It's an absolutely gorgeous Victoria Day weekend Sunday and here I am blogging about Canadian politics. That is a sign showing how pissed off I am at our Government and the system they are destroying.
As I am sure you have all heard by now, Nigel Wright has resigned as Prime Minister Stephen Harper's Chief of Staff over the $90,000 he gave to Senator Mike Duffy. This was an entirely inappropriate gift by Nigel Wright. Why he did it, and how much Stephen Harper was involved in this is still an open, important question.
With all the focus on Stephen Harper and his PMO, I find one little fact keeps being pushed aside:
Senator Mike Duffy stole at least $90,000 from the Canadian Public, still has that $90K+ and is still sitting and being paid to be a Senator in the Canadian parliament.
This all started because of "misfiled" expenses. Expenses that Mike Duffy was not entitled to and expenses that Prime Minister's PMO went to stupid lengths to help bury and cover up. Mike Duffy claimed over $90,000 in expenses and received that $90,000. He claimed to have paid it back, when in fact, Nigel Wright gave him another $90,000. So at this point Mike Duffy has received $180,000 for expenses that he ought not to have claimed. Mike used $90,000 of that $180,000 to "return those ineligible expenses" which means he still has the original $90,000 he claimed. AND in return for receiving all of this money, the audit investigation against him had the damning findings against him removed.
Mike Duffy has agreed that the expenses were ineligible. The PMO has taken action to "pay back" these ineligible expenses. Mike Duffy still has the original $90,000. Ergo, Mike Duffy is a thief and a liar. And he has and is still profiting from his crimes.
Why is Mike Duffy being protected? Why is he not under arrest for defrauding the Canadian public?
We have a known criminal sitting as a Senator in our government which someone else has taken the fall for. And no one is doing a damned thing about it. Talk about your perfect crimes.
Sunday, May 19, 2013
Sunday, April 7, 2013
RBC Temporary Foreign Worker WTF
RBC has found itself the center of a employment controversy thanks to this article by the CBC.
My Twitter feed exploded this morning over the replacing domestic Canadian jobs with foreigners working on a Visa. The article quotes Dave Moreau, who works in IT systems support as one of the displaced workers. This alarmed me immediately as "IT Systems Support" is how I earn my living. Nothing like the concept that you are replaceable with just anybody from anywhere in the world to get the alarm bells ringing.
But the more I pondered the implications of this story, the more questions it raised. Up until now, all of the focus has been on the Foreign Worker concept. But there is another word being used, one that is just as important. That word is "temporary". Remove "Foreign" from the description, and what we have is permanent employees being replaced with temps. That, unfortunately, is not that unusual a story. Replacing long-term full-time employees with cheap contract temporary employees is a long-standing practice. But it does shed a different perspective on this story.
The whole purpose of this move is obviously a cost-cutting exercise. But the long-term goals here are murky. Not that I have ever managed a business, but I assume the whole transition of employees from permanent to temporary is part of a plan to eliminate those positions entirely. The temporary workers are used as a stop-gap transitional step.
**Quick aside. This is one aspect of journalistic reporting that really annoys me. The story by the CBC quickly goes to the sensational components of how this is affecting individual employees. It doesn't raise or follow the logical questions that arise from this move by RBC. There's lots of data, but very little information, which means everyone is wildly speculating.
One of the skills that RBC is throwing away is institutional skills that the employees have gained over the years. These skills are the soft, but hugely important skills that make employees valuable. When implementing or supporting IT systems, often any expert in an area will know how a particular technology works. But only employees know why a technology was chosen, how that technology is used, its overall importance to the organisation and how it interacts with other systems. There's institutional knowledge required, and it's that skill that takes any technology installation through to implementation and wide use. Any IT nerd can install a system, but only members of a team can implement it and integrate it into the company and its culture.
This is the area that is often overlooked by number crunchers that look at reducing headcount. So maybe it is just a short-sighted cost-cutting exercise that will do more to hurt RBC than it will help them save money. But this is just not sitting right with me. If you're reducing headcount, why would you bother with the hassle of foreign temporary workers? There's tons of young skilled Canadians willing to work for minimum wage, even if it is only a temp job. Any job is better than no job, especially when you need to upgrade or work on your skills. Maybe this is just another case of "never ascribe to a wider conspiracy what stupidity and short-sightedness can accomplish on its own." Maybe this is just an experiment where the problems will eventually outweigh the purported benefits.
But it would be really nice of the follow-up to this story dug a little deeper into that, wouldn't it?
My Twitter feed exploded this morning over the replacing domestic Canadian jobs with foreigners working on a Visa. The article quotes Dave Moreau, who works in IT systems support as one of the displaced workers. This alarmed me immediately as "IT Systems Support" is how I earn my living. Nothing like the concept that you are replaceable with just anybody from anywhere in the world to get the alarm bells ringing.
But the more I pondered the implications of this story, the more questions it raised. Up until now, all of the focus has been on the Foreign Worker concept. But there is another word being used, one that is just as important. That word is "temporary". Remove "Foreign" from the description, and what we have is permanent employees being replaced with temps. That, unfortunately, is not that unusual a story. Replacing long-term full-time employees with cheap contract temporary employees is a long-standing practice. But it does shed a different perspective on this story.
The whole purpose of this move is obviously a cost-cutting exercise. But the long-term goals here are murky. Not that I have ever managed a business, but I assume the whole transition of employees from permanent to temporary is part of a plan to eliminate those positions entirely. The temporary workers are used as a stop-gap transitional step.
**Quick aside. This is one aspect of journalistic reporting that really annoys me. The story by the CBC quickly goes to the sensational components of how this is affecting individual employees. It doesn't raise or follow the logical questions that arise from this move by RBC. There's lots of data, but very little information, which means everyone is wildly speculating.
