So I’m trying out this twitter thing. 140 characters seems entirely manageable right now as far as blogging and updates go.

Feel free to follow me here.

Heather (aka fubsy, aka nuttymuffin, aka “the hotness”) has put together a 2008 calendar of her beautiful photographs.

This is the same woman who captured me licking my new TiVo at BestBuy waaaaay back in 2005. That’s right - I pioneered the technology licking movement that won Tod Maffin his Wii.

But I digress - Nuttymuffin calendar. I got one, you should too.

Jen-licking-TiVo photo not included.

So I’m in New York City! The big apple! The city that never sleeps!

I’m bored.

I’m sitting in a conference centre (Javits) in a dirty, industrial part of town, supervising our trade show booth setup and catching up on some work. Thank god for free wifi.

But it hasn’t been all bad.

Even though I had to get up at sparrow’s fart to get to the airport for my 06:20 flight, I had a fantastic surprise when I got there. The co-worker I was flying with used his status points to upgrade us both to first class for the Vancouver-Chicago leg of the flight.

Or at least he thought he did. Turns out the upgrade didn’t go through for both of us, and I was the one who ended up in first class while he got priority boarding and a bulkhead seat (first class was full by the time we checked in). But I got the bigger seat, and breakfast! With real dishes! It was still airplane food, but I’m not complaining. (Thanks again, Rich!) Our bags also got priority tags, so they made our 40-minute connection at O’Hare.

All in all, yesterday was awesome. Our flights left on time and arrived early. The hotel is pretty and swanky (W Times Square) and with the tiny exception of the insane lineups to get up the Empire State building (which had very nice views once we were up there) everything went as smoothly as possible (including the glasses of scotch we downed in the evening).

Today - less smooth.

The booth is going up veeeeeery slowly (Thanks NY Union Labour!), a major piece of hardware is stuck in customs, the flying has caught up with me and my stomach is hateful, my computer (specifically outlook) keeps crashing.

It’s only 2:00pm here, and I feel like I’ve been up for hours. Oh wait - that’s because I have! After a fitful night of mostly not sleeping, I got up at 6:00am to go meet all the vendors, who’d decided they’d hedge their bets on the Union Electricians not finishing their part on time (which they actually did), and showed up an hour later than they’d scheduled last week. Thanks. I didn’t need that extra hour of sleep.

So now I wait, and watch. And hope that this day ends soon and tomorrow everything’s better.

At the beginning of September, my latest contract with Telus finally came to an end and I made the switch to Rogers.

None of the mobile phone providers here actually offer what I’d call “good” rates on voice or data packages in the range I’m using, so my decision to go with Rogers was made strictly from a CDMA vs. GSM standpoint. I also wanted a smartphone with windows mobile and wifi, and Rogers delivered the option that was within my budget: the HTC S621.

Thanks to the recent arrival number portability in Canada, I was also able to keep my number and just swap it over to the Rogers account. Easy peasy. It only took about 18 seconds for the swap to happen.

And this is where I say FEAR YE THE PORTING OF MOBILE NUMBERS!!!!

Check your cancellation agreements, double check your dates, and make DAMN SURE everything you do is on the up and up. If it’s not, you could find yourself on the receiving end of a hefty fine, like I almost was.

I told the Rogers salesguy (a store manager no-less) while I was purchasing that I wanted to port my number, and I was pretty sure I only had a couple days left on my telus mobility contract. He didn’t mention anything about possible conflicts. I figured it was no biggie. I didn’t actually realize until it was done that the porting thing was instant - I figured it would take a couple days, based on the experience I had transferring my land line from telus to Vonage.

Not so much.

I called telus about an hour later when I got home, and found out that the second my number ported, my telus contract was cancelled and I was automatically levied their termination fee of $100 or $20 for every month or portion remaining, whichever is MORE.

And how “early” was my early cancellation? 13 hours. I ported my number at 11:00am September 3rd. My contract expired September 4th.

But according to the first few folks at telus I spoke to, I cancelled early, that is that, and I owe them $100 plus tax.

But remember that bit at the beginning where I said I “almost” paid a hefty fine? I was unfailingly polite, used every ounce of customer-service-fu I possess and prayed to every deity I could think of. And the unthinkable happened.

TELUS MOBILITY, THAT UNCARING, UNCOUTH LEGACY INCUMBENT BEHEMOTH - THEY OF THE “NO INCENTIVES FOR BEING A CUSTOMER FOR SEVEN LONG YEARS DESPITE THE FACT THAT NEW CUSTOMERS GET A BUCKET OF GOLD AND A BLOWJOB WITH THEIR FREE PHONE” - THEY GAVE ME A GOODWILL DISCOUNT FOR THE VALUE OF THE CANCELLATION FEE!

