Vancouver, like many cities has a pay for parking by phone arrangement as well as at private lots.

It’s all fine and dandy, I call a number, enter the amount of time I wish to park for and volia, I don’t need to go and buy a ticket and put it on my dash. It’s easy and saves me a couple minutes as well as saves the environment a bit by saving paper.

Except, they charge me 35c every time I “buy” parking via the phone. It just doesn’t make a lot of sense, sure, it’s getting charged to a credit card which has fees, but the ticket machine takes credit cards too, so both have credit card fees. Every time the paper is saved, which has to add up to a couple cents as well as less wear and tear on the machine which doesn’t have to be refilled / emptied as often. In short, it’s cheaper to process and maintain a pay by phone payment schema than a physical paper ticket printing machine one.

So, why the extra fee for pay by phone?

If some killer features were enabled on the pay by phone I can see the fee for example..

I park, hit “I’m parked here, charge me until I sign out” - that way if I don’t know how long I’ll be at a lot for, I can rest easy knowing that I won’t get one of those insanely expensive “violation tickets” for not paying enough. The same applies for meter parking, if I can get billed for the exact time used, rather than a fixed block, that’s the advantage.

As is, the only advantage is 30s or so to place a paper ticket in the dash and the tax receipt on the website rather than having to use the credit card one. If pay by phone saves the parking companies money, why charge extra for no real added benefit?

Celebration of Light 2008 - China

Originally uploaded by andrew.wallwork

We have good things coming for the Olympics in a few days with this kind of show. A very Olympic theme and it clicked.

Celebration of Light 2008 - USA

Originally uploaded by andrew.wallwork

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.

Celebration of Light 2008 - Canada

Originally uploaded by andrew.wallwork

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.

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.

The Canadian DMCA (ie C-61) also contains a provision that makes it illegal for security researchers to do their work.

The legislation would make all security tools illegal - if it’s capable of circumventing DRM it’s no longer allowed. You are only allowed to attempt to crack / find security flaws in a program or an encryption scheme with the creator’s permission.

Companies don’t like to be told that their products have issues that need to be fixed (if they don’t respond to the concerns it gives them a rather bad image) and wouldn’t likely give permission for companies to probe their software for flaws.

Are the bad guy going to respect the law and not exploit these exploits.

No.

Without people finding and getting these problems fixed we’re all less secure.

Just another reason why C-61 needs to be killed and and something that actually makes sense be written.

Recently I was in a discussion with someone who was saying that “maps were dead.” I believe that the major problem with that argument is that it does not define maps.

Yes, I will agree that traditional paper maps and charts are not as popular as they used to be. Paper does not store in a very compact format.

A set of maps for all of Canada would be several pounds to carry around. Dozens most likely. I can carry the same set of maps on one DVD. One disc. With that I can view them on my computer or transport them to my GPS so anywhere I am I can get directions to anywhere.

With a GPS I can get a set of co-ordinates. That set of co-ordinates while not a map by itself is now part of our major need for geo-location.

If one looks at flickr, many photos are tagged with location. Some cameras even have GPS chips built into them, instant location.

Geocaching, a very high tech game of hide and seek where people hide caches for people to find, posting co-ordinates which can be viewed on an electronic map or downloaded into a GPS unit to find.

Navigation systems, satnav navigates millions of people from point A to point B. You are looking at a map in there.

With everything, we have Google Earth where you can view all sorts of information, from fast food places to maps showing global warming. It’s open so people can share pretty much anything.

In short, maps are not dead - not by a long shot. Everything has just moved to the digital domain.

A few days ago I was reading “Why the 9 to 5 Office Worker Will Become a Thing of the Past” on Pick The Brain. It’s an interesting read, I suggest you check it out.

I have come to the realization that in many cases, the traditional workplace of showing up every morning, attending scheduled meetings and going home at a fixed time does not make any sense for either the employee or the company.

The obvious solution to this problem is planning around the mental energy cycle by breaking the work day into multiple segments. The traditional office setting doesn’t accommodate this because there are few available recharge activities. People can’t do household chores, run errands, or engage in recreational activities without leaving the workplace.

So, where does that leave us work wise. Do we work from home or do we work more at a “informal office” setting like WorkSpace?

I think the solution is a mixture of both. One does need a traditional office for some things like meetings and to collect mail etc but that’s about it. In many cases, one can rent a virtual office to handle those jobs very easily. No need to spend 2000+ a month on another physical place that doesn’t get used a lot.

With modern communication tools such as

1) Phones (both landlines and mobiles)
2) IM
3) E-Mail (including e-mail everywhere on the Blackberry)
4) Virtual Meetings

We are never out of touch - it really doesn’t matter if you are at home or on a cruise ship - with connectivity you can be anywhere and still work.

For some jobs, you have a fixed schedule - you work when it’s necessary but for many information workers there is no 9-5. A 8-10 and then 6-10 workday might be more productive.

At the end of the day, it’s about results not what time people work at. Breaking up the workday inproves productivity and everyone wins.

Celebration of Light - Canada (123)

Originally uploaded by andrew.wallwork

Much better wind conditions helped Canada out a lot. Compared with Spain, it was a totally different show, they used different heights a lot more and it was quite pretty.

As a side note, my apologies for the low resolution of these photos, I didn’t realize my camera was set to low resolution (I accidentally changed it in the dark)