One of the skills that RBC is throwing away is institutional skills that the employees have gained over the years. These skills are the soft, but hugely important skills that make employees valuable. When implementing or supporting IT systems, often any expert in an area will know how a particular technology works. But only employees know why a technology was chosen, how that technology is used, its overall importance to the organisation and how it interacts with other systems. There's institutional knowledge required, and it's that skill that takes any technology installation through to implementation and wide use. Any IT nerd can install a system, but only members of a team can implement it and integrate it into the company and its culture.
This is the area that is often overlooked by number crunchers that look at reducing headcount. So maybe it is just a short-sighted cost-cutting exercise that will do more to hurt RBC than it will help them save money. But this is just not sitting right with me. If you're reducing headcount, why would you bother with the hassle of foreign temporary workers? There's tons of young skilled Canadians willing to work for minimum wage, even if it is only a temp job. Any job is better than no job, especially when you need to upgrade or work on your skills. Maybe this is just another case of "never ascribe to a wider conspiracy what stupidity and short-sightedness can accomplish on its own." Maybe this is just an experiment where the problems will eventually outweigh the purported benefits.
But it would be really nice of the follow-up to this story dug a little deeper into that, wouldn't it?
Thursday, February 21, 2013
What Blackberry Has to Do to Win Back the Corporate Market
The situation has changed since my review of the Blackberry Z10. I have come to the unfortunate conclusion that Blackberry, the company and its products, is no longer a viable enterprise solution. Given that Blackberry is an Enterprise Solution Provider, that's not good.
The Blackbery 10 corporate experience is buggy and incomplete. On release day our company obtained two Z10s (one of which I reviewed) and I configured them through the Blackberry Enterprise Services 10 solution I deployed. Right away I ran into a bug. Blackberry Z10s would not synchronize with an unencrypted Exchange server. Wait a minute? Unencrypted communications? Are you crazy?
Slow down. Let me explain.
A Blackberry Enterprise Server (a BES) acts as a communication proxy between a Blackberry Handheld and the Exchange (or Lotus Notes brrr.....) e-mail messaging environment. The BES uses private encryption keys to encrypt and authenticate all traffic between the handheld and the BES. The unencrypted link is between the BES and the e-mail server on the private network behind the corporate firewall. To access that unencrypted traffic, a snooper needs direct (and possibly physical) access to the internal private network. That is a different security issue. As far as we're concerned, public communications are still encrypted. Here's a diagram showing what I mean:
(click to embiggen)
A Blackberry Z10 will not synchronize any data (at the time of this blog post) in that setup. The Exchange server needs to have a SSL cert installed and published. For us that meant creating another private key and somehow pushing out that private key to the Blackberry handhelds so that they would trust the encryption as valid and.. well.. that is a bigger pain in the ass then I was willing to go through. Ironically, BlackBerry Playbooks do not suffer from this issue. A Playbook registered through a BES10 server works just fine with an unencrypted mail server. Blackberry Z10s? Nope.
I wound up getting the test working using an encrypted front-end Exchange server link and I thought everything was going just fine. Except. Believe or don't, after the initial data synch, the Blackberry Z10s would no longer synchronize changes to calendar or contact items. E-mail only. At this point I threw up my hands and declared fuck it, we're not supporting Blackberry Z10 devices until Blackberry fixes all the bugs in the BES10 architecture. So, no Blackberry 10 adoption at our company. I have better things to do than to be a bleeding edge alpha release bug-finder for Blackberry. I don't get paid by Blackberry to do that.
And this is whereRIM Blackberry fucked up in my studied and professional opinion. Blackberry threw away their stable BES5 architecture, and built a new one from the ground up and called it BES10. And just like any first release software, it is as buggy as a manure pile. Without the beneficial fertilizer aspects.
So assuming Blackberry quickly fixes all those bugs AND that other corporate customers haven't also given up in frustration, here's two things Blackberry needs to do to win back the corporate market.
1) Increase Exchange integration beyond what is offered through the ActiveSync process. ActiveSync offers only basic e-mail, calendar and contacts access. That's it, and it is also what is available to iPhone/Android and Windows Mobile devices. Microsoft Exchange server offers many other features that are not available through ActiveSync. Blackberry, you used to offer tighter Exchange integration, and you need to do so again. It is those additional features that make you a desirable business product. Not "The Hub" or "Blackberry World" (Or whatever the Blackberry app store is called now.)
2) Blackberry, why the hell didn't you ensure that applications for other key corporate applications were available at launch? I'm not talking about Twitter, Google Maps and Facebook. I'm talking about Citrix Receiver, RSA SecurID softoken, Microsoft Sharepoint Browser, JD Edwards/Oracle, etc. etc. etc. Mobile corporate access is more than just e-mail. It is access to the private infrastructure (the "cloud" to use a hated buzzword) that employees need to do their job. Through the BES you offer a secure VPN tunnel for mobile devices, but there are no applications that take advantage of that access. Right now the Z10 is only a portable web browser with a basic e-mail client. Why is it that I have better corporate access through my legacy Blackberry Bold than your latest flashy solution? Did you focus to much on the consumer market and forget about the corporate market that made you a success in the first place? I realize those options I mentioned require you to partner with third party companies. And it could be hard to convince them to get on board with Blackberry. But you needed to do that. You had to do that. You had no choice.
To say that Blackberry has not done either of these solutions is a "show-stopper" is vastly understating the situation. Citrix, with its XenMobile platform is offering many of those missing features to corporations that have adopted Apple and Android. It is a tragic turn of events that I can get better mobile corporate access using an iPhone and XenMobile than I can with a Z10 and BES10. So dearest Blackberry, Citrix (and other competitors) is eating your lunch. Pretty soon you're going to be dinner too, and there won't be a damned thing left of you that anyone wants. You won't even be worth acquiring because other solutions will be better than what you offer.
