Dealing with technical support representatives over the years has taught me to be cynical, suspicious, and untrusting of their knowledge and skill.

However, I had an experience in the past month that was like something from a prior generation.

It started with one of my 18th birthday presents — a Westinghouse Digital Convection Toaster Oven. Now, just because it has ‘digital’ in the name doesn’t automatically spirit it from the realm of ‘kitchen appliance’ into ‘awesome birthday present’, but I was mildly intrigued. I have since discovered what an indispensible piece of food-preparation equipment it is — far more so than the microwave — but back in June, I was not so enlightened or excited.

It sat in its box in my closet until September, when I moved to Waterloo and began actually cooking. I realised then that there was something seriously wrong with my Westinghouse Digital Convection Toaster Oven. Sometimes it would cease to respond to the buttons. At others, the display would ‘crash’ halfway through a bake, causing the heat to remain on until I pulled the plug. Obviously, this behaviour was unacceptable.

After poking around online, it became apparent that the model number of my product did not infact exist — anywhere. It seems that Westinghouse was in some way affiliated with a larger company called Salton, in spite of being not listed on Salton’s own brand registry.

So I called Salton with my defective oven, and they said that it was under warranty and would be completely covered, I just had to ship it to them.

Uh oh, shipping a huge, bulky toaster oven to the US was not going to be pretty. But wait, as part of the warranty agreement, they pay shipping both ways. So I had to mail them my receipt for the $22 it cost me to send it to them, and they mailed a brand new one back.

It works perfectly, and I’m thrilled with it.

But here’s the funny bit: They sent me a cheque for $22 in US funds. Now that’s service.

Mike

I clicked ‘Send’ on a rather important business-related email several days ago, and began shutting down my computer, barely giving it another thought. Within a few moments, however, a bounce message came back, alerting me that my mail had been flagged as spam — worse, in fact, my IP had.

This page exists on Shared Hosting, which means that a single server at Surpass hosts this and approximately 150 other small sites. One of these 150 other users, one of them used their shared hosting account to send a 419 mailing, and now that server’s IP, my IP, is listed at at least two major ‘Spam-Originating Host’ Directories. The two organizations that rejected my mailings were SpamCop and SpamHaus.

To the credit of the excellent people at Surpass, the troublesome user has been expelled, the IP of the server is in the process of being released, and so it’ll shortly be business as usual.

But I’d never seen spam-blocking of this nature before — I’d assumed it was almost entirely inbox-sided. Paul Graham’s articles on killing spam have fascinated me since I first found them several years ago. Mozilla Thunderbird, my mail client, uses a Bayesian filter, and has not had a single false-positive since I started with it in September. And it’s caught all but a small handful of spam.

One thing I found at the SpamHaus page that interested me was the ROKSO, the Register of Known Spam Operations. It’s amazing to see that 99% of the spam we receive originates from only a handful of major sources. Many of the names on the Register are familiar to us, others are just aliases that use aliases.

Anyhow, if you’ve sent me mail in the last few days, and I either haven’t replied, or replied from my uwaterloo account, I apologize for the inconvenience. But I’m back on track, now, I think.

Mike

If there’s a silver bullet for distributing music online, Puretracks.com hasn’t found it.

I mentioned some time ago that I had enjoyed shopping online with my nifty new Mastercard. Contrary to the accusation that shopping on the Internet would encourage careless spending, I found that it allowed me to be much more educated about a purchase, since I could click to dozens of review sites and forums to get the general consensus on a product.

I haven’t bought anything since my new Laser Printer, since I haven’t had occasion. Today, however, I got a moo-ing milk carton for lunch which contained a $5 online music voucher. I was disappointed to not win the Mazda obviously, but it seemed like a good opportunity to form an opinion of ’small purchase download vending’.

As above, it was disappointing. I appreciated the ‘30-second’ preview of each song, but I was annoyed by the inability to do more complicated queries, such as ‘Show me the top 40 most popular songs by number of downloads in subcategory X’, rather than just a general ‘This Week’s Top 100′ listings and by album/artist. Perhaps I was just prejudiced, because the site forced me to use IE instead of Firefox.

I really had a much more positive experience several weeks ago when I purchased the track ‘Feeling the Love’ from the band Reactor’s home page. Of course, the motivation and situation were different. With Reactor, I could have stolen the track, but I paid them the $0.99 to support a group breaking away from the record company bureaucracy. On Puretracks, I was looking to buy any $5 worth of tunes, and ended up with four that I could just as easily have leeched. Except that instead of getting real, normal MP3s, they’re these strange WMA files that require some kind of wierd online authentication to play. Can I even burn these to a disc?

Perhaps much as the open-source movement has changed the way software is distributed (I’ll take OpenOffice over Word any day), groups like Reactor will change the face of the music industry.

The question will still remain, though: Is it financially viable? Will artists’ websites be plastered with corporate sponsorship? Can live concerts, shows, and fan donations really pay the bills for these adults and their families? Probably not… so the model still needs some work. But in the meantime, it’s an uphill battle for the Empire against Peer-2-Peer. Kazaa has been successfully destroyed, but in its place, several more clients vie for the top position, not to mention the almighty Bittorrent.

Mike

I’m surrounded by the cheerful beep-beep of LEGO’s standard RCX firmware confirm-download signal. Feels like an rtlToronto event.

