of other people in the area) unsuccessfully tried to lobby the cable company to expand their service to our neighbourhood. But the response was always that it required too much of an investment on their part for a limited customer base, and that therefore there was “no business case” for it.

Then in 2007 the provincial premier at the time announced a “high-speed Internet for everyone” broadband program for rural Nova Scotia and we were told that everyone in Nova Scotia would have access to broadband by the end of 2009.

Later it was announced that the company hired by the government to provide Internet service in our area was Eastlink and that it would be provided in the form of a local wireless service via strategically placed towers.

And so we waited. As the deadline approached, the status of our particular area stayed desperately stuck at the planning stage and so we started to worry again, and with good reason. Before the end of the year, it was confirmed that the project had been delayed and that we would now have to wait until April or May 2010.

I kept monitoring the status of our area regularly and, in early April 2010, saw a change to a status that indicated that the project was near completion and that the last phase would last no more than a week.

And then… nothing. For several weeks, the status stayed stuck at that same near-completion stage. And then the end of May 2010 deadline was reached and we still had nothing.

Thankfully, a friend of mine who was monitoring the situation sent me a link to a media report in early June indicating that there were “fewer than 200” people province-wide who were still waiting for Eastlink to hook them up, which was patently untrue. But I went back to the status page and then I discovered that it had miraculously changed altogether and that the service was now listed as being available in all areas.

So I picked up the phone and, to my surprise, without even being put on hold, I was put through to a representative who confirmed that the service was now available in my area and offered to set up an appointment for me. She called me back an hour later with a date of June 16, and just warned me that it was an appointment for an “installation test” and that normally they should be able to set me up, but if there were any problems with the signal reception, they would have to come back later with more powerful equipment, “at no extra cost” to me, but of course with more delays.

While waiting for the appointment, I checked the location of the towers in my county on Eastlink’s map and saw that I was located about mid-way between two towers, which was not too reassuring. On the other had, one of the towers was across the bay from us, meaning that there would be a clear line of sight with no obstacles whatsoever.

And so we waited for June 16. Two days ago, I got an automated call reminding me of the appointment. When I had talked to the representative, she has said that they would call me in the morning to give me the approximate time of their arrival. But this morning I didn’t get a call, so I started to worry again.

But finally around noon I got three phone call attempts from a cell phone (cell service is pretty bad in our neck of the woods) and on the last one I was able to determine that the technicians had the wrong civic number and couldn’t find me. I corrected the number and five minutes later they showed up at the door.

Colin and Jason were nice young fellows and they immediately reassured me that they didn’t anticipate any problems with signal strength from my location. And sure enough, their first tests with the tower across the bay confirmed that the signal was excellent, and so they proceeded with the installation, which requires a small antenna on the roof and a ground connection in addition to the service connection, for safety reasons.

They did an excellent job of hiding the cables (including the hideous lime green one for the ground) and a couple of hours later we were able to test things on my computer and confirm that my connection had a download speed of over 3 Mbps and an upload speed of nearly 1 Mbps. Yey!

(The officially advertised download speed is 1.25 Mbps, but the technician said some people got a better speed, for a variety of reasons. He did warn me that they might eventually throttle it back down somewhere closer to the advertised speed. I guess we’ll see.)

Beyond the speed/throughput numbers per se, the big changes are of course that there is no more latency (something that is unavoidable with a satellite-based service) and no more throttling back or blocking of specific sites (“no usage restrictions,” says the web site).

I will have to give it a bit of time before drawing any conclusions about the overall reliability and consistency of the service, but while these speeds are of course at the very low end of the spectrum in today’s world, and even in what Eastlink has to offer, they are also obviously much better than what I used to have with the satellite-based service, which would so often throttle things back down to near-dial-up speeds.

So this is it. Finally, we have broadband, and finally I can say goodbye to lengthy downloads and choppy streaming. What a relief. I think we deserve a nice bottle tonight with our supper to celebrate the end of 15 years of waiting!

In any case, I have to wait for the repair guy to show up and hope that he can fix things without it costing me an arm and a leg. In the meantime, I cannot exactly function without any sort of Internet connection, so I have had to purchase a month of dial-up service, which means that I am back to the joyful days of 28.8 kbps throughput. Yey.

About the only thing positive about dial-up is that it is not weather-sensitive (which the satellite system definitely is). But apart from that, 28.8 kbps is really atrocious. (Theoretically, things should be closer to 56 kbps, but I suspect that the quality of our land line is simply not going enough. It’s OK for voice and fax communications, but with a dial-up modem, whether it is the external Apple USB modem or the one inside my “Snow” AirPort base station, I cannot get anything better than 28.8 kbps. Sometimes I don’t even get that and I am stuck at 26.4 kbps. Sigh.)

In addition, since I got the satellite hook-up a couple of years ago, I have gotten rid of our second land line, of course. I could no longer justify the extra expense. So now I am stuck with dial-up and only a single land line, which I also use for phone and fax. (I have a Pay-as-You-Go cell phone, but only for emergencies. Besides, the cell phone reception in our neck of the woods is pretty bad too.)

It is quite nightmarish, really. Of course, in the couple of years since I last was forced to use dial-up, the average bandwidth requirements of most on-line activities have only increased even further, which makes it even more painful to try and do over dial-up what I usually do over my satellite-based connection.

But what has really been the most frustrating is how atrociously bad Apple’s Mail application is with a dial-up connection. I have a number of different e-mail accounts for the domain names that I manage, and these accounts use various POP servers and SMTP servers. (I only use a couple of IMAP accounts, and only for minor activities, because even with a somewhat faster Internet hook-up, they are still too painful to use.)

Mail is simply extraordinarily bad at dealing with the limited amount of bandwidth. It takes almost nothing to cause its connection attempts to time out or stall (and then it takes forever to notice that the process is stalled and actually stop it). Don’t even think about trying to load a web page (however lightweight) while Mail is trying to check mail or send something.

And what can I say about Mail’s handling of SMTP servers? Good grief. For some reason, Mail has this uncontrollable background activity which causes it to regularly “check account connections” with all the SMTP servers that you have defined in your list of SMTP servers and that you might be wanting to use. Needless to say, since this background activity is uncontrollable, it is more likely to occur when you don’t want it to, and add its own bandwidth requirements to the mix. What kind of idiotic behaviour is this? What exactly is it checking for? Isn’t it something that it could do once in a blue moon instead of once every few minutes?

In addition, I have been completely unable to actually use any of these various SMTP servers, which I normally use with my satellite hook-up without any significant difficulty. Whether it’s due to time out issues or something else, I do not know. But they don’t work at all. So basically Mail is wasting time and bandwidth checking its connections to SMTP servers that it is unable to use properly anyway.

To make things worse, even if I click on the “Stop” icon in the Activity Viewer window to try and stop these spurious connection-checking processes, sometimes Mail fails to terminate them properly and gets stuck at the “Stopping” stage indefinitely (which itself cannot be stopped). Nothing can be done to get out of it! Even quitting Mail no longer works—because the “Stopping” stage is interpreted by Mail as an on-going process and it refuses to quit until all processes are complete. The only way out is to force-quit Mail, even though it is not unresponsive! Otherwise, Mail would probably continue to be in the process of “stopping” the processes for hours…

The only way that I have found to avoid all this nonsense is to effectively give up on trying to use any SMTP server other that my dial-up provider’s server. Since I don’t want to lose all my existing settings (hoping that I will be able to use them again once my satellite system is back up and running), I don’t exactly want to delete all the SMTP servers from the list in Mail’s preferences. So what I have actually done is changed the preferred SMTP server for each account to the dial-up provider’s server, and checked the box that says “Use only this server“.

This hasn’t totally eliminated the “Checking account connections” nonsense, but right now it only occurs whenever I bring up Mail’s preferences. If I refrain from bringing up the preferences, Mail non longer goes through the stupid checking on its own.

Not that this has solved all SMTP-related issues, mind you. Even with my dial-up provider’s SMTP server, which is the only one that works for me now, I still am unable to send any attachment bigger than 1 MB. The sending process simply stops working after sending about 1 MB of data (which takes about 15 minutes, of course). I monitor the data throughput with MenuMeters, and I see that there is no longer any data going out, even though the sending process still is in progress according to the Activity Viewer, with the progress animation looping endlessly.

I suppose it would stay like this for hours, without ever completing the sending, if I didn’t cancel it. I am quite sure that the problem is with Mail itself, which is simply incapable of dealing with this low-bandwidth connection and somehow times out before the process is over, but without exiting the process involved. (I have tried about half a dozen times with messages bigger than 1 MB. It simply does not work.) Maybe my provider’s SMTP server is also not particularly well-designed to handle such a situation, especially when dealing with an e-mail program such as Mail, which only a tiny fraction of its customer base uses. How do you think I am going to be able to get my provider to do anything about it? Do you really thing the average tech support person at a dial-up provider’s call centre knows anything about such issues and can do anything about them? They barely even know that the current version of the Mac OS is Mac OS X 10.5. Their database of information probably still lists instructions for dealing with Mac OS 9—if anything. (I have tried talking to a couple of them. It’s useless.)

When I need to send something larger than 1 MB, since I cannot do it in Mail, I end up using Gmail on the web. Thankfully, Google has a low-bandwidth interface for slow connections, and thank goodness, it is actually able to send attachments larger than 1 MB submitted through the Gmail web interface in Safari. It takes a while (although the throughput is actually better than in Mail with the SMTP server, according to MenuMeters, which is another indication of how well Mail works with SMTP servers), but at least it works. Of course this means that I have to use my Gmail account for this, which is not my default account, so I have to explain to my correspondents that they’ll be getting e-mail from me from another account, etc. etc.

And what to say of Mail’s progress indicators in Activity Viewer? Even for smaller attachments that actually do get through, the indicator is completely, utterly useless. It jumps from 0% to 100% immediately, and then stays stuck at 100% for 10 minutes while it is actually sending the data. Ridiculous!

