Jason Dunn

Bollocks. I really screwed this up. Today is the launch of Windows Vista and Office 2007. As a Microsoft MVP I’m given $150 “MVP bucks” which is money I can spend in the Microsoft eCompany Store. I was surprised that the online company store had stock, because there were rumours about retail gobbling up all the available copies, but they’re selling Office 2007 Home & Student (which lacks Outlook) for $30, and Office 2007 Standard
(which has Outlook) for $50. I agonized for a while trying to decide what to buy, then opted to buy five copies of Home & Student for friends and family. My family is accustomed to using Outlook, but in looking at Windows Mail and Windows Calendar on Vista, I thought that would be sufficient for their needs. I dug around in each program more, and realized that Microsoft made the incredibly stupid mistake (again) of having Windows Mail store user data (email) deep in a hidden folder, in multiple files. That will making backing up, migration, and everything else a pain. And I realized too that my father in particular is fond of Outlook, and he likely wouldn’t be happy with Mail + Calendar. So I cancelled my order for the five copies of Office 2007 Home & Student, planning on placing an order for three copies of Office 2007 Standard. And I’m still waiting. It seems that when you cancel an order, it can take up to 24 hours for your account to be credited back the MVP bucks, meaning I can’t order anything until that happens. And in 24 hours, I fully expect the company store to be completely out of stock for anything that I’d need… 🙁

UPDATE: Hooray! My “bucks” were credited back and I ordered the copes of Office 2007 that I wanted. Strangely enough though the online store didn’t have any number listed for inventory, it just said the word “inventory”. So we’ll see when these things actually show up…

I’ve been meaning to write a friendly response to Paul’s post since I first was alerted to it a couple of weeks ago (Paul and I know each other through Mobius), but things have been busy. Basically, Paul’s complaint is that this blog, and many others, doesn’t fill the screen. Paul explains that he has a desktop display that runs at 1680×1050 and 1600 x 1200 on his laptop (seems like those two numbers should be reversed). Paul evidently runs his browsers in full screen mode. The thing is, most people do not.

I checked the statistics for Pocket PC Thoughts (Google tracks browser window size, while unfortunately Urchin does not) and if you total up all the users who are running their browser window 1280 pixels wide and under, you get 70% of all visitors in the month of January, a strong majority. The percentage of people like Paul who are running at 1600 pixels or more wide? 12%. Not an insignificant number, but also not a huge number. When I’m on my 17″ screen laptop, which runs at 1440 x 900 resolution, I like to see multiple windows on the display at once, to help replicate the work environment that I have on my dual-monitor main workstation. Here’s what I saw when I visited Paul’s blog on said laptop:

[click on the image for the full-sized view]

Not very pretty is it? It’s always a balancing act between the resolution of the browser window from average visitor, and the readability of the site. At the moment I have my 24″ LCD hooked up to my laptop, so I’m viewing the Web at 1920 x 1200 resolution. Take a look at what Paul’s side, MoDaCo, looks like if I were to browse in full screen like Paul does:

[click on the image for the full-sized view]

Now, just like Paul said in his post that he wasn’t picking on me, I’m not picking on MoDaCo here. But to my eyes, that’s not very readable. It’s just too wide – I have to turn my head to read it rather than just my eyes. There’s a reason why newspapers have columns – narrow(ish) columns of text are easy for the eye to follow and read. Usability matters, and while some people may prefer super-wide-pages with super-wide-text, the bulk of the Web-reading population probably does not (although I haven’t surveyed them or anything).

Now all that said, my personal blog template was designed to be around 800 pixels wide, which in retrospect is a bit too narrow given monitor resolutions in the year 2007. I’d like to have the template updated to be around 1000 to 1100 pixels wide, mostly so I can post 640 x 480-sized photos, and hope to have that done in the next month or two. It might not make Paul completely happy, but it will be a bit better for his needs while still maintaining a reasonable column width for readability

My passport expires in February of this year, and I have to travel to Seattle in March for the MVP Summit, so it was time to get a new passport. Unfortunately, now that the USA requires Canadians to have passports for entry (effective January 23rd), it’s causing massive backlog in the system and very long times. Having no other choice but to try and “beat the traffic”, we went for it today…

That’s a picture of the line at the Calgary Passport office. Ashley and I woke up at 5am, drove downtown, and by 6:15am we were in line – and were probably 40th or so. People kept arriving after us, and by 7:15am there had to be at least 200 people in line. The employees started arriving around 7:30am, and we watched as they walked past us, came out to get a coffee, eat a danish, then go back inside. It was all I could do not to say something to them like “Why don’t you open the doors, can’t you see all of us here?”. I brought my laptop to do some writing, but that early in the morning my neurons weren’t all firing in sync, so I opted to read Cell instead (a pretty good book). They oh-so-graciously opened the doors about 8:15am, a whole 15 minutes earlier than normal. 🙄

Once inside we got to sit in plastic chairs while we waited for them to call our number. We were C907, and they were already serving C903, so I was hopeful it wasn’t going to take too long. You definitely want to fill out the form online – people that had the hand-completed passport documents were processed by different booth dwellers, and there were fewer of them to help. Speaking of help, the Passport Office had 12 booths for processing people, yet only five were staffed. They have hundreds of people outside, and only five people processing. Great job government. 🙄 Thankfully, the process wasn’t too horrible once our number was called – it took perhaps 15 minutes. We were out the door by 8:45am, making the whole thing 2. 5 hours of waiting and 15 minutes of actual activity.

I find myself feeling very disappointed in how our government is handling this – they should be opening temporary passport processing offices in several places around the city. Ashley told me that Calgary has two passport offices, while all of Alberta only has three – and Price Edward Island has five in total. That makes zero sense. Processing evidently takes around a month, with the new delays, so I’m supposed to get mine near the end of February – just in time for my trip in March.

What I find interesting is that they cancel and partially destroy your current passport – meaning that I’m now unable to leave the country. What if I had a business trip that suddenly came up? What do business people do that travel a great deal? The system seems somehow broken.