If I were a betting person, I'd bet that in the near future Blackberry is sold off for the worth of its patents and nothing more. Anyone want to take that bet? I want to be wrong, private market economics dictates we need viable competitive options. But the private market does not suffer fools and incompetents, and Blackberry is quickly proving to me that they are that type of company.
The Blackbery 10 corporate experience is buggy and incomplete. On release day our company obtained two Z10s (one of which I reviewed) and I configured them through the Blackberry Enterprise Services 10 solution I deployed. Right away I ran into a bug. Blackberry Z10s would not synchronize with an unencrypted Exchange server. Wait a minute? Unencrypted communications? Are you crazy?
Slow down. Let me explain.
A Blackberry Enterprise Server (a BES) acts as a communication proxy between a Blackberry Handheld and the Exchange (or Lotus Notes brrr.....) e-mail messaging environment. The BES uses private encryption keys to encrypt and authenticate all traffic between the handheld and the BES. The unencrypted link is between the BES and the e-mail server on the private network behind the corporate firewall. To access that unencrypted traffic, a snooper needs direct (and possibly physical) access to the internal private network. That is a different security issue. As far as we're concerned, public communications are still encrypted. Here's a diagram showing what I mean:
(click to embiggen)
A Blackberry Z10 will not synchronize any data (at the time of this blog post) in that setup. The Exchange server needs to have a SSL cert installed and published. For us that meant creating another private key and somehow pushing out that private key to the Blackberry handhelds so that they would trust the encryption as valid and.. well.. that is a bigger pain in the ass then I was willing to go through. Ironically, BlackBerry Playbooks do not suffer from this issue. A Playbook registered through a BES10 server works just fine with an unencrypted mail server. Blackberry Z10s? Nope.
I wound up getting the test working using an encrypted front-end Exchange server link and I thought everything was going just fine. Except. Believe or don't, after the initial data synch, the Blackberry Z10s would no longer synchronize changes to calendar or contact items. E-mail only. At this point I threw up my hands and declared fuck it, we're not supporting Blackberry Z10 devices until Blackberry fixes all the bugs in the BES10 architecture. So, no Blackberry 10 adoption at our company. I have better things to do than to be a bleeding edge alpha release bug-finder for Blackberry. I don't get paid by Blackberry to do that.
And this is where
So assuming Blackberry quickly fixes all those bugs AND that other corporate customers haven't also given up in frustration, here's two things Blackberry needs to do to win back the corporate market.
1) Increase Exchange integration beyond what is offered through the ActiveSync process. ActiveSync offers only basic e-mail, calendar and contacts access. That's it, and it is also what is available to iPhone/Android and Windows Mobile devices. Microsoft Exchange server offers many other features that are not available through ActiveSync. Blackberry, you used to offer tighter Exchange integration, and you need to do so again. It is those additional features that make you a desirable business product. Not "The Hub" or "Blackberry World" (Or whatever the Blackberry app store is called now.)
2) Blackberry, why the hell didn't you ensure that applications for other key corporate applications were available at launch? I'm not talking about Twitter, Google Maps and Facebook. I'm talking about Citrix Receiver, RSA SecurID softoken, Microsoft Sharepoint Browser, JD Edwards/Oracle, etc. etc. etc. Mobile corporate access is more than just e-mail. It is access to the private infrastructure (the "cloud" to use a hated buzzword) that employees need to do their job. Through the BES you offer a secure VPN tunnel for mobile devices, but there are no applications that take advantage of that access. Right now the Z10 is only a portable web browser with a basic e-mail client. Why is it that I have better corporate access through my legacy Blackberry Bold than your latest flashy solution? Did you focus to much on the consumer market and forget about the corporate market that made you a success in the first place? I realize those options I mentioned require you to partner with third party companies. And it could be hard to convince them to get on board with Blackberry. But you needed to do that. You had to do that. You had no choice.
To say that Blackberry has not done either of these solutions is a "show-stopper" is vastly understating the situation. Citrix, with its XenMobile platform is offering many of those missing features to corporations that have adopted Apple and Android. It is a tragic turn of events that I can get better mobile corporate access using an iPhone and XenMobile than I can with a Z10 and BES10. So dearest Blackberry, Citrix (and other competitors) is eating your lunch. Pretty soon you're going to be dinner too, and there won't be a damned thing left of you that anyone wants. You won't even be worth acquiring because other solutions will be better than what you offer.
If I were a betting person, I'd bet that in the near future Blackberry is sold off for the worth of its patents and nothing more. Anyone want to take that bet? I want to be wrong, private market economics dictates we need viable competitive options. But the private market does not suffer fools and incompetents, and Blackberry is quickly proving to me that they are that type of company.
Wednesday, February 20, 2013
About that Canada Soccer's Wellness to World Cup Long-Term Player Development Thing
"Ontario youth soccer to stop keeping score, standings. It’s part of a well-established, research-supported and holistic approach to player development, common in soccer-rich countries and endorsed by the sport’s brightest minds."
So says this article in the Toronto Star.
Ideally, I do agree with the concept that soccer in Canada needs to do more to focus on skills and player development. Cambridge Youth Soccer (the league my sons play in) has supposedly adopted this approach already.
My eldest son is 8. He's been playing soccer since he was two, outdoor and indoor. Never once has he played competitive soccer where scores were kept or standings were maintained. He has a crap-load of participation medals and trophies. Apparently that will continue until he enters high school. No competition until the age of 13. Adults claiming to know better have said so.
After six years of player development focus, how much has he developed? Not a whole heck of a lot.
