Rogers recently sent me a text message offering me "5 free songs" through their urmusic.ca service if I replied "MUSIC." So I did.

About 15 minutes later, I received another text message with 5 redemption codes, each one rendered as a link on my iPhone. Of course, when you click these links, they don't take you to a redemption page, or download a song. They dial a phone number. That's because Rogers chose 7-number long codes, which most modern SMS phones helpfully turn into auto-dial links. Not that Rogers would be able to anticipate that (or heck, even test it). I mean, what are they--a telecommunications company?!?

Ahem. In Rogers defense, the message said to "write down" the numbers. Seems a bit antiquated, but whatever. The next sentence said "Reply REDEEM to download" which I did. My songs never arrived.

Next step was to try the other alternative offered from the text message, "or go to urmusic.ca." So I did. You can see the home page above.

There is no mention of "Redeem your free songs!" anywhere, so after bumbling around for a bit, I finally gave up and tried the Help menu. This is what appeared:

I want you to note the size of the blue scrollbar handle on the right edge of the screen. It's very small. That means the page is very long. In fact, it was 8 screens of tiny type long. This is bad for many reasons, not the least of which is that if your service requires that much help explanation, it is almost guaranteed to suck. After skimming the help documents trying to get it to work, I feel comfortable summing up the service as follows:

PROS:

1. Download unlimited music for $10 a month. If you want it on your phone too, it's $20 a month. Unlimited! Well, except for the songs that aren't included. There are some of those. Probably not the best songs, though. Probably not.

CONS:

1. The music does not sync to an iPhone. Let me say that again: The music does not sync to an iPhone. That would not be a big deal, but Rogers knows I have an iPhone. And they sent me an offer that doesn't work with the hardware they sold me. Imagine that in any other line of business. Imagine selling someone a motorcycle, and then offering them a discount on a roof rack.
2. You have to download another special music player. Hey Rogers: we've all picked our music players by now. Play along.
3. The music player doesn't work on Apple computers. Not a big deal, but a definite technology decision that eliminates a portion of the market that tend to take music pretty seriously.
4. If you stop paying the monthly fees, your music goes away.

I honestly don't mind that Rogers has a service I can't use. I don't expect them to try to make everybody happy, and I understand that being an Apple fan-boy means that occasionally I will miss out on some fun, fun things that only Windows folks can enjoy. But what I do mind is that Rogers has disrupted my afternoon with a completely impossible offer, and they forced me to muck around for 30 minutes until I could deduce it for myself.

What should they (and any other company doing promotion of any kind) have done?

1. Use the information they have to avoid sending me an impossible offer.
2. Include a "iPhones/Macs not included" message in the text (which likely would have led them to step 1, rendering this step unnecessary).
3. Put a huge "Redeem your free music codes!" link on the homepage. Tie your call to action to your landing page. It's online marketing 101.
4. On the redemption page, put a "Does not work with iPhone/Mac" disclaimer somewhere very visible. (Not only would this make me happy as it would solve the riddle, it always seems to make Windows people happy to see Apple fans go without.)

People at Rogers Who Created this Marketing Campaign: you are a bunch of careless douchebags for sending me on a wild goosechase. Also, when your music service dies the imminent, inevitable death it deserves, please remember that while my concerns may not point to the cause of death, if you'd at least attempted to anticipate these completely obvious and annoying problems, I wouldn't feel like spitting on the grave.

So I need to rent a car for a trip to Vancouver. The last time I did this, I just walked up to the counter, and I'm pretty sure I got screwed: over $100 for an overnight rental.

Today I decided to comparison shop, starting with the propaganda on the web site of the airline I'm flying with (WestJet).

