Paul Cipywnyk's Blog

Computer Disintegrating?

Strange things have been happening with my main work computer. The first sign of trouble with the Windows XP machine was when I became suspicious of louder than normal seeking noises from the hard drive and ran a CHKDSK on it a few weeks ago. The scan found a corrupted file which it proceeded to "repair," resulting in all the dates in my Palm calendar disappearing. Fortunately I synch with the Palm fairly often, so I reinstalled the Palm Desktop and synched back 99% of my schedule.

Then a few days ago Eudora froze while going through email and while trying to shut it down, XP crashed completely. When I rebooted, the computer would get to a point in the boot cycle and fail, going into endless rebooting loops. Oh-oh!

I used the XP install disc to boot into the Recovery Console and ran CHKDSK with the /R (repair) parameter. Once it finished, the computer booted OK, but very slowly. It also appears there are problems with the sound driver and that USB 2.0 ports have dropped to USB 1.1 speeds.

I backed up the hard drive and have been using the machine for a couple of days, but am worried about its flaky condition. While the HD is no longer chattering, I get the sense that it is likely going south, and perhaps there are issues with the motherboard as well, so it appears shopping for a new computer may be in order. In the meantime, I'm backing up My Documents and my email daily to a second internal hard drive, and every couple of days to an external drive as well.

Technology is great, but it also sucks when it takes up hours of your time fixing it. I wonder how many hours I've put in over the years replacing defunct hard drives and reinstalling software and restoring data? I've dealt with toasted hard drives at least three or four times for our own machines, and twice for family members.

So remember, it's not IF your hard drive will die some day, it's WHEN it will die. Some people are lucky and go years and years without encountering such problems, but my experience indicates that after three to five years of intensive use, HDs start developing Alzheimer's. Multiply that over four or five computers in our house/office and that's a major meltdown once every year or so.

Backup, backup, backup!

Shaw Email Outage Drags On

Email services through Shaw have been down for over two days already, and the outage is getting very frustrating. I first noticed that I was not receiving messages on Sunday. I kept sending test messages to myself and to my Gmail account, and I finally appeared to catch up when messages began trickling in through Shaw on Monday morning, but by later in the day, email was out again. As I write this at 7:00 a.m. on Tuesday morning, Shaw's email is still down. I have spoken to others who are experiencing the same problem, so its not just me. I don't understand how it could be down so long...

UPDATE: 3:44 p.m. My domain provider says that Shaw is blocking messages from my personal and business domains. They will work on getting Shaw to stop the block.

March 12 UPDATE: Apparently some of my domains were forwarding substantial amounts of spam to my Shaw email account -- something that I was not aware of. My domain host and I have implemented measures to get control of the situation, but I am still bothered that Shaw never told me what was going on, and implemented the block without informing me.

Cheap Latch Could be Deadly

The other day my wife was leaving the house and the door wouldn't open. I thought she was kidding, but when I went down the stairs and turned the handle back and forth, it wouldn't open for me, either.

Eventually she left through the garage while I attempted to fix the problem. I took the lock apart, and discovered that the latch portion had worn out, so that when you turned the handle, the "cam" did not draw the "slide" and nothing happened (Note: I'm not a locksmith so I'm making up my own terminology here...). I took a closer look at the part and was dismayed to see it was made from plastic and flimsy metal.

Yikes! What if the house had been on fire?

I replaced the part with a slightly sturdier-looking one from Rona (albeit still stamped metal and plastic), and remain a bit unnerved by the sensation of not having been able to open our door to get out of our house!

Ludicrous Price for Car Remote Entry Fob

The remote entry (door unlocking) fob to our '98 Subaru Outback cracked the other day, so it fell off my keychain. I knew replacing it would be expensive, figuring perhaps $50-60. So I called the dealer, and was told, get this, $144. Yikes!

Now you've got a couple of square centimeters of molded plastic and a tiny circuit board -- I'd be surprised if the cost to make one of these gizmos exceeded $4-5. Toss in a couple of bucks for shipping, a few more bucks for labor to order and stock the thing, and I still don't see how it could cost more than $10. Oops, how about programming it? OK, let's add $10 for at most ten minutes of work. Ah, the time to write up the invoice and run my credit card... Another $5? We're now up to $25, and unless I'm really missing something, that's generous.

