I speak ‘geek’ - I speak ‘human’ - translating the two in Vancouver, Canada
I’ve been getting a tonne of bounced messages with spam that someone is using with my outbound email address. I’m tracking it down trying to figure whats going on but rest assured I do not send spam, I find spam to be downright despicable and a burden on hummanity.
If you have received a message claiming to be from me, please delete it or forward it to me - that way I might be able to track this down and figure out who is spamming.
With both Canada and the United States in the middle of an election campaign it has been interesting to see where the major focus in terms of where the campaigning is happening.
Last time around (for both countries) blogging was somewhat new, Wikipedia wasn’t the top result on next to every Google search, Social networking was in its infancy - facebook had just been founded - and had maybe 10,000 users.
Flash forward to now and it seems that the main battleground is online. We have seen Barack Obama raise millions of dollars from individual donors using the internet as a donation platform. We have seen people write blogs on the on the barackobama.com site itself. We have seen people seek information rather than wait for it to be pushed to them thousands gave their cell phone numbers to receive a text message the second Obama announced his running mate.
This set of elections has brought the rise of wikis to the forefront. We have seen people edit Sarah Palin’s Wikipedia biography before McCain’s pick was released and wiki wars from the parties have become far more common. We have seen the Liberal Party of Canada launch Scandalpedia - a “wiki style” site of attack articles against the Conservative Party of Canada. Likewise in the US we have seen McCainpedia from the Democrats.
We have seen Michael Moore release his film Slacker Uprising for free on the internet for people to download and watch bringing tonnes of publicity to young people to vote a specific direction.
We have facebook groups galore devoted to political causes, the social networks are becoming heavily politicized and are another front on the political battleground. For example the opposition to the Canadian DMCA aka Bill C-61 was organized on facebook and resulted in real protests and a major outcry from Canadians looking for a balanced approach to copyright reform.
The traditional communication medium, television debates themselves have utilized technology to enhance their effectiveness. One network, CurrentTV, broadcasted twitter messages on screen allowing people to “debate the debate” in real time. We saw little clips of people’s reaction in real time.
In addition, technology is removing the “barrier” of moderation power that traditionally belonged to very few people. We are seeing tools like Google Moderator which enable the power of the crowd to ask questions without an intermediary moderating the questions - more direct democracy.
Technology is getting the younger generations to pay attention to politics because they are able to be directly involved.
Technology is changing politics for the better. How long will it be until we see an entire platform on a wiki style front and having that platform used to elect a government?
Time will tell how technology will impact the results in October and November. In the meantime, get involved and don’t forget to realize that all the technology in the world can make you an informed citizen but you still need to vote!
We have good things coming for the Olympics in a few days with this kind of show. A very Olympic theme and it clicked.
The USA put on a serious contender too - less of a unified theme with respect to the music but well timed and synchronized
The light on the water really makes for a wonderful photo.
Canada’s show this year took a totally different theme than we’ve seen from Canada in the past by using a “Godzilla” theme.
Weather conditions were pretty good - a slight wind to blow the smoke away and hence everyone got some pretty clear photos of the fireworks.
Next up is the USA on Saturday.
Usability of minor little things can make a major improvement in our lives by improving the information available to us.
The simple crosswalk signal is a great example of where you can make a minor change and improve usability considerably.
At present most signals go something like this:
Solid “WALK” then a steady flashing “DON’T WALK” with a solid “DON’T WALK” just before the traffic light is due to turn.
How can we make it better?
Take the “DON’T WALK” flashing - at present it flashes at a steady rate so one doesn’t have any idea how soon the light is going to change, people do “run it” and get caught in the middle, driver’s can’t use the information to plan if the light is going to change to take their foot off the gas and preemptively brake.
Why not make it so the “DON’T WALK” flashes slowly at first and as it gets closer to the light changing make it flash faster and faster. A slowly flashing signal people means people wouldn’t slow down but for a rapidly flashing one people would. Less gas burned by avoiding accelerating only to brake a second later.
