A Word From Lance Although my stories in my blog are true and are recounted as accurately as my memory allows, please keep in mind that I do not have perfect recall. Some of the names have been changed where appropriate.
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Good Quotes Men need sexual fulfillment in order to respond to a woman emotionally; women need emotional fulfillment in order to respond to a man sexually.
(Ellen King)
If you want to be thought a liar always tell the truth.
(Logan Pearsall Smith)
I am a slow walker, but I never walk back.
(Abraham Lincoln)
Show me a thoroughly satisfied man and I will show you a failure.
(Thomas Edison)
Good Books Barney's Version
(by Mordecai Richler)
Market Wizards
(by Jack D. Schwager)
Veronika Decides To Die
(by Paulo Coelho)
Infidel
(by Ayaan Hirsi Ali)
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A couple of years ago I searched the internet for information on whether the prevalence of pedophilia amongst priests or clergy (I will term both “priests” or the “priesthood”) is higher than in the general population. I could not find anything definitive. As reported in Wikipedia, there was a study conducted by the John Jay College of Criminal Justice (the “John Jay Report“) that indicated that approximately 11,000 allegations had been made against 4,392 priests in the USA between 1950 and 2002 representing 4% of the 110,000 priests who had served during the period. The child abuse affected more than 95% of the dioceses. Of the 11,000 allegations reported by bishops in the John Jay Report, 3,300 were not investigated because the allegations were made after the accused priest had died, 6,700 allegations were substantiated, and 1,000 could not be substantiated. And these were only the reported allegations. I can only imagine how many allegations went unreported.
What is more astonishing to me than all the cases of child sexual abuse and child porn in the priesthood, is how the Church deals with known pedophiles. It almost seems a monthly occurrence now where the media uncovers situations in the Church where vile old pedophiles used to be vile young pedophiles who were exposed to their superiors years ago.
It goes without saying that all child abuse and child porn is reprehensible. It is likely some form of mental illness that is very difficult if not impossible to cure. Just as an alcoholic is an alcoholic for life whether or not they drink, it seems that a pedophile is a pedophile for life. Allowing known pedophiles to continue in their roles as priests and therefore assume positions of authority over children is analogous to an alcoholic working as a bartender. It simply makes no sense at all. How can the Church possibly think it is acceptable to move a pedophile to a different community with a promise that they will not reoffend. It’s insane. It indicates a lack of leadership, a lack of morals and a lack of common sense. In effect, the Church is an accessory to these crimes.
The Church as an organization must take responsibility for it’s ‘employees’. The Church must immediately fire and forever ban any priest who knew of a situation where a subordinate possessed child porn or sexually abused children and did not at least defrock the guilty party, whether 20 years ago or 1 month ago (assuming the superior had such powers or could initiate the process). Going forward, the Church must consider it a crime punishable by excommunication for any priest to fail to report allegations of child abuse to the police. It is not enough that a member of the Church report it to their superiors; they must report it to the police. Whether or not a failure to report such an allegation to the police is a crime in the particular country where the alleged offense takes place is completely irrelevant. It is the only way to demonstrate how unacceptable it is to shuffle pedophiles around the Church in secrecy.
I do not understand why people insist on shaking hands and kissing each other on the cheek every time they see one another. It’s ridiculous. Do we really like one another that much that we will risk getting sick and possibly gravely ill? Given all the viruses and bacteria being transferred around our global cesspool, I think it is about time to change these conventions. As far as I’m concerned, the traditional Japanese greeting is the way to go. Why are we so slow to see the genius in some of their customs?
Thank god people are starting to come around to my way of seeing things. It has taken SARS, the Bird Flu and now the H1N1 virus to convince people that shaking hands or kissing each other on the cheek every time we greet one other is an unnecessary health risk. Ever since I became an adult and started thinking logically, I tried to avoid kissing and shaking hands where it is possible to do so without offending people. Why am I the strange one when I meet someone for the first time in my life and I choose to not kiss their cheek or allow them to slobber all over mine? I don’t know where that cheek has been. That cheek might have just been licked by a dog that had just finished chewing on a stick it found in the gutter. Maybe that person just went to a washroom at a gas station, walked out without washing their hands, touched the door handle that had been contaminated by hundreds of people who decided not to wash their hands after taking a crap, and has just finished using that hand to scratch their cheek. Now do you want to kiss that cheek?
