Terrible news: Huy Fong's Sambal Oelek

On Saturday morning, I made the trek up to Somerset Street to shop at the Lim Bangkok. I wanted some of their excellent bok choy and gai lan, but I needed a bottle of hoisin sauce and I thought it would be a good idea to get a new 3.5 litre jug of sambal oelek because I am getting low - only  a couple of weeks left.

And I need my sambal oelek. It is a straight-forward and simple blend of ground cayenne peppers, salt and vinegar. I eat it with every meal. Particularly breakfast. 

At the Lim Bangkok, I started in the sauce and oil aisle. Found a bottle of hoisin sauce no problem. But where were the jugs of sambal oelek? Not in the regular place. No 3.5 litre jugs, with or without garlic and not even the little 8 or 18 ounce jars. I feverishly checked the other aisles in case the jugs were moved. But I was not hopeful. The Superstore moves things on a regular basis. I assume to make us walk back and forth in the store more and interact with the staff, but I haven't seen products shift spots at the Lim Bangkok in ten years.

So, I picked out healthy bags of bok choy and gai lan and a bundle of green onions and went to the cash. The cashier whom I suspect is the owner is always friendly, so I asked about the sambal oelek.

"The factory is closed," he told me.

"Forever?" I asked.

"Don't know if they will come back."

After a sad trudge home, I did some internet sleuthing. News reports indicated that Huy Fong Foods who makes sambal oelek (and the very popular Sriracha sauce) had suspended operations in 2022 because of the world wide cayenne pepper shortage, but there was no news about a current suspension.

The Huy Fong Foods website actually has an easy-to-find email address for their customer service office! So I sent an email:

Subject: Is your factory closed? 

I am in Ottawa, Canada and I went to the nearby market called Lim Bangkok to buy a new jug of Sambal Oelek. I was surprised to find none at all. Not even in small jars.

The store owner told me that your factory is closed and he didn't know what would happen.

I read that you had to suspend production last year. Has the same thing happened again?

Will I one day be able to obtain your sauce that adds such pleasure to my life?

I understand that this is harder for you and all the people at Huy Fong. I wish you all the best.

Thank you,

This morning I received this reply:

Hello,

Unfortunately, we are still experiencing a shortage of raw material. Although some production did resume this past Fall season, we continue to have a limited supply that continues to affect our production. At this time, we have no estimations of when supply will increase.

Because we do not sell directly to retail/market levels, we cannot determine when product will hit shelves again and/or who currently has product in stock. We are grateful for your continued patience and understanding during this unprecedented inventory shortage.  We are currently working on trying to avoid future shortages.

Thank you,
Customer Service
HUY FONG FOODS, INC.

There you have it. In a very short time, it seems that I will have no sambal oelek. It's going to be harder to motivate myself to get out of bed in the morning.

Where are the budget mittens?

Joe Fresh gloves at Loblaws

In the winter, I wear mittens. I do not wear gloves. Mittens keep my hands warm and gloves don't.

Also in the winter, I lose mittens. And toques. On Thursday morning, I lost my toque and a pair of mittens when I got off the bus.

So since then, I have been looking for low-price mittens and toques. I have been to the Bay, Winners, Sports Experts, Giant Tiger, Dollarama, Value Village, Loblaws and several other stores.

I did find some low-price hats. The best find was a $2.50 toque at Dollarama yesterday. Today, it occurred to me I should have bought five or six of them. I'll probably need them all eventually, and in the meantime, I'd have them on hand if I acquire a group of henchmen.

None of these places had low-price mittens. Only gloves. What is up with that?

Please be thoughtful with your Tim Hortons Cups

A Tim's cup in a blue bin on Lebreton Street

Cups at Value Village

If you've been following my blog for several years, you'll know that this is the time of year that I really notice litter. Not because it's spring and the snow has melted. But because there are lottery tickets in the form of Tim Hortons Roll up the Rim cups all over the place.

I don't know what it is, but many Tim's customers are remarkably inconsiderate. Do you see what someone did on Lebreton Street? They tossed a cup in a blue bin with a bunch of other garbage. I have no problem with the fact that a coffee cup doesn't belong in a blue bin. I'm upset that the cup is partially covered and the rim has been rolled back down so you have to pull it out and re-roll it to verify that the cup is a loser.

By contrast, notice the cups I found next to my car on my recent trip to Value Village.

They were tossed so that you can clearly see they are worthless "please play again" cups.

It's a lot of trouble taking a cup out of a bin, removing the lid and rolling the rim up just to discover the original owner was right to throw it away.