Soccer in Canada is not like hockey. We don't have a cultural affinity to it with committed parents and volunteers dedicated to teaching the game. Soccer coaches are whatever parent can be shanghaied into coaching, whether they know anything about soccer or not. Some harried overworked parent shows up, hands out uniforms and gives the kids a ball to kick around. That's pretty much it. I'm not blaming these parents, I wouldn't do much better.
Every once in a while, you do get a coach whose cultural background is soccer. (Or football actually. Sign of how serious you take the sport is what you call it. If you call it soccer, you don't care about the sport.) That coach usually is much better and more dedicated than the average Canadian parent upset that their cottage time is impacted by soccer season. But that's the exception, not the norm.
The Canadian Soccer Association has developed a system that doesn't value winning, and doesn't value skill development either. They say they value skill development, but I haven't seen any evidence of that. So what do we have? A bunch of kids running around a field with a ball doing their own natural skills development. And the parents pay for it. What a return on that investment huh? The kids could get the same value and skills just playing pick-up soccer during recess at school. Except that kids are not allowed to run around and kick a ball at school anymore. That's too dangerous, someone could get hurt.
Soccer in Canada. Organized recess for kids paid for by the parents. Skills and player development? Be nice if it ever happened. The soccer of my youth had the same lack of skills development, but at least it was competitive. And you know what? Even though I was an average bench-warming player, I still had a lot of fun. Kids today aren't even allowed that.
So says this article in the Toronto Star.
Ideally, I do agree with the concept that soccer in Canada needs to do more to focus on skills and player development. Cambridge Youth Soccer (the league my sons play in) has supposedly adopted this approach already.
My eldest son is 8. He's been playing soccer since he was two, outdoor and indoor. Never once has he played competitive soccer where scores were kept or standings were maintained. He has a crap-load of participation medals and trophies. Apparently that will continue until he enters high school. No competition until the age of 13. Adults claiming to know better have said so.
After six years of player development focus, how much has he developed? Not a whole heck of a lot.
Soccer in Canada is not like hockey. We don't have a cultural affinity to it with committed parents and volunteers dedicated to teaching the game. Soccer coaches are whatever parent can be shanghaied into coaching, whether they know anything about soccer or not. Some harried overworked parent shows up, hands out uniforms and gives the kids a ball to kick around. That's pretty much it. I'm not blaming these parents, I wouldn't do much better.
Every once in a while, you do get a coach whose cultural background is soccer. (Or football actually. Sign of how serious you take the sport is what you call it. If you call it soccer, you don't care about the sport.) That coach usually is much better and more dedicated than the average Canadian parent upset that their cottage time is impacted by soccer season. But that's the exception, not the norm.
The Canadian Soccer Association has developed a system that doesn't value winning, and doesn't value skill development either. They say they value skill development, but I haven't seen any evidence of that. So what do we have? A bunch of kids running around a field with a ball doing their own natural skills development. And the parents pay for it. What a return on that investment huh? The kids could get the same value and skills just playing pick-up soccer during recess at school. Except that kids are not allowed to run around and kick a ball at school anymore. That's too dangerous, someone could get hurt.
Soccer in Canada. Organized recess for kids paid for by the parents. Skills and player development? Be nice if it ever happened. The soccer of my youth had the same lack of skills development, but at least it was competitive. And you know what? Even though I was an average bench-warming player, I still had a lot of fun. Kids today aren't even allowed that.
Saturday, February 16, 2013
Society is Designed for a Family of Four
*Warning: All three of the following links will count against your monthly free access to the Globe And Mail website.
The Globe and Mail has had a series of articles detailing the issues around falling fertility rates. Doug Saunders has written a couple of excellent articles. Sheryl Ubelacker wondered why Canadian families are settling on having only one or two children and came up empty.
The answer to that last is incredibly obvious to me, so obvious that I must be wrong. But the simple fact as I see it is that Canadian society has designed itself to accommodate families of four. Anything larger than that and you face extra obstacles and extra financial burdens.
As regular readers know, I have two sons (currently aged 6 and 8). My wife and I debated having more children, but practical considerations stopped us. When I chat with friends and colleagues about this I find we all run into the same roadblocks.
The first consideration is sleeping arrangements. Many homes are three bedroom. My wife and I have one room and each son has their own. If we had another child, where would it sleep? Do I spend money on renovations and build a fourth bedroom in the basement? Do we have two of the children share one room and one gets its own? The inherent unfairness of that just didn't sit well with us. Admittedly, children having their own room is a relatively recent social invention. I remember a sleep-over at a friends house when I was young lad. That family had six children at home. 4 boys and 2 girls. The two youngest sons not only shared a room, they shared a bed. And I slept with them. As a child that had his own room, that was an eye-opening (literally-I barely slept at all) experience.
But assuming you solve that, families run into a transportation issue. How do you fit three car-seats into a vehicle with two rows of seating? (Yes I've written about this before, but it's a legitimate issue.) The middle seat in the back row is unusable once two car-seats are installed, so you either spend weeks shopping for the skinniest model car seats you can find, or you buy a larger, heavier, more expensive fuel sucking vehicle with three rows of seating.
And then there's travel. Family vacation packages are designed for families of four (extra children cost extra $$). Hotel rooms accommodate up to four people. Restaurants accommodate four people around a table, buses,trains etc. accommodate four people on two benches. Heck, as our annual vacation we go camping with a pop-up tent trailer where the sleeping bunks accommodate a total of.. you guessed it.. four people.
(As an odd semi-related note, my wife and I noticed a weird issue when we were shopping for a new dining room table. Tables have shrunk in size over the years such that we had a hard time finding a table large enough all four of us can sit around and still serve ourselves from dishes of food set out on the table (pass-the-mashed-potatoes kind of setup). It appears home-cooking is so passe that we no longer have furniture designed for eating at home.)
