A Canadian validation

So I wanted to switch the name on the billing account for our cottage electricity in Nova Scotia. Had a surprisingly-pleasant customer-service experience with Nicole at NS Power. We chatted about her new office on Water Street in Halifax, where the noisy old power station used to be (back in the 1970's they would open the big windows on the power station at around 3 am on summer nights to reduce the heat on the machines, also letting out the bang-bang-bang sound effects that would galvanize us out of bed, one block over on Barrington Street).

Nicole just sent an email confirming the various changes we made, and adding this note: 'I have waived the $24.00 standard connection charge as a courtesy, basically because you were such a pleasant person to deal with!'

Oh, Canada...

A Dotty Prezi

I endure a lot of Powerpoint presentations, and my heart goes out to the people who make them, and have to try to make them interesting and eye-catching, but still readable. I mean, how many legitimate things can you do with a title and a stack of bullet points?

So I was delighted to stumble upon Prezi, an alternative method for making engaging presentations. In half an hour I whipped up this not-yet-finished presentation on Dotty, the application I am building:

How to empty a storage unit on Prezi

This is a lot of fun! I'll be making more of these things...

going dotty

The problem: we have two storage units full of stuff from my mother's house. She is now in an assisted-living facility, and there is no chance she will need the stuff in the storage units again. There are five of us siblings, and among us we have 11 children, and we don't all live in close proximity to the stored stuff. So how are we going to get the stuff divided out, with a minimum of hassles, so everyone is as happy as the circumstances allow?

I have been working on a solution, called Dotty. It's an online tool that lets each of us log in, review the stuff from storage, and put colored dots (a different dot for each of us) on the things we would like in our households. I have just opened the site for testing with a couple of my sisters, and still have a few bells and whistles to hook up; but overall I am very happy with the app. I built in in FlashBuilder, using Flex 4, with ColdFusion 8 pages to provide access to the MySQL database--and it could hardly have worked better.

I will post a movie soon of Dotty in action. Nice addition to the old portfolio...

Odd props

A few months ago I noted that I had a script in progress that had been stuck at a certain point for months and months. I am happy to report that that play, and two others, got themselves finished by October and had their first reading at a playwrights' crit group in November. I am a slower writer than I would wish to be, dawdling and delaying for weeks and then turning out page after page in unexpected writing surges. If I could harness them...I guess I would be a different person than I am.

One of these new plays takes place on a stalled Ferris wheel, with a couple rocking in each of the cars we can see and a repair man clambering over the structure of the wheel. Another is the famous police-lineup play, in a town too small to have enough people for a lineup. I tend to put ordinary people in proximity to odd props or odd situations, and often good plays come out of it.

For the next couple of months I am concentrating on some software projects I am building, little apps for tiny niche audiences. But if they work out they will make nice additions to my resume. For sure, I am learning all the ways in which Flex 4 is different from Flex 3...

But rustling at the back of my mind there are a couple more script ideas. I have the idea backlog of a member of the leisure class, and at the end of a long day of not-leisure work I can barely stand the sight of all those little nuggets of inspiration. Until I can't stand not to work on them, and we are off to the races again.

Your feedback is very important to us

So I was riding on the commuter train from Boston to Lowell, and the wifi kept cutting out. I am by now inured to losing the Internet connection once or twice during the 40-minute trip (there is a black hole near North Chelmsford), but nine times?

So I found the customer comment form to let them know that the service is deteriorating from 'okay' through 'annoying' to 'why even pretend it's a service?' And I could not submit my feedback on the form they supply. There is a required field called "Topic" with a pulldown menu and the instruction "Please select a Type of Feedback". And there are no options available. Nothing to choose. I clicked "view source" to double check. Hahaha up your nose, Mr. Customer.

So I called them today and waited for an hour to talk to a customer service rep who didn't have a clue what I was talking about, or why I was telling her. But she carefully took down what I said and promised to pass it on.

I guess I'll plan to do only offline work on the train from now on.

               

                    Select One

Speaking so as to be heard

One of my great goals when I was growing up was to be able to speak at least the second language of everyone I was likely to meet. This is a valid and highly laudable goal for a Canadian, but it quickly spins into difficulties if you live in a metropolitan area.

And then I compounded my troubles by spending several years in the Canadian Arctic, where I learned and used Inuktitut and Cree. They are wonderful languages, but they don't travel all that well unless (as Rebekah and I are known to do) you want to discuss something in a Muenster restaurant with a fair degree of confidence that other diners will not know what you are saying.

I live right now north of Boston, and my English, French, and Spanish would seem likely to cover most of the people I run into.  But I didn't realize until I moved there that Lowell, MA, is 20% Cambodian.

I have tried learning Khmer. I got several chapters along, so I could thank shop clerks and so on. And then I met the chapter that laid out the 29 ways you can say "you" in Khmer, and how deploying the right word is important to respect the other person's years/status/relationship to you. I have not gone further.

Oh, and did I mention that the building we live in is about 20% folks from Brazil? I just learned today that Portuguese is in the top 10 of world languages:

1. Mandarin (over a billion speakers)
2. English (about a billion)
3. Spanish (500 million)
4. Hindi (490)
5. Russian (277)
6. Arabic (255)
7. Portuguese (240)
8. Bengali (215)
9. French (200)
10. Malay / Indonesian (175)

 As a kid, I figured that the imperialist languages were the ones to follow, as they would have left speakers of their languages in all their former colonies. Works great for English and Spanish.

What now? I guess the sensible next-language decision these days would be the next biggest trade/commerce/Internet language that I don't now have. So if I'm being sensible, it's off to Mandarin lessons...

Three graces

Our granddaughter Etta, at lower right, communes with two of her cousins at a family gathering in Ottawa.

image caught by Etta's dad, Terry.