The Digital Cobbler

As I reported last post: I was expecting that I’ll have to eventually get a new phone contract to allow the family the perception that they are in constant (potential) contact with me.

However, I’ve reached a temporary setback.

We have a FIDO “couples” plan. But only one phone on it at the moment because I removed my old phone last summer. But I didn’t change the plan because I wanted be able to add a phone back on to it. And so I called them and asked to do that.

Not so fast. To add a phone to this “existing” couples plan, that has only one phone on it, triggers a new 2-year contract. I’ve been a FIDO customer for 9 years. I don’t owe them any 2-year-contract. Ever again. But, says the customer rep, you can change the existing plan to a “legacy” single-number plan (with no fixed term contract) and add a new no-contract phone (as a separate account, I assume). But then we lose the pooled minutes and the legacy plan has too many minutes on the wrong phone. I told the nice pleasant customer-service rep that if I have to start new plans or new 2-year-contracts it triggers the necessity for me to research the other phone providers (including new ones coming this year) because I can’t assume that what Fido is forcing me to change to would be best for me. She told me I’ll have to do that homework.

Damn. Looks like I’m back to square one. Ever since Rogers bought Fido, my phone company has been an obstacle who acts like they’re out to screw me.

At the end of December I bought a Nokia N810 on Ebay.  Among other things, it’s perfectly set up as a wifi-voip mobile phone. I’m getting used to saying “call me at xxxxxxxx”, then having people say, “oh, you have a new cell phone”, and I say, “it’s not really a phone but you can call me and when I’m in a wifi zone, I’ll call you back.”

Some people are intrigued and ask me more about it, but some people really don’t get it. The whole “not a phone but you can call me” is just too weird, I guess.

Anyway, it’s turning out to be very useful but one of the values of a cell phone (that family can call at any moment and have, in their minds, a reasonable expectation that I’ll answer) is a little bit lost on them. The fact of the matter is, however, that when they phoned while I was on my way home from work I wouldn’t likely hear or be able to reach my phone and it would go to message anyway.

That said, it’s pretty much a given that I’ll get a phone too, at some point in the near future. I’m just hoping not to give out the cell number to anyone but those who really have to use it (re: family).

I just handed back my iphone. It belonged to work and I changed jobs and I don’t get to keep it. So, now I’m without a cell phone for the 1st time in ten years. Will I survive?

I’m not sure. However, when I got the iphone in June I kept my old cell number by porting it to a voip provider who have very cheap, pay-as-you-go rates. This provider has a feature that emails me everytime someone calls and leaves a voice mail and, in fact, the email contains the voicemail as an attachment.

So, I’ve carried a wifi-enabled handheld device for years. In fact, at the moment I’ve just re-commissioned my old Palm Lifedrive and that device can usually connect in a wifi cafe and see the emails. Whether it can listen to the attachments, I’m not sure, but there’s also a voip app for the lifedrive which lets me actally make calls. But at the moment the lifedrive microphone isn’t working well and the audio from my calls is inaudible.

Anyway, there’s more work to do on this front and who knows, if I get this all sorted, maybe I won’t need no stinking cell phone!

Had a funny net-day in Abbotsford today. I was at a couple meetings at University of Fraser Valley and I couldn’t get normal websites such as gmail, basecamp, or facebook. Not even plain old google. But I could get VPL’s super-weird user-unfriendly remote email connection where you have to go through a firewall with port 950, authenticate there with a generic login, leave that window open while you then go to an outlook-webclient page using a weird, hard-to-remember URL. It was astonishing. That weird email routine is usually hard to get inside the network of academic institutions; yet, today at UFV, I could get in using my laptop with a borrowed wireless authentication as well as using a library workstation and a guest-authentication.

I mean. That’s just not normal. I’m sure they must have been having some kind of dns/bandwidth/I-don’t-know kind of problem to prevent google and gmail but to have that stuff *not* get through when weird email firewall stuff does get through is very strange.

I was sitting in the coffee shop this aft; I should say “hiding” in the coffee shop because the wireless where I work wasn’t agreeing with Suse liveCD in my laptop (the wifi at the library is superbogus crappy: you have to scroll down below the fold of a page of straight text and the authenticate through a form that sometimes works), and then I had to try *two* coffeshops to get a properly working connection and I was totally grumbling and posted a snarky comment to my twitter when I suddenly thought of this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jETv3NURwLc . So now I’m thinking: is free/cheap  public wifi that’s available pretty much anywhere something that, in  Louis CK’s words: “the world’s owes us?”

I mean, here in the downtown, there’s  almost free, good wifi pretty-much within reach of wherever we might be. That’s actually pretty good. So, even if it doesn’t work once in a while, maybe I should stop griping. I don’t know.

After a Sunday afternoon lull sitting reading our books in JJ Bean’s on 14th & Main we were driving along past Main & Kingsway and I remarked to the wife: where did people hang out on Sundays in the winter when we were 20-somethings?