Throw in the straight financial considerations of daycare, clubs, activities and many of us parents quickly decide that an extra child is just not worth the hassle. The simple fact is, parents with three or more children face burdens unrelated to the direct responsibility of raising children. If you have three or more children, the problems you face are exponential, not linear.
So yes, while we actually wouldn't have minded more children, we threw in the towel at two kids. As I see it, if we want to truly tackle the fertility crises, society and governments have to come to the realization that our issues are also structural. Society is designed for a family of four, and it is a heck of a lot easier to fit in with that design than it is to fight it.
The Globe and Mail has had a series of articles detailing the issues around falling fertility rates. Doug Saunders has written a couple of excellent articles. Sheryl Ubelacker wondered why Canadian families are settling on having only one or two children and came up empty.
The answer to that last is incredibly obvious to me, so obvious that I must be wrong. But the simple fact as I see it is that Canadian society has designed itself to accommodate families of four. Anything larger than that and you face extra obstacles and extra financial burdens.
As regular readers know, I have two sons (currently aged 6 and 8). My wife and I debated having more children, but practical considerations stopped us. When I chat with friends and colleagues about this I find we all run into the same roadblocks.
The first consideration is sleeping arrangements. Many homes are three bedroom. My wife and I have one room and each son has their own. If we had another child, where would it sleep? Do I spend money on renovations and build a fourth bedroom in the basement? Do we have two of the children share one room and one gets its own? The inherent unfairness of that just didn't sit well with us. Admittedly, children having their own room is a relatively recent social invention. I remember a sleep-over at a friends house when I was young lad. That family had six children at home. 4 boys and 2 girls. The two youngest sons not only shared a room, they shared a bed. And I slept with them. As a child that had his own room, that was an eye-opening (literally-I barely slept at all) experience.
But assuming you solve that, families run into a transportation issue. How do you fit three car-seats into a vehicle with two rows of seating? (Yes I've written about this before, but it's a legitimate issue.) The middle seat in the back row is unusable once two car-seats are installed, so you either spend weeks shopping for the skinniest model car seats you can find, or you buy a larger, heavier, more expensive fuel sucking vehicle with three rows of seating.
And then there's travel. Family vacation packages are designed for families of four (extra children cost extra $$). Hotel rooms accommodate up to four people. Restaurants accommodate four people around a table, buses,trains etc. accommodate four people on two benches. Heck, as our annual vacation we go camping with a pop-up tent trailer where the sleeping bunks accommodate a total of.. you guessed it.. four people.
(As an odd semi-related note, my wife and I noticed a weird issue when we were shopping for a new dining room table. Tables have shrunk in size over the years such that we had a hard time finding a table large enough all four of us can sit around and still serve ourselves from dishes of food set out on the table (pass-the-mashed-potatoes kind of setup). It appears home-cooking is so passe that we no longer have furniture designed for eating at home.)
Throw in the straight financial considerations of daycare, clubs, activities and many of us parents quickly decide that an extra child is just not worth the hassle. The simple fact is, parents with three or more children face burdens unrelated to the direct responsibility of raising children. If you have three or more children, the problems you face are exponential, not linear.
So yes, while we actually wouldn't have minded more children, we threw in the towel at two kids. As I see it, if we want to truly tackle the fertility crises, society and governments have to come to the realization that our issues are also structural. Society is designed for a family of four, and it is a heck of a lot easier to fit in with that design than it is to fight it.
Saturday, February 9, 2013
Blackberry Z10 Review
Let me start this review by answering the question at the top of all your minds, "Catelli, as an ardent Blackberry fan, do you like the new Blackberry Z10?"
After 5 days, with absolutely no reservations whatsoever, I can answer with an unqualified "I'm not sure."
I'll wait for you to pick yourself up from the floor and recover from the shock that resulted from that statement.
If I could design my own ideal smartphone I would start with a Blackberry Bold, give it a larger screen, faster processor and a better web browser with HTML5 and flash support. And not change anything else. The Blackberry Z10 is not that phone. It is not an incremental change, it is a radical change, and I am not a radical.
The first issue for me is that I am one of those people for whom touch screens are an annoying inconsistent experience. Doesn't matter who makes them, my experience with them all is the same. I suffer from some sort of defect where my fingers don't consistently register with touchscreens. Touch gestures are a frustrating experience of multiple retries until the screen senses what I am trying to do. (Some days are better than others, I think I have a dryness/lack of finger-oil issue.) While the handy Blackberry mouse-pad on my Bold is a blissfully consistent, fast and accurate experience, I am handicapped in a touch screen world. I also have this problem with Apple/Android/etc. The Blackberry Z10 unfortunately does not solve this problem for me.
So yes, I have biases, and I'm going to try to identify that whenever I can in this review.
In theory, I am the customer that Blackberry's are designed for. I work in a corporate environment that is heavily reliant on a Microsoft Exchange e-mail system. I rely on a fast and accurate keyboard so that I can type long-winded multiparagraph missives to my peers. In that scenario a Blackberry Bold scored a solid A+++. The Blackberry Z10? B- at best.