Shaking someone’s hand might not seem to pose as great a threat as kissing, but let’s look a bit closer. An acquaintance of yours has just finished working downtown in the financial district and greets you by shaking your hand. He has touched at least 15 doorhandles since he last washed his hands. The same door handles that have been touched by thousands of people including homeless people who tend to hang out in the underground Path system. I have nothing against homeless people per se, but I think we can agree that they are not exactly the cleanest people around. Then your acquaintance takes the subway and while sitting down he decides to play with the bottom of his shoes! When I see that, and I have seen it more times than I care to recall, I’m dumbfounded. What are people thinking when playing with the soles of their shoes?? Part of the reason we wear shoes is to protect us from what we’re walking on, like animal feces, urine, decaying birds and insects, gum, dirt, chemicals et cetera. How does it make sense to then play with your soles or pick things out of your treads? You do realize that you’re going to be using that hand to fix your hair or wipe your face or scratch your balls or open a piece of gum OR GREET SOMEONE !!! It simply does not make any sense for civilized people to be doing that. I have been in business meetings before where the person I’m speaking with starts playing with the bottom of their shoes. It is pretty tough to concentrate when you know that at the end of the meeting you’re going to have to shake that hand.
so can we please agree that a simple bow or wave of the hand is enough of a greeting under normal circumstances. Let’s leave the handshaking and the kissing to special occasions, like birthdays. That I could live with.
When I complain to a company about their products or service being subpar, typically the response is that I am one of the very few, or sometimes the only one, who has complained. Whether that is true, or whether they are simply trying to convince me that I am crazy, I do believe that most people do not complain often enough and definitely not as often as I do. I usually am the one in a restaurant who calls over the manager to tell him to turn up the air conditioning because I can’t breath, or lower the volume of the music because I can barely hear the person beside me screaming in my ear. And I’m quite sure that normal people feel the same way because often someone will turn to me and say something along the lines of “thank you -it is much too hot in here”, or “it is much too loud”. So why don’t more people complain more often?
Perhaps most people have lower expectations than I do. Perhaps people have resigned themselves to not getting what they pay for. Perhaps people do not like confrontation. Or perhaps people find it too time consuming or too draining to be worth the effort and expect that others will complain in their stead. I sympathize with this to a certain extent. But how do you expect products and services to improve if everyone has the same attitude as you? If few people complain, companies will assume that most customers are happy and therefore find little reason to make improvements. You are in effect slowing progress by not complaining.
You are sitting there reading this and thinking that you do not have to complain because you show your dissatisfaction with a company’s products or services by refusing to buy from that company again. But that only raises the bar as high as the better alternative. When the best alternative is still subpar there is little motivation for that company to make improvements since they know there is no better option available to you.
So if you care at all about the betterment of society, improving the world we live in and getting more value for your dollar, raise your voice and complain more often. When no one complains, nothing gets done.
This is how my typical first or second date used to go (and sometimes the phone call before the first date if was on the fence about whether to go out with someone):
Me: Do you have herpes?
Woman: No
Me: Have you ever had a cold sore before?
Woman: Yes
Me: O.k. – bye
Then I realized how few people know, or want to admit, that a cold sore IS herpes. Let me repeat that for all the semi-retarded people out there: A COLD SORE IS HERPES. Why is that so difficult for women to understand? There is no other kind of cold sore and there is no Clintonesque question about what the definition of “is” is. I realize this is a bit of an extreme analogy – if HIV could be contracted by kissing someone, wouldn’t you be asking your potential lover whether they have HIV on the first or second date knowing that a kiss is soon to follow along with the chance of contracting the disease? Sure HIV is sometimes deadly, but more and more it is manageable – look at Magic Johnson. The analogy is not completely off the wall since the herpes virus can in some instances lead to severe complications.
I have learned to be a bit more diplomatic when dating and now I try to weave into the conversation a question regarding whether she has ever had “a cold sore” before….yes, EVER (once you have it, you have it for life and can possibly pass it on to whomever you kiss for life, whether or not the actual sore is visible). For some reason “cold sores” seem to be more acceptable than “herpes”, although I have to admit that a lot of women find it a rather odd question regardless of how I phrase it.
