The Waterloo Tango festival just wrapped up, and I had a blast. Danced close-embrace tango with many wonderful partners.

Had workshops from Christopher and Caroline. Very perceptive teachers who can give the best nugget of information.

Only stepped on one partner's toes badly enough to interrupt a dance; that sapped my nerve pretty severely for a while. But the Milonga class this morning was a blast, and got me up to the right rhythm for the first time. Still need lots of work on turns.

Thanks to all the organizers, and I hope it runs again next year.

My "Hello again" page is less broken than before.

I added a neat feature to my business card and resume: a DataMatrix "barcode" that linked to my website.

Of course, after having fun testing it again and again, I concluded it worked and didn't look at it for a few months. In the interim, something I (or my system) did ...undid... the special landing page.

So here I am handing out my identity with this neeto feature...which don't work. Narf.

Market-based price discovery: two immoralities make for an efficiency.

At the moment, I'm shopping, in my underwear, and I'm still not having fun. I've heard and I've learned that Canada isn't great when it comes to customer service, but I never thought it was this bad.

I'm shopping for business-class VOIP service. The vendors are either indifferent or overbearing, but they all adopt the air of "too good to be true". And you know what that means.

The vendors seem to have trained at the "fly-by-night" business school. Pro-forma websites, slick but shallow. Would Bell, in its lowest days, have used Megan Fox clip art to sell phone service?

Two thoughts come to mind:

1. Why would I fill out your web response form? And why would you demand so much information? I'll give you as much information as I believe you need to contact me in the form that I choose.
   (Sure, I'm guilty of creating forms like that, but I never avoided offering an equivalent email address.)
2. I buy according to a standard, not a service. Give me an ISO number, please! But don't overdo it: if you've registered a flight plan for every single electron, it's just as bad as no standards at all.

If people can make use of @ signs for twitter ids and # for hashtags, why didn't they jump at CamelCase for wikis?

Frustrating.

Twitter tweets include so many punctuation marks denoting Twitter-specific objects like users and topic markers, that they eventually look like... well, programming code. Yet people are all agog with Twitter, at 140 characters a pop.

Wikis, which closed the loop making the World Wide Web a truly democratic and social medium for publishing at any length and complexity, languished for years despite bending over backward to work with contemporary technology. CamelCase was brilliant, a previously unused text convention ideal for human-created links.

Even with Wiki's modern popularity, CamelCase is deprecated. We are expected to use [[square brackets]] or some similarly-overloaded structure [in this case, editor's comments--Ed.] Perhaps this is because CamelCase looks like a mistaken omission, rather than an extra piece of information to be parsed.

Welcome to the folks from the nascent Social Media Breakfast group.

Signed into the LinkedIn group. Went looking for the Facebook page/group, couldn't find it. If you do, drop me a line.

Stephen Colbert: "If I had to look at _this_ Jackson Pollock for seven days, without replacing it with _this_ Jackson Pollock, I'd blow my brains out...which would look like _this_ Jackson Pollock."

This is a design joke. It's funny. Trust me.

For those design-oriented people who haven't seen it, the documentary Helvetica is fascinating.

In response to the Stratford Roundtable, I've written a non-technical paper about the Suffr project.

Download

Suffr is a way for a group to manage a computer system. Once a group keeps its electronic infrastructure under control, it can control its information.

Suffr rebalances the incentives that individuals and leaders respond to.

Yesterday's Stratford Roundtable on Public Engagement and Local Government was a surprisingly valuable day. Finding out about it was an accident, but I'm very glad I went.

A joint effort of the Stratford Campus of UWaterloo and the Public Policy Forum, it featured a number of local politicians who seemed to genuinely let their hair down in an admittedly supportive atmosphere. A few speakers were blatant rent-seekers with the flimsiest of excuses for being there. But my distinct impression is that I'd far less rather go toe-to-toe with a mayor than an equivalently powerful bureaucrat.

The thinkers in attendance were focused and even inspiring, offering useful models and speaking well almost to a person. Discussion went all over the place, as is usual in these kind of meetings, but there was an underlying constructiveness to the atmosphere.

Hope it runs again next year.