The touchscreen keyboard on the Z10 is the best touch keyboard I've tried. But it is not as good as a physical keyboard. It's close, but it isn't perfect. So if you are a Blackberry keyboard fan, wait until the Q10 comes out. It is true that the predictive typing aspect on the Z10 is uncanny. Sometimes I have been able to type an entire sentence by just flicking words up. (But yes, flicking for me is one of those inconsistent gesture issues.) What is annoying is that the Z10 will also suggest words by replacing the onscreen space key with the suggested word. I am regularly running into an issue where I type a none dictionary word, like "Proliant" (as in the servers from HP). After typing that word, I need to type a space, but the space key is replaced with the suggested word "Proline". I need to type a space, but I no longer have a space key. Which slows me down and screws up sentences I am trying to type. I haven't yet found the solution to that issue (if there is one.) So far I have to accept the suggested word, backspace over the last character, and at that time the Z10 will replace the suggested word with the word I typed and will then give me my space key back. Frustrating doesn't begin to describe the experience. (UPDATER: Solution to this issue found here. You can either swipe-up your original word or disable the spell-check/suggested word option on the space key. One annoyance solved.)
What also hurts the corporate customer market is the new Blackberry Enterprise Server. To support the Blackberry 10,RIM Blackberry redeveloped the back-end server software that integrates the Blackberry handhelds with the corporate network. This is where RIM Blackberry (quite possibly) have shot themselves in the foot and have thrown away a huge advantage in the business world. Previously, the Blackberry integration with Microsoft Exchange was the best in the market. To the point that a Blackberry had better integration than Microsoft's own Outlook e-mail client. The one feature I heavily relied on was access to Exchange Public Folders. Rather than everyone in the IT Dept. having to maintain their own contact list, we had a shared Contacts folder where we would enter all of our vendors/support contacts/etc. If I updated one of those contacts, everyone that shared that folder would get that update immediately. Through the Blackberry Enterprise Server, I could access those contacts via my Blackberry. I couldn't do that with an iPhone or an Android, which is why I was holding onto my antiquated Blackberry Bold.
The new Blackberry Enterprise Server no longer supports that functionality. In fact, Blackberry now uses Microsoft's own crappy-as-all-shit Activesync interface to integrate with Microsoft Exchange. Which means that the e-mail functionality on a Blackberry is the exact same functionality on an iPhone or Android device which also use Activesync. So why then would businesses go back to adopting Blackberry's over iPhones and Androids? Damned if I know.
Which leads me to the Blackberry Hub. The Hub is where you can quickly access your e-mail/texts/Twitter and Facebook messages with one handy-dandy gesture all from one spot. I understand what they are trying to achieve with this feature, but it isn't exactly something I like. For one thing, the Calendar is missing from the hub. If I want to review my schedule, I have to open the calendar app separately and then hub into my e-mail to suggest dates to my contact through e-mail. Calendaring/tasks and e-mail are integrated features that should operate together as seamlessly as possible. If the Hub did that, then I'd be all over it like a teenager on an Apple store gift-card.
On my Bold I had four e-mail accounts (yes four) configured. As each mailbox had its own icon on my homescreen, I could always tell at a glance if a received message was work/personal or other. Without having to open any e-mail I knew what I could ignore at any given time if I was in a meeting or doing something of high importance. This is something an Apple device does awkwardly at best, and something that Blackberry Hub does only slightly better. The one thing the Hub does not do for me, even though I told it to stop, was to stop notifying me of Twitter events. I configured the hub to ignore my Twitter account, but it refuses to do so. So the Hub notifies me of new messages from my e-mail accounts as well as my Twitter account. I only want it to notify me of my e-mail. Twitter is not important to me and can wait for me to manually check it.
So what else bothers me? Well I had to uninstall the preloaded Blackberry Maps and Twitter applications. Both sucked as much as any application can suck. Period. End-of-discussion. They stink and are 100% unusable.
However, I did take advantage of the Blackberry ability to side-load Android apps. I now have the Android versions of Google Maps and Twitter on my Z10. (Sidenote. The Android Twitter app is somehow integrated into the Blackberry hub as noted above, even though I uninstalled the Blackberry Twitter app. In my opinion that should not be possible. But it may be an incompatibility issue between the Hub and the Android version of Twitter.) But because these are not native apps, the experience is less than perfect. Twitter has a slightly chunky feel where the touch interface is jerky and jumpy rather than slides smoothly. But it still beats the native Blackberry twitter app.
Android Google Maps has other issues. I rely Google Maps with the Traffic layer to plan my daily commute. I have a dashboard mount where I would place my Blackberry Bold and watch the traffic updates for the road ahead. If the 401 into Toronto showed red (as it usually does) I would exit the highway and take a different route. Since I am driving for about an hour, I can't have the phone or the application go into sleep mode and turn off the display. On my Bold I would use an app called Always On to override the screen timeout when Google Maps was running. Very handy. The native Blackberry Maps on a Z10 automatically disables the auto-sleep and would keep the map on the screen. So that's a win right? But as the traffic updates would always inaccurately show every highway as uncongested and smooth driving all the way, its utility was about -80 on a scale of 1 to 100. Like I said, Blackberry Maps is useless. Period. Because I sideloaded the Android version of Google Maps, the screen would constantly sleep every 5 minutes when I was testing it on my drive home this past Thursday. Even more annoyingly, when I reactivated the screen, the Google Maps app would close the map and go back to the default start screen and tell me what businesses were close to my current location. So for any Android users out there, if you are using Google Maps, and your Android goes to sleep, what happens when you wake it back up? Does Google Maps remember what you last did, or does it close your map and go back to the start screen?
So what do I like about the Z10? Well for the most part, it is a solidly executed device. The larger screen is an improvement over my old BB Bold. Web browsing is fantastic, and the Flash engine is so fast I can even play the games on sites like Kongregate.com. Launching and switching between apps is a fluid experience that puts an iPad/iPhone to shame. Having four minimized-but-active applications on the home screen is also quite sweet. (What I would like Blackberry to change is how the Phone app behaves. When I finish a phone call, I want the app to close automatically. I do not need it to stay on the screen and show me my call history.) Taking and editing photos is simple and effective. (Annoyingly, unlike the Bold, the Z10 does not include the date when saving the picture. On the Bold, images automatically saved as IMG-20130209-XXX.JPG. On the Z10, they're just simply numbered IMG_00000001.jpg, IMG_00000002.jpg, etc. Fortunately, if you delete IMG_00000002 but keep IMG_00000001 and IMG_00000003, the next picture you take will be saved as IMG_00000004. So at least they're still sequentially stored, date/time wise. Just without the convenience of knowing when you took the photo by looking at the filename.)
And unlike an iPhone, you can still hook up a Z10 and access the filesystem on it anyway you want. I like being able to sort/move/delete files through Windows Explorer, hell even the command prompt. The choice is mine. Yes, you have to install the entire Blackberry Link package just to install the basic device drivers, but once installed, you never have to start Link if you never ever want to. Not for media transferring anyway. Copy/cut/paste is good enough for me!
So where does this all leave me? Well, the Z10 has promise. The OS and hardware are solid. Certain key features need tweaking and the apps have to be developed and made available as quickly as possible. Since Blackberry thew away what advantage they had with the Blackberry Enterprise-Exchange server integration, it is the App Store hill that Blackberry will live or die on.
In the meantime, I just may go back to my Blackberry Bold. And then hold onto it as long as that sweet little device continues to function. I'm giving the Z10 one more week before I decide for sure.
After 5 days, with absolutely no reservations whatsoever, I can answer with an unqualified "I'm not sure."
I'll wait for you to pick yourself up from the floor and recover from the shock that resulted from that statement.
If I could design my own ideal smartphone I would start with a Blackberry Bold, give it a larger screen, faster processor and a better web browser with HTML5 and flash support. And not change anything else. The Blackberry Z10 is not that phone. It is not an incremental change, it is a radical change, and I am not a radical.
The first issue for me is that I am one of those people for whom touch screens are an annoying inconsistent experience. Doesn't matter who makes them, my experience with them all is the same. I suffer from some sort of defect where my fingers don't consistently register with touchscreens. Touch gestures are a frustrating experience of multiple retries until the screen senses what I am trying to do. (Some days are better than others, I think I have a dryness/lack of finger-oil issue.) While the handy Blackberry mouse-pad on my Bold is a blissfully consistent, fast and accurate experience, I am handicapped in a touch screen world. I also have this problem with Apple/Android/etc. The Blackberry Z10 unfortunately does not solve this problem for me.
So yes, I have biases, and I'm going to try to identify that whenever I can in this review.
In theory, I am the customer that Blackberry's are designed for. I work in a corporate environment that is heavily reliant on a Microsoft Exchange e-mail system. I rely on a fast and accurate keyboard so that I can type long-winded multiparagraph missives to my peers. In that scenario a Blackberry Bold scored a solid A+++. The Blackberry Z10? B- at best.
The touchscreen keyboard on the Z10 is the best touch keyboard I've tried. But it is not as good as a physical keyboard. It's close, but it isn't perfect. So if you are a Blackberry keyboard fan, wait until the Q10 comes out. It is true that the predictive typing aspect on the Z10 is uncanny. Sometimes I have been able to type an entire sentence by just flicking words up. (But yes, flicking for me is one of those inconsistent gesture issues.) What is annoying is that the Z10 will also suggest words by replacing the onscreen space key with the suggested word. I am regularly running into an issue where I type a none dictionary word, like "Proliant" (as in the servers from HP). After typing that word, I need to type a space, but the space key is replaced with the suggested word "Proline". I need to type a space, but I no longer have a space key. Which slows me down and screws up sentences I am trying to type. I haven't yet found the solution to that issue (if there is one.) So far I have to accept the suggested word, backspace over the last character, and at that time the Z10 will replace the suggested word with the word I typed and will then give me my space key back. Frustrating doesn't begin to describe the experience. (UPDATER: Solution to this issue found here. You can either swipe-up your original word or disable the spell-check/suggested word option on the space key. One annoyance solved.)
What also hurts the corporate customer market is the new Blackberry Enterprise Server. To support the Blackberry 10,
The new Blackberry Enterprise Server no longer supports that functionality. In fact, Blackberry now uses Microsoft's own crappy-as-all-shit Activesync interface to integrate with Microsoft Exchange. Which means that the e-mail functionality on a Blackberry is the exact same functionality on an iPhone or Android device which also use Activesync. So why then would businesses go back to adopting Blackberry's over iPhones and Androids? Damned if I know.
Which leads me to the Blackberry Hub. The Hub is where you can quickly access your e-mail/texts/Twitter and Facebook messages with one handy-dandy gesture all from one spot. I understand what they are trying to achieve with this feature, but it isn't exactly something I like. For one thing, the Calendar is missing from the hub. If I want to review my schedule, I have to open the calendar app separately and then hub into my e-mail to suggest dates to my contact through e-mail. Calendaring/tasks and e-mail are integrated features that should operate together as seamlessly as possible. If the Hub did that, then I'd be all over it like a teenager on an Apple store gift-card.
On my Bold I had four e-mail accounts (yes four) configured. As each mailbox had its own icon on my homescreen, I could always tell at a glance if a received message was work/personal or other. Without having to open any e-mail I knew what I could ignore at any given time if I was in a meeting or doing something of high importance. This is something an Apple device does awkwardly at best, and something that Blackberry Hub does only slightly better. The one thing the Hub does not do for me, even though I told it to stop, was to stop notifying me of Twitter events. I configured the hub to ignore my Twitter account, but it refuses to do so. So the Hub notifies me of new messages from my e-mail accounts as well as my Twitter account. I only want it to notify me of my e-mail. Twitter is not important to me and can wait for me to manually check it.
