The Bank Job, part 4

Answers from two of the online banks as of today. ING states that they don’t support transaction download, while President’s Choice doesn’t answer specifically; both support “the current version” of Netscape, but only ING specifically mentions that Mozilla hasn’t been tested; neither support encrypted e-mail communication; and President’s Choice wins the award for the longest message with the most material unrelated to my questions (like an explanation of what 128-bit encryption is). (ING also included a plug for their interest rate, but did have a sense of humour about the blatant marketing.)

I’m disappointed that I haven’t received a reply from Citizens Bank yet, although one’s been promised at the beginning of [this] week. I like the approach they take, particularly their ethical policy (for example, they will not invest in or do business with any company that manufactures tobacco products or derives significant revenue from tobacco-related production). All things being equal–and I can’t judge that yet–they’re probably first on the list.

No answers yet from BMO.

It surprises me that no financial institutions, particularly virtual banks, support encrypted e-mail; it seems a natural progression from requiring strong encryption for transactions. I’m more surprised that signed mail seems to be completely ignored–even an overzealous virus filter that strips off attachments (like an S/MIME signature) should still allow the text portion of the message through.

Lenni! Come back!

My Third Floor neighbours and I have been immensely enjoying our new locale of Montreal, and are soon off to Paris. I do hope you can come to our show as it’s the last we shall do in dear Toronto for the next spell.

Lenni Jabour

Montreal? Paris? Augh!

(And to think I’ve been encouraging Ms. Jabour to tour outside of Toronto. This isn’t quite what I meant, Lenni!)

There are few places more appropriate for Lenni to go, though–she’s got chanteuse written all over her. Best of luck, Lenni… keep an eye on les garçons beaux (and Miss Rosalita!), and don’t stay away too long!

She Spies Monk at the Lathe of Heaven

I mentioned a couple of days ago that I’ve been watching Monk, Tony Shalhoub’s new show. Having given it a reasonable chance (three episodes), and as much as I like him and the character, I think I’m going to give it a pass. The whole show feels somehow forced, and the performances phoned in, not to mention the transparent plotlines.

Much as I hate to admit it, I liked the episodes of She Spies that NBC showed in July. I take that back: I don’t hate to admit it, because I really enjoyed the show. It bears a lot of similarity to Once a Thief, a Canadian TV favourite from a couple of years ago. (I was about to write that that isn’t surprising given Jeff Reno and Ron Osborn’s involvement, but in looking up the link for Once a Thief I discovered I’d misremembered, and they had nothing to do with that series. They are associated with The West Wing as writers, though, which would explain the snappy dialogue in She Spies. Weird.)

Also caught the last 15 minutes of A&E’s Lathe of Heaven tonight (note no The). I was surprised not to see any Aldebaranians, which makes me curious what else was cut; Haber’s Alzheimer-like condition was toned down from his demise in the novel, and I’m concerned that things like the solution to racial harmony (turning everyone grey, and thus causing Heather Lelache’s entire existence to disappear) will have been treated similarly. But I’ve got it on tape, and will check it out… after tomorrow night’s premiere of Jeremiah on TMN. (Hey! Ingrid Kavelaars, who’s from Glencoe, is in Jeremiah. Why didn’t I know that until now‽)

Ricochet Rabbit

I looked up the word cranky. It said grouchy. I looked up grouchy. It said crotchety. No wonder you have such an eccentric culture: none of your words have their own meanings. You have to look up one word to understand another. It never ends.

J. Michael Straczynski, Babylon 5, And the Rock Cried Out, No Hiding Place

It’s been pointed out to me, most recently by my parents (of all people), that I tend to communicate in allusions. (D’oh!) I don’t think this is particularly unique: many of my friends have similar reference points and refer to them often. This isn’t a huge issue most of the time, but it does wind up excluding others from conversations… and some people get a little cranky because we do it so much.

Continue reading Ricochet Rabbit

Credit where it’s due

She likes chicken pot pie, just like me.

