Random thought exchange

I want to take this time to reflect on the past year.

May this upcoming year be filled with joy, happiness, love, health and properity – not specifically in that order.  :-)

Last year I took the time to make a great word cloud based on the keywords used to get to my website. I decided to do the same this year. So here it is…

David Pisarek's website word cloud for 2010

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It doesn’t matter who Rosalee or I voted for. That’s not the point of this article.

The situation

No, this has nothing to do with Jersey-shore characters.

Back in 2007 we received the keys to our brand new house in the brand new sub-division we bought in. We officially moved into the house in mid-January 2008, and shortly afterwards we both updated our addresses for our passports (they needed renewal anyways), OHIP and Driver’s Licenses.

We both knew about the By-Election that’s happening today – from media coverage, mass mailings we’ve received and all of the phone calls from the various candidates offices asking for our support.

Earlier today I had a thought – I wondered why we hadn’t received a voters registration card or any details in the mail, so I went to this page to lookup where to vote.

Once Rosalee came home, we both headed over to the venue. Immediately we were greeted by a gentleman who asked if he could assist. We told him that we never received a card in the mail. He pointed out a booth to his right for us to walk over to.  We went to the booth, and gave our driver’s licenses. The lady flipped through her binder, and found Rosalee’s name, but it had the wrong address. It had an address that’s one street behind ours – but it had the right house number and the right postal code! I don’t get it! From everything that I can find, our postal code is valid for only even numbers on our street, and odd numbers on the street behind us.

When she went to look-up my name, I wasn’t in the book at all. My cousins are – they moved into the area within the last year, and we’ve been here nearly three.

How can the municipalities have our details right and not the fed’s? We received all the information for the municipal election without any problem. There is absolutely no reason why I wasn’t on the federal list for today’s vote.

My opinion on the solution

There needs to be a unified connection and communication between database systems and storage procedures. Once someone updates or applies their address for a vehicle registration, health card, driver’s license, tax submission, marriage license, etc it needs to trigger other updates to happen. The government MUST start a system to gather census details, and merge it with the appropriate areas. Yes, that’s a very high-level overview as to how the systems should run, and yes, there are a lot of technical details and processes that would have to be ironed out. And yes, it will cost some serious cash to make it happen. but it’s a one-time deal. Once the system is up and running, it should catch nearly all of the changes, and make for a more customer-focused experience for all Canadians.

Conclusion

No system is perfect. There will always be someone who has a strange exception and won’t be put through.

The time to start on it is now. The population growth is increasing at such a rate and the cost of services are increasing, it only makes logical and financial sense to get started on it now.

Want to know how the electorial race is going? Visit the Elections Canada website for preliminary results.

Follow-up

What do you think?
Can the government get something like this going?
Should they invest the money to get it going?

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So, walking around today I took a few more pics that I liked and wanted to share.

Enjoy.

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Autumn is in the air, and then in my lens.

Here are some photos from earlier today.

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I’ve just launched the first public beta of http://www.davidpisarek.com (v8).

I’ve streamlined the design, and refocused the site to reflect more of my photography.

Please take a look around the site, and let me know if you experience problems with anything, or if you notice anything strange.

I would really appreciate if you can test the site by resizing your browser, trying different browsers, etc.

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After a long debate with myself, I figured it was time to take the plunge and move my email to “the cloud”. So far I’ve been running it for a few days now, and I like it. I tried it a year or so ago, but I ended up reverting back.

My thoughts (in no particular order)

1. I tried to copy the emails from my computer over to GMail, but it was setting all the dates to the day that I I have all my previous email stored on my computer, so I can reference it whenever I want.
2. GMail supports my own personal domains – so I can send and receive without people noticing.
   1. I find it offensive when Internet professionals and businesses use @hotmail.com or @gmail.com email addresses when they have their own domain.
3. I can still send and receive how I want from my iPhone.
4. I have IMAP configured, so I can still do anything I want with my folders, or as GMail likes to call them… “labels”.
5. I can access my email any time from anywhere, Internet connection permitting.
6. The spam filters are MUCH better than what Microsoft has done in Entourage. So far it hasn’t filtered any legitimate email to my spam box, which is always nice.
   1. I have many server rules setup to wipe out a ton of spam before anything has a chance to make it to my inbox.
7. Google Docs! It’s awesome, and now I can save attachments to that.
8. Viewing online of documents. No more needing to open the document in the application. I can view it in a webpage and save time. Yes dad, that means that all of those “amazing photograph” emails with 20MB powerpoints won’t be AS annoying – but please try to refrain from sending them anyways!  
9. I will not tell anyone my GMail address. I do not want to get email to it. If you want to know why, read point 2.1.

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I’ve been working on the blog a bit in the background – some functional and technical things that I wanted to change, and have slowly been resolving.

One of the items on my list has been to figure out a way to get my automated Twitter “life stream” hidden from the blog homepage. I figure, if someone wants to see my Twitter posts, they’ll either look at my Twitter page, or look at the Twitter category in my blog. I think it’s more important to showcase and highlight my actual posts instead. Plus, on my homepage I have the most recent tweets displayed.

I was going to script something to do it, but instead I came across the plugin “Simply Exclude” by CodeHooligans.

I’m quite impressed. After installing the plugin, within 1-minute I had the Twitter category removed from my homepage. No coding or scripting needed!

The only glitch is that if you tag a post in multiple categories, and one of those categories is excluded, it too will come off the homepage. Maybe this is something that will be fixed in the next version.

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