Julianna Yau’s blog

I used to be a big supporter of Telus. Great customer service, competitive plans, and…well, I really didn’t need anything else!

But that is quickly changing.

I recommended Telus to my business partner, and she has had nothing but problems with them. Billing problems, delayed delivery of voicemail notification, delayed delivery of text messages, and god knows what else. This is a huge problem for us, as we can’t conduct business efficiently if she can’t get her messages promptly (some of them were delayed by almost 48hrs).

Their customer service has degraded quite a bit. Not that I ever had to call them much, but service was always with a smile. The staff at their stores used to be more knowledgeable and better mannered. I used to be able to understand the person on the other end of the phone. None of that is true anymore.

Their new “Clear Choice” plans are what really did it for me, though. I was excited when Telus announced they were getting rid of the system access fee, and expected the new plans to be 2 or 3 dollars off either way. Instead, I found that the closest approximation to my current plan is a whopping $17 more per month. That’s $204 more a year! Of course, I realize that I can keep my current plan, but the prospects of changing my plan are more than a little distasteful. The next plan up from what I have now will cost me $34 more per month — or $646 over the course of the remainder of my 19 month contract.

What’s worse is the equivalent to my plan on Bell is actually 81 cents cheaper per month, and Rogers’ is only 32 cents more per month. An upgrade of my current package to Bell? $16 more per month — that’s a dollar less than what my current package would cost with a “Clear Choice” plan.

So the real clear choice seems to be leaving Telus whenever I can get a sweet deal and a new phone from Bell, Rogers, or one of the new telcos opening up shop next year!

Math overview:

(all plans except Clear Choice include System Access Fee, 911 Fee and Taxes; prices are current as of November 26, 2009 and are monthly)

Last May, I ordered some stuff from Kuroten for a friend’s birthday in July. After a relatively smooth transaction with them last January, I assumed this would give me more than sufficient time to receive everything in time for my friend’s birthday. After almost monthly follow-ups, I finally received it. Today. (Okay, Canada Post left me a parcel pickup slip on Thursday, but I wasn’t able to go to the post office until today).

It’s been a very frustrating transaction, and I’m not quite sure whether I’d do business with them again. I certainly won’t if I need anything quickly, but I’m not sure they sell anything I could afford to wait on for 8 months. They did send me a “token of apology” for the delay in shipping:

It’s very cute (and, thankfully, not pink), and I’m trying to focus on the fact that they did eventually send me the order and a nice little gift, rather than the fact that I don’t really need more flash memory:

It’s probably nothing much compared to what other people have, but I really only make active use of two of those, plus the SD card in my camera.

So, what do you think? Do they get a second chance? They do source some very cool stuff.

I’m still twitching from the painful nauseating lesson I learned today from what shall be my third and last attendance at a Cinematheque Waterloo screening. Although I’m still happy to have supported them with the purchase of an annual membership, they are now well-known enough to be attracting just the type of person I don’t want to have in a cinema with me.

Compared with my near-religious experience while watching Synecdoche, New York, this brought back all my misanthropic feelings and contempt for the inconsiderateness of others. Tonight’s audience had everything but a ringing cell phone—people talking through the live introduction, people arriving late, people [loudly] discussing the film during the film, someone wrestling with a shopping bag for a full minute, someone dropping their keys, and, of course, me hushing whoever was within a 3-seat radius.

The film, Jules et Jim, was passable, but overly long at a mere 105 minutes. After the war sequence, François Truffaut flexed his directoral muscles, then was simply trying too hard to be impressive. I quickly found myself uninterested in the story and unenchanted (sic) by the barrage of perspective shots which had no connection to the narrative. Oh, but wait! French New Wave is not supposed to be about narrative, non? Like with Hitchcock, I’m wholly unimpressed by experimentation for the sake of experimentation (especially when it was laughable or too little, too late).

