Random thought exchange

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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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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As in the past, BestBuy Canada and FutureShop are starting their Boxing Day sales tonight at 8 p.m. EST.

Last year there was a serious flaw. Their websites, and I’m presuming their servers, were overloaded, slow, and crashed. It was an epic failure then, and I bet there are a lot of people who are hesitant to take part this year for fear that their abilities to just browse the site, let alone place items in their cart and place their orders.

Hopefully the BB and FS IT folks have learned from this, and are ramping up for tonight.

There’s a message on the BB and FS “view cart” pages that says all carts will be cleared to allow fair access for all customers. Take a look at the screen captures:

BestBuy view cart screen shot from 2009-12-24 at 2.45.49 PM

FutureShop view cart screen shot 2009-12-24 at 2.46.08 PM

What’s interesting is that there’s a partial failure. When you click on the image with the text explaining the cleared carts on the BestBuy site, it takes you to their homepage. When you click on the one on the FutureShop site, it takes you to http://localhost/ Clearly someone’s brain is already on vacation. Why does the image need to click through to anything anyways? What’s even stranger, is that the FS site is pulling it in with jQuery and iFrames. Why?

Code view from FutureShop website - screen shot 2009-12-24 at 2.56.09 PM

Also, according to the FS twitter account, the site is going to be closed at 3 to 6 p.m. EST and it will be open from 6 to 8 p.m. EST to browse before the sale starts. I wonder why they’re doing this? I don’t think it’s going to build up the anticipation. The flyers were leaked about 4 days ago. There isn’t anything that I’m hoping to score from FS. There are a couple of things I’m looking to get from BestBuy though.

Here’s my shopping list for this season:

• 2x 1.5TB drives – brand A
• 2x 1.5TB drives – brand B
• 2x NAS RAID array’s
• 2x 8GB SDHC class 6 cards
• 1x inexpensive laser printer – this isn’t for me

That’s it. Nothing all that special. HDD’s are on sale at NewEgg and TigerDirect, so I’m likely going to get them from there. Having said that, their prices are “Boxing week”, so I have plenty of time to get them.

I’ll let you all know how “well” I did once all the purchases are done.

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The amount of spam that I’ve started to receive is just incredible. I get about 600 a day!

So, in an effort to block the spam, I’ve setup a few spambot’s to bounce-back spam to the sender. If anyone gets a bounce-back, please give me a call and let me know so I can put your address in the white list.

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The rain today is just crazy, and it’s not supposed to stop until Thursday.

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After waiting for so long, and following up with Wyeth, I finally received my free Chapsticks – cudos to them for stepping up to the plate.

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Well… I have yet to receive them…  I just called Wyeth and told them… they apologized and said that they were going to send me out some more…  ya… we’ll see about that!  I’m hoping that they do….

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