That's quite the markup!

Anyway, Yumi sewed a little leatherette casing around the cracked case, I drilled a hole in the corner of the leatherette, and voila, it's back on the keychain and we saved $144 (not to mention taxes...).

C$ Rip-Offs: Apple Computers

I haven't bought an Apple computer in 15 years, but admit to technolust that drives me to visit the Apple website every month or two. Now that the Canadian dollar has been stronger than the US dollar for some time, I thought I'd compare prices on the Apple Canada and Apple US websites. I was not surprised to see that the Canadian prices were higher, because Canadian consumers have been ripped off by most companies for many years.

Base prices on the Canadian site.

Base prices on the US site.

Update on Dec. 4, 2007: OK, the Canuck buck slipped back below the US greenback by a smidgen today...

Intuit Comes Through on WillExert Problem

Awhile back I wrote about my frustrations with Intuit's WillExpert program, and came to some harsh conclusions. In all fairness, I must update that judgment. I gave the program one more shot today, still couldn't get it to print, and then grasped the final straw -- a call to tech support.

I hate calling in for support because I usually end spending hours on the phone. My negative feelings were bolstered when the automated call system told me that Intuit no longer provided telephone support for WillExpert and that I should email my problem in.

What the heck, I did just that, and was pleasantly surprised to receive a response in a few hours with instructions that solved the problem. Thanks!

Great Info on wikiHow

I just ran across a site called wikiHow "The How-to Manual That You Can Edit."

It has several entries related to streamkeeping and stormwater management.

Here is an entry on creating a rain garden.

And another one on how to
reduce stormwater runoff at your home.

Looks like there are plenty of other goodies, too.

Embedding Google Maps

Google Maps can be easily embedded on other websites. Here I'm testing it out with a map of Byrne Creek Ravine Park, where we do a lot of streamkeeping work.

View Larger Map

The odd thing is, no matter how I adjust the map, and copy and paste the new HTML, I keep getting the original map I searched for. I've deleted my cache, and no joy.

Hey, shutting down Firefox and re-starting it finally shows me the new map! What gives? Hm. It's not an image, so the cache should have nothing to do with it. It's a line of HTML code, but why wouldn't Firefox read the changed code?

Hey, again, the map is still live, so you can play with right from my blog! Cool!

Apple MacBook HD Mixup

Was browsing the Apple Canada website and ran across this interesting option:

Yes, it took me a moment to spot it -- the text says you can choose from among 80, 100 or 120GB hard disks, but the clickable options include only 160 and 200GB drives :-). The error is only with the black MacBook and also exists on the Apple US website.

Intuit's WillExpert Sucks

I am fed up with Intuit's WillExpert. I am generally a fan of Intuit products, using Quicken for my personal finances and QuickBooks Pro for my company, but I've had nothing but trouble with WillExpert.

I bought a copy of WillExpert a few years ago, and it refused to run unless I signed on as an Administrator in Windows XP. This is plain foolishness -- you should never be logged on as Administrator unless you need to do system maintenance tasks. Then eventually WillExpert just refused to let me use it -- I forget if it thought I'd printed too many copies, or whatever, but I never successfully completed a will using it.

Recently I bought a new edition of WillExpert, and it refused to even install on my main Windows XP computer. So I tried another Windows XP box, and it began to install but then it wanted to install Acrobat Reader 5 because the already installed Reader 7 was an "older version." Huh?! I told the installer I didn't want Reader 5, so it refused to install WillExpert. Sheesh! That's as far as I've gotten and I don't know if I want to waste more time on this software lemon.

The hours I've wasted on WillExpert would have paid for a lawyer...

Update: July 17, 2007

I finally got WillExpert installed on a backup computer by allowing it to install Reader 5, even though Reader 7 was already on the target machine. I ran through the Wizard, asked it to print out a draft will, and it shut down with an error message. Tried again, same outcome. It really is a lemon!