I know, pick yourself up off the floor, and read it again just to be sure. They waived the fee. I didn’t believe it either, which is why I didn’t blog about it until the bill showed up in my mailbox stating as such. But it did, and I paid my $20-worth of pro-rated fees happily!

Anyhow, I have a new phone, it’s pretty skookum (although I still can’t figure out how to upload pictures to flickr with it - help anyone?), and I managed to find the three people in the telus organization who haven’t succumbed to the borg. I almost feel bad for signing my soul away to their competitor. Almost.

The blog is undergoing a long-overdue upgrade to the newest version of WordPress. If you experience any weirdness over the next couple days, that’s probably why.

The management thanks you for your patience.

Update: upgrade complete, and spanky new design now showing! It’s worth clicking through to my actual site to see the loveliness that Kyndra created!

(Already crossposted to facebook - with a couple comments there.)

So I went to BarCamp Vancouver 07 last Saturday. I was… underwhelmed.

Having never attended a BarCamp before, I was pretty excited, since everyone I know who has gone has always spoken quite highly of them. But I just wasn’t feeling the love and/or usefulness.

I suppose this makes sense if, like me, you actually enjoy traditional conferences. I like seeing the conference theme, session briefs, schedules. I like planning ahead to see what’s coming up and scheduling my conference experience. Hyper-organization thrills me in a special way.

BarCamp, being an “unconference” is the antitheses of this. While some sessions are determined ahead of time, much of the content and the entirety of the schedule is done up “on the fly” - set the morning of the gathering with the potential to change during the day.

I’d seen a couple sessions I was definitely interested in on the Wiki - but after the “scheduling jam” was held, they all turned out to be after 2:00pm.

Considering I’d shown up at 8:30 for breakfast, session and scheduling jam and introductions - by the time I found out what would be taking place when (settled at 10:00am), I wasn’t really in any mood to hang around.

I did attend one of the first presentations of the day and was mostly interested - but 11:00am - 2:00pm felt like a LONG four hours to fill. I could’ve hung out and tried to make friends - but I’m a bit useless in large groups like that. My socializing and networking abilities seem to dissolve in groups larger than about 20.

Also, generally when I attend a conference, the sessions and presentations are organized around a central theme. There are usually a few sessions I’m really interested in, and some that only tangentially touch on stuff I want to know. But at least they’re 90% relevant to the theme of the conference.

Since BarCamp is an all-inclusive unconference, the sessions only follow the theme of “are you interested/expert enough in something to talk about it? then do so!”

That’s a huge draw for some, but not really for me. It meant that sessions ran the gamut from social media to ADHD to Drupal theming, to open source business development to apple widgets to social responsibility using the web to mainframes to cameraphones to advertising.

And most of that stuff, well I just don’t give a damn about it. It might be interesting stuff to many attendees, but not to me. Actually, not true. Had there been an “intro to Drupal” session, I might’ve attended - but why would I attend a session on Drupal theming when I hardly know what Drupal itself is? Same with the apple widgets. Cool, but I use a PC/Linux setup.

So yes. I left. And didn’t return for the sessions I wanted to see in the afternoon, because by then I was tired and didn’t feel like the 30 minute bus trip back across town. I’m sure I missed out. But I’m not that worried about it.

I came, I saw, and I’ve decided that BarCamp just isn’t for me. Anyone else feel that way, or am I the oddball in this one?

So I wrote that I didn’t think facebook was for me.

And then I figured I’d try it out before making a judgment one way or the other.

Thus far, I am completely unsurprised and underwhelmed.

All sorts of people from various past jobs, schools and affiliations are on there, and I have somewhere in the vicinity of 50 friends. I’ll admit that there’s at least one “friend” on there whose name sounds familiar from high school, but I don’t actually remember interacting with him/her at any point, or what s/he even looked like. But there doesn’t seem to be a good way to question friendships - it’s either confirm or deny!

So far, though, facebook hasn’t delivered anything to me I’d consider “valuable.” There are events being planned through the site that I’ve been invited to, though I’ve also gotten individual email invitations to said events, so I don’t think I was missing out by not having an account.

But in terms of knowing on a minute-by-minute basis which of my friends are now friends with others, and what any given person is… at any given moment in time - I just don’t give a damn. If I did, I would (and do) ask. And I hate small-talk enough, which is what the updates and wall posts are. So I’m sure that if I can’t be bothered to small-talk in the real world, the internets will forgive me for not engaging in it there either.

