Coincidentally, when I started iTunes, it downloaded an interesting podcast on 3D printers as disruptive technology, and thought it might be good to share the podcasts that I regularly download (although I don’t always get the chance to listen to all of them):

• Cory Doctorow’s craphound.com – Cory Doctorow publishes readings of his books and short stories, read by himself or others. Since he licenses all of this writing under a Creative Commons licence, others are free to record and publish his books on audio, which he republishes here. Great way to listen to his science fiction a bit at a time.
• Search Engine – Jesse Brown of TVO podcasts both audio and (short) video on a variety of technology in society issues. Always enjoyable, and some great interviews with willing and reluctant interviewees on topics of copyright and internet access in Canada.
• Spark from CBC Radio – Nora Young produces longer-form interviews on “your digital life”, that is, how technology impacts your day-to-day life. The interviews are slower-moving than those on Search Engine, but provide more depth and discussion on a subject. She also has a podcast of some (even longer) unedited interviews if you’re very interested in a particular one.
• Surprisingly Free – interviews with well-known authors, academics, researchers and others on a huge variety of topics on technology and society.
• Tech News Today – I used to listen to the Buzz Out Loud podcast because I loved the conversations between Tom Merritt and Molly Wood, but when Merritt left, I thought that the quality of commentary decreased, and I eventually stopped listening. Recently, I tried out this podcast that Tom Merritt is now doing on consumer technology, quite similar in nature to the old BOL, and I listen occasionally.

Each of the links above is to the podcast feed URL; to subscribe, just copy the link and paste into your podcatcher (iTunes, for example, or one of the apps that you can get to do this directly on your iPod/iPhone – I just bought Downcast to try it out and have already removed all podcast subscriptions out of iTunes).

Not surprisingly, all of the podcasts are technology-related, although they tend to focus on technology in society rather than the enterprise technology stuff that I do for a living.

I’ve had some great experiences, where I’ve bought quality goods or services, and continue to be a customer of a business that I might never have tried otherwise. A great example of this is WineOnline.ca, who offered discounts through TeamBuy and DealFind; I used all of my coupons, and I’m now a regular customer for ordering wine by the case, delivered directly to my home by their always-friendly team. I’ve purchased other coupons through TeamBuy, too: Toronto Airport Express (which I still use occasionally), the One of a Kind show, Mankind Grooming Studio (great gift for a friend), Booster Juice (too sweet for me, but good to try it out), Smoke’s Poutinerie (yum!), Best Limousine (not as convenient as my current airport limo service) and Rock Candy Life (nice shower curtain). The only problem that I had was a failed delivery from Rock Candy Life that appears to have been a pure shipping error, and was corrected immediately with a new shipment. In other words, TeamBuy definitely falls into my “reputable” classification, since they appear to be offering goods or services from companies that are in turn reputable, hence provide an overall good experience both for buying and using coupons.

Groupon has also worked well for me, including their instant coupons via the iPhone app. I discovered a new tea shop in my neighbourhood, Herbal Infusions (great selection and nice staff), went on a ride with Toronto Helicopter Tours (highly recommended), and tried out Front Door Organics’ home delivery (didn’t work for me because of their delivery schedules, although the food was great). I also bought a Bixi membership that I plan to kick off in the spring, and will likely continue with after the first year if I’m using it enough to justify. I also have a couple of coupons to use for restaurants that I’m eager to try out.

I’ve had mixed results with Living Social: I bought a mani/pedi at Soho Spa, booked the appointment for the day before I was leaving for a Florida vacation, then had the spa call to cancel that morning – after they had marked the coupon as used. I had to contact Living Social to have the coupon reinstated, which they did immediately, so they get points for customer service but could provide better instructions to their vendors about marking coupons before they are actually used. On most sites, the customer marks the coupons as used on the site merely as a convenience, and the vendor doesn’t have the opportunity to mark them used; there’s significant room for abuse here if you don’t track your own coupons but rely on the Living Social site to do it for you. TeamSave, similarly, has “disappeared” vouchers from my account; if I hadn’t been tracking them myself, I would have lost coupons that I had already paid for. DealFind, although I had luck with them on the WineOnline and other vouchers, recently sold one for a 32GB SD card from a vendor that appears unable to process an order, and I’m having trouble even contacting the vendor to find out what it happening. I think that DealFind, like a few other deal sites, have lowered their standards considerably in the vendors that they promote, and they’re likely to see a big backlash from that.