Learning the Telephone Computer Game

Several times over the last few months our call-screening has been evaded and we've picked up the phone and said "Hi" only to hear a digitized voice respond: "Sorry, that is not a valid response."

So tonight I received a call from "Private Number" and picked up the phone to hear "Congratulations!" Before the recorded message went any further, I intoned: "Sorry, that is not a valid response" and hung up.

Of course it was not a victory in any sense at all, but it felt good just saying the words :-).

We occasionally get snookered by the "Private Number" display because that's what often comes up when family and friends call us from Japan.

The Demise of CRT Computer Monitors

When my Mom died last month, I inherited her three-year-old Dell computer and newer 20" LCD monitor. I replaced my 21" Dell CRT monitor with the 20" Dell LCD because they both have 1600 X 1200 resolution, and the LCD takes up less space and uses less power. I also have a 17" Sony CRT and a 19" Sony CRT sitting out in the garage, so I decided to put all three CRT monitors up for sale. After a bit of research I discovered that you can barely give these units away!

Those three monitors -- the Sony 17" and 19" units, and the 21" Dell -- had an original combined cost of over $2,000, but I'll be lucky to get $100 - $150 for the lot these days. It's a shame because they're all excellent units, but it appears CRT monitors are dead. I know CRTs are still preferred for some applications, but those who need them already have them.

I hope tens and hundreds of thousands of CRT monitors aren't being dumped in landfills around the world. My city, Burnaby, accepts computer equipment for recycling at the Still Creek recycling center.

Cory Doctorow on The Totalitarian Urge

Science fiction writer and Internet and DRM activist Cory Doctorow spoke about The Totalitarian Urge: Total Information Awareness and the Cosmic Billiards at Simon Fraser University in Burnaby this afternoon.

MP3 files of two talks Doctorow gave at SFU are available here.

A few notes:

People are hard, technology is easy.

The Internet has stimulated amazing works of collaboration that arise spontaneously. Collaboration is now so cheap that you don't even know it is going on. Anyone who has ever linked to a web page has contributed to collaborating. And now we have tagging of blogs and images.

The Open Source movement built by volunteers is amazing, and has changed our notion of what can be done by loosely controlled groups of volunteers.

People will use technology for freedom faster than it can be walled off. Company employees treat systems administrators as damage and route around them.

The more control there is, the less efficient we become.

Net neutrality vs quality of service -- it is more efficient to simply provide more bandwidth.

The Internet is also open to adding more control. Total information awareness is the idea that if we have enough data we can understand the world. This is leading to black lists, no-fly lists. Yet when you're watching everyone, you are watching no one. The Stasi in East Germany had a file on everyone, yet they didn't know the Wall was coming down. We need to distinguish between technologies that track us for our own benefit, and those that track us to spy on us.

RFID (radio frequency identification tags that are increasingly embedded in products) are setting us on a course for non-stop identification and tracking. We are being conditioned to live in a surveillance state.

Forward valuing is hard to do, but we must learn how to do it both in regard to privacy issues and a sustainable environment.

Toshiba Tecra 530CDT RIP

It's amazing how attached we get to lifeless chunks of technology, and how hard it can be to part with them. My Toshiba Tecra 530CDT notebook computer was a recent addition to the scrapheap. I tore it apart a couple of weeks ago -- it hurt, but I wanted to make sure nothing could be recovered from it, should someone try to scavenge data from it.

I bought it back in 1998, when I learned my Dad had prostate cancer and I quit my job in Tokyo and flew to Saskatchewan to see him. Even then it was a discontinued model that I got at a deep discount, but it kept me in touch with my wife while I was away, and it helped start the business I am still running today, when we moved to Canada in January 1999.

The Tecra sat for years on my desk, though I used it less and less, and replaced it with an IBM T42 about a year and half ago. With a 166MHz processor, 64MB of RAM, a 2GB hard drive, and Windows 98b the Tecra had become a door stop long ago. It was a solid machine, though, and I miss its presence in a strange way. A lot of good, and bad, times flew from my fingers into its keyboard, to wife, relatives, friends, and clients.