And, to audiences, I say:

• I paid to see the movie, not to hear your commentary on it.
• You don’t need to remark aloud to your friend that the woman was wearing a watch on her ankle. We all saw it. Because we weren’t trying to have a conversation with our friends during the movie.
• I don’t care that you like the music.
• A movie is not the appropriate time to teach your kid about ships.
• Please don’t try to get that last little drop of soda out of your drink. I can’t hear the machine guns over your slurping.
• If your phone rings, turn it off. Do not simply answer the phone after your friend calls you for the second time.
• A movie with fast cuts, explosions and a sold-out theatre is not an appropriate venue to take your screaming infant.
• Opening a plastic bag of food you smuggled into the theatre is not less conspicuous if you do it slowly.

And, in conclusion, thank God for Zip.ca. Amen.

I saw Syndecoche, New York today, and I don’t even know where to start with the review. To avoid this being a mess of randomness, I’ll attempt to write this chronologically.

Firstly, it’s been a long time since I’ve been to the cinema. Before seeing The Dark Knight and the Cinematheque Waterloo screenings in the past few months, I had been boycotting the movie-going experience for over four years—a boycott I only broke to see the X-Men and Pirates of the Caribbean movies. After sitting through movies at The Princess Cinema in Waterloo and the Kingston Canadian Film Festival where the movie-goers insisted on discussing the movie while watching the movie, and seeing more mainstream movies like Mystic River, Master and Commander and Tears of the Sun (all of which were horrible, by the way) where people insisted on answering cell phones and slurping their drinks, I badly needed a break from seeing movies with the public.

So, the 20 minute “pre-show” of commercials was a tiresome surprise. With the amount of money they must be making from the sale of ads, I’m upset that ticket prices are still as high as they are. I did, however, get to enjoy a hearty laugh at Stella Artois‘ attempt at making their “beer” seem like something worth drinking.

The movie was absolutely amazing. I do wonder whether people who aren’t familiar with Kaufman’s work would get the full effect of it. His world is unique, but entirely consistent, and Synecdoche, New York was an extremely fine presentation of it. I’m both relived that his direction lived up to my expectations (hopes?) and that he has finally been able to direct one of his own screenplays so I can see exactly what he had intended.

Synecdoche, New York had the fuller version of the world we started to see in Being John Malkovich but, more surprisingly, seems to be a refined version of the themes in Michel Gondry‘s video of Bjork‘s Bachellorette. The absurd humour in the movie was in keeping with what Kaufman did in Adaptation, and the actors did a fantastic job with maintaining the understated delivery required for it to be “Kaufmanesque”.

What we saw on the tv, books and magazines of the main character were obviously created by Kaufman, much like what he did in Eternal Sunshine of a Spotless Mind. And what has been driving me mad is I forgot the name of the artist who painted the work by the character Adele Lack. The artist had been properly credited at the end of the movie, but Kafuman has once again been able to fabricate a character into real life, and the internet has once again failed me for finding what I need.

The casting was perfect. Philip Seymour Hoffman continues to amaze me, and I’m glad Catherine Keener was able to do another Kaufman movie. (IMDB doesn’t give a unique link for joint venture searches, so you’ll have to do it yourself if you’re that curious.)

I will be trying to see the movie again before it disapears from the cinema. Although it was worth the four-year wait, I missed the significance of the clocks/time in the movie (please, don’t tell me what it is—I want to find it for myself) and want to capture the artist’s name. The thought of waiting at least another year for the DVD release is maddening. And although the circumstances are entirely different, a part of me is terrified I’ll relive what happened when I missed the Cremaster Cycle when it was at the Guggenheim.

One of my contacts pointed me to Getting To First Base, which is an introductory book to online marketing via social networking. It has a less evangelical feel than The Cluetrain Manifesto where rethinking business is concerned, and provides a good overview of the social sphere and guidelines for how to start wading in that pool. It’s also an extremely easy read—I was able to get through it in less than an hour, despite Acrobat Reader’s refusal to scroll through the pages smoothly.

Just before hitting the half-way mark in the book, I started to really wonder how many companies are well-managed enough to know how to properly use the advice given. With all sizes of companies and not-for-profits, there seems to me that the separation between those who know how to engage and those who don’t is vast. It doesn’t feel like the basic concepts of brand management and public relations has really changed. What has changed isn’t even who is talking about you, but how much more the “public” and “consumers” are able to be heard by each other.

Perhaps most people haven’t realized it, or maybe they just don’t want to talk about it, but the strength of the consumers’ voice means that PR can no longer be a simple whitewashing of a company. Although mistakes happen and the public can be forgiving, a company now really needs to be well-managed, self-aware, honest and transparent to not become a company people love to hate.

The problem? The perception is that many companies were not built on principles of good management, self-awareness, honesty and transparency. In most cases, that’s true. And changing the culture of a company is extremely difficult, and increasingly so with the age of the company. Smaller companies fall victim to being managed by people who may not necessarily have an innate skillset for things in and around the world of marketing.

More than ever, it really does matter whether you’re providing quality products and quality customer service. People feel empowered by being able to speak honestly about a product or service, and they like it. If your printer sucks, word will get around. Boasting about its great features won’t do much, because people know your job is to make your printer look good. But offering to fix the problem, or engaging the consumer on possible improvements, works. The problem again is that most companies don’t have an organizational structure or mandate which allows this to happen.

The section Should You Build Your Own Social Network? cover what I think is the biggest symptom of a company’s disconnect with what to do with social networking. In an attempt to maintain some sort of control and not wanting to play with others, some companies try to start their own social network. And waste a ton of time and money.

Overall, the book provides good advice to its target audience, but I’m still skeptical about whether it can be used by its target audience.

And I’m glad they follow their own advice. The Friends reference had me sold.

For several months, I have been looking for something (anything) which can post a digest of my Ma.gnolia bookmarks to this blog.

My first attempt was with Feedburner‘s link splicer, which does that…but only integrates the content into the blog’s feed. Although that’s useful, it isn’t the functionality I want.

Then I tried Ma.gnolia‘s own blog posting tool. Although it worked wonderfully, I stopped using it when my host upgraded to ModSecurity 2. This was a problem because modsecurity needs to be deactivated for the xmlrpc file so that WordPress will accept remote posting, but ModSecurity 2 can only be disabled by the host and for my entire site. This posed a security risk I wasn’t willing to take just to get digest posting of my bookmarks.

I was manually creating digests for a while, but that couldn’t be a permanent solution.

And then I searched through the WordPress plugins again and found that Postalicious had been updated to handle not merely De.licio.us bookmarks, but others…including Ma.gnolia!

At this time, it looks like Postalicious only supports one account from De.licio.us, Ma.gnolia, Google Reader, Reddit or Yahoo Pipes.

You can select:

• the WordPress user acount to attribute the post
• the categories for the post
• whether pingbacks are allowed
• whether comments are allowed
• the minimum number of links a post can have
• the frequency of posting (no limit, max of x bookmarks per post, minimum of x hours between posts, or post once every x days after hh:mm)
• whether to publish after the criteria are met, or keep in drafts
• whether to edit an existing post or start a new one if the author publishes the draft
• allow/disallow a custom list of html in bookmark descriptions
• post only or no bookmarks with a custom list of tags (no spaces, comma separated)
• whether to use bookmark tags as the tags for the post
• whether to always use the same custom list of tags for the post
• date format, based on PHP standards
• post slug template
• post title for single or multiple days
• bookmark syntax (e.g. bookmark link – description – custom text)
• tag syntax
• customizable post template for single or multiple days

Overall, I would say the available options have been very thoroughly considered, and the plugin works wonderfully.