This is how to throw away a Tim's cup

We have too much stuff

There are many signs that our society has become too materialistic.
The top-rated show on A&E is Storage Wars where we watch a group of colourful characters buy and sell the contents of storage lockers whose owners have defaulted on the monthly rent.
The top show on History TV is Pawn Stars where we watch a colourful Las Vegas family buy interesting items from people who never admit they're desperate to pay gambling debts.
History also has American Pickers and Canadian Pickers which each follow two guys who drive around buying stuff that fits the expression "one man's trash is another man's treasure."
Spike's highest rated show is Auction Hunters, another storage locker buying show.
A&E's Hoarders is also doing really well. If you're like me, you watch Hoarders and say, "at least I'm not that bad."
There are many more shows about acquiring stuff. The ones I know about and usually enjoy include Hardcore Pawn, Antiques Road Show (UK, US, Canada), Auction Kings, What the Sell, the very weird Oddities, and Pawnathon Canada.
But here's something that hit me this morning when we were on Catherine Street dropping Zander off at the bus station. See this storage locker building that is a block from Bank Street:

It used to be a bowling alley.
I'm not saying that a bowling alley is the absolute best use of downtown real estate, but it makes me sad that it was more economical for the owners of 270 Catherine to rip out the lanes, pins and ball returns and put in storage lockers.
Shouldn't we be bowling instead of acquiring so much stuff that it won't fit in our homes so we have to rent storage lockers?

Grape bags

So here’s the thing. There are all sorts of big things going on - tsunamis, earth quakes, nuclear disasters, wars, revolutions, elections - but the top item on my “blog about this” list for the past month has been something that bothers me about the bags they put the grapes in at the grocery store. All those other things are more important, but anything I would say has been said and if I don’t get this out of my system, I may never blog again.

It used to be you’d pull a plastic bag off the roller and bag your own grapes. Now they’re bagged for you. I suspect that if I ask Loblaws or one of the other grocers why, they’ll tell me it is for my convenience.

However, I suspect it is so that they can sell more of the grapes that have fallen off the stems. As an experienced grape eater I can tell you that these are the first grapes to go rotten. Back when we bagged our own, the loose grapes would stay in the produce bin and Loblaws would have to throw them out. Now they go home with any customer who isn’t obsessive about choosing a bag without loose grapes.

This is not what bothers me. I see pre-bagged grapes as just another tactic in the retail industry program to sell us things we don’t want. I don’t like taking home bad grapes, but saving a few seconds bagging is almost worth the trade-off.

What bothers me is this: Given that the bags have many holes (for air flow? draining moisture?) do they really need airtight Ziploc seals?

And if they do need airtight Ziploc seals, shouldn’t they be seals that actually work and not ones that won’t stay closed no matter how hard you try to line up the grooves and press on them?

Blogging Woes

There are two reasons I almost didn't blog this week. First of all, too much happened on the weekend. Then there was Monday.

Friday night, it was Spins'n'Needles. [I had fun, but didn't make anything notable. Ed and Eileen who came with us mod-podged things. Ed did his cell phone and Eileen did a button plate for a kitchen fan. It was inspiring.] [Flickr Photos]

Saturday morning, the Great Glebe Garage Sale. [Major score - a working overhead projector for $10.] [Flickr Photos]

Saturday afternoon, the Rogers Cable guy came and determined that the reason I am not getting channels 61, 64, 67, 68 and 69 is a problem on the main line and not in my house. This struck him as funny because I haven't been getting the channels for several months and I'm the first customer who has complained. Since channel 64 is PBS, I'm guessing that none of the Watertown diehards live in my neighbourhood.

After the cable, I obviously needed a nap.

Saturday night, wow! The Roller Derby. Excellent fun. I've found a sport that I enjoy watching. The Rideau Valley Roller Girls posted blowout victories over the their out-of-town opponents. Let me know if you want to come the next time we go. [Flickr Photos]

Sunday was a busy day here at the house.

Okay. Then Monday. Maybe it was the smoke in the air, but I didn't get a good night's sleep and woke up grumpy. Very tempted to call in sick. Halfway to the bus stop, I put my hand in my pocket and discovered I didn't have my bus pass. Back at home, it didn't turn up. So I tossed my bag in the back seat of the car and sat down in the front to drive to work. As I put the key in the ignition I realized I could hear someone talking even though I hadn't turned the key to start the radio. I listened more closely. "Shut up, fool. Shut up, fool. Shut up, fool..."