Firefox 2.0 Slow to Load Pages?

Firefox has been my browser of choice ever since it came out, but the latest version, 2.0, has been irritating. It seems to be very slow at loading websites, especially after it's been up and running for some time. I can run Firefox 2 and Explorer 6 on Win XP Pro, and sites that never finish loading on Firefox load in a flash on Explorer. If I shut Firefox 2 down and restart it, it loads sites just fine, but gradually slows to a crawl again.

I also found that I had trouble downloading a bunch of programs from Adobe using Firefox 2 recently. I was finally upgrading to Macromedia Studio 8, and downloads of Dreamweaver, Flash, Fireworks, etc., kept choking and dying mid-stream on Firefox 2. When I switched over to Explorer 6, I downloaded all the applications in the suite with no problems.

Hm. I didn't have any such issues with Firefox 1.5.X. I don't see a huge hue and cry about this on the web, though there are a few complaints out there. Whatever it is, I hope it's rectified soon, 'cause I love Firefox!

Dang, it's happening again! I was looking for URLs to add to this post, and Firefox 2 began choking up again. It just doesn't load pages, or gets stuck halfway through.

Eudora Going Open Source

My long-standing email program of choice, Eudora, is going open source in collaboration with Mozilla's Thunderbird project. This is cool!

See the press release.

I've often considered switching to Thunderbird, but I've been using Eudora for so long that it's tough to change. I'm looking forward to great things happening.

Privacy and Digitizing, Networking Health Care Records

The issue of digitizing and networking medical records has appeared in various panels at the Computers, Freedom and Privacy 2006 conference that I have been attending.

Here is some info on the Canadian initiative.

And here is a US patient privacy rights website on some of the privacy and security implications of what has been happening in the US.

This is something that very few people are aware of, particularly the security and privacy implications. Who gets to access such a database? How are those people authenticated? Can they download and save information to local computers? How are those computers secured? Can they print out information? Can I access my own information? How do I authenticate myself? If I think there are errors in my information, can I correct them? How? How are patients identified? Is there a common identifier across all of a person's records, or are there firewalls between various sorts of data? Can my dentist access what my gynecologist can access? Can insurance companies access that data? Can other branches of the government? The police? Are warrants required? Where is the data hosted? If it's in the US, other laws may apply, and the US government may be able to access that data secretly using anti-terrorist directives... It goes on and on.

One panelist said hey, forget it, the insurance companies already know all this stuff about all of us....

Spychips: Laying the Ground for Pervasive Computer Surveillance

Katherine Albrecht from CASPIAN, or Consumers Against Supermarket Privacy Invasion and Numbering, spoke on the potential negative privacy and security impact of RFID tagging at the Computers, Freedom and Privacy 2006 conference. Albrecht has written Spychips: How Major Corporations and Government Plan to Track Your Every Move with RFID, and there is a Spychips website.

Good info on RFID technology. Companies are experimenting with RFID tags in clothing and in indvidual items that you might buy. The problem is many of these initiatives are secret and consumers are not being told what the technology does.

Rob Atkinson, president of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation represented the other side of the debate. He said that the debate is all about whether we are for progress and optimism or not. New technology always creates fear. America has always made the choice for excitement and going forward. He did agree that secret tagging should be illegal, but overall felt tagging had many benefits.

Yet concerns remain. Some business models are very invasive. Some companies are placing RFID tags into clothing labels and into shoes. One plan wants to plant RFID readers in cell phones so that when we are walking down the street and see someone wearing something we like, we can scan them and find out where the item is sold. Uibiquitous readers are planned so that the moment you walk into a store, a doorway reader can scan a tagged customer loyalty card and know your complete purchase history.

I see the benefits of RFID, however I'm certainly going to check out the security and privacy concerns.

Northern Exposure: Lessons From Canada’s National Privacy Law Regime

The Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic (CIPPIC) made a presentation on compliance with Canada's national privacy law at the Computers, Freedom and Privacy 2006 conference in Washington, D.C., this afternoon. A few quick notes:

CIPPIC just released a report finding widespread violations of Canada's privacy laws, though Canadian industry was on board for implementing the law in the first place because consumers were becoming increasingly nervous about online ecommerce and other activities.

