Voicemail turned into text messages

This is kind of cool. SaskTel (a Canadian telco in… well, you figure it out) is now offering a voicemail-to-text conversion. For $10 a month (or 40 cents per voicemail), any time someone leaves a voicemail for you, the service will “automatically” send you the text of the message via SMS.

It’s not clear to me if there are humans doing the transcribing or (gak) some kind of voice-recognition software, but I’m dying to try it out.

Anyone in Saskatchewan have this on their account yet? If I left you a voicemail message, could you send me back what you get?

Thanks to Jo for the tip. :)

Posted September 27, 2007 Comments

The Most Disillusioned Canadian Tire Employee Ever

Today, I met the most disillusioned Canadian Tire employee of all time.

I went into the Cambie Street store to pick up a propane-powered patio heater. They were obviously in the middle of changing over to their winter stock, since most of the shelves in the “Outdoor” section were empty.

I went up to one guy who was just kind of standing around, looking a bit overwhelmed. I’ve never worked in retail, but I hear inventory week is like that. I asked him where the outdoor heaters were.

He breathed an elongated sighed and rolled his eyes (think Napoleon Dynamite pissed off) and said “I have to call someone.” I followed. He called the warehouse. No, it turns out, they don’t have any propane heaters.

I told him I thought the web site said they were available, and he said: “You can’t trust the web site. That’s what they get for paying us minimum wage.”

Indeed.

(As it turns out, on the way out I found a number of other propane heaters in the store. Picked the Coleman Procat up. Works like a charm.)

Posted September 26, 2007 Comments

The curse of unhelpful error messages.

I’ve been spending a few weeks reviewing the massive Adobe Production Suite CS3. I’ve been poking my way through Premiere Pro and Photoshop and have totally loved the experience. Premiere Pro, especially, runs circles around Final Cut Pro in terms of user-interface (though FCP, I think, still excels in larger projects that need heavy lifting).

Anyway.

So today, I was playing with the Levels function in Photoshop CS3 and this error message (right) popped up.

I don’t mean to pick on Adobe, because this happens in so many applications. But the “I crashed” message is, frankly, lazy programming.

Programs know why they crash. At the very least, they know the values of the variables in memory at the time of the crash.

I had to call Adobe support and read this totally generic error message to the the technician. Needless to say, he was baffled. “That doesn’t really tell me much.”

No shit, Sherlock.

If you’re writing an application, at least put an Error Code on the screen. Back when I was coding, we called them Exit Codes, and you could tell why an application quit. Not displaying that code doesn’t help anyone.

(For the record, the Adobe technician was really helpful, and we tracked this down to a permissions problem.)

Posted September 26, 2007 Comments