Believe it!

Default Programs was designed to help users make choices about their default behaviors. A large part of this is that defaults in Vista and beyond will be primarily controlled at the Per User level instead of the Per Machine level. This allows much more flexibility for the multi user computer environment that we believe is going to become the standard.

Curious

For some reason the previous post doesn’t appear to be showing up in any of my feeds. Wonder if there’s something about it specifically or if it’s always the most recent post that’s missing….

Somehow it had been marked as private the last time I edited it. No problem.

Bryenton’s

Thanks to the wonderful, expert help of Nichole Coolledge at Bryenton’s Furniture over the last week, I will soon be taking delivery of a Tempur mattress. Nichole is the kind of person I love to deal with: knowledgeable about what she’s selling, informative without being pushy, friendly, understanding and sympathetic, and above all genuine.

I’ve also dealt with owner Bob Bryenton several times over the last ten or fifteen years and have always been impressed with his willingness to take time—sometimes a couple of hours at a stretch—to listen to what I’m looking for and explain the relative merits of his products. When I walked in today, probably three years after the last time I saw him, he immediately knew who I was, and we talked for a bit as if I’d been there just yesterday.

Nichole and Bob are the reason that more than half of the furniture in my condo is from Bryenton’s, a store that’s 100 kilometres and more than an hour’s drive away. It seems about time to recommend them, and I do so highly and with many thanks.

Tire fire

Rene Roy from Canada writes: What do you think about the Canadian Tire Guy being dumped?

Leah: I just heard about that. It’s kind of sad.

I’m glad Rene Roy asked this important question during last week’s Globe and Mail chat with Leah McLaren, what with boring topics like Crash-lash and intra- and extra-office romance getting all the press. 🙂 But I have to weigh in, and now’s as good a time as any: nothing against Ted Simonett or Gloria Slade, but their Canadian Tire couple ads were nothing but a ripoff of Home Hardware’s long-running earlier campaign featuring Keith Kemps and Kaya McGregor.

Kaya and Keith were superior in every way: they had realistic relationships and conversations between themselves and their neighbours, they weren’t obnoxiously condescending, and they each had (sometimes unexpected) strengths and weaknesses. (Among other things, I love the fact that she was the handy one.) I bought their characters and characterizations so much that I wrote to Stuart McLean at one point suggesting that, should his Vinyl Cafe stories ever be filmed, Keith and Kaya would be shoo-ins to play Dave and Morley.

So, with all due respect to Leah McLaren, good riddance to the CTC. May they be cursed with spending eternity with Canadian Tire’s equally- and always-obnoxious Scrooge and Santa.

Web standards

I find it somewhat ironic that both the Web Standards Project and advocate Lachlan Hunt updated their sites recently but failed to meet one of the goals of the web: that Cool URIs Don’t Change. Even if they did find that the URIs had to change, there are ways to prevent the existing ones from disappearing—but that’s exactly what happened to their feed links.

On a related topic, both sites also failed to preserve their unique item IDs in the new feeds.

Both are subtle points that affect what’s most probably a tiny minority of users… but is it setting a good example that they don’t/can’t/won’t take these implicit standards into account?

I don’t claim to be perfect in this respect—I have no idea if my feed item IDs changed when I last upgraded WordPress, for example, although I bet they did—but I’ve got a plethora of 301 Moved Permanently redirects on this site, my old one and others I manage to keep old content available. And both WaSP and Hunt kept the bulk of their URIs constant/redirected, so they’re still better than 99% of the other sites out there; the only reason I’m picking on them is that I just noticed that both feeds were dead.

More Leah

Since I posted yesterday, Google’s search algorithm has turned things around a bit: Leah McLaren‘s site for The Continuity Girl is still the third hit, but other pages have gotten a nice PageRank boost so there’s a little less bile immediately evident. I’d never even thought to look at Rotten Tomatoes for a list of Leah’s movie reviews (she’s seen a lot more than I have, but we share basically the same opinions on the ones that coincide), and this interview at Gremolata is an interesting read too. (There’s an all-salmon diet? Ewww.)

I think the funniest thing, though, is this line from her G&M bio: This is her first real job. That’s exactly how I describe the job I’ve held for a decade (ever since graduating), and I don’t plan to leave anytime soon.

Finally, for what it’s worth, Mark Evans sort of echoes my call for Leah to start a blog of her own. You know, it seems to me that a book tour would be ideal fodder for a few posts… I’m just sayin’….