The PIPEDA federal legislation began being phased in about six years ago. The act applies generally and provinces can enact their own legislation based on the act.

Companies must designate a chief privacy officer and must have a privacy policy. What information is collected and how is it used and disclosed? To whom is it disclosed? How can consumers access and correct information, because organizations are obliged to correct mistakes and share changes with other organizations it has shared data with. Companies may not require consent for supply of service, beyond what is reasonably necessary.

What happens if an organization doesn’t comply? Anyone can complain and privacy commissioners have broad investigatory powers. However, commissioners have no order-making powers and courts are the next recourse.

CIPPIC found widespread non-compliance. In a survey, several companies had no privacy policies. Over half could not name the person responsible for privacy. Overall, 70% of privacy policies failed to fully comply with PIPEDA.

Other data showed that 86% of companies that did share data did not say in their privacy policies who they share with. Over a third of companies did not respond at all to access requests. Only 21% fully complied.

Enforcement is key. Companies need incentives to comply. Market forces are not providing these incentives. The law needs teeth. Companies are still not complying after five years. There is no real risk of penalty for non-compliance. Companies know they will only be slapped on the wrist behind closed doors.

In the question period the difference between “reasonable” and “necessary” information came up. PIPEDA keeps talking about "reasonable" however Quebec legislation states "necessary," and "reasonable" is much more open to interpretation.

Senator Patrick Leahy Opens CFP 2006

Senator Patrick Leahy opened the Computers, Freedom and Privacy 2006 conference by pointing to three key trends: a post 9/11 interest in security; a coming digital data micro-monitoring revolution; and a rapid post 9/11 rise of partnerships between government and private data collectors, and outsourcing of data collection and management.

He said there has been a blurring of lines of privacy protection. Private data agencies are becoming akin to mini CIAs. We face many risks, but we have to get the balance between security and privacy right. The public doesn’t want false assurances or to be unduly alarmed. We want to actually be safer, and we have a long way to go to accomplish that. New technologies shape the way we understand privacy. There have to be checks. Modern databases, networks are the defining challenge for privacy.

We are on the verge of a revolution in micro monitoring that can lead to widespread surveillance of our daily lives. Governments are increasingly using techology to monitor people. Nobody is above the law, you can’t pick and choose. The FBI has infiltrated groups across the country—religious, environmental, etc. Suppose you protest a tax policy, the building of a road, an environmental issue—should your group be infiltrated by your government? In the current environment, the Bill of Rights would not be ratified. Is this what we want to give our children? We should use info-gathering technology to protect ourselves, but there is no blanket right to spy on citizens.

We want to encourage innovation but ensure privacy.

The government is retroactively classifying data. This devotion to secrecy is often to conceal mistakes.

Technology is moving faster than we can predict. If we give up the rights we fought for in the Revolution, the Civil War, and two world wars, what are we going to leave for the next generation.

Off to Computers, Freedom and Privacy 2006 in Washington, DC

We headed out to Washington, DC, where I'll take in the Computers, Freedom and Privacy 2006 conference, along with some sightseeing. Yumi is tagging along.

We had a bit of excitement along the way in Toronto, where we changed planes. There was extra security on for flights into Washington's Reagan National Airport because of its close proximity to the center of government. We had to clear security again before entering the departure lounge, with all carry on baggage checked by hand.

We boarded the Embraer 175 and after awhile the captain came on the PA system and said there was a glitch with a computer and they would have to power down the entire plane and reboot it. It took about 90 seconds in darkness before they fired it back up. Then a few minutes later he came back on the PA with a command to deplane immediately and leave all personal belongings behind because a fuel truck near the plane was smoking. The plane was only about a third full so we scrambled off quickly.

After about 15 minutes back in the departure lounge, the captain said there had been an electrical problem on the fuel truck, and that the fire marshal had cleared us back onto the plane. An adventure to start the trip! We departed about 45 minutes late.

