PandaRose

10/12/2026

A happy Thanksgiving to you and yours from all of us at PANDAROSE!

09/09/2026

A moth got into Harvard and ended up in the Smithsonian. Please note, that unlike the modern age, this moth achieved this without once posting that it was "humbled and honoured." And including 5 different photo angles of the celebration dinner.

On September 9, 1947, the team working on Harvard’s Mark II computer found a moth stuck between the contacts of a relay. They removed it, taped it into the logbook, and wrote: “First actual case of bug being found.”

Engineers had already been calling technical faults “bugs” for years, so the entry was a joke. Someone was being a smartass in the maintenance notes, which is a much more believable origin story for our industry than anything involving a visionary in a black turtleneck.

What I appreciate most is that they physically attached the problem to the report. Just here’s the moth, it was in the computer, we have relocated it to the book. Please enjoy your functioning computer. I promise one day this will be how I respond to an IT ticket if I ever get the chance.

However, with most organizations, the policy would be to upload a photo of the moth, fill out eleven mandatory fields (two of which are necessary for SOC compliance), and wait for an automated reply asking whether you’d tried restarting the entire building. Eventually, the ticket would close because you hadn’t responded to an email that you never got. Eventually, when you finally reached someone, they’d explain that removing the moth isn’t straightforward because someone in payroll or HR depends on it.

Why am I writing these random ramblings about moths, tickets and bugs... Well, this a useful test for the software we build at PANDAROSE, actually: does the person using it have greater or fewer reasons to swear at their computer? A prettier screen doesn’t count if someone in accounting has to copy the same numbers into five different spreadsheets. Those of us who grew up saving our work every thirty seconds because we didn’t trust Windows have already done our time, let's not pass that on to the next generation, they’ve got enough skibidi bu****it to deal with without Excel coming for their last remaining aura points. Or at least I think that's how they'd put it.

I’m not asking for every technical problem to be solvable with tweezers. But I do appreciate a resolution you can explain without booking a second meeting.

Meanwhile, that moth has spent seventy-nine years attached to its performance review. One bad afternoon at work, and now schoolchildren learn about it.

Bit harsh.

09/08/2026

Not every website needs to be custom-coded from the ground up.

And not every business should be held together by 37 WordPress plugins and a prayer.

WordPress and custom web development both have their place. The trick is knowing which one actually fits your business.

WordPress can be flexible, affordable, and perfectly capable for many businesses. But when you need specialized functionality, integrations, complex workflows, or a site designed around the way your business actually operates, custom development starts making a lot more sense.

The question isn't “Which one is better?”

It's “Which one is better for what we're trying to build?”

We broke down WordPress vs. custom web development, including where each shines, where each can become limiting, and what businesses should consider before choosing.

Read the full comparison:

Should your business use WordPress, custom development or both? PANDAROSE explains the tradeoffs, integrations, maintenance and best fit.

09/03/2026

Details matter.

It’s why several of us at PANDAROSE are rather fond of Anohka, and probably why we obsess over things most people will never consciously notice in our own work.

Also, proper glassware matters. This is not up for debate. 🥃

09/03/2026

AI has changed a *lot* since we ran our seminar series last year.

And I mean a lot.

Last year, most businesses were still figuring out ChatGPT, prompts, summaries, and whether asking AI to rewrite an email counted as witchcraft.

Now we have AI agents working through multi-step tasks, deep research tools, workflow automation, AI connected directly into business systems, far better document and data analysis, coding tools, sales and marketing workflows, and systems that can increasingly go away, do some actual work, and come back with the result.

Which is both incredibly useful and, occasionally, slightly terrifying.

There is also approximately 900% more AI nonsense floating around, so knowing what is genuinely useful has become even more important.

PANDAROSE is thinking about running another series of practical AI seminars this fall, focused on what has actually changed, what businesses can realistically use today, and what you can safely ignore despite somebody on LinkedIn insisting it will "revolutionize everything."

Interested?

Comment below or send us a DM and we'll add you to the PANDAROSE AI seminar mailing list.

If enough people put their hands up, we'll start putting the fall sessions together.

09/03/2026

**Kelly's thought of the day**

I got some private messages about Coconut Day that I thought I'd continue the trend. So here goes: apparently today is Skyscraper Day, which I guess exists because somebody looked at September 3rd on a year when it wasn't Labour Day and decided it needed more architecture.

It did make me think about websites, though, because a lot of business websites eventually turn into skyscrapers, but not in a good way. Not the beautiful, planned Art Deco skyscraper in New York. No, more like the Kowloon Walled City, where people look at the thing and wonder how it remained standing.

Nobody really designed the thing. It just grew organically. John added a page in 2019, the SEO consultant installed three plugins in 2021, IT bolted something onto the side in 2023, and Margaret made the contact form send everything directly to her inbox. Margaret left two years ago, and weirdly there haven't been any contact form submissions since.