It was my Mr T in Your Pocket and button 3 must have gotten pushed in when I dropped the bag. I reached back and shook the bag until Mr T shut up. (Although it is called Mr T in Your Pocket, I keep it in my shoulder bag.)

When I arrived at work and took the bag out of the car, he started up again. I had to adjust everything in the front pocket of the bag to get him to stop.

Work was okay except that something came up that prevented me from going for a swim at lunch.

At home, I thought things were on the upswing. Manon cooked a tasty supper for us. Kaye washed the dishes so I didn't have to. There were no good TV shows on so I had a full evening to do a little volunteer coordination for Propeller Dance and write some blog posts.

But first there was a comment to moderate. This is notable because it was an actual comment and not spam. An anonymous person took issue with Marcie's list of exciting things to do in Ottawa. I approved the comment and then went to the posting to put up a reply. But the comment wasn't there. So I went to comment moderation. There were 115 comments awaiting moderation. All spam that I hadn't got around to rejecting. Might as well do this now, I thought.

So I clicked "select all" and then clicked "reject". At least I meant to click "reject". Since the following screen said "115 comments have been published", I must admit that I may clicked "publish" instead.

So instead of blogging last night, I spent the evening deleting comments that you might have found useful if you are looking for verifiable sex or a mobile home park in Oswego, but which I found embarrassing.

The comment on Marcie's post appeared for a while and has now vanished again. I suppose I should go to Blogger's known issues page and see if I can find out what's going on, but it's bedtime.

The All-Alone Punchbuggy Emotion

It seems the psychologists have identified six basic emotions that are experienced by people everywhere. These big 6 emotions are: anger, fear, disgust, amusement, sadness and surprise.

Of course, there's big competition to identify other emotions and expand the list to the big 7 or the even the big 15. The New Scientist has an article exploring 5 less famous emotions that could be added to the list: elevation, interest, gratitude, pride and confusion.

But they've missed that emotion you feel when you see a VW Beetle and there's nobody around to punch.

I got punched four times today. Twice by Manon and twice by Kathy A. Sure I spotted punchbuggies, but only when I was all by myself. Including this Star Trek fan's bug that I think should have been worth two punches.

I Need a New Host

I have a problem. In their continuing efforts to make themselves less valuable to me Rogers and Yahoo will no longer provide me with file hosting after October 26.

This means that I have to bring all the files that I put up on GeoCities somewhere else. For the pictures and html documents it is a hassle, but not a big deal.

The problem file is my Human Bingo Excel file. It is the most popular thing I've done and I am having a hard time finding a place to have it hosted where people can easily download it without having to go to wonky ad-filled sites.

It is 92 KB.

Any ideas?

Dave gets Grumpy: Carts at Food Basics

Because Sally kindly loaned me her car this afternoon, I was able to load up my plastic bins and reusable bags and go grocery shopping somewhere outside the neighbourhood. I decided to try a Food Basics. I've never been there before but I gathered that they claim to have low prices. I like low prices.

I pulled into the parking lot and walked up to the store with my load of bins and reusable bags. Walking past a cart return area, I noticed that the carts had those little chain things that some stores used to use where you deposit a quarter so that you'll return the cart to the cart area instead of stealing it or leaving it somewhere in the parking lot. Then I saw someone actually return a cart and slip the chain from the cart in front of hers to get her quarter back.

I checked my pocket and discovered I had no change at all. The cart return area at the front had only one cart. I'll grab that, I thought. But before I could get to the free cart, a guy ripped out of the store and conjoined his cart with it.

I swore to myself and walked back to the car. Then I thought, come on, they must have a way to give you a cart when you don't have a quarter. Some sort of key thing. And just because they don't trust you to be civilized with their carts doesn't mean you should drive to another store.

So I walked back to the store. Just behind the cart area I spotted four young fellows in green Food Basics golf shirts. "Is there any way I can get a cart without a quarter?" I asked.

"Best bet would be ask one of the ladies at the courtesy desk," said one of them in a tone of voice that rubbed me the wrong way.

"I'll just shop somewhere else." I turned around, walked back to Sally's car, put the bins and bags in the trunk and drove to a store a good ways further down Carling where the prices were probably higher but the carts were free for the taking.

My decision to drive away from Food Basics was about being pissed off and showing it, but I stand by my decision.

First, I'd rather not shop where the first message upon arrival is that I am not to be trusted with a shopping cart. I've been carefully returning grocery carts to the proper area for more than 30 years. You don't have to hold 25 cents of mine to get me to do that. Even when I'm grumpy or in a hurry.