I’m also more than a little distrustful of their terms of service, which state that anything posted to the facebook site is property of facebook. From their TOS:

By posting User Content to any part of the Site, you automatically grant, and you represent and warrant that you have the right to grant, to the Company an irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid, worldwide license (with the right to sublicense) to use, copy, publicly perform, publicly display, reformat, translate, excerpt (in whole or in part) and distribute such User Content for any purpose on or in connection with the Site or the promotion thereof, to prepare derivative works of, or incorporate into other works, such User Content, and to grant and authorize sublicenses of the foregoing.

So this means that I suddenly grant the site creators unlimited rights to any blog posts, photos or other content I include on facebook. For me, this means that the one photo I’ve got up there is the only one that’s staying, and I’m going to be removing the “blog import” function in the notes section shortly. I’m not delusional enough to think that the facebook machine is going to get rich off of my paltry ramblings, but it’s the principle of handing over ownership of my creation. Homey don’t play that.

While initially I liked the idea of sharing my activities, events, photos and thoughts with an audience who would otherwise not be reading my blog or seeing me in person - I won’t compromise my own rights to those things for the sake of people with whom I don’t regularly interact, or have only a long-past place and time in common.

So the Verdict? Mildly interesting, ultimately not valuable to me.

I’ll stay on facebook for the sake of the invites that roll through there, update my “Jen is…” whenever I’m feeling clever, and probably leave some wall snippets or comments here and there whenever I’m so inspired. But until it actually prompts me to participate in a meaningful way - and one that leaves me feeling a little less violated - my public profile and private experience will likely be highly uninteresting.

Generally I’m a bit skeptical when it comes to new gadgets.

They usually come trussed up in pretty boxes, covered in promises that they’ll revolutionize my life and I’ll forget what ever came before them.

So far only my TiVo has ever lived up to that promise. And if you know TiVo, you’ll know that it’s a pretty tough act to follow.

So imagine my surprise when I received the Rocketfish Wireless Rear Speaker Kit to review - and found that, in line with the promises on the box, it just works.

The promise is that you’ll hook up the transmitter to your sound system using simple speaker cables, then place the receiver within 100′ and hook your rear speaker cables into it. The “CD Quality” sound is transmitted over a 2.4GHz wireless signal, and voila - you can hear a mustang MiG-28 scream across your room as Iceman and Maverick duke it out in the skies. It literally took me 10 minutes to set the whole thing up. And I really mean me! Even I - who normally foists these kind of things off on Neil because I just can’t be bothered - found it really, ridiculously easy to figure out.

There are only a couple potential issues with this solution:

1. If you have truly open concept living, it may not work super well for you. Both components require DC power to operate, so while the units don’t require direct line-of-sight to work, you do want a power outlet pretty darned near where you’re plugging things in to avoid unsightly wires - the problem you’re trying to solve in the first place. If your couch is smack dab in the middle of a loft, you’re going to have to run cables anyway.

2. The sound is good, to me, on my system. I have basically destroyed my upper register hearing, and my surround sound system is one of those $100 combo units (dvd-player, receiver, 5 identical speakers in a box) - so there’s not a lot of fine tuning going on in my audio visual experience. If you’re a die-hard audio-snob, I can’t vouch for the unit’s performance on your $1500 speakers.

At about $100 USD, the kit is completely reasonably priced for those who purchase high quality AV products. Personally - while I don’t know that I’d spend that kind of money on my own system (because generally I don’t care enough), it got me using the rear speakers that had been sitting in a box for over a year, because I couldn’t be bothered running ugly cables around my room.

And that’s pretty awesome as far as I’m concerned.

Of Facebook.

I signed up. No promises that I’ll stay, but you can go ahead and attempt to find me and add me to your various networks.

So far I find the site clunky and annoying. Perhaps it can change my mind.

UPDATE (40 minutes in). Complaint the first: For various reasons, I use a couple different email addresses. They aren’t “work” or “school” addresses - but I can’t find any answers on the help page to consolidate multiple addresses (that have nothing to do with work or school) into one account. Evite lets me do this, why not facebook?

UPDATE (a few hours later) So it seems that, in a stupid, circular way, I can add email addresses. I can “change” my contact email, which will add the new address. Then I can change the contact email back. Unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to be a way to just add an email address and leave the contact email at the default.

I am still trying to resist the Facecrackbook.

