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 ain’t no kind of design guru but this wordpress theme is really good:

http://basicmaths.subtraction.com/

Very clean and neat and to the point. Hmmm. Even makes me think I might want to change my themes, almost.

Thanks to Jon for tweeting this.

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!

So I was able finally to try out scoopler. Okay. Pretty handy.

In fact, it taps a thread that I’ve been thinking about for a while: the idea that the “standard” supply of  information content that means something to a given community has to include comments, criticisms, posts, and blogs by the very members of the community. And these posts and comments are now, increasingly, on these social networks that are hard for traditional information-agglomerating tools (website search (google), catalogues (library), listserv archives and digests, and so on.

Last time I tried to use it, scoopler were having some reliabilityi issues. But this time, while I think there’s still a few speed issues, it works pretty well and, in fact, it’s pretty handy to have. Especially for info on events and ideas that are moving fast. It’s worth checking out.

I read an article on a list about Scoopler and how it might be great because it was going to try to catch tweets and status post realtime and let you search for them. But I’ve tried to use it twice and I keep getting a blank search-page that says this:

Hmmm. Even late on a Thursday night. I guess the web never sleeps. But this doesn’t bode well for realtime tweet searching.

This (http://magiclantern.wikia.com/wiki/Magic_Lantern_Firmware_Wiki) is really cool! Now I’m not a videographer, as you might know. But, oooohhh, there’s something about hacking into the camera’s OS to make much more than what was originally intended that just makes my head spin. Who would ever predict that this would happen. If it catches on, film-making might never be the same. Wow!

Thanks to Baden for the tip.

Walking with an iphone means I have a 2gb camera in my pocket, all the time. That means, I’m prone to taking pictures, all the time. Generally speaking, the total lo-res package is pretty bad but, still, a camera is what you make it to be. So here’s a couple pictures.

While I was reading this , I read a sentence that got me thinking about why the web is both strange and sensible at the same time.

While Mike Johnston (whose is the proprietor of The Online Photographer ) was proposing a simple exercise to improve ones’ photographic skills (and which I should try to follow, one day), he wrote this,:

“If there are, say, 30,000 people reading this (approximately our average daily readership, an astounding fact that still mystifies me), a couple of thousand might think this suggestion is a sound one…”

I think, based only on his writings, that Mike is probably an honest, neither overly conceited nor overly modest, guy who knows quite a bit about his subject (much more so than the average: he had, afterall, been employed in the past as a photography journalist by specialty print magazines) and is very good and entertaining in his writings about said subject. That 30,000 people a day should read his site is a testament to two things. One is that, as we all know, by far the majority of that hugely vast amount of content on the web isn’t really of much interest to anybody else. Even discounting the dumb, evil, or designed-to-disgust content, most of it just isn’t anything special. So good, honest, thoughtful writings by someone who knows something about his subject is bound to, eventually, attract people who appreciate it.

Second is that there are so many people surfing and reading the web that even if this good content is really not gripping enough for most web surfers, the minority who are attracted are still an amazingly sizable chunk of people.

I think I’m making this sound more profound than it is or maybe it’s more profound than I can describe without sounding like a pompous twit (I’m not Mike Johnston, after all). But it does continually amaze me that good people with good skills who may have lost their niche in the analog world find a new one that looks completely different but which enables their skills to be out in the skills-marketplace, so to speak, and attracts the people who are looking for those skills. Even, in this case, if it’s just good writing about photography.

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.