Second, perhaps I'd have walked in to the courtesy desk and they'd have had a cart right there for me. But perhaps I'd have had to wait in line for ten minutes behind other people with problems and then had to endure more waiting or humiliation because I didn't happen to carry a quarter with me.

Third, the lack of helpfulness of the four young men outside the store and the tone of the fellow who answered suggests to me that other interactions with the staff there might have been similarly useless or annoying.

[By the way, I'd have sent them an email about this, but they only let you contact them with one of those contact forms and their form just adds to my grumpiness.]

IE8 and why I am going back to being a late adopter

When I was growing up, I planned on being an early adopter before the term had been invented. But the reality hasn't panned out that way. Maybe it's because they never came out with the watch phones and jet packs I wanted. Or maybe it's because I'm frugal. In any case, I carry no cell phone, my Windows XP machine is running Microsoft Office 2000 and nothing I own has a GPS in it.

So it was a little odd that last month that I decided to upgrade from Internet Explorer 7 to Internet Explorer 8 without waiting for experts to tell me that the bugs had been worked out.

IE8 has a bunch of new features I like. But...

Until today, for me, and based on my internet searches over the past month, for quite a number of other people, IE8 did not have a "find on this page" feature. You know, the basic crtl-f "find". Like if you're on a complicated page and want to find the link for "contact us", you couldn't do a search for "contact".

I found the answer at The Winhelponline Blog, not at a Microsoft site. Microsoft had me doing a bunch of things that accomplished nothing but waste hours of my time.

So now IE8 is working, but there is still something that bugs me.

I use the security setting that causes IE to tell you when you are on a page that has a mixture of secure and insecure content.

Probably I should find a way to have it not tell me this, because it never tells me that either "nothing on this page is secure" or "everything on this page is secure", only when it's a mixture. If I don't need to know in the all or nothing cases, why do I need to know in the mixed case?

But this is not what's bugging me about IE8. In IE7 and earlier versions, when this situation occurred they said "This page contains both secure and nonsecure items" and and asked "Do you want to display the nonsecure items".

To see everything, you clicked "yes".

In IE8, they ask "Do you want to view only the webpage content that was delivered securely?" And then give an explanation about some content not being delivered by a secure HTTPS connection.

To see everything you click "No".

Now every time the message comes up, I read the question, then the explanation, and then go back to read the question because the explanation made me forget that "No" is the answer I want to give. Maybe this is good exercise for my neural pathways and it's preventing Alzheimers but it makes me cranky.

Eber Irigoyen blogged about this on What do you want to program today? and one of his commenters provided the method for eliminating the message. I'm going to implement it. Then I'm going to submit his post and mine to Seth Godin, the This is Broken guru. And I'm going to go back to waiting until Lifehacker or Windows Secrets tell me it's time to download the new upgrades.

(By the way, I don't care if someone out there likes another browser like Firefox or Chrome more. This is not what this post is about and I may just delete any comments endorsing other browsers.)

Do they really want us to use the stairs?

The people in charge of our health tell us we should use stairs whenever we can . [Examples]

Meanwhile, the people in charge of our buildings make staircases so ugly they must assume that nobody who matters ever uses them.

The building this staircase is in has marble flooring at the main entrance. The elevators have tinted mirrors and buffed metal trim.

And this is the main staircase. Not the emergency backup stairs.

Dave gets Snarky: The Doctor's Office from the 80s

I'm in a bad mood tonight. I've been sitting at my computer for 3 hours and have accomplished almost nothing even though I've been trying to accomplish things and have not in fact played a single game of Mumu.

This is the kind of bad mood that would be improved by me making someone else grumpy. Since I haven't got anybody to grump at right now, I would like to share an exchange I recently had with the office of a medical specialist.

I realized in late February that I had lost the piece of paper telling me when I was supposed to see this specialist for a followup to a test that I took. A test that obviously hadn't shown anything serious because it was one of those deals where if it was serious, it was seriously serious and they would call me in right away, but if it wasn't serious, I'd just go in so they could tell me I'm okay but I'd be even better if I cut back on fats and sugars and exercise more.

I'd lost the paper, but I had the doctor's business card. First I tried the phone number. It rang a few times and then I got a message telling me that they were on lunch hour and I'd have to call back between 1:30 and 4pm.

I called at 3pm and got a busy signal.

So I sent an email to the address on the card:

Hello,

I believe I have an appointment late this month with Dr. Q to review results of a test...

I can't find the paper with the date for the appointment on it.

Would you be able to tell me when it is?

Thank you,

David Scrimshaw

Seconds later, I received a reply:

From: admin...