And it is just as bad for receiving mail. If I get any e-mail with large attachments in a batch of incoming mail, the progress indicator for receiving mail in Activity Viewer is just as useless. It stays stuck in a given position, listing the subject line of a totally unrelated message that has actually already arrived in my Inbox, while it is receiving the other e-mail with the big attachment, and then, after 10 or 15 minutes of absolutely no movement, poof! It’s done and the message is there. In such circumstances, what is the point of having a progress indicator at all? It does not provide any kind of reflection of the actual progression of the transaction.

I could probably go on and on… Simply put, it seems to me that it is quite clear that Apple stopped caring about dial-up users a long time ago. I am quite sure that they don’t even bother to test Mail with a dial-up connection. They don’t give a flying hoot about dial-up users. It’s elitist, and it’s pathetic.

Unfortunately, it looks like I will be stuck with this situation at least until next Tuesday, which is the earliest time that the local repair guy can come. (Of course, with my luck, the work order that was sent on Monday never arrived, so it’s only when I called to complain that I hadn’t heard from anyone yet that they double-checked and had to issue a new work order, which delayed everything by another 48 hours.)

And that is assuming that he actually will be able to fix the problem, and that there isn’t another snow storm that makes work impossible on that day.

I know I survived with dial-up for many years, but really, in this day and age, it’s a bit much. I have too many commitments, and I simply don’t have time to wait for web pages to load and e-mails to arrive at a snail’s pace like this. And I must say that Apple really does not make it any easier with its atrocious handling of low bandwidth situations, especially in Mac OS X’s Mail application.

We are still counting, in Nova Scotia, on our provincial government to deliver on its promise of “high speed Internet for everyone” by the end of 2009 (which in our case will be fixed local wireless with a tower, in all likelihood), but so far there has been no sign of anything happening locally yet.

For example, they are the only wireless provider that I can actually use at home. I used to have a Rogers cell phone, but I couldn’t use it in my own house, because the signal was so poor. Rogers’ own customer service was atrocious as well, but that’s another story… I ended up switching to Aliant (a local BCE subsidiary) just to be able to use the cell phone at home. I only have a pay-as-you-go phone, and I only use it for emergencies, but of course I still have to pay a $10 monthly fee regardless of how little I use it, so I want to be able to use the minutes that I am accumulating for long-distance calls instead of paying for them with my regular land line.

I am also a BCE customer for my satellite TV service, which used to be called “ExpressVu,” then “Bell ExpressVu,” and now apparently is just called “Bell TV.” Again, for a time they were the only satellite provider in our area, and even now there is only one other competitor and its offerings are not really on par with what’s available through Bell, especially for high-definition stuff. (Two players is not real competition.)

I have been with BCE for satellite TV for 10 years now, and with them for cell phone service for several years. I have also been with Aliant for my land line for 15 years. So objectively I am a long-time customers and Bell and its subsidiaries have made quite a bit of money with me.

What is driving me crazy is that, after all these years, Bell Canada still has one of the crappiest web sites that I have ever used. They recently revamped it, but apart from a new logo with ugly kerning and other new “snazzy” graphics (inspired by—guess who?—Apple and the iPhone), it is the same old crap, and it’s atrociously painful to use.

First of all, there is the speed. I know that I have a relatively “slow” Internet connection and I know that secure connections are typically slower than regular, unprotected HTTP connections. But I use all kinds of other secure web sites, and none is as slow as the Bell.ca site. It is simply excruciating.

Then of course it only half-supports Mac OS X’s Safari. It doesn’t reject you outright, but it fails to support Mac OS X properly is various subtle ways. For example, I logged in this morning and checked the option to “Remember me,” yet this afternoon it asks me to log in again. And it fails to automatically fill in the password field for me. It only fills in the user name field. So I have to remember that particular password and type it manually each and every time, whereas for all kinds of other sites for which I use similarly complex passwords, I can use the automatic Safari feature to fill them in automatically. (I have a heavily encrypted database for all my passwords that I access using a master password, so that I can use complex passwords for various sites and not have to remember them all. Since this is my home workstation and no one else is using it and it is password-protected itself, I don’t mind Safari filling in the password fields for me automatically. But obviously Bell does not support this.)

Then there is the slightly problematic fact that I have specified in my user profile that my preferred language is French. The site knows about it, but that doesn’t prevent it from displaying everything is English:

(Up until this latest web site revamp in 2008, it was actually impossible to specify Nova Scotia—the “NS” in the image above—as the user’s province, even though Bell Canada has been offering satellite TV services Canada-wide for over 10 years. Their excuse was that Bell Canada itself was not offering telephone services in the province, and so the Bell.ca site didn’t recognize that province as a legitimate location, even though the satellite TV account information for Nova Scotian customers was only accessible through that web site! This was obviously because the old Bell.ca web site had been designed at a time when satellite TV account information was not available on-line, but once they made it accessible, they simply neglected to revamp the enclosing web site architecture—until now, i.e. the middle of 2008.)