The ride in to Washington was spectacular in the dark with the major monuments and government buildings lit up. The approach to Reagan National provides an excellent view of the Mall, and you can see why they have the extra security for Reagan flights. It’s only seconds from the flight path to major sites. Yumi tried to snap a photo or two, but the turbulence resulted in smeared streaks of light.

The L’Enfant Plaza Hotel was a bit of a disappointment. Perhaps it was a "4-star luxury" hotel 20 years ago… The TV in our bathroom is a tiny old thing, the toilet paper roll doesn’t stay seated, the furniture is somewhat "distressed" and there is generally a tired air about the rooms and hallways. The mini bar was not stocked, though I suspect that if it had been we would have avoided it anyway -- prices for room service and hotel restaurants are not encouraging for us hillbillies :-).

I was also disappointed to find that the hotel's wireless Internet access was not included but cost an extra $9.95/day or $24.95 for three days. I guess now that so many people are free from usurious hotel telephone charges, hotels are trying to make up the lost revenue in high-speed Internet access. Seeing as I have to do homework for my Royal Roads MA in Professional Communication course while I'm here and interact daily on online discussion boards, I had no choice but to cough up. Dial-up was an option, but it would have been irritatingly slow.

WiFi in California Parks

Just discovered that California is offering WiFi connectivity in some of its state parks. Will have to check out how common this is. Usually when we go camping, we're trying to "get away from it all," but then again, we could go camping for longer periods if we could do a little work too. Hm. Have to think about this one :-)! Wonder if/when BC parks would have such service?

Check it out.

The information isn't all that clear to me, but it looks like you can get access for US$7.95/day.

South Korea Zooms Ahead in Domestic Robots, Internet

Interesting article in the New York Times on South Korea's widening technology lead in communications and robotics.

"South Korea, the world's most wired country, is rushing to turn what sounds like science fiction into everyday life. The government, which succeeded in getting broadband Internet into 72 percent of all households in the last half decade, has marshaled an army of scientists and business leaders to make robots full members of society."

The initiative aims to get a productive robot into every home between 2015 and 2020, while one scientist would like to hit that goal by 2010.

As for Internet connectivity, "Since January, Koreans have been able to watch television broadcasts on cellphones, free, thanks to government-subsidized technology. In April, South Korea will introduce the first nationwide superfast wireless Internet service, called WiBro, eventually making it possible for Koreans to remain online on the go — at 10 megabits per second, faster than most conventional broadband connections."

This is all well ahead of Canada, which is considered to be one of the most wired western countries, and way ahead of the U.S. Japan, too, is much more wired, and "wirelessed" than North America, and has a culture that is more accepting of robots. It will be interesting to see how this technology lead continues to play out in the future.

The NYT article goes on to say that there have been negative ramifications in terms of privacy, however the government is also developing "IT Ethics" curriculum for schools to teach online manners and respect.

Testing Qumana

Testing Qumana

DRM = CRAP

"ZDNet Executive Editor David Berlind suggests that CRAP or Content, Restriction, Annulment, and Protection, is a catchier phrase than DRM - Digital Rights Management. Why does he think this technology is crap? Once you've bought music or other content to play on one device, it won't play on any other device because of the proprietary layer of CRAP."

Great little 3-minute video!

I have yet to buy a portable digital player -- I'm still catching up on ripping my CDs to my computer -- but when I do, I would certainly want it to be free of C.R.A.P.

Yeah, what a dinosaur :-). I'd be more likely to have an iPod or other player if I still lived in Tokyo and rode the train to work every day, but having worked from home in the Vancouver area for the last six years, I've had no pressing need for one.

That said, I admit I have been getting more of an itch to get an iPod -- they're just so darn cute -- but I'd likely limit what I put on it to C.R.A.P.-free MP3s and podcasts.

Logitech Z-2300 Speakers Rock

I bought at set of Logitech "Z-2300 Extreme THX®-certified 2.1 performance speakers" for my computer at Best Buy yesterday. They were on sale for C$99.99 from a list price of C$229.99, a deal I couldn't pass up.

