Category: Internet matters

Posts about the internet

Keynote and Pages

Tempted by the reduced prices on Apple’s new App Store, I picked up Pages and Keynote, Apple’s answers to Microsoft Word and Powerpoint.

While it is annoying to have to learn the ins and outs of new software, it cannot be denied that Apple’s offerings produce beautiful output rather easily. In particular, the software comes with templates and typefaces that make it simple to produce documents and presentations that look rather hip and professional.

I have already produced a fellowship application and a job application using Pages (and the attractive Didot serif font). I am also in the process of producing a guest lecture using Keynote and am quite happy with the visual results I am getting.

Technology for content creators

As a technology geek, I can see the appeal of devices like the Kindle and the iPad, especially as far as portability goes. It would be great to have a device small and light enough to carry around all the time, yet less annoying to use than a smartphone.

That being said, the iPad in particular seems to have major disadvantages as a content-creation machine. The web browser has trouble with some parts of the back end of WordPress (creating posts, editing posts, dealing with media, etc). The multitasking capabilities of the device are also somewhat lacking. Rather seriously, copying and pasting on the iPad is far from easy or intuitive – a pretty critical failure for someone who needs to move text between emails, blog posts, blog comments, other webpages, etc.

To me, the MacBook Air looks like a far superior option for people actually heavily involved in the creation of content. It’s a real computer that is fully under your control (you can even install Flash!), and it has a real keyboard and real web browser. If you are doing more extended work, you can plug in a mouse. It lets you take content from a USB key, or plug in your iPod to charge. Alongside all of that, it is remarkably small and compact – especially the 11″ version. It’s not as powerful and capable as a full computer, but it is plenty capable of accessing the internet and email, which would be the critical functions for me. If I need a computer that can do some heavy lifting, I can always go home and use my Core2Duo iMac.

If I wasn’t in the process of saving up for an uncertain financial future, I would almost certainly go out any by one to replace my heavy and increasingly non-functional G4 iBook. As it stands, if I do find myself heading off to join an academic program, it is probably an investment I will make.

Core competencies

If you are primarily a content producer, running a website or a business inevitably seems to involve doing some work outside your area of core competency. You need to deal with clients, negotiate rates, file taxes, manage webservers, etc.

There is one line of thinking that says all such activities are a necessarily evil, at best, and that we should all stick to doing what we are most skilled at. The Ricardo theory of trade may be the purest expression of this idea. It says that if everybody focuses exclusively on what they are best at and sells the products of that skill to everyone else, they will be able to pay others to provide all the necessities of life.

We all do a fair bit of outsourcing. Consider the case of Thoreau, who built his own house and found some of his own food. Compared to him, we are pretty much all more specialized.

Of course, Thoreau’s philosophy is pretty much the opposite of Ricardo’s. Thoreau thought that you should do for yourself even what other people could do better: haul the lumber for your shack on your own back, rather than hiring a man with a cart.

The main question here seems to be how far you should specialize. There are definitely gains to be made in specialization. As Malcolm Gladwell argues, if you spend 10,000 hours practicing the activity you do best, you might become world class at it. At the same time, specialization produces vulnerability to change. A hummingbird with a beak that has evolved to fit only into a single kind of flower is in a lot of trouble if that flower becomes rare or goes extinct. This idea is well expressed in the anime film Ghost in the Shell: “Overspecialize and you breed in weakness; it’s slow death”.

Personally, I think it makes sense to cultivate at least a couple of sets of skills – something abstract and something practical, perhaps, or at least some sort of serious hobby outside of work. Also, even when something isn’t a core competency of yours, it can be worthwhile to know a bit about it. It would be useful for me to take a course on Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), for instance. Web design certainly isn’t a major activity of mine, but it would be nice to be able to customize sites a bit without having to spend heaps of time trawling through forums and plagiarizing the code of others.

The CRTC and UBB

Regarding all the furor about usage based billing, I don’t think that basic concept is really so objectionable. Someone who uses 100 times more bandwidth than someone else should probably pay more for it.

What I object to is the rate at which the big telecommunication companies are being allowed to charge for bandwidth: $1.90 a gigabyte (GB), above a low limit. Movies, especially, are rather large. One ordinary definition movie from iTunes is about 1.5 GB – 2.0 GB. High definition movies are even more. The cost of actual providing the bandwidth is much lower, and letting the big firms charge such a high amount risks choking off promising new uses for the internet, such as increased videoconferencing. My relatively modest internet use in December (67 GB, well below my previous 200 GB cap) would have resulted in an added charge of nearly $80 to my monthly bill.

It would be fine to have an internet pricing regime that included some variability, it’s just important that it be set up in a way that allows upstart firms to challenge monopoly providers, lowering costs for consumers and improving service. Letting the big companies squeeze their competitors to death with hefty overuse fees doesn’t serve the best interests of Canadians.

[Update: 11:24pm] Michael Geist has a good piece about all of this: Fixing Canada’s Uncompetitive Internet.