There are numerous other problems with the site. But what really drove me nuts this morning was that I had to change my credit card information. Credit card information changes are a fact of life. The expiry date changes, or the whole card number changes. This is inevitable. This means that, eventually, every user who pays with a credit card will need to be able to access and edit his payment information.

Lest we forget, credit card payment is actually a convenience for companies such as Bell.ca. They don’t have to process other forms of payment. They can just charge your credit card automatically every month. It’s convenient for the user, but it is particularly convenient for the company. So you would think that they would make an effort to ensure that keeping one’s credit card information up-to-date is as easy as possible.

Think again. This morning, after activating my new credit card, I spent half-an-hour browsing the ultra-slow web site trying to find a way to update my credit card information for the automatic payment of both my monthly satellite TV bill and my monthly pay-as-you-go cell phone bill. There was no indication anywhere that this was even possible. Eventually, I ended up looking up the “Support” section and finding a list of “Frequently asked questions.”

There I was told that there were 67 FAQs, and I was taken to a page displaying the first 10 only, even though there was ample space on the page to display 50 of them. Of course, there was nothing in the first 10 about credit card information updates.

I went through the next 10, and then the next 10, and then the next 10, etc. (seeing, in passing, questions such as “Why do I have to subsidize service in rural areas?,” which is a nice thing to show to customers like me, who are in rural areas, and makes them feel really valued) until finally at number 56 there it was:

How do I change my pre-authorized credit card payment information?

“Finally!” I thought, and promptly clicked on the link. And here’s what I got:

A f***ing empty page! That was the icing on the cake.

I had no choice but to pick up the phone and call the 1-800 number for Bell TV instead. Of course, I had to wait 15 minutes before I actually got through to a human being. As per usual, the person, with a barely understandable foreign accent, asked me for my phone number, even though I had punched it in 10 minutes before during the process of going through the automatic 1-800 number menu options. (Why ask for it, if you’re going to ask for it again anyway?) And I had to identify myself and blah blah blah.

And so, after forty-five minutes, I was finally able to change my credit card information with this person, albeit with an obviously error-prone live human conversation instead of what should have been a perfectly reliable, secure on-line account information modification.

And then of course I had to go through it all over again for my cell phone service, because it was not the same service, even though both services are with Bell Canada and both are accessible through the same on-line Bell.ca account!

So I was put on hold for another ten minutes and finally got to speak to another customer representative. The poor fellow actually had a normal English accent, and I just couldn’t resist the temptation to give him a piece of my mind about the whole situation.

I just had to tell him to compare what I had just had to go through with Bell Canada with the situation with, say, the Amazon on-line store. There, I just had to log in, follow the obvious links to modify my credit card information, and bam! It was done in two minutes, with no human intervention and no risk of error (except in my typing).

I asked the guy to just imagine what it would be like if people had to go through what they have to go through with Bell Canada with every company with which they have to update their credit card information when it changes. It would take people a whole day!

It is absolutely ridiculous, and it is absolutely scandalous that such a large company, with such deep pockets and millions of customers that are effectively a captive market, is unable to offer a decent on-line experience with such basic tasks as changing one’s credit card information.

The Bell.ca web site is a pathetic piece of sh*t, and since they have just revamped it, there is absolutely no hope that things will improve any time soon. Yet of course they will keep getting my money, because they are the only choice for satellite TV and for cell phone service in my area as far as I am concerned. But it is such a frustrating experience!

For the record, for my third BCE service, the land line with the local phone company subsidiary, I had to go through yet another web site, which is not particularly pleasant to use, but at least is faster, lets you log in with a four-digit passcode (which is not a particularly secure approach in my opinion), and—gasp!—actually lets you change your credit card information right there, right then.

Alas, I already know, from my previous experience with the exact same company two years ago (and three years ago), that this will simply not be enough, and that, due to atrociously long processing times, they will probably not have the correct credit card information in their system by the time the next payment comes up. I specifically waited until just after the day of the monthly payment for this phone company to activate my new credit card and ditch the old one, but I just know that, a month from now, I will get a bill that says that my payment failed and that I will be charged a late fee the next month.

Wanna bet?

This is the wonderful world of BCE and its subsidiaries. I have a list of companies that I have to notify whenever my credit card information changes, and BCE and its subsidiaries are the only ones that make the whole experience atrociously painful, each and every time. And yet there is absolutely nothing that can be done about it, because we are a captive market, and our regulators are too busy gazing at their own navels to see what’s going on in the real world.

It would be interesting to try and pinpoint the reasons for this sudden surge.

And it would also be interesting to compare this with trends in Unicode use in e-mail communications. Sadly, my own experience suggests that things are probably not as improved in e-mail as they are on the web. I don’t have statistics about how many e-mail messages in my Inbox are encoded using Unicode, but I doubt very much that it represents more than a small minority.

And I am still occasionally encountering situations where messages (often forwarded messages) lose their proper encoding and are rendered improperly, which makes them unreadable and unusable if they contain any non-ASCII characters.

Of course it does not help that Apple’s own Mail application still does not seem to be able to use Unicode by default. The default text encoding when composing a new message is “Automatic” and, in my experience, that means that the message is encoded in ISO-Latin1. I have to manually select the Unicode option (in the “Message” menu) each and every time I compose a message.