A little over a week ago, a friend suggested that I watch Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog, pitching it as a pet project of Joss Whedon’s. Deciding to watch it was a struggle for me, with pros and cons all over the place. In retrospect, I probably over-thought the decision:

• Although I’m not a fan of the premise (or particularly interested in the storyline) of Buffy, I must grudgingly admit that I did find the writing to be witty in the few episodes I’ve been made to watch.
• I hate loathe musicals, but Neil Patrick Harris’s insane level of coolness promised to negate that.
• My primary operating system is OpenSUSE, but I kept Windows so I could still access things that aren’t available for Linux.

So, out of curiosity and boredom, I decided to pay the mere $6 for 43 minutes of entertainment, and it was worth it. Harris plays Dr. Horrible wonderfully, and it was nice to be able to enjoy Whedon’s writing without the supernatural (yes, I somewhat hypocritically make allowances for the world of superheros and supervillans).

The only horrible part was that the show is only [currently and legitimately] available in Apple’s DRM-protected m4v format. This means the $6 is more of a long-term rental fee than an outright purchase. Considering the price of a DVD or a rental from a brick-and-mortar store, it’s not a bad rate…but still leaves a bitter aftertaste.

Contrary to what some might think, I’m not a supporter of DRM. Although I support the right to use it as part of a business model, I don’t think it’s a good idea. I have yet to finish reading Wired Shut, but the chapter “Speed Bump” poses a solid argument against using architectural and technological measures to correct for social behaviour.

My personal opinion is that the use of Technical Protection Measures by individual creators in an attempt to protect their work is misguided and will be more detrimental (in terms of cost and promotional opportunities) than they are lead to believe. What is needed aren’t more barriers to the enjoyment of creative works, but educating people on the real cost of production and the value of a work. The situation, although more ignored, is more clear-cut for visual and media artists, who usually work alone or in small groups.

In the traditional model used by many visual artists, they bear the cost of creating their work and generate income from a variety of sources, including (but not limited to) grants (which are, in Canada, taxable income), teaching, exhibition fees (paid by galleries when the work is for display and not sale), second and third jobs, and the occassional sale. When work is sold through a gallery, the gallery typically takes 50% of the sale price to cover their overhead (rent, staff salaries, etc). In Canada, there is no legislated resale right which would help boost the income of artists when their growing careers increase the value of past work in the resale market.

When I run this information past my non-artist friends, they’re often shocked, particularly at the fact that a gallery gets a commission which is much higher than commissions in other industries. Suddenly, being an artist isn’t so glamorous, and “sticking it to the man” isn’t so chic.

For the past few weeks, I’ve been drained and in dire need of a revival… and it turns out some fine films were all I needed. While stone is my favourite medium for creation, film is my favourite medium for “consumption” and I haven’t been exposing myself to enough fine film recently.

Tonight, I attended Double Vision, presented by The Images Festival, CFMDC and CAFKA. The films screened tonight were extremely fine and well-crafted.

Notes in Origin (Ellie Epp, 1987) was my favourite because of Epp’s playfulness and superb grasp of time and timing. At the end of each “note”, I hoped there was another, until I fell into Epp’s rhythm and understood how many notes there would be. The length of each note was perfect, and her punctuation of the end of the film was direct without taking the audience out of the film.

Christina Battle’s the distance between here and there was crafted with a brilliant crescendo and ended with a similar grace and firmness. With both Epp and Battle, I didn’t quite know where they were taking me or how they would resolve the film, but I knew for certain I was in good hands.

Kitchener-Berlin (Phil Hoffman, 1990) was an absolute feast for the eyes. The interlacing of images was done with immense purpose, and I had a distinct sense that Hoffman knew exactly what to show us and when. At the end of Part 1 was a short film-within-a-film which I absolutely adored. The film was The Highway of Tomorrow or, How One Makes Two, a self-proclaimed amateur film by Dent Harrison. It was wonderfully playful, and the R100 makes me yearn to see Matthew Barney’s Cremaster 1 to search for a connection which probably doesn’t exist.