In the “not so good” category, we have DealTicker. I’ve only bought one thing from them, and it’s been a massive fail both from a vendor product standpoint and customer service. In mid-November, I bought a coupon for touchscreen gloves – the vendor site showed some brightly-coloured striped gloves that I really liked. The coupon was not valid until November 30th; the day before, I checked the vendor website and the striped gloves were still there, but after the 30th, when I went in to place my order, they had removed all the striped ones and only have plain grey gloves left. I contacted the vendor; they replied:

A variety of colours were available, however, as an online retailer, we experience a high volume of sales (outside of group-buy deals) especially for this popular seasonal item. Our suppliers no longer carry the colours previously advertised on our site. Therefore we are not able to stock the same colours.

A pure bait-and-switch scam: sell the customer one thing, then attempt to substitute something else. I contacted DealTicker, who gave me a completely different response:

We have investigated your complaint, and have been assured that Lifestyl.info will restock any items currently sold out. As they received a great deal of response to this deal, some models inevitably ran out. As your voucher is valid for one year, there is plenty of time to allow them to restock any item that is currently sold out.

Obviously, no real communication going on between DealTicker and the vendor, in spite of what DealTicker claimed. I requested a refund; DealTicker responded that it would be processed by December 29th, almost a month later. Unhappy with this, I tweeted that DealTicker should be ashamed to sell a bogus coupon, then take almost a month to refund me for it. The following Twitter conversation, in which they stated that their really horrible customer service is “awesome” and I am “miserable”, ensued (read from the bottom up):

At the very least, whoever posts to their Twitter account should be moved to a position where they don’t interact with customers.

Also in the truly horrible category is WebPiggy, which took part in The Butchers scam. I bought two different deals from them – an airport limo company that wouldn’t even return my calls, and the Butchers – and had to have both of them refunded since I couldn’t get what I paid for. The airport limo refund came right away, along with a code for an additional discount on my next WebPiggy order, but I had to send several emails and make phone calls to the customer services director with accusations of fraud before he made the larger refund for the Butchers.

The upshot of all this is that I’m more careful about the sites that I will even consider purchasing from, and the specific deals that I will purchase. TeamBuy, Groupon and a few others are definitely on my list, while DealTicker and WebPiggy emails go straight to my spam folder. I also avoid deals from websites that appear to be pushing junky products purely through internet sales, like Lifestyl.info and xsv360.com deals that have proved quite unsatisfactory, and where the same goods can be found at a similar regular price at more reputable online retailers such as TigerDirect and Canada Computers. Instead, I now focus on deals for local businesses that I just need a bit of an excuse to try out, and of which I will potentially become a regular customer.

In my business, if I sold a service then tried to bait and switch to something else that wasn’t what the customer wanted, or was deficient/rude in my customer service, I’d be out of business. By that measure, some of the online coupon sites should definitely not be in business, and won’t be getting any of mine in the future.

Two blogging protégés of whom I am particularly proud are two professional writers, both of whom I helped technically, but also provided encouragement through the early days of “but what will I blog about?” For those of you who blog, you know exactly what I mean: that feeling that you can’t possibly have anything interesting enough to say that people will want to read. To you, I say two things: first, everything is interesting to someone, and Google will be the matchmaker; and second, the half-life of a blog post is about one day, so if you say something stupid, just keep writing tomorrow’s post and today’s will be forgotten.

My friend Ingrid has a business based on making business writing understandable. With a background in both law and journalism, she writes, edits and coaches businesses on creating business communications – both internal and external – more readable and clear. She has done some business blogging on her site, but her real blogging treasure is her semi-monthly On Being column. On Being started as an email newsletter of sorts, and I finally convinced her that it would be perfect in a blog format, since that’s what it essentially was already, although distributed to only her email list. One of her concerns was that she wanted to monetize these articles, possibly selling them to a magazine, and she was concerned both that they would no longer be saleable once published online, and that other people might steal her ideas. I hear the same arguments from many people: why give away ideas if I can charge people for them? What if someone else copies my work? As Cory Doctorow often points out (apparently quoting Tim O’Reilly), the biggest issue with most authors isn’t piracy, it’s obscurity: if you give away some of what you do for free, the money will follow. To that, I add my own view: if all you have to sell is what you’ve already written, then your business model is not sustainable. Think of your blog as marketing, a sort of online portfolio of your work and ideas. I’ve written 730,00 words on my business blog in the past 6+ years, and I consider every one of them an investment: almost all of my business now comes to me because someone reads something on my blog.