Needless to say, I don’t do that, and I doubt very much that many Mac users do. If Entourage’s own interface is any indication, the situation isn’t any better on the Microsoft side.

It’s undoubtedly harder to force IT people to implement proper Unicode support and the use of Unicode as the default encoding in e-mail communications than it is for web pages, where the author of the web page is more in control and there are fewer potential pitfalls between author and reader.

But I am still hoping that, in the not-too-distant future, we’ll all be able to use the full range of Unicode characters in our e-mail communications without having to worry about whether they’ll be readable—and without being forced to switch to HTML e-mail (gasp!) either.

The evidence: The story must obviously have been on the mainstream news today, because my 85-year-old father-in-law, who got his first-ever (regular) DVD player a year ago as a Christmas present, called me this afternoon and asked me: “They had something on the news about DVDs today… Does this mean that I will no longer be able to rent/buy DVDs?”

My father-in-law is far from dumb. He does the Globe And Mail‘s cryptic crossword puzzle every day (and usually finishes it). He reads a lot. But of course he doesn’t know much about technology. He got himself a new Panasonic plasma TV earlier this year, but still has trouble figuring out exactly how many HD channels he actually gets with his current cable provider. He enjoys the tennis and the golf and the nature shows in HD, but does not always bother to wait one extra hour to watch some of the regular CBC programming in HD instead of SD on the local channel.

He also does not buy any DVDs and rarely rents them. (To be honest, the Christmas present was a bit of a dud.) So he doesn’t actually know a whole lot about DVDs.

But I think it is still telling that, upon hearing the news about HD DVD today, he became concerned about his continuing ability to play DVDs on his current player.

Clearly, the “HD DVD” name itself was not enough of a departure from “DVD” to make it clear in everyone’s mind that it was an entirely different format. In that respect, there is no ambiguity about “Blu-ray.”

Now that one format has won, it is possible that, over time, it will replace regular DVDs to the point that people will also call the new format “DVD,” just for convenience’s sake. (“Blu-ray” works better as a modifier than as a noun. “Disc” is too generic and “Blu-ray disc” is a bit too long.) But for now at least, I think it will be clearer in the minds of people like my father-in-law that “DVDs” and “Blu-ray discs” are two different things, and that you need a special new player in order to be able to play the latter.

I am not seriously saying that the name itself is what killed HD DVD, of course. But it seems to me that it didn’t help clear the format confusion in the minds of non-technical people, who of course will have to be won over for the new format to supersede the existing standard DVD. (Paradoxically, now that HD DVD is dead, it will be easier to abbreviate “high-definition DVDs” as “HD DVDs” without causing any confusion about the format!)

Personally, I am very glad that the format war is already over. While I was always eventually going to purchase a high-definition player and start building up a collection of HD discs, I never was in any hurry to embrace the new format—even though I have the required equipment for it—for a variety of reasons.

One is of course that I didn’t really want to spend any money until the stupid format war was over, just in case (even though I would probably have chosen Blu-ray and therefore would not have regretted my decision).

Another one was that, frankly, regular DVDs already look and sound pretty impressive on my system, with my upconverting DVD player. I know that high-definition DVDs will look and sound even better, of course, but regular DVDs on my system are already orders of magnitude better than regular DVDs were on my previous system, and they provide a very enjoyable experience as it is. High-definition DVDs will not provide another quantum leap, but more of an incremental improvement.

Yet another reason was that, at this point, most of the high-definition titles are still movies and recordings that I have little interest in. While I do enjoy the occasional blockbuster, I am mostly interested in a catalogue of movies and recordings that is not yet available in high-definition. Presumably this will all start changing now as the Blu-ray bandwagon gathers momentum, the prices drop and more studios and labels join in.

Finally, it seems to me that the Blu-ray format is still a work in progress and they still have to work out the bugs and kinks and achieve a truly stable standard with no compatibility issues of any kind and all the promised features. I suspect that this will still take a little while so, again, I am not in any hurry. I already spend enough time dealing with software bugs and hardware flaws in my day job, so I like to keep my entertainment as bug-free as possible!

I am also wondering exactly how long it will take before we have affordable devices that can both play and record Blu-ray discs and let us archive high-definition content recorded off the TV. This, of course, is an even thornier issue, with all the stupid copy-protection stuff interfering with legitimate, honest uses of a recorder, so I don’t really expect this particular issue to be solved any time soon. In truth, what will probably happen is that I’ll buy a regular Blu-ray player once the prices have dropped some more and more titles are available, and then later on I’ll replace it with something that can both play and record—just like what happened with regular DVDs. If it actually happens. Which is still a big if.

Anyway, for now, my father-in-law has been reassured, and personally I’ll be curious to see what happens with Blu-ray in the next few months.

See, I don’t really use faxes much in my line of work, but I do need to have a proper phone/fax machine, just in case. When my last machine broke down, I got my employer to buy me a replacement and, of course, they chose the cheapest model available, which was (at the time) a HP 1020.

