That’s the title of my Slaw post for today.  It reads as follows:

1. Border crossings would delay his delivery. Imagine Santa explaining himself to a border guard/customs agent.

2. Reduces product liability risk for any defective toys.

3. Avoids scrutiny of privacy issues of the naughty/nice list.

4. Avoids pressure by toy lobbyists and sympathetic legislators.

5. Makes it easier to protect his trade-secrets for sleigh innovations, home entry techniques, and apparent mastery of space and time.

Techdirt and Slashdot comment that some people have placed images of license plates belonging to people they are not fond of on their own cars, then speeding by photo radar, resulting in the other person getting a ticket. 

Techdirt’s spin on this:

In general, we have trouble with things like speed cameras and red light cameras — both of which don’t tend to do much of anything to make the roads safer (rather, there’s evidence that they lead to more accidents). The reality is that they are really about boosting revenue for local governments, not about safety — which explains why plenty of places have been found illegally changing parameters to make them bring in more revenue.

For the London Free Press – December 22, 2008

Read this on Canoe

Yahoo announce this week that it would anonymize search user data (in most cases) after only 90 days.  That’s significantly less than Google or others – some of which until recently retained it for a couple of years.  There has been a lot of pressure to reduce the amount of time that user data is retained.  Those that want to retain it longer say it is needed for the user experience. 

Of course its all about the details, and how anonymous it really becomes, but the less info that is retained about individuals, the better.  Like many things it is a balancing act – some info retention is needed to provide services – the tough practical issue is how to provide the services but at the same time limit the amount of personal information retained, and how long it is retained.

I’ve referred to the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) before.  The EFF describes itself as the leading civil liberties group defending your rights in the digital world.

They have summarized their work in 2008 by a video inspired by the 12 days of Christmas.

Seems that an Australian court ordered a default judgement to be served on two defendants by sending a message to their Facebook pages.  See this article in the Australian Morning Herald.

Cory Doctorow of Boing boing comments on how this is a bad idea, saying how “It’s like serving notice on me by sticking a post-it on a toilet wall on which someone has written “Cory wuz heer” and declaring it legal.”

I wouldn’t go that far – this is hardly going to become a standard method of service. 

Kudos to the court in my view – this would be more effective than the usual last resort of publishing a notice in a local newspaper.

For the London Free Press – December 15, 2008

Read this on Canoe

If we are going to spend our way out of this recession by doing infrastructure projects, what better way than to build a performing arts centre in London.

Lets get on with it and design/build a PAC that is the most environmentally friendly, functional and attractive PAC on the planet.

In addition to all the other reasons for building a PAC, it would accomplish many things: 

• provide economic stimulus and jobs
• provide a boost to London area environmental research
• provide a positive buzz about accomplishing something we can be proud of to boost confidence
• improve the perception of London as a good place to be
• help Orchestra London gain solid financial footing by boosting attendance

BusinessWeek has an article entitled Windows Mobile: What Microsoft Needs to Fix.  It talks about how phones using the Windows mobile operating system are losing market share to the iPhone and Google Android, and what Microsoft needs to do to fix it.

I hope Microsoft can pull it off with Mobile 7, and that they get it out to the market soon.  The marketplace needs the competition.

For example, I currently use an HTC phone with Windows Mobile 6.  When I got the phone about a year and a half ago, it was cutting edge.  But now, with the advent of the 3G iPhone, and Blackberry Bold and Storm, it seems like a boat anchor in comparision.

When my 2 year phone contract rolls over this Spring – I may just switch over to an iPhone.  I have always tried to resist the Apple hype – but may not be able to any longer.

There are rumours that Microsoft may announce a Zune phone at the upcoming CES.  That could prove interesting if it is done right, and if it can ship relatively soon with a compelling mobile 7 OS. 

One of the frustrations with mobile phone announcements is that they are usually announced as vapourware – and not available for months – and then often only much later in Canada – and perhaps not with one’s current carrier that one is tied to with things like family plans and other bundled services.

That’s the title of my Slaw post for today.  It was inspired by Dan Pinnington’s Slaw post from yesterday.

It reads as follows:

Dan’s 10 essential technology skills and practices contains some good tips (although I must admit I’m not good with keyboard shortcuts – I think more graphically and tend to use the mouse).

I have a couple more to add.

When creating Word documents don’t use the “enter” key to create spaces between paragraphs. The right way is to use the paragraph settings to set the “before and after” spacing. Otherwise, you can’t make efficient use of things like paragraph numbering or bullets. And by using the “before and after” setting, you can often easily adjust the length of a document a bit to make it fit on one less page.

And don’t use page breaks to keep headings and paragaphs, or multiple paragraphs together. The “keep with next” feature within the paragraph settings does a far better job, and continues to work when things get moved around during editing. That’s assuming, of course, that you have used the “before and after” setting to create paragraph spacing.

And if you want to keep a consistent look and formatting among your headings and paragraphs, use “styles”.

One thing I like about Office 2007 is that the controls used to do these various things are very visible and easy to find. I highly recomend the upgrade.