A lot of BountyUp contracts are under a few hundred dollars, with items perhaps satisfying the long tail. I hope the service begins hosting assurance contracts for larger initiatives, like funding the 2008 Olympics (too late, taxpayers allready are on the hook for that one) or long term care for seniors.
Monthly Archives: June 2008
Canoscan Toolbox is Poop
Excuse my potty mouth. Canonscan toolbox is total crap. It takes special people to make crappy software. Someone should make a website to out the members of software teams (i.e. programmers, product managers (especially product managers), etc.) that produce software the wastes vasts amounts of time and causes human stress.Canoscan Toolbox used to work. Then is just stopped working. ON A MAC. WTF. This is a very common problem.Tried reinstalling upgrading rebooting a few times. Finally installed/paid $70 for VueScan which seems to work with the Canon scanner even though Canoscan toolcrap doesn’t. Installing Vuescan seems to be the recommended workaround for this specific problem when you survey the web via Google. If you worked on the development of Canoscan Toolbox and are proud of your product or your skills in general, please leave your name and a comment.
The Sad State of Online Credit Card Statements
The only reason to use online credit card statements I can think of is for electronic filing. It should take less time to download the statement than to scan and OCR in a batch feed scanner.
- Amex Canada. Its ok once you find where to log in on the web site. Your eye is not drawn to the login place. When you download the PDF it is exactly like the printed statement you receive in the mail.
- Citi Mastercard. Hard to find the login page. Its confusing becuase they also have login for banking, which appears different. Download statement detail doesn’t do what you think. No way to download a statement the looks like the one you receive in the mail. There is a printable version that will sufice. The information is all on it. Good enough to file.
- ScotiaBank Visa. If you are very careful on epost you can generate a nice pdf you can file. Click on the Account Details view, then look for a print link. The one your eye is drawn to will give you a fubared print of your browser page some numbers chopped off – you might not notice till its too late, like when you actually retreive a statement a month or two down the road. Look for the small print link on the statement itself. Press that will you have a nice printable version you can file. You also need to be sure you click on account details before you print. Oh. Did I mention the account details doesn’t have the balance due on it. The default view is the completely useless account summary, which makes you think you are looking at your bill but really you are just looking at the top of it (although it does have your balance on it). You could easily be tricked, file the wrong thing, and then you are done.
Despite the likelihood of you making a human error and hosing your file, receiving a bill from epost seems to be the most efficient way to file bills electronicaly. I may cancel my mastercard in favour of one that is supported on epost.
Amex – well there is no choice in the matter. The only reason I carry it is for the odd Costco purchase.
Firefox 3 Doesn’t Render Nicely
For example, as the browser width decreases, the stuff the used to float and pop under in FF2 no longer does, and no horizontal scrollbars appear to help the user see what is cut off.
I don’t know whether to wait for the next release or spend a weekend trying to get my layout working.
Another Trimark Employee Deserts
Another deserter. The company and brand are intact, but how about their process and key employees? I think they just have a brand now. Time to move on.
Why Are We Still Writing Cheques?
I received an invoice for a service I recently received. Instead of logging into my bank account and clicking “pay invoice”, typing in an invoice number, and receiving a virtual canceled cheque, I need to:
- find my chequebook
- write a cheque
- address an envelope
- find a stamp
- put the darn thing in the mail
Will someone please build a solution where any business large or small can issue an invoice, and if I choose to pay it online rather than mail a cheque, I can do so without the intermediaries getting more than the price of a stamp, and more importantly it must take less time than writing and mailing a cheque. Think of the time savings. Oh yeah, and also I complain about the carbon footprint of the existing system of payments using the postal system, because no argument is complete these days without mentioning the carbon footprint.
Syntactic Noise For RDF
Anyone care to illustrate the syntactic noise in an RDF sample?
No Way Up For Women
My friend Sherry Towers had an article published in NewsScientist “No Way Up For Women”.
What is worse? Tofu or Bisphenol?
Which is the worse hormone disruptor? Which leads to more birth defects? Eating Tofu, or all the sources of Bisphenol a mother is exposed to combined?
Via Mercola “Mothers who ate a vegetarian diet during pregnancy had a fivefold greater risk of delivering a boy with hypospadias, a birth defect of the penis. The authors of the study suggested that the cause was greater exposure to phytoestrogens in soy foods popular with vegetarians.”. I had seen similar reports in newscientist but couldn’t quickly locate the article. Probably references the same study.
How many parents have replaced their bisphenol plastic bottles with steel or glass, only to fill them with soy based formula?