From the moment I took that machine out of its packaging, I hated it. It had all kinds of stupid flaws, from the nearly invisible flashing green dot that is the only indication that you have messages in the answering machine to the fact that the fax machine wastes paper for various “reports” and error messages instead of displaying them on the LCD screen.

One of the most irritating aspects of the machine in daily use is the way it handles caller ID. The LCD screen can only display one line, so it only displays the number, even though caller ID information includes two lines (name and phone number). You cannot scroll through the list of the caller IDs of the most recent calls on the screen. If you want to review recent caller ID information, you have to print it on paper! Even the most basic phones let you review recent caller ID information on their LCD screens…

But the worst aspect of it is that, most of the time, the HP 1020 does not even display any caller ID information at all, even though that information is readily available. My other phones in the house are all able to “see” the caller ID of most phone calls without any difficulty. With the HP 1020, which is my main phone in my office, most of the time when I get a call the LCD screen does not display any information, even if I let it ring twice or three times.

For a long time I thought that it might have to do with the quality of the phone line to my office. Then a few weeks ago I read about this new Caller ID application by Apimac that can use Apple’s own USB modem to receive caller ID information and display it on the computer’s screen, without interfering with the phone device that is used to receive calls. Since I had a couple of unused Apple USB modems lying around, I figured I would give the application a try.

I used a phone cable splitter to split the line going into the fax machine and plugged the phone line into the Apple USB modem. I plugged the Apple USB modem into a USB hub connected to my Mac Pro. And I installed Caller ID. Even though Mac OS X did detect the modem port right away, I actually had to reboot the computer before Caller ID was able to use it properly.

But after that, everything worked fine. And I saw that Caller ID, using the Apple USB modem, connected to the exact same phone line as the fax machine, was able to display the caller ID information all the time, even though the HP 1020 still was unable to display it most of the time for the same calls.

Needless to say, I promptly purchased a licence for Caller ID, and I haven’t looked back (at that stupid HP 1020′s LCD screen, that is). Caller ID does not just detect the caller ID information; it actually matches it to the contents of my Address Book database, which means that it actually displays the phone numbers of the people I have in my Address Book along with their full name as recorded in the database. And it keeps a log of all the calls, that can be easily reviewed on screen, without wasting any paper!

The conclusion here is obvious. The electronics chip that is used in the HP 1020 to detect caller ID information sucks. The whole machine sucks. If faxes were more important in my work, I would get a proper machine, from another manufacturer. Or I would seriously explore on-line alternatives. But fortunately with Caller ID I can lay the issue to rest for now.

http://www.3121.com/joy/

Even if you don’t have the bandwidth (the Flash movie is approximately 50 MB), even if you are only a casual Prince fan, even if you are not even a Prince fan, but simply a fan of music, you owe it to yourself to take the time to download and watch and listen to this.

The picture quality is not all that great, but the sound track is terrific, and the recording as a whole is simply awe-inspiring.

And yes, when Prince can release this kind of recording officially through his own web site, is it any wonder that he is irked by the profusion of cheap five-minute snippets of grainy video and horrible sound that YouTube lets its users post on its site in order to generate revenue?

Those YouTube users obviously do not see it that way and don’t see their own activities as harmful to Prince in any way. After all, they give him lots of additional free publicity… Yes, but Prince is not going after them. He’s going after the guys who profit from the whole situation. Maybe it is a hopeless battle. But the move raises a number of valid points, from YouTube’s own double standards with respect to music and pornography to the question of the long-term impact of low-quality recordings on the legacy of a modern-age artist.

What is for certain is that this video posted on 3121.com emphatically demonstrates the power of such recordings and very successfully conveys the pure excitement of seeing Prince play live. It’s obviously not as good as actually been there. But it’s the next best thing (and certainly the only alternative for millions of less fortunate music lovers) and we can only hope that there is much more to come from the same source.

(Of course, many long-term Prince fans would probably also raise the issue that Prince has been teasing us like this for years, with only glimpses of what he can actually do and of the vast amount of recorded stuff that he has been amassing over the years. That too is a valid point. But we are not the ones who have to deal with the politics and the economics of actually releasing the stuff. Does the current recording industry strike you as a very healthy place to be operating in right now? I guess we just have to be more patient… It can be frustrating, yes, and it can be tempting to succumb to the temptation of obtaining bootleg recordings. But at the very least, if you do succumb, do it in a way that does not allow any third-party to profit from it. In this digital age, it really is not that hard…)

From the very beginning (1999), the on-screen guide was limited to 48 hours, which was highly insufficient. And there was really no excuse for it when all the other competitors had week-long on-screen guides.

I don’t know why it took so long for Bell ExpressVu to address this issue, but they finally did. Yesterday, I was browsing the on-screen guide and expecting to hit the snag at 48 hours as usual and, much to my surprise and delight, the guide just kept scrolling and scrolling on the screen, and indeed was showing stuff farther in the future.

(The Bell ExpressVu on-screen guide can be buggy at times and, depending on which channel you are looking at, sometimes when you hit the 48-hour limit it just keeps jumping back a couple of hours and showing the same thing over and over again, giving you the impression that you scrolling farther to the right when you are not.)