I've spent the last couple of hours ripping dozens of CDs to my computer, listening to the huge improvement in sound quality as I do so. These speakers pump out 200 watts of RMS power, and are very crisp and clean compared to my muddy old GNT-5000 32 watt 2.1 speakers that cost about $45 new.

I hadn't been listening to music much on my computer, but that's going to change. The Z-2300s are a joy to listen to. The wired remote is also very handy, with a master volume, subwoofer volume, headphone jack, and power/standby switch. No more feeling around under the desk for knobs, switches and jacks!

Now I'm thinking about a Creative Sound Blaster X-FI sound card to augment the built-in sound on my Intel motherboard...

Passport Office Wait Times Wildly Off

I was applying for a new passport today so I checked the Canadian passport office website for times and locations.

I was happy to see that the site had average wait times posted. I saw that the Surrey office was averaging ten minutes and the Vancouver office was at 18 minutes. Surrey is a bit closer anyway, so I took the Skytrain to the office, arriving less than half an hour after I'd checked the website.

There was a line out into the hallway when I got there around 12:50 p.m. Hmm. I was assigned a number at 1:04 p.m. My number was called at 2:13 p.m. That's 69 minutes from getting a number to getting service, or seven times the wait posted on the website. The real wait was 83 minutes, or over eight times what was posted.

I asked a staff member how often the website was updated. She shouted down the row and a guy answered that it was refreshed about every ten minutes. Right. She said the wait time was always around an hour.

While I laud the government in its high-tech, near real-time efforts, what is the point of providing wildly innacurate data? Rather than smoothing the process, it just makes clients angrier because it raises false expectations.

When I checked the website again at 3:30 p.m., the wait time was posted as 18 minutes.

Just give us the truth, OK?

Shaw Mail Attachment Troubles Create Havoc

We received a barrage of phone calls and faxes from a client in Japan late last night regarding missing files that we had sent by email nearly 12 hours earlier.

It took until nearly midnight to resolve the problem, which initially was caused by problems with Shaw's mail server in handling file attachments, and was later exacerbated by a total loss of Shaw Internet connectivity.

It appears the problem began when Shaw's mail server would time out when uploading email with attachments. I've heard of other Shaw users complain about this issue recently. The bottom line was that our client in Japan did not receive our translations on time.

By the time we learned of the problem by telephone and fax, Shaw was down completely. Rebooting the cable modem, rebooting computers, nothing helped. Our Shaw connection was out for several hours.

I finally tried using my laptop to dial up using the ATT Business Internet account that we occasionally use on the road. I had trouble getting connected, and eventually got a message that my password had been revoked, however the dialup program allowed me to access only the ATT site so that I could re-enter my credit card number and set a new password. No explanation why the password had been revoked, however I had not used the account in seven or eight months.

Internet at last, at a blazing 26.6 kbps! I got the files to our client, and went to bed frazzled.

The ATT backup (after the revoked password issue was solved) saved our bacon.

Recently Telus has been badgering us to switch to ADSL, which is finally available in our complex after nearly four years of waiting though we're just a few miles from the Telus head office. I was tempted to get it in addition to Shaw for backup, but backed out after reconsidering the $30/month cost.

Then again, that would be a small price to pay to ensure our business has Internet access 24/7.... Hmm.... But would we really have 24/7 access? I've heard of problems with Telus, too. Sigh.

For the occasional Shaw problem, the ATT barebones dialup account for $12/month will probably do.

UPDATE: I heard from Shaw on Thursday, March 23, that its mail server had been added to the SORBS spam-blocking list in error, and that Shaw is trying to correct this as soon as possible.

Ephemeral Blogs, Computer Records

Through this entry on Doc Searl's blog I found a link to Jeffrey Zeldman's blog in which Zeldman writes:

"Anyone who has worked long and hard on a blog, zine, or web product realizes how ephemeral they are. (We are Ozymandias.) Preserving blogs is a multilayered task involving curatorial and editorial acumen, systems and programming skills, an understanding of copyright law, and more. If the preservationists do their job right, people 25 years from now will have some inkling of what we have created in this time. If they get it wrong, our work turns to sand."