Sent: February 18, 2009 3:00 PM

To: Scrimshaw, David

Subject: We do not respond to emails

Thank you for your email. However we do not respond to clinical emails.

Please contact the office by phone 613.....

So I replied:

From: Scrimshaw, David

Sent: February 18, 2009 3:01 PM

To: admin...

Subject: RE: We do not respond to emails

Then why do you have an email address?

Just to annoy people?

I felt pretty good about this, but it had two obvious problems.

1. Obviously, nobody is actually reading these emails; and
2. I still didn't know when I was supposed to see the doctor.

I tried the phone number again. Busy signal.

I set an Outlook reminder and tried phoning several more times over the next two days. Every time I called I got the busy signal or the message about how it was the wrong time.

So I sent a fax.

You'll be happy to know that within a half-hour, a sheepish-sounding woman phoned me and actually apologized because my appointment was supposed to be for the next day but the doctor was out of town and they had to reschedule my appointment. She was kind of sheepish about it all, but I took no pleasure in it. It was really the guy in charge that I wanted to hear apologize.

Here is the fax I sent:

2009-Feb-20

Re: Appointment with Dr. Q

Hello

I am faxing because:

• When I call, I either get a busy signal or a message that you're not answering your phone at the time I call.
• When I emailed, I got a reply that says you don't reply to emails.

I think I have an appointment next week, but maybe I've already missed it.

If you are able to, could you let me know when my appointment is? I have lost the paper with the date.

David Scrimshaw

Tel: 613-236-.... [my phone is usually free, and when not, you can leave a voicemail]

Email: david....@....ca [I do reply to emails]

p.s. Given that you deal with people who may respond poorly to stress and tension, perhaps you should investigate some of the modern communication techniques like using the "reply" button on emails and using "voicemail".

Useless Signs

The Loblaws on Rideau Street has two huge moving ramps to bring shoppers and grocery carts from the parking garage up to the store level and back down. A cool thing about the ramps is that they have a special feature that locks the cart wheels so that the carts cannot role down the ramps, even when they are completely loaded.

Today I noticed they have new signs at the top and bottom of the ramps that say "Caution! No Restricted Traffic".

They are nice big signs. Even if there is someone out there manufacturing them in bulk, they must have cost $100 each with the mounting brackets and installation. To me, it's a lot of money and effort to convey absolutely no message.

Here are my theories on what the signs might mean:

• We are not supposed to interfere with the movement of people and carts on the ramps. (Like by leaving a grocery cart at the ramp entrance and walking away.)
• If we have trouble walking, we aren't allowed to use the ramps.
• We are not supposed to take certain wheeled objects on the ramps (strollers? personal grocery carts? bicycles?).
• At some point the locking system for the carts failed and they haven't removed the signs now that the carts are locking to the tracks again.

My experience with pointing this sort of thing out to people is that because they know what they mean with their sign, they figure I am stupid for not knowing. So I'm not going to write a letter to Loblaws suggesting they change their signs to something that actually communicates to people.

However, if by some chance, you've googled something like loblaws ramp caution restricted traffic because you had an unfortunate experience with the ramps at Loblaws and the authorities there told you that you should have known better because they had the CAUTION sign, you can say, "I know a lawyer with a degree in cognitive science from MIT who spent half a day trying to figure out what your stupid signs mean and he came up empty."

3 Rhetorical Questions Related to Things that Bug Me and a Small Miracle

1. Why do perfectly able-bodied individuals with nothing in their arms push "open door" buttons and thus waste (a) electricity, (b) an opportunity to use their muscles, and (c) my time while I wait for the door to slowly swing open?
2. How is that every battery operated device in my house uses one of 4 different standard batteries (AA, AAA, D, and 9-volt) that have been around for almost 100 years and can be found everywhere in the world, but when I pull out a plastic container to put my lunch in, I will have to rummage through roughly 40 completely different lids before finding one that will fit my container?
3. When Mel Tormé wrote his song about chestnuts roasting by an open fire, what made him think the definite article "the" was more appropriate than the indefinite "a" in his title The Christmas Song? Did he think all the other Christmas songs would disappear?

Now that I've got those out of the way...

Shortly after 9am this morning, on a number 95 bus with more than 30 passengers, between Dominion and Baseline stations, a 5.4 km trip that took roughly 11 minutes, not a single person spoke on a cell phone. One young woman may have responded to a text message, but she also might have been checking the time.

It's fine with me if you don't use Facebook

I have admitted it before. I am on Facebook.