Let me belatedly preface this blog by saying that I DO NOT HOLD ANYTHING AGAINST PEOPLE WITH HERPES (some of my best friends have herpes ). I simply would prefer to avoid contracting it. I do not judge people with herpes since there is usually nothing to judge. It is typically not an indication that a person is a slut, or loose, or dirty, or anything of the sort (not that there is anything wrong with being a slut). It is simply a matter of how diligent that person is in taking precautions against contracting the virus and often times, dumb luck. I say ‘luck’, since many people contract HSV-1 (“herpes simplex virus 1”) on the lips when they are children. A parent or an uncle or aunt may pass on the virus when kissing them hello (I do find it odd when adults kiss children on the lips – but that’s a whole other discussion). I say “on the lips” because it is possible to contract HSV-1 on the genitals. Yes – the exact same virus that causes cold sores can be contracted on the genitals. And HSV-2, the virus that is typically referred to as “genital herpes” can be contracted on the lips. Strange but true. If you do not believe me, read this article at Herpes.com titled The Truth about HSV-1 and HSV-2.
I have a phobia of contracting herpes. I am sort of working on trying to get over this phobia, but since it is a PHOBIA, it is not that easy to “just get over” as my friends often tell me to do. One reason is that herpes is with you for life – currently, there is no cure and there is no vaccine available to protect you against contracting the virus. I believe that GlaxoSmithKline is working on a vaccine, but have not yet been able to produce one. When they do I have no doubt its stock is going to sky-rocket. Here is why: depending on what research report you read, somewhere between 30% and 50% of the adult population in North America either have HSV-1 or HSV-2. If that is not an epidemic I don’t know what is.
Now let’s get to the heart of the matter. Until there is a vaccine or cure, please do me a favour to make my life a bit easier. If you are female and attractive and between the ages of 25 and 40, when you meet someone named ‘Lance’, please simply give him the thumbs up if you do not have HSV-1 or HSV-2 and the thumbs down if you do have either HSV-1 or HSV-2….or if you’re blonde, if you’ve ever had a cold sore before.
Here are some salient facts quoted from the article mentioned above in case you are too lazy to read the whole article.
“Under a microscope, HSV- 1 and 2 are virtually identical, sharing approximately 50% of their DNA. Both types infect the body’s mucosal surfaces, usually the mouth or genitals, and then establish latency in the nervous system. For both types, at least two-thirds of infected people have no symptoms, or symptoms too mild to notice. However, both types can recur and spread even when no symptoms are present.”
“…either type can reside in either or both parts of the body and infect oral and/or genital areas. Unfortunately, many people aren’t aware of this, which contributes both to the spread of type 1 and to the misperception that the two types are fundamentally different.”
“The common myth is that HSV-1 causes a mild infection that is occasionally bothersome, but never dangerous. The reality? HSV-1 is usually mild, especially when it infects the lips, face, or genitals. However, in some cases type 1 can recur spontaneously in the eye, causing ocular herpes, a potentially serious infection which can lead to blindness. In very rare cases HSV- 1 can spread spontaneously to the brain, causing herpes encephalitis, a dangerous infection that can lead to death.”
“In the case of oral HSV-1, many of the approximately 100 million Americans who are infected acquired the virus when they were children….On the other hand, almost all of the approximately 40 million Americans infected with HSV-2 acquired the virus as teenagers or adults.”
“Both viral types are easily transmitted to their site of preference, and can also be spread to other sites. Both are most contagious during active outbreaks, but are often spread through viral shedding when there are no recognizable symptoms. According to Spruance, people with recurrent oral HSV-1 shed virus in their saliva about 5% of the time even when they show no symptoms. In the first year of infection, people with genital HSV-2 shed virus from the genital area about 6-10% of days when they show no symptoms, and less often over time.”
I have recently come to the realization that the telephone has a major drawback – as hard as I wish for the super-human ability, I simply cannot reach out through the phone lines to the other end and grab the annoying customer service rep by the throat and shake some sense into him or her!
If only I could invent some way of sending a non-lethal, yet effective, electric shock through the phone lines. Between Dell, Apple, Canon and Rogers, there must have been more than twenty occasions where the ability to ‘reach out and touch someone’ would have saved me a lot of shouting and swearing and sheer and utter frustration.