When I found out that our major design project was a LEGO navigation challenge, I immediately jumped to ‘how can this be done the fastest, and skipped the more obvious question of ‘how can this be done the easiest or most reliably. Our bot is working great, of course, but as with many around me, it’s loaded with two separate programs — a slow and steady one and a quicker, more fault-prone one. Trying to reliably follow a line with a single light-sensor is a really tricky challenge.

So I was surfing over to the rtlToronto site, and I noticed they’ve posted some better pictures from the Deep Yellow game, which was my baby, but there’s also some rules up for a fiendishly difficult new challenge — mini block stacking.

Don’t think I’ve got time to build for this, but I’ll definitely try to make it into Toronto to watch.

Mike

I’ll keep this spoiler-free, but honestly, if you haven’t seen The Incredibles yet, you owe it to yourself to go and do so.

For films that are so overwhelmingly well received, it’s interesting to check out what those few negative reviewers said. Is it just blustering and ‘feelings’, or do they present a legitimate case?

One of the five ‘rotten’ reviewers, a Jeremy Heilman, did have some interesting things to say. Some of it is garbage. To suggest that The Incredibles comes as a new installment in a series of ‘domesticated toys, bugs, monsters, fish and now superheroes’ is complete and utter baloney.

However, his discussion about the violence in the film is an intersting one.

Children causing death to the villain’s minions is surely new to Western kids’ movies. Is it an accident that no one thought to replace them with ‘killer bots’ that could be dispensed with no regret? Moreover, how did Brad Bird feel about this, considering the peace-and-love message in his ‘other’ film, The Iron Giant?

As I thought about it, it occurred to me that perhaps it’s a completely different message here — one that Heilman overlooked. Is Bird simply trying to point out that under situations of deadly threat, extreme force is permissible? In the watered down, UN-permeated society of today, it seems possible.

It doesn’t necessarily justify the actions taken in Iraq, but some people still need the reminder that talking things out at a mahogany conference table doesn’t stop a terrorist or dethrone a dictator.

I disagree with Heilman that The Incredibles undermines family values, but these things are worth thinking about. And hopefully there’ll be some commentary about this on the DVD.

Whatever your take, the fun-factor for this movie is off the map — it’s out there becoming a classic regardless of any political overtones. And anyways, according to IMDB, this was mostly conceived by Bird in the early 90s, and in production well before September of 2001.

Mike

Addendum: Here’s a terrific review of the positive morality in Pixar’s films. I found this link from SaveDisney.com — exposing the shocking acts by Mike Eisner that are driving Disney into the ground.

I never really intended the previous incarnation of this site to exist for all that long. It was more of a temporary entity while I mulled over how I wanted this page to appear.

I knew pretty well right away how I didn’t want it to appear — as a centered, fixed-width, two column page, like every single other blog site out there. The two column layout is sensible in terms of content, but I wanted to see if I could really flex a bit of CSS muscle and create something interesting with some bolder colours to contrast all the ultra-modern pastels out there.

I think it came out all right.

It’s not finished, but I’m too busy with school these days to wait much longer before going live. Anyway, the engine is purring much smoother now — all the pages are fully compliant, the links are nice and tidy, the archive is much more browsable, the security is much better. All around, it’s a reflection of everything I’ve learned about PHP in the last year. A worthwhile journey it’s been, and it wouldn’t have started without Blitz, so I’m very much endebted to him. Every month I still see a handful of referrals come through from the old location.

Anyhow, it’s bedtime now, but give me a shout about it. Especially if you’re on a browser other than IE6 or Firefox and you’re seeing a visual anomaly.

On that note, Firefox 1.0 comes out today. Be sure to pick it up.

Mike

I’d just like to inform the world that The Incredibles is awesome. I really have very little to say beyond that, except to affirm that Pixar’s philosophy of story-first has never been anywhere from right on the mark, and it’s appalling that major studios still refuse to acknowledge this fact.

How is it that astronomic investments are made in films like the Matrix sequels and Star Wars on such slip-shod stories? Is there no one who sits at the boardroom tables with these guys and says ‘I hate to be so brutally honest, but we need to take this whole script 4back to formula…’?

Maybe it’s management. Studios are companies that make money — Pixar is a company that makes money too. But Pixar to me takes on more of the image of a big fraternity of artists who just really love to make good movies. Love good stories, love good humour, love good characters.

And that’s how it should be.

Mike

I realised a couple nights ago that I’d been pretty well listening to the same 50 songs for the two months since I arrived in Waterloo. This is a problem.

I’d resisted upgrading past Winamp 2.7, since reports had been bad on Winamp3. But I sprung for it, having heard about the Winamp Radio Stations, which operate under the dubious legality of ’since it’s streaming media, it doesn’t matter that you get whole songs for free.’

I really like it. I’ve got an all-time hits station and an classic rock station bookmarked that have both been great. The titles are unimportant, though. What matters is that it’s really just someone’s 24 hour playlist being broadcast over the net for anyone to listen to. And as long as their taste is agreeable, the relationship is good.

I’d remembered reading poor reports about internet radio some time ago, but my recollection is that the article author was checking out RealPlayer streams and was connecting via a fast modem or slow highspeed.

Well, I’m connecting on quite brisk highspeed (Rogers), and I haven’t had a single Buffering Break in my 128kbps streams in the 5-6 hours that I’ve listened to them over the past few days.

I realise, scrolling through the gigantic list of stations, many with less than ten listeners, that there’s probably a lot of really lousy ’stations’ out there. But the Internet is ruled my mob law. Yes, anyone can publish whatever they like out here, but it’s the votes of confidence by readership that make some fail and others not.

Mike