As a WestJet passenger, here are the "deals" I can get renting a mid-size vehicle with unlimited kilometres for a 4-day weekend:

Budget ("Free day!" coupon): $184 base + $78 fees/taxes = $262 = $65.50/day

National (no coupon): $273 base + $97 fees/taxes = $370 = $92.50/day

Alamo (no coupon): $142 base + $56 fees/taxes = $198 = $49.50/day

Two hilarious things to note here:

1. Budget is HEAVILY favoured in the WestJet "coupon" advertising media I received. I assume they pay for this treatment, and they aim to win you over quickly by stressing their available deals and coupons. However, even with the "free day" coupon, they were pretty expensive, and by my math, without the coupon, their rate would be over $350.
2. National and Alamo are the same company. In fact, these rates are for exactly the same car, from exactly the same location, with exactly the same conditions. The images above show how their web site reservation systems are essentially identical, except branded with different colours and slightly different verbiage ("booster seat" vs. "toddler seat").

The lesson: don't assume a "coupon" is a good deal. It looks like taking 5 minutes to compare online rates can save you between $60 and $170!

A friend asked me to donate money to some cause. There would be walking, helping the less fortunate, and all that good stuff that I myself am loathe to do. I will donate.

So I went to the web site and started making my donation. When I got down to the section for billing, I was asked to select my title from a list of options in a drop-down box. Being a "Mr." I tabbed to the field and hit the "m" key. "Mr. & Mrs." appeared. One option here would be to hit the "m" key again and see if "Mr." would come next. However, the normal way of sorting text would suggest that "Mr." should come *before* "Mr. & Mrs." so rather than take my chances, I just clicked on the drop-down, hoping I could quickly click on my option.

You can see the resulting list of titles in the picture above. This is possibly the stupidest drop-down in the history of non-joke drop-downs. Rather than put the most common options near the top, the web designer here has chosen to sort them all in alphabetical order (*except* for "Mr. & Mrs.," perhaps because it is the most often-used title) regardless of the popularity of the title. One of the most popular options, "Mr.," is so far down the list I almost have to *scroll* the drop-down to find it.

The list also contained "Mr. & Mrs." again, further down, "Mr. and Mrs.," "Mrs. and Mr.," and at the end of the list, out of alphabetical order for no reason, "Councillor," and "Lieutenant-General (ret'd)." Obviously no currently serving Lieutenant-Generals are welcome to make donations here. Take that, Marcel Duval!

Why is this design decision so stupid? It's the 80/20 rule. 80% of your users will use 20% of the options, or in this case, it will be even more skewed-- more like 95% of your users will use 5% of the options. So, you make the common options easy and quick to find. How many Brigadier Generals or His Excellency Sheikhs do we have in Canada? Few enough that if they really want their title on their tax receipt, they can be the ones to use the scroll bar.

Which raises an interesting question. If I asked for a receipt made out to "Brigadier-General Joshua Prowse," could I still claim it on my taxes? And why is there no "Her Excellency Worship Mayor?" It seems to me that if you're going to go to the OCD extent of listing all of these insane titles, you'd also go to the trouble to be gender neutral.

(Geek Alert: If you are not a computer nerd, this post will have no value to you. Please move along.)

In my classroom we use USB drives as our primary drives, booting up the operating system (Ubuntu) from them, running software from them, and storing documents on them (for a how-to, see my previous post). After doing a "clean" install, I often want to make a perfect duplicate of that drive onto another drive, so that I have a spare ready to go in case a student needs one temporarily.

Unfortunately, the process of duplicating, or "cloning" a USB drive is surprisingly convoluted. The quickest way to do this on a Mac is to use the terminal command dd as outlined below. Be aware that it actually takes longer to clone a drive than it does to perform a manual install, but you don't have to click through the steps, and you will have a complete duplicate of the original USB drive on the second USB drive.

(It goes without saying that you take my advice at your own risk!)

