As I was making Sunday morning crepes, I found bits of straw in my package of President's Choice Organics whole wheat flour.

When we brought back the item to the store, they told us to call the company and they might be able to do something for us. I just wanted to return the bag for a new one. So today, after waiting 20 minutes on the phone, we were told to bring back the bag to the store and get an exchange or store credit. Apparently it is happening quite a bit with this product and the manufacturer is getting a new sifting machine.

Regardless, it is a total of an hour wasted for us that we will never be able to get back.

CNN Fortune article: follow this link.

ImportGenius, a search engine that gathers “competitive intelligence” by monitoring U.S. Customs records of ocean containers entering American ports, reported that Apple recieved 188 mysterious containers.

ImportGenius report: follow this link. 

For Canadians: Several of those products carried the Apple computer name in what appeared to be an accidental disclosure on the customs record. With arrival notification addresses in Vancouver, Canada, many of Schenker’s shipments appeared destined for the Canadian market. Apple has thus far not made the iPhone available in Canada, however Rogers Wireless recently announced that it would begin offering the item shortly. They declined to offer more specifics about when they would start selling the phones. 

Opera claims that Opera Mini is used by more than 44 million people. 

So why am I only hearing about this now? Obviously my head is stuck in the ground, or I've been working with Notes too much.

Opera does not appear on our analytic reports at Trapeze, but I've found some iPhone users using the Safari browser - that is cool.

According to Canalys Research, last year Symbian OS held about 65% of the mobile OS market worldwide. I have not heard of anyone using Opera on their mobile phone.

More from the press release:

"In addition to the massive popularity of people downloading Opera Mini directly to their phones, in 2007 there was strong demand for the company’s embedded browser solution, 59 handsets were announced with Opera Mini pre-installed. Altogether, more than 800 different phone models are being used by Opera Mini."

OK. Rogers, here in Canada, supports a list of mobile applications that users can use with unlimited access. Opera is not one of them. If you want to use it, you will get hammered with data fees.

I would be very interested in a breakdown of users by country and provider. I may send them an email. 

Good evening miniscular listening world!

It's been busy in Marioland navigating the User Conference season at Trapeze Group. The North American conference was in April, the European UC is on now, and the UK is on early next month.

Big deliverable for this quarter was the delivery of Danish and German versions of our support site, and they were delivered today. Big chunk of work off the scorecard.

I have a terrible reputation of delivering on time with no budget, and this was no exception. With all the Lotus Notes development I've been doing, my Notes/Domino programming abilities are getting stronger, but those aren't very marketable skills these days. It's too bad actually, because Domino lets me prototype uber rapidly. Notes has a terrible reputation (I won't deny), and no matter how much I try to defend it, there is a large segment of the population that hates it and will not give it a chance.

Notes does not suck, you just have to know how to work with it.

It's all about the user experience. 

As practitioners, we live, eat and breath user experience. We look at it from every perspective through our daily routine.

My daughter has gone in to Tim Hortons (Canadian coffee/donut restaurant chain) and received a free Timbit (donut hole) on occasion. The retail cost to them is $0.16. This is a fairly inexpensive item to give my daughter a greater user experience, and makes me more likely to return to that establishment to continue giving them my business. Simple marketing strategy. some people do not get it.

Read this article from CTV news: http://tinyurl.com/5nj48d

A while ago I found a Yankee Group report called "Zen and the Art of Rogue Employee Management". I went back to it a few days ago after reading a post on Ed Brill's blog on "Doubling Down".

It explains how the corporate environment is becoming increasingly consumerized: "… along comes some rogue employees with consumer technology and devices that will enhance productivity as well as help balance work and family life, and they insert them into the enterprise ecosystem." Some of us love having all the cool toys and features, but we also need to remember that whatever we bring into the corporate environment may not work with the system. Often, employees use their work computers for personal use. They'll install programs that they use for music, videos, etc. IT departments try to walk the line of not being too strict with locking down computers, but also expecting employees to act responsibly — there is a computer use policy in most places of work. 

It's a very interesting report that offers a brief look at what some IT teams have to deal with. Check it out.

ToRCHI, the Toronto chapter of ACM SIGCHI, is organizing a one-day workshop on the topic of user experience (UX) design of web site information architectures (IA).

This event is not an instructor-led course. Rather, the event organizers intend to attract about 10 people to spend a day exchanging their knowledge of the workshop topic. The workshop consists of structured activities and discussions devised and facilitated by the workshop leader. This event format is the same as workshops held at conferences such as the annual conferences of the Usability Professionals Association (UPA) and others.

For more information, go to www.rurl.org/pme. The session is June 23 from 9AM-5PM.

I'm planning (tentatively) to attend this event and if you are in this area, you should too. It's a great opportunity to get together with other senior level practitioners in the GTA.