The invites keep flooding in.

Mostly I am afeared of pictures from my youth, fueled by young hubris and much liquor, being tagged with my name once I’m there. And some things are just best left in the past.

But other than that - while I’m feeling weak and impressionable - does anyone have a *good* case for actually signing up?

Thank you for being environmentally responsible

Originally uploaded by peechie.

It’s been a long while since I’ve purchased inkjet cartridges. I don’t print all that much and they only end up needing replacement every 12-16 months. In the past, it’s actually been cheaper to buy a new printer (since I generally buy the cheap, crappy ones and they don’t last very long).

So I was pleasantly surprised when I received two postage-paid envelopes with my two-pack of cartridges to return the empty ones to HP for recycling.

Considering the waste problems exacerbated by the influx of peripherals ending up in dumps this little move toward a bit of extra environmental consciousness made me almost (not quite, but almost) feel okay about forking over nearly $70 for the privilege of printing, and adding further volume to my recycling bin.

Someone was asking me yesterday about social networks. And what with the constant stream of emails and posts about facebook, twitter, et al, I figured I may as well chime in on my stance.

No.

Just no.

My feelings on social networks and web 2.0 in general strongly mirror Derek’s, who said it so well, I’ll just give you his words:

I have this thing about trying to keep my online existence stable, so if you link to something of mine, it will still be around in a few years. If I gave you my email address or ICQ account number in 1996, or my blog URL in 2000, it still works…. I like to have an archive that persists.

I have this blog. I have my photos on flickr. I have a profile on LinkedIn. I really think that’s enough. I’ve had the same email address and cell phone number for at least 8 years, with no intentions of changing them.

But when you get down to the nitty gritty of my reasons, it’s honestly mostly out of sheer laziness. It’s a universal truth that any product with staying power will do one of two things: Increase Pleasure or Reduce Pain. I enjoy blogging, I find WordPress easy to use. Pleasure Increased. I very rarely included pictures in my blog posts, because I found it a huge hassle to upload them to my webspace and remember the code to insert an image (doing it so rarely meant I never bothered memorizing it). Enter flickr, and whaddya know - an easy way to store my photos, and include them on my blog. Pain reduced.

As for LinkedIn - It’s an easy way for me to remain connected with past colleagues, especially now that I’m job hunting, and maintain a network in a fairly unobtrusive way. It also keeps professional networking easy for the socially uncomfortable (myself included) by setting the tone for a conversation. Asking my old boss for a recommendation on my LinkedIn profile is easy for both of us, rather than dropping him a line out of the blue and asking for referrals or references when we haven’t even spoken in 3 years. LinkedIn for me is reducing pain and increasing pleasure because I’ve gotten some great introductions through the service as well.

Don’t even get me started on Second Life. Dealing with Real Life is more than enough most days.

So while I’m not writing on walls, or tweeting, or soaring through virtual worlds, or whatever else people do on the myriad of social networks available - I AM on the internet. I’m googleable by about 12 different variations of my name, and not at all hard to find or get in touch with.

Also, curmudgeon that I am, I’m really trying to spend my energies on valuable and authentic social relationships. Someone who only finds me because I happen to be on facebook, and starts a conversation with “So, what’ve you been up to in the past… 10 years…” is, nine times out of ten, just curious about where people in their past are now. If there was actually a solid basis for friendship, we’d have probably kept in touch a little more regularly.

However, the person who takes the time to google, find my blog, photos or profile, and actually makes an effort to keep in touch a little longer than the lifecycle of the average social networking site (Friendster who?) - well that’s what I want online social networking to deliver.

There’s this song I love by a band called Streets. The song is the lead track on their album A Grand Don’t Come For Free, and it’s called It Was Supposed to be so Easy. Basically it’s about a random guy who was supposed to deposit some money in the bank and everything that can go wrong in that particular scenario does. It sets the stage for the rest of the album, taking the listener through a lyrical journey during which the poor bloke loses £1000 and his girlfriend and the rest of his life pretty much falls apart.

But this isn’t about music. This is about reinstalling my OS.

It was supposed to be so easy.

It all started about a year ago when I contracted a few viruses (virii?) that any scan/quarantine/erradicate program I could lay my hands on were powerless against. I’m sure all sorts of interesting data was compromised (if you’ve ever emailed me, your spam is probably my fault. sorry.) but overall my user experience wasn’t too drastically affected.