1. Plug in both USB drives (they must be the same size, of course). If prompted that either of the disks is "uninitialized" just click Ignore.
2. Open the terminal and run this command: diskutil list
3. A list of drives will appear. Find your bootable USB (source) and empty USB (destination) drive names. (On my Macbook, they were /dev/disk2 and /dev/disk3 respectively.)
4. In the terminal, type the following command, but replace diskA with your source drive, and diskB with your destination drive: dd if=/dev/diskA of=/dev/diskB conv=notrunc
5. If you get an error message that says "Resource busy" run the Disk Utility program, click each of the partitions on the busy drive, and click the "Unmount" button. Do NOT eject the drive. Then try step 4 again.
6. Wait a long time. When the dd command is finished, you can eject the newly cloned USB and try to boot it up in another computer.

(Thanks to pjen from Flickr.com for the image.)

I would pay an extra 1% on my taxes every year if the government would build one of these every 10 ramps or so.

After year one, when all the signs had been built, they could use the continuing revenue to add educational programs to teach people to count to 4.

That's right, I also think drivers suck at 4-way stops.

My friends gave me a six-pack of delicious Espresso Stout as part of my Xmas present. Their young sons added a homemade card, based on the alcoholic component of my gift.

The inside of the card, shown in the second picture, is so bang on it is scary. Not only is that exactly what I say when offered a beer, but those beer taps are uncannily accurate for two kids in single digits.

(On a bit of a tangent, is there a word for the child of a friend who is so close that the kid calls you "uncle?" He's not really my nephew... can I suggest "nephrew?")

First, a quick back story. For months, I had been setting off the theft alarm contraptions at retail stores. I had no idea why. I never steal, and I feel incredibly guilty even at the implication, so this meant that every time I entered or exited a store, I was extremely stressed out waiting for the siren to stare blaring. It made the holiday shopping season a dread-filled pain in the ass.

But here's the funny thing: Nobody ever stopped me. Ever. Not once. A conservative estimate would be that I set off 100 alarms over the holidays, and I was stopped exactly zero times.

Then in January, I went to Mountain Equipment Co-op (MEC, apparently pronounced "em-ee-see," not "meck") to spend some gift certificates I'd received for Xmas. When I went in, the alarm immediately went off. Obviously I hadn't stolen anything yet, but the smiling staffer by the doors stopped me. Not to frisk me, but to help me figure out why I was setting of the alarm. She took my jacket and vest, ran them each independently through their alarm, and we determined my jacket was the culprit. She went and demagnetized it, and then explained that sometimes when you put your clothes through a wash/dry cycle, they can remagnetize (for the record, I did wash my jacket in the early fall). I haven't set off an alarm since.

MEC's choice to staff their doors with people who deal with alarm events not only deters and identifies actual theft situations, it also quickly and considerately dismisses innocent shoppers. Both of these are great for business. In my case, the staffer went the extra mile to ensure I wouldn't be bothered by the uncomfortable feeling of being thought a thief ever again--they made my life better. There's little more a retailer can do to earn my trust and patronage.

Thanks MEC!

[Postscript: I used my GCs to buy a down winter jacket. The next day, a chinook started and the average temperature hasn't dipped below 0 degrees Celsius since. Go figure.]

You can find this at Toys 'R' Us in the Sadness and Disappointment aisle.

Well, Movember is over, but thanks to everybody who donated. It was a great experience having a mo' for the first time in my life, and confirming what a truly horrible idea it would be, if not for the fact that it helped raise money and awareness for prostate cancer.

I put together a little video for your amusement, and there's still time to donate at http://ca.movember.com/mospace/386150

Enjoy, and thanks again!

I put my winter tires back on my car today. You may recall me taking them off back in May. Let's do some basic math to see how long summer lasts for car tires, courtesy of timeanddate.com:

October 13, 2009 - May 30, 2009 = 136 days (or 4 months, 13 days)

So in Calgary, your summer tires spend roughly two thirds of the year in storage.

(The photo is of my car's bug-covered bumper after driving from Calgary to Winnipeg. In the summer. Sorry, I don't have any pictures of my tires.)