Here are the things I do on Facebook:

• Confirm as Friends people that I actually have met;
• Occasionally update my status to say that "David is" doing something innocuous;
• Respond to an invitation by indicating that I may go, so that I can easily copy the event into my Google calendar;
• Look up ex-girlfriends;
• See if friends have posted embarrassing or sexy pictures of themselves;
• Seek damaging information about people suing my client;
• Delete invitations to join political groups;
• Reject all invitations to sign up for games, contests, quizes, etc; and
• Respond to personal emails from people for whom I do not have a proper email address.

Here are things I don't do on Facebook:

• Instant messages (they creep me out);
• Games, contest, quizzes, etc;
• Ask people to have lunch with me by posting a message on their "wall";
• Send messages to people I already have a proper email address for; or
• Send out party invitations.

When you send me a message through Facebook, I get an email that tells me so and tells me what the message is. I can reply directly from my email system, but I will have to type over the "noreply" address with enough of your name that your address pops up. If I have your address. If I don't have your address, I will have to click on the Facebook link in the email, possibly log in to Facebook, and reply there. I'll delete the Facebook messages, but I won't be confident that Facebook isn't keeping it all in an archive somewhere.

Like many of my generation, I have an unfortunate tendency to get cranky. The extra clicks, typing, and possible privacy breaches I just described bring out that crankiness. Now that I have mentioned it here, I am more likely next time to remind myself to not get cranky about this and your using Facebook rather than email will help me on my path to not getting irritated by little things. On the other hand, depending on how slow my computer and browser are, you might have wasted 30 seconds to a minute that I could have spent writing something you'd like to read.

If you want to stalk me, you may find you're better off going with this blog, my Google calendar, and Flickr than with Facebook.

Bonus Link for people who have read this far and are not fond of live squirrels, a Youtube video that shows you how to hunt squirrels and make sandwiches with them. [I think it might be for real.]

Bonus news about my life for people who care, it occurred to me that since the used components that made up the urban inuksuk aren't all going to leave the house soon (so far only the little TV and 2 smashed VCRs are gone), they might as well be stacked in the inuksuk shape and when I mentioned this to Manon, she was actually enthusiastic. So it lives again. For a while.

I Wish You Would Use Google Calendar

This is the first post in a news series. I was going to call it "Social Applications That I Use That I Wish You Would Also Use", along with its sibling series, "Social Applications I Use That I Wish You Would Not Use", but my experience with "Things I've Been Doing Instead of Blogging" is that a long title for a series has disadvantages that I prefer to avoid.

You would improve my life if you used Google Calendar.

With Google Calendar (or "GCal"), I can send event listings, appointments and tasks to my Outlook calendars at home and work. I can send event listings to friends and if they use Google Calendar, Outlook or any of the many other compatible calendars, these dates will go into their calendars as well. If I've put the address in correctly, there will even be a link to the Google Map for the place.

When an event is in your electronic calendar, not only do you see it when you look at your calendar, but you can get email or pop-up reminders. As many as you need. (And I often need a lot.)

If you used Google Calendar to tell me about an event, I wouldn't have to cut and paste the details into the various fields of my calendar. I would just have to "accept" and it would be done. If I want to invite someone else, I put them on my invite list and they can do the same.

Added bonuses:

1. Using a GCal notice, You're less likely to leave out critical details like time and location.
2. Many more people RSVP to calendar requests than to ordinary email invitations.
3. You get most of the benefits of one of the eVite type sites without the annoyances. /li>

Additional Tips:

• The Quick Add feature is pretty smart at figuring out what various ways of writing dates and times are. If you type "at 414 Bank St" it will figure out that 414 Bank St is the venue for the appointment.
• If you want Google Maps to show the location for a building, but you have other information, like the name of the building and what part the event is in, put the additional information in parentheses after the address. (Here is an example.)
• You need to be careful about your "private" and "public" settings. I once came across the calendar of an Alberta sociology professor because she'd set her calendar to "public" and, after she added a conference in Ottawa to it, it showed up in a listing of "Ottawa" calendars. She may not have minded strangers knowing her lecture schedule, but probably didn't want us knowing the names of her doctors and how often she saw them.

Finally, if you are not going to use Google Calendar to tell me about an event on your web posting or email, please at least use actual text to do it and not a jpg or gif of a poster advertising the event. I really hate typing when I shouldn't have to.

Other problems with C-61 and the Copyright Act?

Copyright Expired? For now, I think. Taken in 1957, Photographer: Hulton Archive/Stringer.

If you follow blogs or even the regular news, you may know that many people are upset over Bill C-61's amendments to Canada's Copyright Act that will criminalize the breaking of technology that prevents users from copying digital media.