If I hear one more person with an almost unintelligible Indian accent stalling for time to do some quick research by asking me how the weather is in Toronto or how “those Toronto Maple Leafs are hitting the puck” this year, I think I’m going to hit the ceiling. One of my favorite conversations transpires when a customer service rep threatens to hang-up the phone if I don’t stop ‘cursing’. I try to explain to them that I use expletives when I’m frustrated as a way of expressing myself, and their lack of knowledge is frustrating me. I point out the difference between using expletives to express myself in the normal course of conversation and swearing ‘at someone’ to belittle or demean them, which I agree is usually wrong. I might say: “this is fucking ridiculous!”, but I wouldn’t say: “you are a fucking idiot”. At this point the phone has already disconnected so I’m not sure how much of the explanation they took in. Customer service reps as a breed of people simply cannot distinguish between the two. And god forbid you get someone from the bible belt on the phone – “Jesus Christ” can no longer be used either. I realize that swearing in most circumstances is boorish and uncivilized and shows a lack of a decent vocabulary. But there is something to be said for freedom of speech – and of course a ‘universal language’ comes in handy when speaking to someone who can’t quite understand English. In any case, why are people who can barely string together a few sentences of the Queen’s English telling me how I should be expressing myself?
About a month ago I asked an Apple executive what their policy is with regards to customers swearing. He said there is no official policy, but he did confirm my suspicions. They teach their reps to give a number of warnings prior to hanging-up the phone when someone is being verbally abusive and insulting . But there is absolutely no justification to put down the phone or refuse service simply because a customer chooses to use expletives to express themselves.
I have noticed another incredibly annoying M.O. with customer service reps. It seems to be catching on like wildfire. When they do not know the answers they should know, they simply hang-up the phone. The first few times it happened to me I thought it was just some technology issues that companies experience with their phone systems. But the pattern became quickly apparent. Even if you are smart enough to get their names before the conversation heads south, it is very difficult to track down the recording of the conversation. Some companies only use first names to identify employees rather than employee IDs and typically a case number is only created at the end of the call. I recently wrote a letter to the Apple Canada President, Derek C. Smith, Steve Jobs, and Tim Cook, the Apple COO, to complain. Someone in the Office of the President called me back to apologize and gather information to look into the matter as they were concerned with this behavior. I am expecting to hear about their ‘investigation’ into the matter and to see whether they were able to track down my conversations with the those little..…culprits.
If one of the offending customer service reps I spoke with happens to be reading this blog, take note that the next time you hang-up the phone after putting me ‘on hold’ to do ‘a bit of research’ to figure out the answer to my questions, I might just hire someone named Rocco to track you down and ‘inquire’ in person how your research is coming along!
I should have posted this update earlier. It is in reference to my blog titled “DO NOT UPGRADE TO SNOW LEOPARD IF YOU OWN A CANON“. I had mentioned that I was expecting a call from the Office of the President to resolve the incompatibility issues I was having with my Canon printer and scanner. I did receive a call from a representative last week and they offered to send me a complimentary multi-function model upgrade to the complimentary printer they sent to me originally for incompatibility issues between the Canon products I had purchased and Snow Leopard. I have not set up the printer yet, but if there are any issues I will be sure to blog about it.
I was strolling along Bloor Street the other day amongst the celebrities at the Toronto International Film Festival and I found myself thinking about life. As I was watching people rushing by I began to wonder how many of them actually enjoy their day job and how many just do it to make enough money to live the life they want to live outside of work. I have gone through about 6 jobs and I haven’t yet found one I truly enjoyed. From my many conversations over the years, I would hazard a guess that approximately 50% of people enjoy what they do for a living or are satisfied with what they do. The other half are either biding their time until something better comes along or have resigned themselves to their ‘fate’.
I recently read an article in the Guardian newspaper from the UK that reported 23 people have committed suicide at France Telecom over the past 18 months (and I believe another 13 attempted suicide). At first blush that seems like an awful lot of people taking their own lives, but it is not completely out of line with the occurrence in the general population. France Telecom has approximately 100,000 employees. According to Wikipedia, in France the suicide rate was 17 people per 100,000 in 2005. In Canada and the United States it was 11 people per 100,000. (Perhaps the French don’t know how to live after all)
I do not think there is anything inherently wrong with suicide. I completely understand how all-encompassing and stressful work, life and love can be at times; I am also guilty of allowing all three to get the better of me more often than they should. But if people who actually have a job are committing suicide, and assuming that their job was at least one of the aggravating factors, which admittedly is a bit of a stretch, imagine what the suicide rate is for people who can’t find a job and who have to rely on their family or government for support.