My friend and neighbour Doug is a retired history teacher who writes books about the history of Toronto. In his 70’s, he might seem like an unlikely candidate for blogging, but he has grabbed it with both hands and seems to be loving every minute of it. It started a few months back when he was bemoaning that all of the material that he had gathered for his latest book just couldn’t make it into the book due to space constraints. I suggested the blog as a supplement to his books as well as a creative outlet, got him set up on WordPress, and he was off. After the initial setup, he maintains his entire site and blog himself using Windows Live Writer, poking into the WordPress web interface only to check site statistics. He has a page for each of his books, but I especially enjoy his almost-daily updates with historical perspectives on neighbourhood happenings, such as his recent series on a historical building close to us being moved to another location, which were inspired in part by a conversation that we had at a coffee shop one day when he spontaneously described the entire history of the building (a former iron works) to me as we sipped. He even bought a new camera to add a little colour to his posts (although the language is often colourful enough). He’s getting started on Twitter and Facebook, although those are still works in progress.

Blogging is not, as many insist, dead. It’s just being left to the professionals.

FileNet had been part of my mid-life crisis. Working for my own companies (one product, one services) for 13 years before joining FileNet in 2000, I had just shut down my 40-person services company and decided to take some time off. FileNet execs had a different idea, and convinced me to relocate from Toronto to Costa Mesa and create my own position there. I picked “Director of eBusiness Evangelism” as my title, worked directly for the president, and travelling to 14 countries in 16 months. I loved the job, the people and the travel, but poisonous corporate politics eventually wore me down, and I decided to call it a learning experience and move on. Hence the road trip, to meet up with all the great west coast FileNeters who I had worked with, then off to Australia to see the gang down there.

Five days later, things changed. I was in Lake Tahoe when the planes hit the towers, and heard about it when  a friend called me that morning from Sacramento, where we were supposed to meet that evening. “Turn on your TV”, he said. “I’m in a cabin in the woods, I don’t have one”, I replied. So he described the events of 9/11 to me, the towers having already fallen, before I headed for the main lodge where I spent the day watching the news coverage and trying to get word of NYC-based friends and colleagues.

With life seemingly frozen in time, I decided there was no better time to take a real break, like I should have done back in 2000 instead of joining FileNet: I spent a month driving up the coast to Vancouver, a leisurely 10 days there, then a trip to New Zealand and Australia that ended up lasting three months (after my host down there pointed out that I didn’t have a job, so didn’t really need to go back after three weeks as originally planned).

January 2002, I finally ended up back in Toronto, the city that owns my heart, picked up some consulting and did my third incorporation to form Kemsley Design. That turned into more implementation consulting work, business blogging, conference presentations and industry analyst cred, and I’ve been doing the one-person consulting gig ever since. I sometimes think that I have one last startup left in me, but really like the lifestyle of the independent consultant.

Kemsley Design hasn’t quite reached the 10-year mark, but it started with that decision 10 years ago to get out of a corporate culture that was bad for me. Happy anniversary to my decision to get back to doing the work that I love.

He looked down at the screen, the glowing map. Saw it as a window into the city’s underlying fabric, as though he held something from which a rectangular chip of London’s surface had been pried, revealing a substrate of bright code. But really, wasn’t the opposite true, the city the code that underlay the map?

Your site has sent me 85 flight reminder messages so far about my flight tomorrow, starting at 7am today and continuing approximately one every 2-3 minutes. Please fix this.

There are a few other problems with your site:

• Online checkin required two attempts, with no apparent cause for the failure.
• I was unable to book my last two flights online in spite of repeated attempts in two different browsers. Eventually, I gave up and called an agent but this is not my preference.
• This comment form that I’m filling out right now doesn’t prefill with my contact information in spite of the fact that I’m logged in. Also, on Chrome, it only allows 3 characters in the comment field (when I tweeted about this, several friends replied that "wtf" fits in that space).

As a long-time software engineer and heavy user of many consumer websites, I have to say that I’m sorely disappointed in the quality of your site — you need to hire a serious QA person to test this stuff out before you start inflicting it on the rest of us. As much as I love flying Porter, the online experience is enough to put me off. It might not drive me back to Air Canada (yet), but it certainly is not making me happy.

I tweeted to them about the problems, but I don’t think that they have anyone monitoring their tweets or comment emails on weekends, and I don’t expect to get an answer back for a few days. Even then, it is unlikely to be satisfactory, based on my last exchange with them about their website, which went most along the lines of them telling me that I was obviously doing something wrong. In the meantime, I’ve set up an email filter that removes the messages from Porter as they arrive.

I fly Porter on the routes that it covers because it’s a great in-person experience:

• They almost always have a 20% off promotion available, which undercuts Air Canada fares.
• The airport is 2km from my home, which means that I can actually walk there, or take a $8 cab ride instead of the $55 required to get to Pearson airport.
• I get to take the shortest ferry ride in the world to get there, which earned me the “I’m on a boat” FourSquare badge.
• I am only required to be at the airport 45 minutes before my flight.
• The lounge, available to all passengers, has free coffee, tea, soft drinks, cookies and wifi, as well as comfy chairs.
• I love the smaller propeller planes since it actually feels like flying.
• They fly to Midway rather than O’Hare.
• The flights that I’ve taken so far have a good on-time record.
• If I’m at the airport early enough to catch the previous flight, they’ll change it for free if there’s room on the flight rather than trying to shake me down for extra cash (are you listening, Air Canada?).