I've noticed some other issues with C-61. I've been waiting for one of the copyright gurus to weigh in on them, but since they haven't, I'm going to bring them up now, and maybe someone will tell me I've got it wrong.

No more 50 year-term for a Corporate Photo

Section 10(2) makes the person who owns the initial "negative or other plate" of a photo the "author" (or creator) of the photo. In the digital age, this is taken to be the owner of the camera or the owner of the memory medium. Being the author is not the same as being the original owner of the copyright. Section 10(2) has some interesting ramifications, for example:

• The bride and groom will be "the author" of photos taken at a wedding reception on disposable cameras that they have placed on the tables. The guests who snapped the photos will not be the authors.
• Staff photographers for a newspaper are the author if they buy their own film or use their personal digital camera, but the newspaper is the author if it provides the film or digital camera. Either way, under s. 13(3), staff photographers do not own the copyright in those photos unless they have a contract that says otherwise.

Section 10(1) says that if the author is a corporation, the term of the copyright will be remainder of the year in which the photo is taken plus 50 years. [Section 10(1.1) excludes one-person corporations from this rule.] When s. 10(1) does not apply, the term of copyright is the same as the term for most other works: 50 years after the end of the year in which the author dies.

If C-61 passes, s. 10 will be deleted from the Act.

I think this will be good for you if you hold shares in a corporation that makes money from selling old photographs

It will not be so good for you if you would like to reproduce photographs that were taken more than 50 years ago (i.e. before 1958). It will be a serious challenge to determine if the copyright term on a particular photo has expired. I imagine that public archives will refuse to make copies of photos for patrons unless they know the photographer died more than fifty years ago.

As for any newlyweds who leave cameras on the tables at their wedding reception, I'm sure your guests will be happy to sign papers assigning their copyright in the photos to you.

No more automatic copyright for people who pay to have photos taken:

Currently under s. 13(2) if you pay someone to take a picture, you own the copyright in that photo unless you agree to let the photographer have the copyright. Professional photographers generally get around this by putting a clause in their contracts giving them the copyright. You people who have hired professional wedding photographers and later felt like the photos of your special day are being held hostage will know all about that.

13. (2) Where, in the case of an engraving, photograph or portrait, the ... original was ordered by some other person and was made for valuable consideration, and the consideration was paid, ... in the absence of any agreement to the contrary, the person by whom the ...original was ordered shall be the first owner of the copyright.

Under C-61, s. 13(2) will be repealed. Photographers will no longer have to put a copyright clause in their contracts to own the copyright.

I don't understand why this change is being made. Professional photographers have been keeping the copyright anyway and because it is explicit in their contracts, there is less confusion about who owns the copyright.

If C-61 passes and you're at an amusement park and you pay $5 for a picture of yourself, will you have to get permission from the photographer to upload a copy to your blog?

Missed Opportunity and a hidden landmine: The 25-year reversion to the estate

There is a little-known clause in the Copyright Act that causes headaches now and then. It is s. 14(1). If an author who was the first owner of the copyright in a work gives or sells the copyright to someone else but doesn't mention this assignment in their will, the copyright reverts to the author's estate 25 years after the end of the year in which they died.

The British introduced this provision into their copyright act in the 1800s. Presumably to address the situation where artists and authors waste their money and leave nothing for their grandchildren.

Every now and then some publisher or record company finds out they've lost the right to publish something they thought they owned under this provision and some authors survivors get a windfall. Sometimes it affects you and me because the people who inherit the copyright impose crazy restrictions on reproduction of the copyrighted work.

However, the main impact of this rule is that authors get paid less than they otherwise would when they sell the copyright in their works. Big companies are going to pay less for a copyright that lasts 25 years after the author's death than they would for one that lasts 50 years.

The British dumped this rule in 1956. This could have been an opportunity for us to dump it also.

And married people, keep in mind that with 13(2) repealed, even if you get your wedding photographers to assign the copyright in the photos to you, 25 years after the photographers die, their estates can reclaim that copyright.

Another Missed Opportunity - Publicly funded works

Some people had hoped that the next amendments to the Copyright Act would see a relaxation in how copyright applies to government and publicly-funded publications. With no amendment we cannot freely reproduce publications that our taxes have paid to create even for non-commercial purposes.