As reported in Business Weekly in the UK, a recent study by researchers at the University of California, San Francisco, University of East Anglia in Norwich, University of Oxford, and London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine showed that an increase of three per cent in unemployment was associated with a 4.5 per cent increase in suicides and a 28 per cent increase in deaths from alcohol abuse in the population younger than age 65.
What does all this say about our society and the lives we live?
I’m not sure, but it doesn’t seem so good.
If you step outside yourself for a moment and outside the world we live in and look down on Earth from a distant planet and see yourself and all your stressed-out friends and family at work, would it seem ‘normal’ to you? Would it look like something you would choose to do without pressures from societal norms? If work was your spouse or your lover, would you choose to stay with him or her? Are we more accepting of ‘settling’ for a job or career than we are of ‘settling’ for a lover? Do we simply accept being unhappy at work, or merely satisfied, as a part of ‘life’?
I am not yet sure what the answers are, or whether there are any answers, but I am not quite ready to ‘settle’ for something merely satisfactory in my personal life or my professional life. What happens when the money runs is also something I have not yet figured out.
According to Bernanke the recession is likely over. You may soon be contemplating ways to claim a severance package while finding a better job. I have several suggestions based on my experiences.
I would say that a pretty good start is renting a Ferrari to deliver documents. But not necessarily the only way. There are so many more less conspicuous ways of having your boss question what he must have been smoking the day he hired you. As I had mentioned in a previous post, if you have been told to sit at your desk and summarize unbelievably boring court transcripts for your two-month litigation rotation during articling, you might want to try explaining to your boss that you did not go to university for 7 years to do something a law clerk could do (no offense intended to law clerks). If that does not do the trick, spending an hour reading the newspaper at your desk every day to break up the monotony should get his attention. And when he walks by while reading said newspaper and asks you whether you have finished summarizing the 15 seemingly bottomless boxes of transcripts, simply answer: “not quite yet…still working on it”.
You might find yourself working for the president of a company who is a little ‘rough around the edges’. He is typically referred to in the industry as an A-hole and an incredibly difficult person to get along with. He is often verbally abusive, arrogant, unhelpful, egotistical, and loves to drink to such an excess that he actually passes out on the dance floor at your Christmas party, on top of the poor employee he is dancing with, and has to be carried out to his limo. Let it slide when he makes a few racist comments around the office such as referring to Asian people as “slants”. But after you have a lunch meeting with him where the consultants are glancing quizzically at you while your boss talks about “the slants”, confront him after the meeting. Tell him that you are uncomfortable with his racist remarks in general, but especially during meetings since you feel it is inappropriate and reflects poorly on you as a participant in the meeting. When he tells you to “fuck off”, wait until he does it again. Then write him an email telling him that you are serious, you think it is racist and that he should have enough respect for his employees to refrain from making racist remarks in their presence. After he tells you to “fuck off” again and he starts making your life a living hell while looking for excuses to reprimand you, it is time to start looking for another job and negotiating a severance package.
You may have just started a great job after two months of interviewing with several people at the company including the COO and the head of your department, writing a four hour case analysis test, a pre-employment psychological assessment, and negotiating the terms of your contract. Since you were negotiating with your future boss, you did not think it was a serious issue that one of the terms you agreed to was not in writing…a free parking spot in the building for your new car. When you arrive for the first day of your employment on September 10, 2001 and there is no parking spot waiting for you, enquire as to why and wait for your boss to look into it and get back to you. After there is a devastating terrorist attack in New York the following day that will likely cripple the hotel industry for the next two years and you just happen to work for the development group of a company in the hotel industry, wait a day and then ask your boss again why there is no parking spot for you. When he says that he looked into it and there aren’t enough parking spaces for you as well as your more seasoned colleagues, insist that it was a term of your contact and that you expect him to live up to the agreement. Wait another couple days and ask him again, and then again until finally he tells you to stop asking him because there is nothing he can do about it. Then wait until you get a pink slip less than a month later ‘due to a company restructuring’ in light of a slow-down in the hotel industry.
If you happen to be working at an investment bank or somewhere that has a similar 24/7 work schedule, ask the managing director in charge whether it might make sense to set up a quiet room with comfortable chaise lounge chairs where employees could go for a 20 minute power nap to refresh themselves. When she asks you whether you are serious, answer “very serious”, and then explain that it is very uncomfortable napping at your desk.
