Greg Quill is a poor journalist

To: Bureau of Accuracy/Public Editor
Janet Hurley, Entertainment Editor
Greg Quill, Entertainment columnist
Toronto Star

This letter is in regards to Mr. Quill’s article, “Shaye no longer a trio, except on TV,” originally published at thestar.com/article/259441. [1]

I was extremely disappointed with Mr. Quill’s sloppy and wildly inaccurate article. It listed an incorrect cause of death for Tara MacLean’s sister, an incorrect number of children for Ms. MacLean and made several false statements regarding Shaye’s relationship with their record company.

Poor “reporting” such as this would not have made it to print when I was the arts editor for my university paper, Imprint. I expected Canada’s largest newspaper to have higher standards. Clearly, I was wrong.

Tara MacLean has enumerated the errors on her blog.

Perhaps Mr. Quill should stick to performing music and refrain from writing about it.

Sincerely,
Paul Schreiber

[1] The article has been updated with some corrections since its publication. That does not excuse the shoddy work.

Avis, please try harder

This July, I rented a car from Avis in San Diego. It was a pretty poor experience. So, I wrote them a complaint letter.

Besides writing the letter itself, I thought I’d have fun. In the spirit of Yours is a Very Bad Hotel, I proudly present “How NOT to rent a car”:

Here’s the letter itself:
Continue reading “Avis, please try harder”

Vote for my SXSW interactive panel proposal

My session is Putting the Quality in Quality Web Applications.

Here’s the blurb:

A misspelled word, stray pixel or errant semicolon can erase your data, confuse your customers or put you on the front page of the New York Times. Learn what’s important when it comes to web app quality and how to make your site test itself while you sip margaritas.

This is going to be a presentation, not a panel. I’ll cover diverse aspects of web application testing — from CSS bugs to typos to buffer overflows. What are the most common problems? How can you fix them? How can you avoid them? How can your computer do the work for you—how can you automate as much of this as possible? Lots of demos, code samples, real-world best practices.