If you’re new to London, Ontario, I hope you weren’t interested in the garbage and recycling pick-up schedule for your new place.

While trying to look up pick-up times for yard material today at work, I came across this gem of user experience.

No word of a lie, that is the real size of the map up at London.ca. The user is supposed to click on a “zone” to download their zone’s .pdf. Oh, and no where in the .pdf does it give any indication of what area that particular zone covers.

Anyone see where Maitland and York is? Me neither.

In today’s wired world, web applications seem to pop up every hour of every day. In the past 6 months, I’ve probably signed up for about 50 web services, and consistently use maybe 4-5. Out of all of these, one service has in the last 12 hours blown me away; not necessarily the application itself (it’s really good, but a bit buggy), but the personal contact that I’ve had. And, that contact was initiated by them, not me.

The company I’m talking about is Grooveshark, an online radio/music sharing website. When I first signed up, I was blown away by the Grooveshark Lite user interface, and the quality of the music it provided (everything I searched for, from Sigur Ros to Radiohead to Ben Folds Five was available). After an hour of online music bliss, I made the decision to sign up for the full service.

However, once I got into my account, I was quite dissappointed. The user interface was drastically different from Grooveshark Lite, and was not intuitive to use. The good impression I had from the 1 minute it took to get going on Grooveshark Lite was almost lost when I couldn’t even get a song to play in the main section.

Eventually, I went back to the Lite player, while signed in, and with their Sharkbyte software (which allows downloading and uploading music to the service) running on my computer. However, I quickly realised that something was amiss. I wasn’t getting the same quality that I had when I first went to the site. The songs would play for a few seconds, then stop to buffer, play for a few seconds, stop to buffer, and on and on like that. After a few refreshes and even restarting my computer, I came to realize that when I didn’t have Sharkbyte running, and when I wasn’t logged into the website, the Lite player worked perfectly.

It seemed odd to me that this would be the case, so I posted it on my Twitter, just as a personal note. Within minutes Ben from Grooveshark.com sent me a message saying that he agreed with my observations regardinging the Grooveshark service, and that I should look forward to the new Grooveshark beta coming out in two weeks. He went on to say that the new interface would be similar to the Lite player, with some of the community features added in. I was really happy to hear that! If they could get the Lite player to function properly with the community features, I would be in online community-driven radio heaven!

But, the most impressive thing to me was that my random note was not only seen, but responded to personally by Grooveshark. It really showed me that even though they didn’t have a solution for me right away, that they were already working on some great updates to their service. When I had posted my twitter frustration, I really hadn’t planned on going back. Yet, even though he didn’t have a solution for me, Ben encouraged me to stick around to give the updated service another try.

Thanks, Ben. I’m really looking forward to seeing Grooveshark get bigger and better!

When I designed the theme for my blog, I made the decision that I also wanted to release a public version of the theme. I have never released a public WordPress theme, but felt I knew enough from designing several themes on my own, as well as developing a couple of full websites on the WordPress platform. 

Well, I am proud to announce that I feel I have a test-ready version of my new theme, Junction. I would love to find 3-5 people who would be willing to test the theme out, and to provide feedback for me. 

There are a few issues I know I’d like specific feedback about:

1. I have attempted to “widgetize” my footer (as this theme doesn’t have a sidebar). I haven’t been able to test this yet. 
2. The overall look of the theme. Any additions or changes you’d like to see. 
3. Any mistakes or omissions I’ve made. 
4. Any features you’d like to see. There are a few things on my personal blog I haven’t figured out how to implement properly yet, but maybe together we can figure it out!

Right now in London, there are several discussions happening regarding drive-thrus. On one side, fast food companies argue that it will hurt business, while environmentalists argue that the earth is paying the price.

Well, I think I’ve found the argument to end all arguments for this issue.

What would become of the Crystal Wedding Chapel, Canada’s first drive-thru, Vegas style wedding chapel?

This week I started putting together a new theme for my blog. As I posted earlier, the one I was using just wasn’t cuttin’ it. So, starting from scratch, I built this new theme. For now, I’m calling it “Munctional.”

There are a lot of things that I love about this theme, including the About section at the top, the layout of the footer, the position of the date stamp, and much more. I hope that these things aid the use of the site, and I’d love to hear your thoughts as to how everything works/does not work, and where you see potential for improvement. I’ll be posting about some of the cool features and details that I have incorporated in a little while.

There’s a few things I’m still unsure about, mostly the link colours in the main section, as well as the colours used in the footer. What I’m thinking about doing is doing a few colour schemes and giving you the ability to pick what scheme you like using a style switcher, but that will be a little while from now (as I’ve never used a style switcher before).

Until then, I’d love to hear your thoughts on the theme as it is now. I guess you could call this the beta version. At least, I will. It sounds so much more hipper that way.

I think I’ve mentioned this before, but the current theme (white background, 3 columns) is a theme I downloaded just so I could get blogging again. From the time I started using it, I began to notice more and more things that I didn’t love, and felt a stronger urge to design my own theme. I also wanted to design a theme that could be used by anyone.

Well, I’m about 90% way finished my first goal, and will have a public version out likely by mid-July. I’m tentatively calling it “Munctional,” as I wanted a strong, minimal, functional design. I’m not stuck on the name, so if you have any suggestions, let me know.

For now, here’s a sneak peak at the layout: