pointing out the obvious

While in Vancouver, I had the chance to witness one of the many interesting side effects of a bottle deposit system for all types of bottles (not just beer bottles as exists in Ontario).

While in line at a local grocery store, I saw a someone bring in about 25 bottles for a deposit refund. He got about $1.50 in refunds after delivering his cache of plastic and glass bottles. These bottles were pretty worn out, but he got his refund and was on his way.

What I find interesting about this is that Vancouver is a pretty damn clean city. I don’t see tumbleweeds of cans and bottles roaming the streets. So this bottle deposit system has this interesting side effect - someone will pickup a bottle on the street to get the refund.

This happens in Toronto, but the people leafing through my trash at 6am are only looking for beer bottles. Why not extend that program to include plastic and other bottles? This might reduce the volume of recycling set out weekly by residents of Toronto, but something tells me most people don’t recycle because they are lazy and don’t understand the impact of their actions. So this might not work unless people are aware of what happens to that bottle.

Maybe they can implement a bottle deposit system, and continue to run the recycling program. The bottles with deposit that make it into the recycling system can be sorted out at the plant - thus the recycling truck can actually be making money instead of losing it. This leaves the recycling left out overnight available for scavenging, but that’s okay - if you are too lazy to return the bottles yourself, someone else can reap the benefits of it.

I understand this is much easiser said than done, but Vancouver seems to have it in place. Why can’t Toronto? The LCBO bottle depost system is long overdue, but at least it’s on the horizon.

I find it interesting (but not suprising) that the big players cannot get personalized advertising right. As noted in a recent Three Minds post, it shouldn’t be a challenge to use their existing search engine knowledge to put “wine and cheese” together with something other than “power drill”. Meanwhile, Google seems to do this well, and it’s subtle, so you don’t feel like you’re overrun with advertising.

What’s interesting is whether you feel Google’s smaller, subtle advertising has more credibility than the skyscraper ad displayed by AOL. Or does the relevance of the advertising lend credibility to the portal? hmm…

With regard to subtle vs in-your-face advertising, there is likely a context for each. If I get an email including a note about “king kong”, a skyscraper ad or video for the upcoming Transformers movie makes sense. If I get an email about blogging, it makes sense to display a list of blog hosts - google style.

While walking to lunch the other day, I saw a car being washed in an outdoor public parking lot. The washer had a pickup with a big water jug on the back, a soapy bucket, and some rags - he worked for zipcar and was washing rentals. I ground some gears and thought - Wouldn’t it be great if you could order a carwash online, instead of driving to the gas station?

This kind of service is available all over the place, but not quite delivered in the right way. In underground parking around Toronto, there are self washing stations available. Some even have special spots you can park in to have your car washed while you shop for groceries. I’ve seen them, and never used it because it required me to figure something else out while I was rushing around doing errands. The other hurdle for me is trust. I want to know the person washing my car isn’t going to scratch or dent it.
So, wouldn’t it make sense to have a mobile car washer? You can order your wash online, tell the mobilewash employee where your car will be within a certain time window, and presto, you’ve got a clean car.

Getting over the trust issue isn’t so bad either. The truck can have a webcam on it, so you can actually SEE your car being washed (or a prerecorded version of it). The video works twofold, security, and legal for both parties.

I think it would make sense. Whenever I’m driving, I’m late for something, so have little time to deal with gas nevermind a wash. While he’s at it, he can fill up my tank with gas and be done with it. Everyone hates the gas station. Why not bring full service to your doorstep.

The gas delivery already exists for commercial trucking fleets (delivery vans, etc.), so it wouldn’t be a stretch to bring it to the consumer.

I decided to make the move from netfirms.com to superwebhost.ca.  The main reason for the change is that they are local, and I’d rather support a local company.  The other reason is that mod_rewrites work as advertised - Netfirms.com seems not to be able to support wordpress permalinks.  Permalinks now work without the index.php in the url, so life is good.

So, the new ONE ZONE wifi network is up in toronto, however, you are required to have a mobile phone to use the service as they send you a username and password through SMS. I suppose it’s necessary for legal reasons - so the ISP has someone to chase when you’re doing bad things online. However, it immediately limits the number of people who use the system. People do still exist without cell’s - and they aren’t luddites. There are also people out there who would rather not get nonsense SMS messages sent to them.

I already get nonsense from Telus once in a while, I don’t need more.

What’s even funnier, is the wifi signal from ONE ZONE is stronger than the wifi signal provided by my office. Awesome.

It never really occurred to me until I read bbum’s what the dell? post about dell’s totally ridiculous website.� It’s true.� I can never really find anything, though I feel like I’m finding things.

It looks like they have recently re-engineered their search engine - it now returns somewhat useful results instead of nonsense.� Though, if you search for POS, it’s still next to impossible to find their “small business POS” landing page that is filled with good and relevant information.� Instead, you’re directed to many smaller nonsense pages with fancy images - which reinforces the feeling of finding something when I haven’t.

It also reminded me of how dell creates some pretty crazy hardware.� I’d rather have an iMac.

I use ATG often enough to know that they had a fairly brilliant tool a few years ago, but they seem to have lost their motivation to innovate and replaced it with a big need to productize and seemingly confuse potential buyers. One of the big issues I see from a user/developer standpoint is the lack of support material available online. ATG has much information available on their website, but what frustrates me is that it’s hidden from search engines like google because you are required to login to view it.

The result of this is two-fold. Developers have no real resources to help solve issues, and customers have nowhere to look for relevant information. I suppose this is more of an issue for developers than customers, but for a company that pioneered JSP pages and developed a spring like architecture over 6 years ago, it seems as though the technical brilliance at the company was held back by the business.

Case in point: If you search for “ATG 2006.3″ in google, most of the top 10 results are me working through installation issues for MySQL and OSX. Which gives me great insight into google search engine optimization methods, but leaves me with an empty feeling when faced with solving complicated ATG development issues.

Interesting idea: sustainable apparel. Finally we have someone pushing the limits on sustainability, and filling the void for the globally aware consumer.

Checkout the details here. You can also checkout blog.nau.com and their website nau.com.

I’m sure there are more links and details, but here’s the digg for it.

Of course it’s sad, but it shouldn’t suprise anyone that Steve Irwin (aka the Crocodile Hunter) died as a result of being too close to a wild animal.  You can read the Animal Planet statement here.

What always bothered me was why he was an icon for children.  I’m not saying he was a bad guy, he was a great happy, bubbly, energetic guy, that likely got along great with kids.  What I’m questioning is the way he “led by example” when it came to dealing with wildlife.  He was very experienced around animals and approached them with much more caution than he led us to believe.  The message he sent home was “animals are not scary”, through things like bringing a baby into a crocodile feeding pit.  I guess Michael Jackson has done similar, but no one wants to be compared to that.