OhRyan.ca

Driving around with a friend (who recently moved back to the city) the other day when he brought up a good point, city street signs are completely random. It’s impossible to know where to look for a street sign and sometimes you can’t find one at all, even at major intersections.

In cities like Winnipeg, where traffic signals are hung from horizontal poles, the most visible place to mount a street sign is directly on the mounting pole, right above the roadway. I think that’s pretty straightforward common-sense.

I’ve pulled some images of Portage Avenue from Google Streetview. Portage is one of the busiest roads in Winnipeg, it’s the start of the Yellowhead Trail (west to Edmonton) and part of the main Trans Canada Highway (to Calgary). According to the City of Winnipeg’s 2009 Traffic Flow study (pdf), Portage Avenue received an average weekday flow of 75,000 cars per day – the portions of road mentioned below see about 75% of that. Suffice it to say, it’s a busy road.

Portage & Moray

An example of good signage; every major intersection should be set up like this. You can clearly see a large sign marking the cross street above every traffic signal on all four intersecitons.

Portage & Sturgeon

A few kilometers west of Moray lies one of the worst examples of street signage in the city. The westbound lane (on the left) is fine, it’d be hard to miss that Sturgeon Rd sign. For no apparent reason eastbound lane is completely non-standard. The traffic signal is clearly missing a sign, you’ll probably have to squint to actually find the sign. I’ll give you a hint, it’s off to the right…on a “no stopping” sign. How completely random is that? It gets worse, the sign post is actually offset a couple of meters ahead of the intersection. So, if you’re stopped at the stop line, or anywhere in one of the left-hand lanes it’s actually physically impossible to see the sign.

Obviously inconsistant street signage is far from the biggest problem facing Winnipeg, it’s not even the worst problem with the roads. It’s just one of those little things…

I’ve posted about newspapers before, the industry’s seemingly imminent collapse and lack of success online are interesting problems to me. As far as I’m concerned, newspapers (and “old media” in general) are still a relevant source of information and there’s really no reason they should be dying.

As Erica Glasier put it on her blog the other day:

They take raw information and give it the context that years of newsgathering provides, and the clout of accuracy commiserate with the individual media org’s brand.

The Problem

I am under the impression that newspaper website are struggling to make ends meat because online ad revenue is not making up for their losses in print distribution. On top of that in their attempt to keep up with the times by added commenting functionality to their sites, they’ve degraded the experience of their online presence. Much to nobody’s surprise news site comments are often filled with trolls, bigots, spam and other meaningless drivel.

My Thought

An extremely simple solution to address these two problems would be to charge a small monthly subscription fee for access to the commenting system. Somewhere around $3 – $5 per month.

Being required to go through an ecommerce transaction should be enough to deter outright, viagra-selling-spammers who depend on bots and cheap labour to blanket the internet with spam.

But also, in theory this small fee should  discourage trolls and other nuisance commenters who are likely to register an account on a whim, if registration is free and easy. These same types of people would be very unlikely to shell out a few bucks just to spew racial slurs. In the case that a fee isn’t enough to discourage unwanted commentors, having an account tied to a credit card makes it much more easy to ban an individual; it’s quite a lot more difficult to get a new credit card number, than it is to get a new email address and register another account. Site’s like Metafilter have been using this tactic for years.

Would anyone actually pay to comment?

I’m really not sure, but I think it’s worth a shot. It’s clear that blanket paywalls don’t really work – they sort of break the internet and nobody wants to pay just to read an article similar to another one posted elsewhere for free. Blocking comments on controversial topics works to a degree, but reasonable dialogues about controversial issues are often fascinating.

I believe that every newspaper has core audience who would pay a small fee to comment.

I came across a 2 part “Mantioba Travelogue” video from the 1940s on youtube. An era when Manitoba seemed to have been much more prosperous.

Part 1: mainly features Winnipeg. Interesting facts at the time Winnipeg was Canada’s 4th largest city – a position currently occupied by Ottawa-Gatineau (Winnipeg #8 now) – and meatpacking was the #1 industry in town.

Part 2: Featuring Brandon, Riding Mountain and north.

It seems to cut off before the end, but I was unable to find a part 3.

As we mentioned in the latest Canadian Tech Roundup, there’s quite a lot of chatter on reddit.com/r/Canada about Shaw sneaking bandwidth overage charges onto customer’s bills. I have some thoughts on the new policy, but I’ll leave those to the end of the post. First, the fun facts:

• Shaw has lowered bandwidth caps for every tier of internet service across the board by 25% and added new bandwidth overage charges, as follows:
  • Lite: 1Mbps, 15GB/mo, $2/GB overage
  • High-Speed: 7.5Mbps, 60GB/mo, $2/GB
  • Extreme: 15Mbps, 100GB/mo, $1/GB
  • Warp: 50Mbps, 175GB/mo, $1/GB
  • Nitro: 100Mbps, 350GB/mo, $1/GB
  • I’ve excluded tier pricing since vary by region and bundle.
• In addition to these new charges Shaw is offering bandwidth “bundles.” The details are somewhat hidden on this page, they break down like this:
  • 10GB for $5/mo (or $0.50/GB)
  • 60GB for $20/mo ($0.33/GB)
  • 250GB for $50/mo ($0.20/GB)
  • I imagine Shaw’s banking on customers buying bandwidth they don’t end up using, as these business models tend to work.
• According to the tech support rep I talked to and a few posts on reddit, Shaw is rolling out the overages on a “three strikes” basis. What this means is, the first month you go over you bandwidth cap Shaw will notify you, but won’t charge you. The second month, they notify you again. It’s not until the third month that they’ll actually charge you.
• Shaw has a tool to monitor your bandwidth usage, but they will not enable it on your account unless you go over your bandwidth cap.