Put This On

Put This On is a site worth looking at if you’re a man who buys into the whole idea of avoiding wasteful living. After all, it makes a lot more sense to spend $300 dollars on dress shoes that will last twenty years than to spend $80-100 on shoes that will fall apart in six months and look bad in the interim.

Just don’t get addicted to the site and buy some gargantuan wardrobe. Something you only wear once every year won’t get worn out quickly, but also probably doesn’t justify the resources that go into making it. Put This On is good about encouraging the purchase of used formal clothes, including the inexpensive and apparently superior-quality clothes available at estate sales.

They have some very professional video segments on denim, shoes, and work clothes.

In any case, the site is already very famous and most of you had probably already heard of it. For the few who hadn’t, though, it seemed worth mentioning.

Jeopardy selection starting

As my trivia buddy Aaron pointed out via Twitter, Jeopardy testing is starting today – just the thing for the various species of geek and nerd who I am pleased to say read this blog.

One of Ottawa’s better trivia teams is called ‘I Lost on Jeopardy’. Even if you don’t win on the show, just getting on it might be enough to get them to let you join.

There are scheduled test times for the eastern, central, and Pacific time zones:

  • Tuesday, February 8th at 8:00pm ET
  • Wednesday, February 9th at 8:00pm CT / 7:00pm MT
  • Thursday, February 10th at 8:00pm PT

If you are lucky enough to be in Alaska or Hawaii, the times are 7:00pm (Alaska) and 6:00pm (Hawaii).

The test takes an hour and will only be given once on each of the three nights.

Fewer photos to Facebook

Because of how they get their money, it seems to me that Facebook has a business model that is fundamentally opposed to the interests of its users. Since they don’t pay monthly fees, they aren’t Facebook’s customers. Instead, they are Facebook’s product, which is then sold to advertisers in the form of eyeballs and (more worrisomely) databases of personal information.

Because of that, Facebook is never going to be proactively involved in protecting privacy. Instead, it will always be pushing the boundary and doing as much as users are willing to accept. Bit by bit – visibly and invisibly – it seems that privacy protections will be eaten away and more and more data will be available to Facebook’s real clients, the advertisers.

In response to this, I have been gradually stripping down my profile. That’s not all that possible, however. For one thing, Facebook never forgets information you entered, even if you delete it. For another, it can guess all sorts of things about you based on your friends. It can guess what sort of products you are likely to buy, or even if you are gay.

Some people may not be bothered by this, but I am. As such, I am going to shift away from posting photography on Facebook. Instead, I will mostly rely on Flickr Pro, which is a paid and user-focused service.

[Update: 6:39pm] Fear not, photo appreciators! There will still be photos uploaded, and they are likely to be in smaller batches of higher quality work. These are from today: Rideau Canal Skating 2011.

Cause to comment

One more reason to comment: this site uses WordPress SuperCache as a way of rendering pages for non-commenting visitors. The cached versions are not fully up-to-date, especially when it comes to comments left by visitors.

As soon as you leave a comment that behaviour changes for your computer. That means you will be getting a freshly rendered version of the page every time.

Crediting friends for photos

I put a lot of photography online. I try to put a photo per day up on this site, and I have heaps of photos on Facebook and Flickr. It’s a hobby I enjoy and people seem to enjoy seeing my photos, including ones of themselves.

As photo and computer gear have made it easier and easier to store large numbers of digital images, my library is ballooning. I use iPhoto to store ‘digital negatives’ and currently have an album of 36,109 photos. Most of those photos (over 2/3) have been taken since I came to Ottawa.

While lugging around a giant SLR, it is fun to let other people try taking a few shots. One person brought the gear, but that doesn’t mean people with different perspectives shouldn’t be allowed to make use of it.

I do try to memorize which shots are mine and which ones were taken by others, but I deal with a daunting number of photographs overall. Once in a while, I may accidentally mis-attribute a photo taken by someone else as my own. It is never my intention to do so, and I ask you not to be offended if I haven’t remembered which shots you took. I would always be pleased if you would let me know, so that I can provide an appropriate caption or hover-over text.

Does that seem like a sensible approach to people?

Bell, usage based billing, and TekSavvy

It seems the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) has let the dominant internet service provider (ISP) Bell largely ruin the smaller ISP Teksavvy:

From March 1 on, users of the up to 5 Mbps packages in Ontario can expect a usage cap of 25GB (60GB in Quebec), substantially down from the 200GB or unlimited deals TekSavvy was able to offer before the CRTC’s decision to impose usage based billing…

We encourage you to monitor your usage carefully, as the CRTC has imposed a very high overage rate, above your new monthly limit, of $1.90 per gigabyte ($2.35 per gigabyte in Quebec).

Forcing big companies like Bell to lease capacity to companies like Teksavvy seems very smart, as it helps prevent dominant monopolies from forming. Unfortunately, such arrangements don’t have much meaning if you also allow the big company to force their own policies on the smaller companies that are leasing from them.

Consider the case of a customer using 100 GB a month – half of Teksavvy’s previous low cap. Before, they would have paid $44.30 with tax. Under the new rules, they would pay that plus another $142.50 in additional data usage fees.