We've all seen it: this enormous organic behemoth that everyone is afraid to touch because nobody knows what will fall over if they do. Yet most customers don't care about any of that. They just want to know what you do, whether you do it where they live, and how the hell they're supposed to get ahold of you.

So here's something actually useful you can do today: pull up your company's website on your phone and try to use it like someone who has never seen it before. Don't use muscle memory, don't pretend you know that the slightly lighter colour means the text is a link, and don't mentally excuse the weird bit because “we've been meaning to fix that.” Just try to call, book, buy, request a quote, or whatever it is you actually want a customer to do.

If you get annoyed, write down why. That's probably a better website to-do list than whatever came out of the last all-hands strategy meeting.

We're concentrating on quite a bit of web work around PANDAROSE this September, and frankly, a lot of good web design is just cleaning up years of accumulated nonsense. Dead pages, forgotten plugins, forms nobody has tested since 2022, navigation that made sense to the person who built it, and assorted digital archaeology. Make the important stuff work again.

Also, if your website has a pop-up asking for my email address before the page has even finished loading, I am closing it with considerably more aggression than the situation deserves and there's a decent chance I'm just leaving.

So, question of the day: what's the thing on a website that makes you immediately want to leave?

09/02/2026

Apparently today is World Coconut Day.

PANDAROSE does not offer coconut consulting. I checked. However, I do enjoy getting a nice young coconut while walking down Spadina on a hot day, and I can tell you the best vendors if you want that.

That being said, September has that very specific “everyone is back at work and suddenly all the things we ignored in July are annoying again” energy.

I know, we've gotten fewer calls all summer, and I'm pretty sure it's not because everything miraculously fixed itself courtesy of Microsoft.

You know the issues I mean. The Wi-Fi dead spot in the boardroom. The laptop that fell off a desk and now sounds like a jet fighter. The printer that works for Brenda, but only Brenda, and only on Thursdays. And the server everyone is pretty sure is backed up.

Right, Bob?

And most importantly, the website that was last given a proper update when Wordle was new.

That stuff.

So this month PANDAROSE is putting some extra attention on two things we already do a lot of around Spruce Grove, Stony Plain, Parkland County, Edmonton and beyond: Managed IT and website design.

If you've been following the blog lately, you've probably noticed the theme.

If there’s a technology problem in your business that everyone has simply learned to live with, tell us about it. Let's fix it and make your life so much easier.

You know, so it feels like a nice warm beach in Cuba, with a coconut.

(I worked it back in. ;) )

I would be willing to bet you don’t need a giant “digital transformation.”

You may just need someone competent to fix the stupid thing.

However, if you actually need help with coconuts, we’re probably going to refer that one out. Maybe to the nice vendor on Spadina, if he's still open.

09/02/2026

Where does your business get stuck?
Not the thing you've already bought software to fix.
The annoying thing.
The report someone rebuilds by hand every Friday.
The customer information living in three different places.
The website form that emails Steve, who then copies it into something else.
The spreadsheet everyone is terrified to touch because apparently Karen built it in 2017 and now it runs the company.
That stuff.
Rachel is at BizBash with the Franklin Chamber of Commerce today, and that's the question we're asking.
Because before PANDAROSE builds a website, connects a system, automates a workflow or brings AI into the mix, we want to know where the business is actually getting stuck.
Sometimes the answer is new technology.
Sometimes the technology you already have just needs to work together.
And sometimes Karen's spreadsheet is fine. Leave Karen alone.
Come find Rachel at the PANDAROSE booth at Garment Factory Events from 10–3 and tell us:
What's the one process in your business that makes everyone groan?

08/01/2026

We’re so excited for our next team building event!

https://www.facebook.com/share/r/1EyKU2MMfa/

07/28/2026

Doctors make terrible patients. Mechanics drive questionable cars. IT companies sometimes discover that the “temporary” development server has quietly become production.

That happened to us.

A power outage exhausted the UPS, the drive failed, and we discovered that the machine’s actual importance had drifted far beyond the way we were still treating it.

The good news is that the layers worked. Git preserved the code. Backups gave us a foundation. Replication and other records filled in the gaps. A data recovery specialist recovered almost everything else.

The bad news is that recovery was far more manual, expensive, and irritating than it should have been.

The real failure was not the hard drive. It was allowing a system’s responsibilities to change without updating its monitoring, backup, recovery, and replacement plans.

Your version may be a server. It may be a spreadsheet, an old accounting computer, a shared mailbox, or one employee who is the only person who knows how something works.

Temporary systems have a habit of becoming permanent.

We wrote about what happened, what worked, what did not, and what we changed afterward:

There is a running joke that doctors make terrible patients, mechanics drive the worst cars, and contractors live for years with unfinished work in their own houses. IT companies have their own version of this. We spend our days providing managed IT support and telling clients to replace aging equip...