There is another set of films tomorrow, starting at 8pm at The Gig.

Like the XO, I needed to have my Eee exchanged for another due to a keyboard problem. But unlike the XO, the problem was mostly cosmetic (the left side of the space bar was slightly warped) and I was able to take the Eee to the retailer to be exchanged. Not being a consumer product, the XO naturally has a disadvantage because it has no retail store. That was to be expected. But the fact that I needed to pay a total of $32CAD in shipping and $48USD in brokerage and surety bond fees was a total surprise. That added another $80 to the price of the laptop, with no guarantee that the one I would get in exchange would be fully functional.

That’s not to say that the keyboard of the Eee is perfect. Like any keyboard, it requires a bit of time to become accustomed to it. Because of how cramped the keys are, I really notice any extra length on my fingernails because I’m typing with the very tips of my fingers on the main A to L row of keys. The placement of some keys is quite awkward, particularly the “1”, which is more easily accessible with my ring finger than my pinkie. The “e”, “i”, “c” and “m” keys are often missed due to how I need to curve my fingers and apply pressure to the keys. Surprisingly, this is more noticeable for single words than when typing entire sentences.

The touchpad, like any other, is a painful alternative to a mouse. Luckily, the Eee’s operating system (Xandros, a flavour of Linux) auto-recognizes the two Logitech mice I have. Linux does not have great support for more than just the scroll-wheel and left- and right-click buttons, but this is not something unique to Xandros and is something I don’t really need.

I did have some permissions issues when trying to install new dictionaries for OpenOffice.org…it seems that I could only get to the “super user” access through the terminal. This may be a strange glitch in the way I have customized my Eee, because I have not seen this problem reported by other users. Once I was able to install the Canadian dictionary, the spellcheck was an invaluable feature of OpenOffice.org. Because of the idiosyncrasies of the keyboard, it is invaluable to be able to correct many typos quickly.

Adding more software to the Eee is not always an easy task. From what I’ve seen, “Easy Mode” only allows for updates to the software, and any adding or removing of software needs to be done in “Advanced Mode” (i.e. full KDE desktop for Xandros). Because Xandros does not have the same market penetration as SUSE, Fedora or Debian, it doesn’t have quite as many pre-compiled applications available. Many users have reported that most Debian packages are compatible with Xandros, but those packages do not seem to be supported for Xandros by either the Xandros folks or the Debian folks.

When showing off the Eee to friends, they’re always struck firstly by how tiny and light it is, and then by what a familiar feeling they get from the “Advanced Mode” interface. When using the Eee in public with little fanfare on my part, I found that many onlookers were extremely curious, but stopped short of actually asking about it. The Eee received many glances which I assumed were intended to be discreet attempts at determining what the heck it is (and possibly who makes it).

The power adaptor is both a blessing and a source of frustration. Because of its size, I was able to toss it into my purse along with the Eee itself. But the placement of the prongs relative to the bulk of the adaptor resulted in two instances where I thought I could use the adaptor…but couldn’t. In the first instance, there were two free ports on a powerbar, and the length of the adaptor was greater than the space available for two more compact plugs. In the second instance, the outlet was on a hub attached to a table at a lecture hall and the prongs were too far down on the adaptor for it to nestle into the L-shaped space allowed for the adaptor. In both instances, I was dearly missing the compactness of the actual connective parts of a standard laptop adaptor.

Because of the size of the screen I would not recommend the Eee as the only computer you own. It’s great as a portable second computer, but is less than ideal for extended use and extensive work (particularly anything involving graphics work). The operating temperature of the Eee is also a persistent concern. Although it seems to level out at a “hot-but-not-too-hot” temperature, I often worry about it overheating.

Overall, I love my Eee. I just need to find a way to make the adaptor …more adaptable.

Oh, Google, how you disappoint me. First with YouTube’s unnavigable help pages, then with a product which, despite being in beta, fails to do what its help pages claims it does.

Now that I have two (and soon to be three) laptops (!), and after discovering that free WiFi is spotty at best, I thought I should look for a feed reader which will allow me to access feeds on several computers and offline. After a bit of research I narrowed my options to Liferea and Google’s Reader. Because I didn’t want to wrestle with figuring out how to synchronize Liferea on two computers (I suspect I would need to have the user files on an SD card and transfer the card from one computer to another), or getting Liferea onto Sugar, I decided to try Google’s Reader first.

The first frustration was that, unlike Thunderbird, Google’s Reader only imported posts as of the day the feed was added to Reader. After giving it some time to play catch-up, I found that (a) it will import older posts, (b) there is no option to permanently remove a post from Reader (only an option to mark it as being read), and (c) there is no option to mark a post as unread if it’s date is prior to the date you added the feed to Reader. This means if I am not reading a blog from the day it was created, I need to use one of Reader’s other features (like starring or tagging posts) to keep track of older posts which I have not yet read.

I did find that starring items is great for “bookmarking” posts I want to revisit later, particularly for the many posts to which I want to respond in my blog. The “add tags” option has potential, but seems cumbersome. I suspect it is meant to supplement Reader being alternative to social bookmarking sites like Ma.gnolia, when used alongside the option to “share” a post (and have it show in your public profile). This would be quite good for anyone who almost only reads blogs and doesn’t have the need to bookmark non-feed webpages… but I have yet to figure out if it’s possible to integrate Reader’s sharing feature with another Google bookmarking option to be a complete social bookmarking option.

Trying to get the offline feature to work was another exercise in frustration.

Installing Google Gears managed to send Firefox into a potentially infinite loop.

When you click on “offline” in Reader, Google explains how the offline mode works, tells you that you’ll need to install Google Gears, and warns:

This installation requires that you restart your browser, so we recommend you close all other windows before you begin.

After you confirm, a window opens with the splash page for the Google Gears installation. You again need to confirm that you want to proceed with the installation of Google Gears. After confirming again, there is are TOS to be accepted and the installation will then finally begin. The instructions are to allow the installation, and again:

Close and restart your web browser (be sure to close all browser windows).

What they fail to explain is that if you simply use Firefox’s built-in restart button for add-ons, and don’t close the Google Gears installation page prior to restarting, Firefox will try to install Google Gears again when you restart. Fun. I guess that’s why they keep trying to tell you to close all your browser windows.

The offline feature itself does not allow you to “even exit your browser and open it again later while you’re offline.” If it does, it totally wasn’t working for me. I was able to successfully go into offline mode in Reader, then in Firefox, and to be able to read posts in Reader. But no combination of going offline in Reader, Firefox and/or disconnecting from my internet connection allowed me to access Reader after closing Firefox and using it in offline mode after starting it again. Their help page simply indicates that I need to navigate to http://www.google.com/reader/ and it will magically work…but Firefox disagreed, telling me that “Firefox is currently in offline mode and can’t browse the Web. Uncheck “Work Offline” in the File menu, then try again.”. After trying one too many times, Reader now tells me that “synchronization has failed” when I go from offline mode to online mode.

Trying to get help from Google was, not surprisingly, as good as impossible. Their help page for offline mode maintains that:

You can even exit your browser and open it again later while you’re offline. Just enter http://www.google.com/reader/ in your address bar the same way you do when you’re online. (Note, however, that the http://reader.google.com/ form of the address will not work when you’re offline. You may want to check your bookmarks to make sure you have the correct address there.)

If I try to provide feedback that the information was not helpful, I have a maximum of 100 characters to tell Google “how [they] can make this better”. Although it’s an interesting challenge to summarize all of this in 100 characters or less, I don’t think it’s worth the work effort.

Hopefully, testing Liferea will be a less frustrating experience.