Then the fine folks at microsoft came out with their genius “genuine windows” update, which decided that my copy of WinXP was not genuine (a claim which I will neither confirm nor deny) and my OS slowly started cannibalizing itself. I was stuck in a catch 22, where system restore was disabled, and upgrades deemed necessary to run applications were disallowed. Programs were ceasing to function.

No matter, says I - I’ll just get another copy of XP and reformat. It’ll get rid of the viruses in the meantime.

It was supposed to be so easy.

A business acquaintance of mine had an unused copy of XP in her office. As I occasionally do contract work for her, we figured that as long as she wasn’t using it, it made sense that I installed it as another company copy of the OS.

Reformatting, here I come!

The hour or so it took for windows to chug along through its install process didn’t reveal any problems. Until it came time to register the software. It couldn’t find an internet connection. I was lost, so I had my handy resident nerd sleuth out the problem. Turns out that none of my motherboard drivers installed, including (of course) the onboard ethernet adapter.

There was much cursing and yelling and googling and threats of throwing fiscal responsibility to the wind and going hog-wild at the apple store and finally the tearing apart of boxes in the back of a closet - but I did manage to find the old install CD for that particular piece of hardware. And lo there was internet. We thought it was good.

We were wrong.

Turned out that after what was now 3 hours of backups, installs and other assorted clusterfucks, that particular copy of XP had already been activated.

Back to square one.

Behind that actually. Square one already had a functioning - albeit crippled - OS.

Enter Linux.

And the heavens opened and the earth rejoiced and all and sundry (and nerdy) were glad.

We downloaded and burned a copy of Ubuntu.

We loaded the cd.

And it just. worked.

Ok, there is one bit that doesn’t “just work” - there isn’t any default support for a lot of media formats, like .mp3 and .mpeg because of patent issues. Neil had to ask it to install those particular plugins.

Other than that, it was an amazingly friendly boot and install, and open source applications have come a LONG way since I tried using a Linux OS (fedora) for a couple months at work a few years ago.

And with the advent of Ubuntu, I now live in a windows-free home. It’s strange, but so far it feels pretty good.

Especially since the awesome African tribal music ubuntu uses as its startup sound is so much cooler than the ubiquitous windows startup riff.

Oh, and speaking of music, at the end of the Streets album, the guy’s life turns around, he gets his girlfriend back, and he finds the £1000 he thought he lost.

Sometimes everything works out ok after all.

So we’re sitting at an internet cafe in London, because so far, the city kindof hates me.

We asked the friendly concierge(s) at our Oxford hotel and the Oxford-London bus guy where to get off to get the tube to Paddington station. They sent us about 8 tube stations too far away, when the bus actually stops in a few places that are WAY closer. Thanks.

So we make it to the tube. With 3 suitcases, two of which are very large and heavy. No lift (at least not that we could find). One suitcase paid the price of its extendo-roller handle halfway down the stairs. Of course, of the three suitcases, it’s the one we borrowed from someone else.

Then the tube breaks. For twenty minutes.

So we finally make it to our hotel. We figured things would obviously be different now that we’re not staying on the company dime, but holy hell. The neighbourhood is nice. The hotel is clean - but it really is a complete shitbox. With no internet - hence the cafe.

We’re also in cash-panic mode. Despite settling the skimming thing, and having it confirmed (twice) that I would be using my debit card to take out cash in the UK between Feb. 23 and March 5, my card’s been cut off. We had to resort to a cash advance from my Visa, because we just had no more cash, and don’t really want to have to do that again. Especially since we put a whole lot of cash into my bank account, specifically for taking out during the trip.

So that lands us at the internet cafe, checking my vonage account for whether the bank tried to call me (they did) and if I had any voicemail messages. I do, so now it’s back to the hotel to rack up some lovely international calls to try and sort this mess out.

Also, it’s raining. Uncharacteristically Hard. And my umbrella gave its life valiantly in a windstorm in Henley.

On the plus side, there is an H&M here, and the ethnic food is fabulous! I just wish the British would figure out how to make a damn sandwich properly.

Here’s one for the geeks.

Know what would be really cool? If I could select an option on search engines that would automatically sort results based on geographic relevance.

For instance: I need some information on community and career resources in Prince George. If I select that little box, a tool runs to grab my IP and gives me results for the city of Prince George, BC instead of Prince George County, MD. Heck, let me save a profile with my address and postal code, or any other geographic location indicators so I get results that are far more relevant.

Google: know that “default address” I selected for your pretty maps utility? How’s about you use it to filter my search results as well. Maybe only if I ask you to - but I’d like to be able to ask you to.

This should be possible.

Anyone know anyone who might want to do something about this?