Links:

• Bill C-61
• The Copyright Act
• Michael Geist: The Canadian DMCA: Check the Fine Print
• Winkler v. Roy: A 2002 case where the copyright in the Black Donnellys reverts to the author's landlady

Complaints, Choirs, and Accepting Winter

In my ongoing quest for self-improvement, I decided a few years ago that I should stop complaining about the weather, and even to go beyond not complaining to accepting the weather, as in having "the serenity to accept the things I cannot change". The weather this winter has been a challenge, but as I was clearing snow off a car last week I found my miserable thoughts interupted by the thought that among the millions of tiny snowflakes I was sweeping onto the driveway, no two were the same. It made me sort of like the snow.

I've waited this long to blog this because I don't want to annoy the other bloggers with my Pollyanna I'm not complaining about winter attitude.

But don't worry, just because I'm not complaining here, doesn't mean I don't have complaints. It's just they're mostly about things I can change and if I blogged them, you'd say, well, duh, stop blogging and do something.

In Finland, they have an expression for when a bunch of people are complaining, valituskuoro or "complaints choir". Tellervo Kalleinen and Oliver Kochta-Kalleinen got the brilliant idea of creating a real complaints choir. They did it first in Birmingham. They came up with a stirring complaint song, but I'm giving you the song from the second Complaints Choir in Helsinki because it is magnificent:

There have been Complaint Choir performances all over the place.

If you want more complaints, but without singing, I suggest you go to this site.

If you want more choir singing, check out this church choir in the village of Zolokere, Malawi:

Or you could try:

• South Africa's Holy Cross Choir singing Mthandazo wase Africa (Pray for Africa)
• A church choir in Namibe, Angola, Africa
• The church choir of Nlog, in Bakossi, West Cameroon
• Namibian Youth Choir

I don't know what the words mean to the songs from the African choirs, but I do not believe they are complaints. Of course, most or all of the singers never experienced February in Canada.

Uses for Binder Clips - Prevent Sliding Folders

First I'll show you the binder clip use from Lifehacker reader Mike, then I will tell you why I didn't post it the very day I saw it.

Mike didn't like the way his hanging folders slid around when he opened his file drawer, so he cleverly used this binder clip to stop them from sliding.

Now Lifehacker appears to have had no conflict over showing this as another of the wonderful uses of binder clips, but I was torn. I had to think about whether to file it under "Uses for Binder Clips" or "Inappropriate Uses for Binder Clips". This is because to me having the folders slide around is part of the fun of a file drawer. However, I am trying to learn to accept that for someone else my fun can be their annoyance and if a binder clip removes an annoyance, that is a good thing.

This is not the reason I didn't post this use right away. No, I'm afraid I had a more venal and embarrassing reason. I am filled with jealousy. I have been hoping since I started the binder clip series that Lifehacker or Merlin Mann would notice these postings and give them some props. But no. I've gone unnoticed. Reader Mike has one fairly obvious idea for solving a marginal problem and he gets his own posting on Lifehacker. Meanwhile. the bigtime binder clip boosters ignore the contributions to the field that I've made or reported on.

I should be content with the acclaim and adoration that I receive from all of you loyal readers. I shouldn't need recognition beyond what I have. I know that. But still, I feel discouraged. And who pays the price? You do. Instead of just posting Mike's picture and moving on, I procrastinated ten days and have now burdened you with my petty complaining.

But from now on, I will do my best to accept the vicissitudes of fame and put your interests ahead of my own selfish whims.

If Lifehacker, Merlin Mann or BoingBoing do come across this posting here are the top 3 binder clip uses I think you might want to feature:

• Uses for Binder Clips - Fashion Accessories
• Uses for Binder Clips - Stopping the Progress of Nature from Pearl.
• Uses for Binder Clips - Emergency Eyeglass Repair

Moo Moo's Ice Cream in St. John's, NF

Moo Moo's Interior; photo: M. Blouin

If you are in St. John's in the summer time. You will almost certainly go for ice cream at Moo Moo's. They have an excellent selection of flavours to please all tastes.

Abigail and Jessica enjoying their selection; photo: M. Blouin

I understand that when available "Moon Mist" is not a flavour that pleases all tastes. For example, while my young friend Jessica enjoys it, her mother has a long list of unpleasant things she would rather do than eat Moon Mist ice cream.

If you are particularly gluttonous, you may decide after eating your ice cream cone to have a second cone, but to make it a soft cone.

Dave making a mistake so you won't have to; photo: M. Blouin

Based on my one experience, I would advise against this. If you must have more, stick with the "hard" ice cream. Unless you enjoy something that resembles frozen milk more than the soft ice cream you are used to.

Moo Moo's Ice Cream Inc Address : 88 Kings Road, A1C6L7, St. John's, NL Telephone : 709-753-0999