It occurred to us that there was almost nowhere to go: I remember once or twice going to the SoftRock Cafe and once going to the old Vienna tea house on Robson. K remembers going to Beanos. Ugh. I can’t deny I went there too. But it got me thinking.
I realize now that I spent a lot of time visiting friends. At their houses. And that reminded me of what people used to say: Vancouver was a very difficult place to break into the regular social life. There were no ubiquitous coffee shops. No hip hangouts. There were bars, a few nightclubs. And during the day there was Beanos. So almost everybody visited their friends at someone’s house and that meant that if you didn’t know anybody in town, you didn’t meet any locals. And if you didn’t like your friends, it was very hard to meet new ones.
(My perpective is limited, I know. I grew up with a very close set of friends who I still see. I realize now that we didn’t admit newcomers easily. Although I don’t think that was on purpose as much as it was a function of having known each other from such an early age. But that’s another story….)
I hate to admit it (because people are probably sick by now of hearing about the “before Expo/after Expo”story) but this *was* something that changed after Expo 86. For one thing, before Expo, very few places were open on Sunday. Certainly bars weren’t. Most stores weren’t. And I seem to recall that many many cafes were not either. That’s compounded by the fact that there weren’t many cafes in the first place.
I guess this is something we can be thankful for now that we have a grownup-like city. Traffic may be a constant hassle. Rent may be insanely expensive. But at least there’s somewhere to go and something to see on any given day. It sure wasn’t like this when I was growing up.

I have to admit: even though the Mother of all Funk Chords has been all over the web (posted in places as disparate as Slashdot and Virtual Dave…Real Blog), I still think it’s the coolest thing I ‘ve seen in ages.

It’s all done by this guy.

Saw something interesting the other day: A handful of folks gathered under the portico of Vancouver’s central library around an electrical outlet charging their electric bikes. That got me to thinking: nomads need electricity.

Now, of course, in this day and age we already know this. But I suspect most of us who are thinking of on-the-go electrical needs are thinking of electricity for devices (you know: laptops, phones, and so on). That’s certainly an important question. But E-bikes are becoming an important part of the transportation spectrum and they can’t bring them into coffee shops and libraries to get them charged. And, in addition, coffee shops aren’t exactly free electricity anyway. You have to buy something to sit there.

So, that brings me to the puzzle of finding free or near-free, outside public electricity access for E-bikes. Is there some kind of wiki/blog/list where somebody is keeping track of outdoor plugs? Is it in this Yahoo Group? It would seem to be a good idea to maintain a list somewhere. I’m not tapped into the e-bike community at all so I don’t know.

As an example: people are tracking power in airports and there’s plenty of public wifi lists (here’s one) so I suspect the e-bike community trades this info somehow.

Of Course, if the idea catches a public-buzz, then somebody will definitely try to commercialize it so I suppose one should be careful what one wishes for.

All the different themes on this site connect to an underground urban concept that, among other things, is call Urban Nomadology. Here are a (very) few places to start exploring the concepts of urban nomadism:

Lipstick Traces by Greil Marcus is an amazing book. It connects the punk music explosion from late ’70’s Britain back to the situationists of Paris, the Dadaists, and much further back than that. This, from my perspective, is essential reading to understand the cultural component of Urban Nomadism here at the start of the 21st century.

Nomadology.com is an interesting introduction to the topic. Not a “linear” or narrative one though.

Of course, nomadism has no urban component in most people’s minds. When they hear “nomad” they usually think of Pastoral Nomadism , if anything. Mongolia presents a good example of pastoral nomadism. This U.S. Country Studies article might help. Although, there is, apparently, more to it.

So, here’s an extremely brief Urban Nomad Primer:

Despite the prevalence of Situationists throughout the 20th century (as examined in the aforementioned Lipstick Traces), the idea that this is connected to a kind of nomadism is a reasonably new idea.  It’s, to me, the logical next phase of the Digital Cobbler concept. I think this embodies a kind of urban nomadism that is economic, cultural, and social.

However, it’s also important to acknowledge right away that this is an urban component of digital geography that may have eqivalents in the exurban and rural communities. Or, using the names used in Joel Kotkin’sThe New Geography the book, the blog, in the Nerdistans and Valhallas of North America. It may be the case that these different types of communities are all so much inter-twined and are consequences of the same digital geography to the extent that I can’t discuss the urban component without dealing with the others.

More about Urban Nomads in a while when I organize my readings and so on.

Okay. It should be obvious that nomads don’t need so much stuff. But I find that the “lose the clutter and set yourself free ”  or “organize the clutter (and still set yourself free)” kind of advice you can get is extremely uneven. And I come from a long line of packrats (and I’ve fathered another packrat but that’s another story) so I know something about trying to get rid of the clutter. 

Take the case of these two examples of set-yourself-free-and-lose-the-clutter guides: 

1. When Organizing isn’t Enough: SHED your stuff, change your life by Julie Morgentstern  is one of those execrable self-help books that takes 250 pages to say what could be said in one well-written 20 page pamphlet.

But, there is a kernel of usefulness here:

There’s three parts to the process: 1. SHED 2. Find your theme 3. Pick your point of Entry.

SHED means: Separate the treasures, Heave the trash, Embrace your identity Drive yourself forward. The first two parts are obvious, the third part is understandable (a bit more about that below). The fourth part is a bit rah-rah contrived but if that’s what works for some people, fine. 

What is interesting is that it the shedding isn’t necessarily of physical things. It can just as easily be things you do or think you have to do. And the “embrace your identity” part is to use this process to figure out what you are (or, more accurately, what you want to do ) so you know what it is you should shed (I think).

The Find your theme part is about finding the theme of the shedding so you have a focus for why you’re doing what you do. I’m not sure how this differs from the “embrace your identity” part but there you are. I’ll read a bit more and see if I can figure that out. The third phase (Pick your point of Entry) seems to be a kind of “name the moment” idea but I will read a bit more of that just to see if it goes anywhere useful. 

That said, there’s no way I can read this whole thing. Like I said, it’s 250 pages to say 20 pages worth. 

2. The second example of lose-the-clutter advice is the complete opposite of the first: smart, quick, brief, and inspiring. So, I won’t bother going on about it, just go read The Last Viridian Note  by Bruce Sterling.