The only downside is that they don’t have US customs and immigration pre-clearance in Toronto, meaning that I end up in the international arrivals area at the destination airport where there is rarely a NEXUS kiosk and often a lineup. Not a problem for early morning arrivals, but from late morning on, I’ve sometimes ended up stuck in a crowd of arriving European travelers.

The good news: the flight reminders seem to be holding at 85 for now.

Thanks for this mobile productivity goes to the following iPhone apps: NextBus (actually a mobile site, not an app), DropBox, TTC Exit Guide, Kindle, FourSquare and WordPress.

Some of this might seem trivial, but these things enhance my life and make me more productive. Knowing when the next streetcar will really arrive tells me whether I need to take a taxi to avoid being late. Accessing active project documents allows me to some work done even thought I’m in the middle of a haircut. Knowing which subway car to board can save me battling through crowds on the platform, only to end up at the wrong exit. Even reading a book is business in this case: ironically, it’s “Empowered”, all about allowing people to use their own tools and methods for getting things done better.

In case you were wondering, the ringer is off: I take calls and read email on my schedule, not just because my device tell me to. Use your mobile device to work the way that you want to, not to turn you into a phone and email slave.

You can find all the details here, including how to reserve tickets. At $20 per ticket, it’s a deal if you’re in the mood for a bit of culture. Also, it’s a great neighbourhood to dine on Portuguese churrasqueira and Italian gelato before or after the show.

I wrote to the info email address on the website, asking if they publish the nutritional content, and received the answer that they don’t publish that information, and were just writing a statement about why that is. I checked back on the site today, and here it is:

At Fresh, we have chosen not to have nutritional breakdowns for our food and juice menus. Here’s why:

We believe that for the last few decades, food industry marketers, nutritional scientists and journalists have confused us about what to eat. Knowledge that used to be passed down from one generation to the next has been taken over by a money-making agenda put forth by people looking to profit from the confusion. We are taking a stand against this and want to follow a philosophy closer to what Michael Pollan talks about in his book “In Defense of Food”. His mantra is deceptively simple.

“Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.”
Meaning: Eat real food-real ingredients that haven’t been processed beyond recognition. Don’t stuff yourself. Be mostly vegetarian.

Nutritionism started in the 70s, and is basically the science of breaking down food into its various components. For instance, rather than saying “Oranges are good for you”, nutritionism would say “Oranges have vitamin C, fibre and calcium. These elements are good for you”. Nutritionism suggests that food is simply the sum of its parts and that the effects of individual nutrients can be scientifically measured, and that eating requires ever changing expert advice. One day it’s saturated fat that is bad, next day it’s carbs, then it’s trans fats…what’s next?

I’m sorry, but that just doesn’t cut it for me. For a restaurant chain to basically say that they don’t need to publish nutritional data because everything there is good, when they serve foods that are high in sodium and fat, is total nonsense. I want the data, not a patronizing statement that implies that Fresh knows more about my nutritional needs than I do. I responded:

I read the new section on your website but have a pretty serious problem with it because it implies that I’m not smart enough to handle data such as how much of any particular nutrient is in my meal. I like to know what I eat, in particular, I want the calories, fat, carbs, protein and sodium content so that I can manage my overall food consumption. Sorry, but I just don’t trust you — or any other restaurant — to pick the right choices for me since you have no idea what my specific needs are. I already eat mostly vegetarian, and not too much, as Michael Pollan advises, but I notice that my overall health suffers if I consume too much sodium, or if my protein-carb-fat balance is too much out of whack. That means that I track those things, and unfortunately, if I can’t track what I eat at Fresh, I’ll be eating there much less often.

You need to trust your patrons to make their own choices, not try to make those choices for them. Most people will never go to the website and look for nutritional information; for those of us who do, we really want that information, not a patronizing statement about what you believe rather than the nutritional facts.

If we’re going to get out of the dysfunctional eating mess that we’re in today, everyone needs to become more aware of what they’re eating. For some people, they just want a feel-good nutritional nanny statement like the pap that Fresh already serves up. But for some of us, that means that we want nutritional breakdowns including protein, carbs, fat and sodium. Bring it on, please.

View Toronto Farmers Markets 2010 in a larger map

It covers a slightly different list of markets than the map and calendar that I published earlier this week (and I actually like the calendar view since I can overlay it on my own Google calendar with a single click), but it’s a great consolidated view.