Santa, Please Bring Canada Tech Stuff

Before go any fur­ther I want to first say that I do appre­ci­ate that there’s a lot that’s got­ten bet­ter in our tech lives since our move to Canada. That includes over­all faster Inter­net con­nec­tion speeds,  a great fea­ture from our ISP that for­wards a copy of any tele­phone voice­mail to my email as an attach­ment (and which I can actu­ally open and lis­ten to on my iPhone — FTW!), and a fair amount of free Inter­net Wi-fi in cafés nearby.  I also appre­ci­ate that our online bank­ing works very well (with the excep­tion of not being able to pay US credit card bal­ances from our US dol­lar account, but inter­na­tional rules are rules, I sup­pose), and that pay­ing for pur­chases at your aver­age store or even fast-food chain can almost always be done with your ATM card — some­thing that we could never expect with any reg­u­lar­ity in the US (Is this still the case, US read­ers? I haven’t checked lately.) Now, even the El Gato EyeTV soft­ware on my Mac finally gets list­ings for Cana­dian TV chan­nels (it only took them 4 years with me bug­ging them at every Mac­world Expo for this). Translink has 2 mobile apps for the iPhone (if you count Google as one of them), and buy­ing movie and con­cert tick­ets online is almost some­thing we now take for granted.

How­ever, there are a few things in the tech realm that just plain suck in Canada. I’ve already writ­ten ad nau­seum about cell phone rates being out­ra­geous, but I had got­ten used to that, except for the fact that it keeps mak­ing itself known in all sorts of places, when you least expect it. Like, for instance, Twit­ter, the microblog­ging ser­vice that I some­times post to or use to fol­low the sta­tus of oth­ers. If you live in the US, you’ve prob­a­bly never seen this annoy­ing lit­tle mes­sage in your Twit­ter page:

If there were only some way to have that mes­sage go away already… We know, we know, Twit­ter, Cana­dian data rates are pro­hib­i­tively expen­sive for you to send us mes­sages from Twit­ter. At least you could stop adding insult to injury by con­stantly remind­ing us of this fact, and let us turn the stu­pid, ugly thing off.

Other tech things I wish we’d get in Canada? Hey, how about being able to see TV reruns online, via the ser­vice called ‘Hulu’. When­ever I bring up their screen from a Cana­dian Inter­net con­nec­tion I see this:

And of course, our Amazon.ca is only a pale shadow of Amazon.com, with a frac­tion of the selec­tion, and we can’t use Net­flix, Zap­pos, or Mint. Our non-HD TiVo is all but laughed at in Canada (despite the supe­rior inter­face) because the HD TiVo will never be sold here. The rea­son is that it requires Cable­Card, the tech­nol­ogy par­tially adopted in the US that allows you to use a sim­ple mag­netic card to con­nect to HD cable rather than the big, ugly boxes they have here (often bun­dled with ugly, hard-to-use PVRs). I’ve heard that the cur­rent ver­sion of Cable­Card, v. 1.0, is imper­fect because it doesn’t sup­port 2-way com­mu­ni­ca­tion or on-screen guides.

C’mon, Santa. You finally got us the iPhone and an honest-to-goodness Apple store. What about some­thing this year? And Black­ber­ries don’t count, since they come from here (Besides, most folks already know that the Black­berry Storm is an Epic FAIL.) So Mr. Claus, could you see fit to get us v. 2.0 Cable­Card (which fixes the whole 2-way com­mu­ni­ca­tions prob­lem) accepted here in Canada, and that even­tu­ally we once again catch-up to the States? Fail­ing that, Zap­pos, Net­flix or Mint work­ing here wouldn’t be bad, either. Whad­dayasay, Santa?

Happy Canadian Thanksgiving, and a Little Progressive Humour

Happy Canuck Turkey Day! Pam and I are roast­ing a Turkey thigh (and even that is huge…), plus also roast­ing a pump­kin (seeds sep­a­rately). I feel all Martha Stewart-y.

Since it’s not only Thanks­giv­ing sea­son, but also elec­tion sea­son for both the US and Canada (and again, we get ours a lit­tle ear­lier), thought I’d include this lit­tle bit of emi­gré humour (just in case the unthink­able hap­pens in the States):

Many thanks to my friend Mark Bartelt, a very enlight­ened Cal­i­forn­ian who I met through the arti­cle I did for the LA Times years ago, for the pointer to this lit­tle gem that is all too close to reality.

Another Opportunity for Obama

I couldn’t resist point­ing to this newly-created site when I saw it today.

I’ve been work­ing two dif­fer­ent drafts of post­ings, depend­ing on who wins the Amer­i­can elec­tion in Novem­ber. If McCain does win, I guess the bright side will be that I might be able to encour­age a whole new group of friends to join us here. If, how­ever, there’s a Con­ser­v­a­tive major­ity in Par­lia­ment by that time, it might be a lit­tle tougher…

Vancouver Still Way Up There in Livability

The num­bers have been tal­lied once more for the cities through­out the world in terms of ‘liv­abil­ity’. Accord­ing to Busi­ness Week, “Mer­cer Consulting’s annual roundup of the global cities with the best qual­ity of life” says that the most 25 liv­able cities include:

1. Zurich, Switzer­land
2. Vienna, Aus­tria tied with Geneva, Switzerland
3. Van­cou­ver, Canada
4. Auck­land, New Zealand
5. Dus­sel­dorf, Germany
6. Munich, tied with Frank­furt, Germany
7. Bern, Switzer­land
8. Syd­ney, Australia
9. Copen­hagen, Denmark
10. Welling­ton, New Zealand
11. Ams­ter­dam, Netherlands
12. Brus­sels, Belgium
13. Toronto, Canada
14. Berlin, Ger­many
15. Mel­bourne, Aus­tralia tied with Luxembourg
16. Ottawa, Canada
17. Stock­holm, Sweden

Low­est rank­ing city of the 215 sur­veyed was Bagh­dad, Iraq. The high­est rank­ing US city was Hon­olulu, at num­ber 28. The arti­cle didn’t show any after 17 (or 20, again, depend­ing on how you count).

How and why are these rank­ings put together? Here’s what they said:

The rank­ings are based on a point scor­ing index, with Zurich scor­ing 108 and Bagh­dad scor­ing 13.5. Cities are com­pared to New York as the base city, with an index score of 100. The quality-of-living sur­vey cov­ers 215 cities and is con­ducted to help gov­ern­ments and major com­pa­nies place employ­ees on inter­na­tional assign­ments. The sur­vey also iden­ti­fies those cities with the high­est per­sonal safety rank­ing based on inter­nal sta­bil­ity, crime, effec­tive­ness of law enforce­ment, and rela­tion­ships with other countries.

I don’t know if this is sig­nif­i­cant in any way, but last year Van­cou­ver came in third, once again behind Zurich and Geneva, and was tied with Vienna. This year com­ing in 4^th (or third, depend­ing on whether you count the tie as one or 2) with the same 3 cities above us, and a score of 107.6 amounts to more or less the same standing.

I’ll be par­tic­u­larly inter­ested to see how this num­ber changes over the next few years, both before and after the 2010 Olympics.

The Undecided American Voter

I saw this car­toon by Bruce Beat­tie via Digg and had to repost it here. I can’t tell you the num­ber of times I’ve heard friends back in the States say ‘If the Repub­li­cans win this time, we’re join­ing you in Canada’.

Pam would be thrilled, but I’d be wor­ried about those left behind aboard the steadily sink­ing USS ‘Amer­ica the Doomed’.