Down with AT&T!

This is what happens when you have no real, substantial, competition in your marketplace. In most of the US, as I am led to understand, AT&T is the "last-mile" copper provider, but as is the same with Bell in Canada, they must lease that copper out to other companies who wish to provide services on it to allow for open competition. Problem is, that except in the major markets, they don't have any real competition.

So now they change the terms of their internet service contract to a text that basically says, "talk bad about us and we'll cut you off."

Initially I read this on BoingBoing Saturday when it was posted, and was maddened at least enough to repeat "glad I'm not in the US" a few times, but this morning I've heard about it from several sources again, Stacey's shared items feed, and Leo Laporte's This Week in Tech podcast both come to mind right now.

Good to know that others are jumping on this, not that I'm at all convinced it will change anything.

Mailplane

If you're a Mac user and a Gmail fan, I would highly suggest you head over and check out Mailplane. This application adds all of the functionality to the Gmail user interface that I've ever thought was missing.

Basically, it's a separate app that presents you with a browser window that shows your Gmail account...all of the widgets of course now use proper Mac styles, and allows more advanced interaction through the use of buttons on the toolbar and drag'n'drop functionality.

For example, need to send a partial screen shot to someone? Start composing your message, click the screen shot button, and drag the area you want to send. Nice and simple.

Have multiple Gmail accounts? No problem, just double-click each account in the drawer to switch between them. (It also offers the possibility to add all passwords to the Mac keychain.)

Full Growl integration is also nice as I use it as my master notifier on my system.

Mainplane is in beta right now (invitation required, but it only took me 24 hours to get one sent to me), it will be shareware when it hits public release. I'll definitely be dropping the small cost on it...I'd argue that it has saved me or Canadian Tire that much money in the few days that I've been using it.

Fixed.

Okay, so I didn't happen to try that feature out properly before I posted about it. I was always connecting from an authenticated browser session so the image always came up for me.

I've fixed it now by having the camera send pics every minute to another web server and the image you're seeing is coming from that.

I realize the picture is tiny...I'll try to find a way in the future of integrating it onto the blog in a larger format. Watch for the camera moving and scanning the surroundings!

New Feature

Not like it's all that interesting...but on the right you'll now see a live picture from out the front of my house. I've started mounting embedded Linux network cameras around my property to provide some extra security. (They do all the cool stuff like motion analysis, picture emailing, text messaging, and mag-switch monitoring so they can tell me the open/closed state of the doors in the house.) Yay Linux!

Update: Ooooh, and I forgot the best part. It's also full of PTZ goodness...so if someone is walking up the stairs the camera will move to zoom in on the stairs, take pictures, and email them to me and SMS my cell. Then it moves back to the wide shot again.

Wii

Okay, Wii = the coolest thing ever. And I got one...just happened into Futureshop and they had one left in their lockup. Now my arms are so sore (after 6 hours of Wii boxing) that I cannot move them anymore.

Ewww.

It's so humid here right now that I'm sitting here, in my AIR-CONDITIONED lab, and my fingertips are sweating. Yes, my fingertips.

Conversations on a Theme

For those of you unaware Lennoxville (or, post-LV) types, you should know that the staff at BU is currently on strike. It started last week while I was at OLS. Originally it was supposed to start in August but was advanced because the union said that the administration was going to terminate 15-20 people. It turns out that this isn't true, at least according to the management I spoke to today...it was going to be a very small number of jobs that would be actually 'ended', but there would also be a number of people retiring who would not be replaced. Anyway...'truth' is a very bendy line in a situation like this...there's plenty of propaganda vomit coming from both sides.

I've been writing about this in Facebook, in a group that the Poutine Press set up to discuss (nay, provide groundless support for) and Nelly Khouzam (a prof of mine...and someone who used to head the union) sent me an email last night. Reprinted with her permission:

Dear Scott,

I have just spent some time reading all the material on facebook concerning the strike, and I was quite saddened to read your messages. I think you have a very wrong idea about what the APBU is about and stands for. The records office is actually understaffed, and if the employees who work there did not go as far beyond the call of duty as they do, things would be a lot less smooth than they are presently. The APBU does not protect the lowest common denominator. We work to ensure that everyone is treated with fairness and equity. I have been active on the APBU Executive for 9 years, and became so after I was treated unfairly by the administration, and the APBU helped me. I would strongly argue that I do not represent the lowest common denominator. I understood and appreciated 9 years ago what the APBU stands for and I decided then to put a lot of my energy into supporting and defending their principles. I would also argue that I have done this at no expense to my main job, which is serving the students and accompanying them
in their education and learning at Bishop's.

I would be more than happy to spend time with you, if you so wish, to try and rectify some of the misconceptions you have about the APBU,

sincerely,

Nelly Khouzam
Professor, Computer Science
Past President, APBU
Member of the APBU Executive
Member of the APBU Faculty Negotiating Team
Member of the APBU Staff Negotiating Team
Member of the Faculty Evaluation Committee
Former member of the Bishop's University Executive Committee of Corporation
Former member of Senate
Former member of the Senate Planning Committee
Former Chair of the Computer Science Department
and many others.