If your boss comes to you at 6 O’clock one evening and tells you that he just scheduled an important meeting with potential clients for the following morning and he needs a presentation drafted and a book assembled with relevant information and to motivate you he says that you will be invited to the meeting. Go ahead and tell him that it will not be a problem. Stay there until 5 in the morning doing the work, race home to get a bit of sleep, shower and return to the office for the 8:30 am meeting. When your boss greets you with ‘good job on the presentation’, but then 15 minutes later walks right by your desk to go meet the clients without even a glance your way and fails to invite you along, simply get up, walk out to the lobby where your boss is greeting the clients, introduce yourself and follow them into the boardroom. When the meeting concludes simply say: “I hope you did not mind that I joined the meeting.”
Good luck.
Until recently I had been using a Blackberry smartphone ever since being introduced to it at a job on Wall Street ten years ago. At that time it looked like a pager – the 850. Every couple of years or so I upgraded the model and have used the 7100, 8700, Pearl, Curve 8310 and the latest Bold. I got tired of pulling out my hair when trying to sync my Blackberry with my Mac. Unbelievably, and rather annoyingly, RIM does not make a Desktop Manager for the Mac (although they claim one is due out this month). Third-party programs like Pocketmac and Missing Sync are pathetic and a complete waste of time.
Partially due to the syncing issues, partially because I had heard that the iPhone is such an incredible device and partially because I am a Mac user I decided a couple of months ago to try the new iPhone 3GS. After using the iPhone for a month I saw merit in some of the hype, but overall it was a devastatingly disappointing experience. In most respects the iPhone simply cannot compare with the Blackberry.
Everyone knows where the iPhone is better than the Blackberry:
• An abundance of really cool Apps that install easily and work well;
• The compass – I tend to head in the wrong direction more often than not;
• Internet browsing is amazing;
• Multimedia – Apple excels at this.
In almost every other respect, the Blackberry is a much better device. I have emailed Steve Jobs and the COO Tim Cook and spoken with reps in the Office of the President at Apple at length about the many failings. Why would Apple design a device that, although beautiful, is fragile, slippery and easily dropped. You would think that the brainiacs at Apple would have figured out that a smartphone without somewhat flat sides to grip the device, a slick coating and a full glass front is a recipe for disaster. This ridiculousness has spawned a whole industry in protective coverings for the iPhone. Couldn’t someone at Apple figure out that making a beautiful device that requires a case to protect your $600 investment is beyond idiotic?
The emailing function, although not terrible, simply cannot compare with the Blackberry. If you don’t want to be bored to tears, skip to the next paragraph. To be fair, Rogers and their partner, Yahoo, played a part in the dysfunction. Boiled down, if you set up your email accounts on the iPhone using iTunes (the program used to interface with the iPhone), there is a conflict between the iPhone and Rogers’ email servers, the effect of which is to block your desktop from retrieving emails for about five minutes after your iPhone has checked for messages. If you set it up on the phone itself, the “push” function that is supposed to ‘push’ your email to your iPhone as the message arrives on the server only works intermittently and you may not receive emails for hours. So you have to set it to retrieve emails every 15 minutes to get emails reliably. But, if your desktop downloads the message before your device, the device does not recognize it as a new message so there is no ‘new message’ notification and the email is not in ‘bold’ font to let you know you have not read it (something to do with Rogers only having POP3 accounts). I know – confusing, ridiculous, frustrating, pathetic and ridiculous! Although no sane customer would try to figure out what the hell was going on, I probably spent over forty hours writing emails and speaking on the phone with about 20 different tech support agents (most of whom knew less about the iPhone than I did), VPs, and reps in the Office of the President at Rogers, Apple and Yahoo. At first people thought I was crazy and brushed me off. But after I wrote to the various VIPs, people started to jump and were soon admitting there were issues. I believe they are still working on resolutions. I have not received an update for about a week.
Onwards and downwards. If you are not a Mac user you can skip this paragraph. If you use a Mac and you are still running the Tiger operating system, do not bother buying an iPhone. To my absolute shock and consternation, syncing reliably between the iPhone 3GS and Tiger is next to impossible. You will undoubtedly lose calendar events and address book information. I tried syncing with Entourage and iCal and Address Book with direction from ‘specialized’ tech support personnel from California who were supposedly the best that Apple had to offer and they could not figure out what was going on other than to say that they think they have corrected the problems in Leopard and Snow Leopard. You would think that ‘syncing’, arguably one of the most important functions of a smartphone, would work between an Apple desktop and Apple mobile phone, especially when Apple claims in their literature and technical specifications that the iPhone requires OS X 10.4.11 (Tiger) or later. Again – ridiculous!