So what else bothers me? Well I had to uninstall the preloaded Blackberry Maps and Twitter applications. Both sucked as much as any application can suck. Period. End-of-discussion. They stink and are 100% unusable.
However, I did take advantage of the Blackberry ability to side-load Android apps. I now have the Android versions of Google Maps and Twitter on my Z10. (Sidenote. The Android Twitter app is somehow integrated into the Blackberry hub as noted above, even though I uninstalled the Blackberry Twitter app. In my opinion that should not be possible. But it may be an incompatibility issue between the Hub and the Android version of Twitter.) But because these are not native apps, the experience is less than perfect. Twitter has a slightly chunky feel where the touch interface is jerky and jumpy rather than slides smoothly. But it still beats the native Blackberry twitter app.
Android Google Maps has other issues. I rely Google Maps with the Traffic layer to plan my daily commute. I have a dashboard mount where I would place my Blackberry Bold and watch the traffic updates for the road ahead. If the 401 into Toronto showed red (as it usually does) I would exit the highway and take a different route. Since I am driving for about an hour, I can't have the phone or the application go into sleep mode and turn off the display. On my Bold I would use an app called Always On to override the screen timeout when Google Maps was running. Very handy. The native Blackberry Maps on a Z10 automatically disables the auto-sleep and would keep the map on the screen. So that's a win right? But as the traffic updates would always inaccurately show every highway as uncongested and smooth driving all the way, its utility was about -80 on a scale of 1 to 100. Like I said, Blackberry Maps is useless. Period. Because I sideloaded the Android version of Google Maps, the screen would constantly sleep every 5 minutes when I was testing it on my drive home this past Thursday. Even more annoyingly, when I reactivated the screen, the Google Maps app would close the map and go back to the default start screen and tell me what businesses were close to my current location. So for any Android users out there, if you are using Google Maps, and your Android goes to sleep, what happens when you wake it back up? Does Google Maps remember what you last did, or does it close your map and go back to the start screen?
So what do I like about the Z10? Well for the most part, it is a solidly executed device. The larger screen is an improvement over my old BB Bold. Web browsing is fantastic, and the Flash engine is so fast I can even play the games on sites like Kongregate.com. Launching and switching between apps is a fluid experience that puts an iPad/iPhone to shame. Having four minimized-but-active applications on the home screen is also quite sweet. (What I would like Blackberry to change is how the Phone app behaves. When I finish a phone call, I want the app to close automatically. I do not need it to stay on the screen and show me my call history.) Taking and editing photos is simple and effective. (Annoyingly, unlike the Bold, the Z10 does not include the date when saving the picture. On the Bold, images automatically saved as IMG-20130209-XXX.JPG. On the Z10, they're just simply numbered IMG_00000001.jpg, IMG_00000002.jpg, etc. Fortunately, if you delete IMG_00000002 but keep IMG_00000001 and IMG_00000003, the next picture you take will be saved as IMG_00000004. So at least they're still sequentially stored, date/time wise. Just without the convenience of knowing when you took the photo by looking at the filename.)
And unlike an iPhone, you can still hook up a Z10 and access the filesystem on it anyway you want. I like being able to sort/move/delete files through Windows Explorer, hell even the command prompt. The choice is mine. Yes, you have to install the entire Blackberry Link package just to install the basic device drivers, but once installed, you never have to start Link if you never ever want to. Not for media transferring anyway. Copy/cut/paste is good enough for me!
So where does this all leave me? Well, the Z10 has promise. The OS and hardware are solid. Certain key features need tweaking and the apps have to be developed and made available as quickly as possible. Since Blackberry thew away what advantage they had with the Blackberry Enterprise-Exchange server integration, it is the App Store hill that Blackberry will live or die on.
In the meantime, I just may go back to my Blackberry Bold. And then hold onto it as long as that sweet little device continues to function. I'm giving the Z10 one more week before I decide for sure.
Tuesday, January 15, 2013
Internet Meme - True Story
Back in 1989 I was an indifferent High School student taking Grade 12 Chemistry. On the Chemistry final (that I was well on my way to failing) we had the question "Is Hell Exothermic or Endothermic?" My answer, I swear, was nearly identical to the one listed here at Snopes.com
Imagine my surprise when I received an e-mail from my sister around 1996/1997 forwarding the claim that this answer was given in a Chemistry University course in Texas (or some other state). I was amazed and floored. I had always wanted to find out if my teacher had shared my answer and thus an Internet meme was born. I was never able to confirm that; and chances are the meme was sourced from the parody listed in the Snopes article.
But part of me will always wonder if it was my answer was the one that triggered that meme...
For the record, I have no idea what I scored on that exam, and I only passed Chemistry with a score of 50%. And it is my opinion that was a sympathy mark from my teacher so I could get my credit. BUT. It is not FALSE that a student wrote that cheeky answer on an exam final. I did it. Cross my fingers, hope to die, I wrote that answer.
Oh, and Mr. Ferguson? Thanks for the 50%. I did not earn it.
Imagine my surprise when I received an e-mail from my sister around 1996/1997 forwarding the claim that this answer was given in a Chemistry University course in Texas (or some other state). I was amazed and floored. I had always wanted to find out if my teacher had shared my answer and thus an Internet meme was born. I was never able to confirm that; and chances are the meme was sourced from the parody listed in the Snopes article.
But part of me will always wonder if it was my answer was the one that triggered that meme...
For the record, I have no idea what I scored on that exam, and I only passed Chemistry with a score of 50%. And it is my opinion that was a sympathy mark from my teacher so I could get my credit. BUT. It is not FALSE that a student wrote that cheeky answer on an exam final. I did it. Cross my fingers, hope to die, I wrote that answer.
Oh, and Mr. Ferguson? Thanks for the 50%. I did not earn it.
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