And my response:

Hi Nelly,

It should go without saying that I don't consider my statements as a direct reflection of you.

My disagreement is with unions as a whole, and because of my affiliation with Bishop's, with the APBU specifically. I have seen, either through poor PR from the union or a lack of credible examples, very few points which would cause me to feel support for _this_ union when in general I lump them all into the category 'evil'. Perhaps evil is too strong a term and certainly its alignment with 'chaotic' is not correct, but I use it to express my absolute distrust in whatever motive they purport to have.

Forgetting everything else I feel about them, unions support the weakest of the group so as to bring the standard of work down, and for this alone I can never support them.

This said, I would be happy to meet with you at any point to discuss this further as I would always prefer to be well-informed, however I would find the possibility remote that you may change my mind on the larger subject. I am on campus every day now during the week, most likely in the mornings.

I'm going to take her up on the offer to speak about this further. Details of that conversation will follow on this blog in the next few days. As I wrote, I would always like to be better informed (you know, that whole "information is the only thing that really empowers" stuff).

Quote.

"Features kill puppies."

-- Rusty Russell @ linuxsymposium 2007

Factoid

In Ontario the ambulance is the only emergency vehicle that is not granted legal exception to go through a red light even with lights and sirens on during a critical run. That's not to say I've ever seen a medic get ticketed for doing so, nor do I think any sane cop ever would, but that's the law as it stands right now.

Okay...or how about a second...

Quebec is currently the only geo-political area in North America (and in most of the world really) where it is illegal to use an in-car GPS navigation device. This is because of the existence of an over-reaching law banning driver-visible televisions which was written as 'any electronic screen'. It's amazing they allow in-car radios in this province.

Cool 2.0

Anyone looking for a USB storage drive? If you've got a little money and want the coolest (and safest!) way to store your data which requires virtually no maintenance at all from you, check out Drobo. Or better yet, check out the demo video!

This kind of hot-swappable ultra-redundant storage has been the stuff of servers for well over a decade now, but this little machine brings the technology to the forefront, at a price that isn't totally unreasonable and it requires virtually no user maintenance. It's already added to my wishlist.

The Coolest Thing

Many times I've seen the International Space Station in orbit as it passes overhead, and for me the experience will never lose its grandeur. Debate all you want about whether 'we' should have built the station or whether we should have set up a moon base or whether we should have explored the oceans first, it's still awesome to look up at the football-field-sized man-made object floating 350 kilometers overhead.

Tonight was particularly good, as I got to see the space shuttle racing away from the station at only about 30 arc minutes away (which amounts to only a 2 second timespan ahead of the station ). The shuttle is planning to return to earth tomorrow, but until it's ready to do its deorbit burn it remains in the "upside-down" configuration which means that the top of the shuttle and payload bay are facing the earth so momentarily it was second only to the moon in terms of brightness as visible to us. Very cool.

Note to Record Labels

If your song isn't available on iTunes, I'm going to steal it.

The sooner you figure that out the sooner you'll start to realize more sales. Someone would assume that you business gurus would have learned that in the first year of your degree -- somewhere between couch-burning and stripper-sex.

Go to iTunes to buy the White Ladder album by David Gray and there are only 2 songs from it available. Now I know this isn't the fault of iTunes...they would love to sell every song ever produced, I'm sure, so that leaves labels, as I'm ever-more sure that artists have little control over their own music these days.

So, off to Pirate Bay and problem solved, but I certainly would have preferred to pay someone for it.

5 Minutes

That's how long it took to be convinced to quit my job today. Really I should have quit a long time before now; after all, I only had it as an 'in' to get me hired by the department as full-time staff and we all know how that turned out.

So I was meeting with Layachi (my Masters supervisor) today to plan out my research for the summer and he asked how much they were paying me based on my approximation of 20 hours/week for the entire year. I did some rough calculations, presented him with a number, and he hands me back a bigger one. "That's how much I'll pay you per year during your Masters" he says. (This is contingent on me quitting the ITS job and spending full-time on studies.) "Done", I say. I really didn't want to be with ITS anymore anyway...it was just something to pay the bills. They unfortunately have a very backwards view of what IT Services in an educational setting should be.

So that's the news.

Ad Augusta per Angusta

(This is probably going to sound like a rant, and indeed it may be. I just don't quite know why the majority of my posts seem to be poorly-worded diatribes, when I'm generally regarded as such an optimistic person...for that matter I have no idea why I'm so optimistic. I am, after all, a fat, bald, single, 33 year old anglophone in Quebec with no full-time career. Woohoo...good thing I'm super intelligent eh?)