The covers all the facts I know at this point in time.

So I’ve given this whole situation a little more thought since the podcast on Monday and I’m having a hard time feeling too negatively about this new policy. I do feel like it’s my nerdly duty to oppose bandwidth caps on principle, but I just can’t do it. The supposition is that Shaw is unfairly punishing their heavy internet users, the every growing number of households cutting cable TV service, eating into Shaw’s overall profits. The math just doesn’t work out. The caps – even the 25% lower caps – are still quit reasonable. Crunching some numbers, an average video file at 720p resolution is somewhere around 600MB/hr*, at that rate the 100GB cap will afford you 170hrs of video per  month or almost 6hrs per day; 175GB/mo get’s you almost 10hrs/day of video. That is a lot of video and far from punitive.

Not only that, Shaw to my knowledge shaw has never claimed that their service to be “unlimited” and their website is totally upfront about the bandwidth charges. I don’t really have a problem with paying more when I use more of a service, that’s how capitalism works. That said, their $1/GB standard overage charge is quite high. I would be kind of upset if my next bill included several gigabytes of overage at $1/GB. As someone who has been involved in decisions to buy 10s of thousands of gigabytes of bandwidth per month, I can say with confidence that somewhere around $0.50/GB would be a much more reasonable base rate.

Although it leads to some questions about how much bandwidth actually costs Shaw and how they really feel about their customers; I think their “three strikes” policy is an interesting way to roll out these charges. It’s certainly a lot more generous than the likes of Rogers.

My main complaint about the whole situation is the way Shaw is informing customers about the change – ie. they’re not. Adding new unexpected charges on customers bills without any kind of warning is pretty much the worst thing a company can do for their relationship with customers; nobody likes to see extra charges on their bills. I assume Shaw has done the math and only a small number of customers will actually be affected by these changes; and I assume they think they can contain the small amount of outrage they expect. There is a good chance that they’re wrong, for the most part, users that will be exceeding caps are nerd and nerds tend to be pretty vocal about this sort of thing. Secondly, based on my talks with Shaw support, they’re still treating the overages as a punitive measure; which is just ridiculous. If you’re charging me for a service, just charge me for the service, making me feel bad about it will just make me feel bad about your company.

Am I out to lunch? What are your thoughts?

* correction: as noted in the comments 60minutes of 720p content is closer to 900MB. I was referencing an hour long tv show, which is actually 50 minutes of content and the files I was examining may not have been full 720p.

Turns out being a dad and employed full time leaves little room for things like long blog posts. I came across a number of particularly fascinating things this week in my travels on the information super highway.

• Monday: Protocol relative URLs
  Turns out, you can leave out the protocol (http, https, ftp, etc) when including a URL in html and browser will figure out what to do with it. This is particularly useful when including unsecured content on a secure page. I’m sure knowing this years ago would have saved me one or two headaches.
• Tuesday: What Jason Calacanis Learned From Zuckerberg’s Mistakes
  In his weekly LAUNCH newsletter Calacanis talks about his take on rollout hiccups and privacy mistakes Facebook has make over the years. In his educated opinion “Facebook’s success — and mistakes — are based on its developer-driven culture, not because Zuckerberg is some evil mastermind.” Essentially, Facebook developers have historically been allowed to roll out new features with little to no oversight, allowing the site to iterate quickly, keep ahead of the competition and occasionally annoy foreign governments. He makes a convincing argument.
• Wednesday: How a quartz watch works
  I already had a rough understanding of the piezoelectric effect as used inside digital watches, the video does an excellent job of explaining the concept. As usual reddit commentary filled in the gaps, explaining in detail exactly how the electronics translate the quartz vibration into time. 
• Thursday: Google Bookmarks exists
  Someone leaked that Yahoo! would be shutting down delicious and the internet lost it’s ever-loving mind! Turns out there’s some hope for delicious. Anyways, I haven’t used delicious much since the days it was still called del.ico.us. As far as I can tell, Google Bookmarks has done a pretty good job of pulling out delicious’ most useful features, plus you get the added bonus of having your bookmarks appear at the top of Google results when your search is relevant – if you’ve ever starred something on a search results page you’ll already have some links in Google Bookmarks. I had actually been looking around for a good bookmark service, this discovery couldn’t have come at a better time.
• Friday: Word Lense
  This iPhone(3GS+) app instantly text on-screen. As in, you point your iPhone at a Spanish sign and the words are replaced onscreen with the english translation. This is easily the most impressive augmented reality technology I’ve seen to date! We are truly living in the future.
  iTunes Link
• Saturday: Boardgame Remix Kit
  I am a huge fan of the boardgame revival hitting nerdom over the past 10 years, as such, I’ve become quite bored of the classics like Monopoly, Clue(do), Trivial Pursuit and Scrabble. When I came across Boingboing’s post about the Boardgame Remix Kit I was absolutely blown away the creativity and simplicity. The kit is a set of tweaks, mashups and completely new games built on 4 classic board games. It’s available as a PDF for £2.99 on the official site or as an iPhone app for £2.99 ($4.99 in the Canadian store). Both are beautiful.
  

There you have it, my week in links. This post contains something like 13 links in addition to the main links, I really suggest you click them all.