i@m.fm

Our car insurance is up for renewal next month, so I figured it’s time
to get some quotes to compare. TD already gave me a quote (over the phone), which was
far more expensive than our current insurance from Aviva Traders. Let’s see what the other players in this market can offer me.

OK, let’s go. I go to belairdirect.ca. I saw some advertising from them
and figure that this might be their domain. Got it right. Click on huge
“Get a Quote” button.

Guess they didn’t set things up properly. Well, let’s klick on “OK”. What’s next:

OK, let’s try “belairdirect.com” – same problem. It only works when you
use “www.belairdirect.com”. Note for the webmaster of the Belairdirect
sites: It is very nice that you made sure that you can also access the
websites under different domains, and even without using the “www.”
prefix. To prevent people from encountering this error, you might want
to set up a redirect on the other domains that points to the working main site. If you need any help doing this, I am available for consulting

Anyways, let’s get a quote, now that we know which website they want us
to go to. Filling out page after page. Side note: Canadian Auto
Insurance will generally not acknowledge any experience driving in
countries other than possibly the US. Even when the driver’s license
now just gets changed these days, without any additional test for many
countries. Anyways, still on my way throught he forms… Finally there,
the last button “Obtain a Quote”. Click.

Exciting… Insert Elevator music here… and then (60 seconds later or so):

(Please note, when you try again later (and go through all the (now pre-filled) forms again), you receive the same error).

Since I had advertising from them I figured let’s try RBC insurance. However, here too after filling out a loooooong form:
 

Our
online quote service is designed to handle most situations. However,
based on details you entered, we require additional information in
order to provide you with an accurate quote for your insurance needs.

I guess I will end up staying with Aviva, for now.

Should Bloggers Know XHTML & CSS? ask Nick of Performancing.com? The answer is: They should not have to.

However
I did notice that cutting and pasting from articles or posts on the web
into a rich text editor can be quite challenging and can possibly
produce a lot of garbage HTML. My current solution: I try to remember
to paste the text into a pure text editor and re-copy it from there
before actually pasting it into the rich text editor of the blog.

By
no means a perfect solution, but it seems to work fine in most cases
for now. In the future the Blogging System/CMS should take care of
these formatting issues.

James is going on a Feed Diet (WarpJam). A great idea. He started out by reducing the amount of feeds he subscribes to to 15 and then added a couple of new blogs that he had not been reading before in order to broaden his mind.

I recently started using Google Reader, and I do notice that I barely make it through the new articles in a day. So a Feed Diet might indeed be what the Doctor ordered, after all I also see quite a bit of redundant information in my feeds.

By the way I just meet with James the other night, and you should keep an eye on his company Names@Work. They are up to no good many good things.

I tried today to sign up for an account with digg.com and world66.com. The problem? I never got the confirmation emails.

Since I have access to the mailserver logfiles, here’s one of the corresponding entries:

We
try to reduce the amount of spam for the users of our non-profit box.
One of the things we do, is to make sure that the sender address
actually is likely to exist. So please, make sure it does exist, if you
want us (and many other people employing this method) to receive your
mail. Hey, nobody said it needs to be a real account or someone needs
to read the mail there. Simply pipe it to /dev/null, but do set the
address up. Thanks.

[Update: Digg activated my account manually after I emailed them]
 

Now this is why I love the Internet, and I am very impressed by who seems to have now embraced the age of the participation web: The United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) has set up a Wiki on JotSpot for their The Peer to Patent Project. Maybe this is the first step in the much needed review of our patent laws, as the project is supposed to enable Community Peer reviews of Patents.

Apparently British scientists have created a made-to-order embryo that does not inherit a possibly cancer causing gene:

I feel torn. Torn between many different projects, and of course my
newly expanded family enjoys the highest priority in my life. What is
this blog about? What is the next project I should be working on? How
can I work on as many projects as possible?

I think I am on the way. On the way of clearing the path, to use one of
my employer’s project name. I do think that “clearing the path” does
not necessarily mean to get rid of things, even though it can be part
of it. For me the most important meaning is to sort through the
clutter. Organizing things makes things better and easier to follow.

This blog here for example. It’s a personal blog. It will remain a
personal blog. This probably means it will cover many topics of my
interest. Then there is a neglected family blog, which is in need of a
new name. Ah, and yes, it should not only be in English. Back to the
i.m.fm blog… Some sub-topics (some of them quite popular amongst my
visitors) should be moved to separate sites in order to unclutter this
blog. I am mainly talking about some of my “consumer be aware” type of
posts… And maybe the business stuff needs a new home as well? What do
you think?

One day I will clear through (most of) the clutter, promise
Unfortunately this blog here is not the highest cleanup priority on my
list (my wife will confirm this, even though we probably still disagree
on the top 5 rankings).

As the domain monetization and domain investing space gains more and
more (negative and positive) attention, I think it’s time for a
reminder that I do have a separate blog about the domainer industry:

Domain Editorial: About and for Domainers