Below is a list of the other ways in which the iPhone pales in comparison to the Blackberry:
- The iPhone does not automatically recognize phone numbers, addresses or website addresses in the calendar (and maybe emails and notes in the address book – I cannot recall) and allow you to simply point and click to call the phone number or open the website. You have to enter it manually in the respective applications. Not so easy to do while driving or walking;
- You cannot copy and paste a phone number into the telephone application to make a call – it must be entered manually in this mode;
- If you have multiple email accounts you cannot reorder them on your device, so if your list of accounts runs more than one screen you have to scroll down to the next page to see your emails;
- You cannot see emails from different accounts in one place; you have to go in and out of the various email accounts to see all your messages;
- You cannot see text messages in the same place as your email messages;
- There are few customization options with respect to audible and vibration notifications. For instance you cannot get a vibration notification of a new email arriving without having a tone as well – you must have both or none, or set the whole phone to vibrate in which case you don’t receive audible tones or rings. For some of the audible notifications like a text message there is only one sound available (reminds me of the first Ford Model Ts – “Any customer can have a car painted any color that he wants so long as it is black” – yes I know, not even a color);
- There is no way to have the phone turn on and off automatically at preset times;
- There is no LED light to indicate when there is a new message or calendar event, so if you miss the vibration or tone you will have to unlock the phone to see if there is a new message waiting;
- It is not possible to delete a character to the right of the insertion point; and
- The battery drains awfully quickly when using data intensive applications.
There are probably other shortcomings that I have subconsciously blocked from memory. I gave the iPhone back a few weeks ago and I believe I am suffering from PTSD (posttraumatic stress disorder). I am looking forward to my first attempt at syncing the Blackberry Bold with my iMac using the new RIM Desktop Manager if it is released – that should be entertaining fodder for a new post.
I recently upgraded my Mac OS to Snow Leopard from Tiger. So now I cannot print or scan documents…..for an estimated 4 months! Such a wonderful surprise compliments of Canon! According to Canon technical support, if I were smarter I would have checked to see if my 2-year-old peripherals are compatible before upgrading my operating system. I love it when companies place blame on others for their own incompetence. Sure – I might have checked. But I think they’re missing the point: Canon SUCKS!
As I attempted to explain to the Office of the President, I bought a Canon because I was under the impression that Canon was a good global tech company with a lot of resources to stay on top of changes in technology, their products are sold in Apple stores, and I was told that they are compatible with Mac. If I had checked and found out that my peripherals were keeping me from upgrading my Mac OS, I would have been equally as pissed. What kind of product support is that? Do they seriously expect me to spend $500 on a printer every two years because they are too incompetent to have upgraded drivers ready for new operating systems? As a global tech company they should not have difficulties keeping up with two operating systems: Windows and Mac.
According to Apple, Canon and other companies were given the necessary information to upgrade their drivers many months before Snow Leopard was released to the public.
Canon’s estimate for when they will have their updated drivers available for multi-function printers: “probably by the end of the year”. Ummmm……and until then I’m supposed to do what exactly? Handwrite documents? Sketch what would otherwise have been scanned? I don’t understand.
I wrote an email to the President of Canon Canada, Keven Ogawa, about this annoyance. His unpublished email address that seems to have worked is kogawa@canada.canon.com.Canon’s head office in Canada can be reached at 905-795-1111.
I received a call from Kevin Ogawa’s office after copying him on my complaint, and after some ‘negotiating’ Canon agreed to send me a cheap $50 single function printer – a pixma IP2600 – at no charge as a “gesture of goodwill”. I recently received it and set it up only to discover that it does not print well at all. Some of the words are distorted and there are white dots running through the print. Incredible. I am now waiting for someone to get back to me on Monday to discuss this matter further. Such fun.
Apple has a list of compatible hardware so if you’re planning on upgrading to Snow Leopard make sure to check the list first for products Compatible with Snow Leopard.
Some updated Canon drivers can be found for download on their support page.
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