I don't care what job(s) people pick for themselves. Really. I don't. I never look down on people based on the job they've chosen to work at, however I will contemn a person fully and completely when they choose to be negligent in their duties or when 'substandard' becomes synonymous with 'satisfactory'.

Honestly, we spend 2000 hours a year working at these jobs...almost a full third of the amount of time we spend awake each year. It seems to me that there should be no excuse but for us to actually take the time to do a good and conscientious job. This is why I spend 45 minutes interviewing even the 16 year old that I might put on a cash register...I have to weed out people with the attributes that will lead to substandard work, and it'll cost me a lot less to spend the time interviewing them out up front than it will if I hire them and then we have to go through the necessary paper trail to get rid of them later (after we've potentially had to put up with weeks or months of wasted time).

Why am I upset about this today? Well, this is actually on the forefront of my thinking most of the time...as I travel through my day and witness stupidity after incompetence after complacency ad nauseum. People I work with...'developers' (wow am I playing fast and loose with that term) who write applications that I *sincerely* hope they're keeping as far from their resumes as possible. Stores I shop at...where staff and managers alike seem to be equally incompetent, but worse, seem to have no desire to change that sorry fact.

Folks, if it's in the purview of your job description, know it! Or at the very least be prepared to learn it when you need to.

Find out what your employer expects from you, and then aim to do more. (Note to my poor union-caged friends here...this could get you in trouble...I have never found a union that I liked.)

Accept criticism (well, constructive criticism) for what it is. Peer review can be one of the best methods to improve your own performance.

Learn more than your little pigeon hole in the business. Not only does it make you more valuable to the business, but customers/clients perceive you as a more conscientious person.

My ambulance instructor, a crazy Irish paramedic named Kelly Shepperd, once taught me his description of truly knowing a job inside out. We had been working with our airway equipment: oxygen tanks, valves, masks, airways, bag valve masks, suction kits ... and practicing with all different ways to assemble and configure all this stuff. To get truly good at proper assembly of it all can take hours and hours over many days (bag valve masks - the thing they squeeze on ER to get air into you - actually have 25 or so parts...little rubber gaskets, valves, connectors, etc.). So my group had spent all these days with this stuff and we thought we knew it inside out and backward. That was, until Kelly took it all apart, stuck us in a closed room, and turned off all the lights, and then timed us putting it back together. His notion: you don't really know something until you can do it with one of the senses that you normally require for that task removed.

With computers I try to be the same way...when Canadian Tire calls me about something if I can't talk them through the procedure cold, over the phone, with no screen in front of me, then I don't know that task well enough.

So that leads me to my final point: know your job right to the fringes, all the weird stuff that may never happen...because then the day to day stuff will not only seem simple, but you'll be perceived as an absolute expert.

Now, I'm in a big glass house here. Certainly I haven't aspired to all of these goals in every job I've ever done...but I'd like to believe that I gave 120% effort to every employer. Even if I haven't always done that I'm committed to learning about things. I make tons of little post-its about things I don't know an answer to and then I tackle them whenever I have some spare time. The gist of what I'm trying to get at is that I just don't understand the sloppy work concept. I don't understand why people do it. I don't understand why managers accept it. And all the while, the rest of the world suffers from it.

Fiction.

When I was young (young -- 9 actually, grade 4 -- young) I was into Dungeons and Dragons...series 1 stuff, not the series 3 and 3.5 that the kids are playing these days. Anyway, I remember when my parents got me my stuff D&D stuff, they were nervous because there had been a rash of news coverage about how dangerous it was...that kids would lose themselves in the fantasy. Indeed the concern was that we would lose our ability to determine the difference between the story and the real world. (This belief was largely given steam because of a few events that did happen where some kids in California dropped a little acid, got dressed-up as thieves and paladins and wandered around the sewers attacking each other with sword-like implements.)

Flash-forward to 1997. Harry Potter and the Philospher's Stone is released to much praise becoming a seemingly overnight hit. Subsequent books in the series earn further accolades. But in the last many years we've heard rumours of problems, groups of conservative parents banding together to state that it's dangerous to let kids use their imaginations in this way (??? - go figure on that one). Or the church, the church denounces all things Harry Potter because evil takes too-prominent a position, and because the books proffer fantasy over reality. In fact, Rev. Gabriele Amorth of the Vatican said, "By reading Harry Potter a young child will be drawn into magic and from there it is a simple step to Satanism and the Devil,"

In both of these cases the subjects are put forward as fiction. FICTION. The kids know that it's fiction -- ask them, they know. So why is it that when something so purely *fictional* is put forth as *fact* (or at least half-fact), the world is not up-in-arms?

Stop forcing children to read the bible. Or at the very least tell them it's no more real than Harry Potter.

I'm just terribly dismayed that I'm more surrounded by deeply religious people than I thought I was a few months ago. And more so when I see parents forcing their children into the same religious shackles; your children are too young to decide for themselves, ergo they are not religious, they are simply repeating the actions and thoughts that you're brainwashing them with.