Andrew Niccol, S1m0ne

I’d estimate that only about ten people in this city have heard that line and understand why it’s one of the funniest in the entire movie. In fact, my guess is that over 99% of the people who have seen the movie wouldn’t recognize it… because it shows up after the credits have rolled. This is why directors can get away with the vanity a film by credit–not only don’t people acknowledge the fact that there are talented people other than actors and a director involved in a movie, they actively ignore it by walking out.

Also note that the source of the quote above is the writer of the film, not the character or actor (even though Pruitt Taylor Vince nails the line as Max Sayer).

The Bank Job, part 3

One week after I sent my original query, I’ve gotten no response at all from two of the three banks in question, and no response from the unsigned message I wound up sending to Bank of Montreal. Nice work, guys.

I’m going to try again, unsigned to all three this time, and at Mike’s urging, add President’s Choice Financial, even though they are run by the same bank that made me start looking for alternatives.

Trading Spaces updates

Those clever folks at TLC have a good thing going with Trading Spaces. They’ve even got updates on what the homeowners have done to their rooms since.

Perhaps even more interesting, and something a clever programmer at TLC is going to think of in a year or two, is going back to visit the couples. An hour representing two days is a pretty short time to judge, but based on that I’ve got to say that there have been some seriously dysfunctional relationships featured on that show. There have been more than a few very functional friendships too (nudge nudge).

This concludes today’s foray into the persona of a nosy Parker.

Linkrolling

I’ve been trying to come up with a term for the current fad of linking each word in a phrase to something different. The best I’ve been able to come up with is linkrolling. It’s similar to blogrolling, defined as a list of links… [that] are usually connected in some way and located usually on the same page as the weblog, in a column on the side . Linkrolling, then, is blogrolling in the small: providing a list of links in a compact inline form.

[Update, later: okay, so I’m just coining a new meaning for the term. Note that most of the sites listed currently use linkrolling interchangeably, and often redundantly, with blogrolling. I stand by my definition, and have discovered a new term in the process: thanklink.]

Markup validation indicators

The Mozilla usability list published by self-proclaimed usability weenie Matthew Thomas (aka mpt) has been a hot topic recently.

Not to be contrary–particularly against Ian, Asa and Blake–but I think I’m with mpt on this one, though not exactly for his reasons. Mozilla is a developer tool, and so should have features for developers. According to the 1.0 release notes, Mozilla-the-platform is targeted at the developer community, and it’s up to third parties (like, say, Netscape) to take the codebase and customize it for a consumer audience. (I do debate classifying several of mpt’s items as usability issues–from an application perspective they’re clearly features, but from a future-of-the-web perspective they’re usability.)

I’d love to use a browser that makes the validation status of a page user-visible, because I want to use it to develop my pages. I don’t care about anyone else’s. The indicator doesn’t need to list the errors–the W3C validator and other tools will do a better job, as Asa argues–but it indicates that there’s a problem, which is what an indicator is supposed to do. It should do the same for any content type Mozilla can display. Arguing against having it in Mozilla because end users won’t like it doesn’t fly–end users don’t care about the DOM Inspector or Venkman (the JavaScript debugger) either, but there they are. (I rarely use them myself, but that’s because I don’t write a lot of JS… yet.) At times, for similar reasons, I’m even on the side of those who argue that there shouldn’t be a quirks (i.e. compatibility) mode in Mozilla (or IE)–providing such a feature without an indicator just makes it harder to show page authors, software makers et al. that they’re creating bad code.

(I’ve been looking for an article by mpt where he explains that he knows he’s been a real jerk lately, but have had no luck–I’m caught in the Google gap. Should have blogged it a couple of days ago when I read it. The point was that I tend to agree with what he’s said but not the way in which he’s said it.)

Finally, lest it seem I’m a complete mpt apologist, I don’t like his weblog design–I find it’s hard to read and generally not aesthetically pleasing. (I’m going to echo his own criticism of Internet Explorer: to me, his blog looks like a refugee freom Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory. I’d almost go so far as to bemoan its usability. Almost.