Of course, this much-anticipated improvement does not address the more general issue of the actual reliability and accuracy of the on-screen guide information, but I suspect that this is a problem with all TV providers and depends on a number of factors, including the reliability of the sources of information.

And I also can’t help but find it slightly insulting that Bell ExpressVu implements such updates without any kind of attempt to communicate with its users about it. I mean, what’s wrong about just sending us a short update message announcing this improvement? Does the company really have to do those things stealthily and leave it to the users to find out by themselves, accidentally, that things have been improved?

Still, it’s somewhat encouraging to see that the company is indeed working to improve the overall experience. There are still numerous bugs and interface flaws in the system, but on the whole things have gradually gotten better over the years. (I no longer see the problem with stuttering playback, for example, so it must have been addressed in a software update at some point.)

The latest issue of the company’s “entertainment magazine” also mentions (p. 57) that a new satellite will be launched in the first half of 2008, so there is hope for more HD content in the near future…

Until yesterday, the database’s web site was very window-centric as opposed to user-centric. You had to load the login page in a web browser window, log in with your user name and password, and then stay within that window to use the database’s interface, which was frame-based and never looked exactly right in Mac OS X’s Safari. If you accidentally closed that particular web browser window, you had to start all over again, because the database’s server was unable to remember that you were already logged in and wouldn’t let you reload the main page directly in a different browser window.

These limitations were somewhat annoying, especially in the context of the workflow of a professional translator. If you were working on a document in your word processor and needed to look up a term, you had to select the term in the word processor document window, copy it, switch to Safari, switch to that particular Safari window with the TERMIUM interface, find your way to the field for entering the search request either with the mouse or with multiple tabs on the keyboard, paste your term, and then hit Return.

Well, as of yesterday morning, this is all changed. For accessibility purposes, TERMIUM had to revamp their entire interface, and the new one, while not particularly pleasing on the eyes, is actually much more user-friendly in the context of the workflow described above.

Now, once you’re logged in, TERMIUM remembers that you are logged in and let you load as many different pages with different search requests as necessary. The UI no longer uses frames and looks OK in Safari (i.e. it looks the same as in other browsers). This means that the main URL of the page is now a URL that actually contains the search request in a format that can be used by a search template in LaunchBar.

Here’s the template I am using:

http://www.termiumplus.gc.ca/tpv2start/start.html?i=1&lang=fr&index=ent&__index=ent&text=*&go_search.x=0&go_search.y=0

The * character is where the actual search query goes.

So now when I need to look up a term, all I have to do (with LaunchBar 4.3) is select the term in the document that I am currently working on, press-and-hold the shortcut for LaunchBar (command-Esc on my machine), type my abbreviation (“term”) to invoke TERMIUM in LaunchBar, and then press the Return key.

This uses the TERMIUM search template to automatically build a URL around the term that I have “sent” to LaunchBar and then send that URL to my default browser, i.e. Safari. Provided that I am already logged in to TERMIUM, Safari opens a new window and loads the page with the results of the search for the term in TERMIUM.

It might not sound like much, but it is definitely a time saver and a good factor in RSI prevention, because it doesn’t involve any mouse clicks.

Of course, if I actually want to copy the result of my database search query back to my word processor, I will still have to use the mouse to select the term in the Safari window and copy it to the Clipboard, etc. This is because accessibility in web browsers doesn’t quite yet extend to efficient selection of important sections of text in a web page. (See the current problems with text selection in web pages on the iPhone, as described by John Gruber.)

But in many cases all I need is to see the result, because I will have to retype it in my word processor anyway. (When authoring a word processor document, there are too many issues around text formatting, smart vs. curly quotes and other punctuation inconsistencies to make it practical to copy short text snippets from the web.)

So the bottom-line here is that the new TERMIUM is good news for accessibility, and not just for the disabled. As a professional user, I find that these improvements actually help implement a more user- and text-oriented workflow. Mac OS X, like other operating systems, is still too application-centric and still requires too much mouse clicking for people working with text, but there are ways to improve the situation, and the new TERMIUM offers further improvements for users of that database in that particular department.

We had a 10-CD changer in the Jetta, but, as an iPod user, it was obvious to me that our new car would have to have an iPod connection. But it was obviously not the main criterion for choosing the car brand and model.

In the end, we chose to buy a Honda Accord. When investigating various car brands and models, I always made sure that an iPod option was at least available (if not built-in). There was one for the Honda Accord, so I didn’t bother to investigate any further and just asked the dealership to order and install the option.

This was obviously a mistake—at least when it comes to the actual quality of the iPod feature. I didn’t expect a masterpiece of UI design from a car manufacturer, but I somewhat foolishly assumed that any iPod feature from any self-respecting car manufacturer would have a minimum standard of quality and usability—especially considering that it was, in this case, an add-on priced at $375 (CDN).