It’d save gas and make things a little less stressful. As an added bonus, you wouldn’t have to replace the signals themselves (the other option the digital count down timer requires a replacement) but rather re-program the lights to change the flash rate.
I managed to get an unbroken fix on my hike up the Grouse Grind yesterday - here’s the tracklog.
Needless to say, I also grabbed an altitude log here - it’s a few meters out of calibration but it gives you a good idea of the grade of the trail.
If you want the GPS tracklog here it is in .gpx format
In short, they have finally offered an “unlimited” data plan for $30/month. Ok - it’s technically not unlimited but given the definition that we have seen by carriers in the US it is more or less.
It’s a concession but still not perfectly acceptable. The voice plans are still outrageous compared with the US and the fine print, the System Access Fee (aka pure profit), massively overpriced caller ID, voicemail, low minute buckets.
Will Rogers fix their minute plans to become an acceptable affordable wireless carrier?
On a related note, both Bell and Telus simultaneously decided to start charging the exact same price for incoming SMS messages. 15c a message to receive messages and you have no way to opt out - you pay if someone sends it. Yes, 15c for something that costs them literally nothing to provide.
Previously free incoming SMS was one of the few good things about Canadian cellular (I would guess the 6.95 to 8.95 SAF would cover the SMS fees) but now it’s gone. I guess top profits in the developed world aren’t enough for Bell and Telus - they need to charge more.
With Rogers getting all the flak over iRipoff - why of all things would their marketing department be so stupid to bring the wrath of consumers onto them by introducing this fee?
This is the first in a series of many as to what is messed about C-61.
With most phones the price you see is a fraction of the wholesale price that the carriers get the phones for. Obviously the phone is not “free” or $50 to the carrier but it certainly isn’t the hundreds of dollars the carrier claims it’s worth retail.
The carrier makes up the money that they “lost” by subsidizing your phone over the plan of your contract hence they “lock” your phone so it can only be used on that carrier’s network.
But what if your contract is up. Surely the carrier has made up their cost to give you the phone and the phone is technically yours in the clear. Shouldn’t you be able to take that phone and take it to Europe where you can buy a SIM (Wikipedia) card and pay European rates instead of extremely expensive Canadian roaming ones?
Currently the carrier isn’t obligated to give you the code to unlock your phone to allow it to work with other carriers. Under C-61 it would be illegal to unlock your phone as that would be breaking encryption.
Two main options present themselves
1) Require the carriers to provide unlock codes for every non subsized phone with a simple phone call request.
2) Make it legal to unlock your own phone / make the tools legal to do it when you’re not under contract by adding some langage saying that all the provisions against unlocking don’t apply on unsubsized phones.
A combanation of both would be ideal as there really is no excuse for someone to have to force unlock something they own. Carriers should be required to provide the codes but if they won’t, it should be legal to unlock.
There is a major confusion in the media about C-61 and they don’t understand the core problem. The issue is not about people downloading music it’s about the anti-circumvention provisions which make it illegal to break the digital rights management (Britannica - Wikipedia) which prevents you from copying music and in some schemes requires your computer to “phone home” to an server from whoever you bought the music from before it will play.
Imagine if iTunes closed up shop suddenly. Most of the tunes you’ve paid for would suddenly become digital paperweights - with no server to verify that the content is legal it won’t play.
Providers have held consumers in the dark in the past. Google discontinued it’s video store leaving millions of videos they sold unable to be played (they did sort of offer partial refunds to people who bought their content.) Major League Baseball changed the format they sell videos in rendering all previously sold content useless. No refunds. Microsoft discontinued some of their phone home servers too so if you changed computers suddenly the music collection that you’ve paid good money for is also worthless.
C-61 would make it illegal to break the DRM on content that you’ve paid for but can no longer enjoy. Who is the real criminal here? It’s not Canadians.