It was only when I plugged in my iPod and started trying to use it with the car that I realized how wrong I was. (It also didn’t help that the Honda web site had absolutely no details about how this option worked, and that the local dealer had no previous experience with it. It was actually the first one they had ever installed! I guess there aren’t that many iPod users in southwest Nova Scotia…)

Our Honda Accord comes with a GPS navigation system, so it has a rather large LCD screen, with more than enough space on it to display tons of textual information.

Yet, for some reason, the Honda engineers have decided that the interface for using the iPod should be exactly the same as the one for the built-in 6-CD changer. So all you have is a screen with buttons for “Next Track,” “Previous Track,” “Next Disc,” and “Previous Disc.” And that is it!

In actual fact, the “CDs” in this case are playlists that you need to create on your iPod with iTunes. The playlist have to be named “Honda1,” “Honda2,” “Honda3,” etc. up to “Honda7.” You can put as many tracks as you want in each playlist.

Once you plug the iPod in and turn the car audio on, you press the button to select the CD changer twice, which switches from the actual CD changer interface to an interface for controlling the iPod which is… also labelled “CD-C” (as in “CD changer”). In other words, they did not even bother to label the interface “iPod,” even though an iPod is the only thing that you can connect to it.

Then, in order to select the playlist you want to listen to, you press the “Next Disc” or “Previous Disc.” When it says “DISC 1,” it actually means that you have selected the playlist called “Honda1″ on the iPod. Ditto for “DISC 2,” “DISC 3,” etc. So you have no option to assign a more descriptive name to each playlist. You are just supposed to remember what you put in each playlist.

It gets worse. Once you start playing one of the “discs” (i.e. playlists) through the interface, the only thing that the big navigation screen displays about the track that is currently playing is… its track number! There is no artist name, no song title, nothing!

So if you have a playlist with 100 tracks in it, all you see is “Track 1,” “Track 2,” etc. You are just supposed to have memorized the entire playlist before actually plugging the iPod in. (Once the iPod is plugged in, you can no longer use the iPod’s controls or screen, for understandable safety reasons.)

I realize that this is an interface primarily designed for CDs, and that CDs do not come with their own textual information about the tracks. But there is quite a difference between a 12-track CD for which you have the CD sleeve in the glove box and you can check track numbers and titles at any time and a 100-track playlist on an iPod for which you have no way of consulting the track information once the iPod is plugged in and the music is playing!

I phoned Honda’s customer service on the very first day I had the car and was able to talk to a customer service representative named Philip. He tried to justify the limitations of the user interface with safety reasons, and I can understand this to a degree. You don’t necessarily want drivers to try scrolling down lists of hundreds of songs on their navigation screen while they are driving.

But surely displaying the title and artist name for the currently playing track on the navigation screen is not too much to ask and is not a safety issue! After all, this is a screen which displays a fair amount of information when it’s in GPS mode (not that I’m likely to ever use the feature). If that amount of information is not considered a safety issue for the driver while he’s driving, then I fail to see how displaying the track information would be one.

The customer service representative took note of my comments and said he would pass them along, but of course I don’t really expect Honda to send me a software update on CD next week that addresses those concerns. The auto industry doesn’t exactly work like this.

I will now probably have to live with this poor user interface for the next ten years. I am obviously not about to return the otherwise excellent car because of this particular issue, but I must admit I am quite disappointed.

There are other aspects of the audio system that are quite good. The CD changer is fine, the sound quality is great, and you can both control the volume level and skip tracks using controls on the steering wheel itself. These controls work for the iPod option as well, letting you skip tracks in the current playlist. (To change playlists, you still have to use the buttons for changing “discs” on or next to the navigation screen.)

But there are also other aspects of the iPod feature that add to the disappointment. For example, because of the use of a CD-based interface, the track number is actually limited to 99—even though there is of course tons of space on the navigation screen to display more digits. You can have more than 99 tracks in a single playlist, but the track number on the screen goes back to “00″ after 99.

And then there is the problem of what happens when you disconnect your iPod, use it for something else for a while, and then come back to the car and plug it back in. If a song is on pause on the iPod when you plug it in, you have the option to continue playing that song, by using the “DISC 9” option. (Don’t ask.) But otherwise the car’s iPod feature has forgotten where you were in each playlist and just starts playing the tracks of the playlist from number 1 again.

The only other option is “DISC 8,” which plays songs on your iPod in random order. So if you actually want to play an album that you have not included in any of the “HondaN” playlists, you have to disconnect the iPod, start playing the album on the iPod, reconnect it and use the “DISC 9” option. That’s it. Needless to say, it’s not exactly something that you would feel safe doing while driving.

I realize that there are safety issues that car manufacturers have to take into consideration. But even within the strict limits of what is considered safe to do while driving, Honda’s engineers could have done a much better job with the iPod interface.

(And this approach also completely fails to take into account a situation where you have a passenger sitting next to you who does not have to do any driving and can devote his or her entire attention to the screen.)

I do wonder whether all iPod interfaces in other car brands and models are equally bad. I have no easy way to determine this, but if my experience with Honda is a reflection of the average quality of what’s out there, we still have a long way to go before car audio options include quality iPod features that are actually reasonably user-friendly and simply usable.