I've thought about how ephemeral blogs can be unless there is some system for archiving them. If I die, or stop paying my Web host, all of the writing in my blog would disappear. Of course I keep backups, but who knows how to find and access them? Not even my wife knows. And it's not only my blog. I have all sorts of information on my computer and scattered on the Web on various services.

When I had a health scare that put me in the hospital for a week awhile back, I suddenly realized that so much of my life was on my computer, and that my wife, or an executor, would have no idea what to look for, where to find it, or what all my user names and passwords are. I'd told my wife the password to my encrypted password-management program, however she'd long forgotten it, or that the program even existed.

Or how about the Web sites I administer? I don't have many, but I do have a site for a client and a few non-profits that I volunteer with, and nobody aside from me knows how to access them. Not good.

I need to have a plan in place, and information in a safety deposit box to cover for me. Nobody likes thinking about their own demise, but people had better start thinking about what they have on their computers and parked all over the Web, and how others would be able to access that data.

Gmail Slowing Down?

Is it just me, or is Gmail experiencing growth problems? Several times over the last couple of weeks I have run into trouble accessing the service. I use Gmail only for schoolwork, and keep my personal and business email separate, but it has been irritating on occasion. It also makes me wonder if I would ever trust all my email to Gmail or another Web email service (I use Yahoo as backup for my regular business account) -- not that I've never run into glitches with my regular mail services...

Oops indeed!

Though I have yet to use it, the Gmail chat system also seems to be having problems.

USB Port Zaps Computer

When I started to plug my Canon SD400 digital camera into a USB port on my main tower computer today, there was a short, sharp static hiss, and the computer died. Yikes! I'd recently read about improperly grounded USB ports frying motherboards, however I'd plugged the camera into that handy front port dozens of times with no problem.

With a final paper due for a course in my MA in Communications program at Royal Roads University later today, I was a bit perturbed, to say the least, though I'd synched with my laptop a day ago so I had a fairly recent version of the paper on it. I also have an external Maxtor USB drive backing things up automatically.

Hitting the power switch did nothing, so I unplugged the computer, waited a couple of minutes, plugged it back in and hit the power again. It finally booted, but Windows XP Pro took a lot longer to get to a login screen than usual.

I finished my paper and posted it, and then I tried the camera again. Zap. So I did the unplug routine again, and tried the camera one more time. It finally made the USB connection without shutting down the computer, however a popup window informed me that the download from the camera would be slow because I was not using a USB 2.0 port. Huh? It used to be a 2.0 port!

Rather than roll the dice on the front port again, I plugged the camera cable and my Palm cable into rear ports, however they too are now running at the much slower USB 1.1. I haven't solved the mystery yet, but if the motherboard hasn't been crippled, perhaps reinstalling the USB drivers might do the trick.

Update March 17, 2006: I checked the BIOS settings today and discovered that USB 2.0 "High Speed" had been disabled. I enabled it, and now downloads are zipping along like they used to. I'm still avoiding those front USB ports though!

Doctorow on Blogs, DRM, Privacy

Great interview (part one, and
part two) with Cory Doctorow in Red Hat Magazine:

"I don't think that... information necessarily wants to be free or doesn't want to be free or whatever. I just think that...if your business model is based on bits not getting copied you are screwed."

"I think that in order to be a technology activist, you have to be an optimist and a pessimist. You have to be an optimist in that you believe that technology can be a tool for genuine liberation ... and positive social change and for democracy.... You have to rather devote your energy to seeing to it that those positive outcomes from technology come to being."

Effects of Blogs on Mass Media

A few fellow learners in the Master of Arts in Professional Communication program at Royal Roads University have asked to see a paper I did on blogging, so I've decided to post it here. (Newsdaily Canada has linked to this paper.)

The Effects of Blogs on Mass Media
From a Media Theory Perspective

by Paul Cipywnyk

Introduction

This paper explores the effects of Web logs, or blogs, on traditional mass media with reference to media theory. It covers the evolving relationship between blogs and mass media since the first blog was set up at the end of 1997 (Lyons, 2005), and how the blogging medium may face the imposition of regulation in the future.

The premise of this paper is that this simple, yet powerful communication medium has already had a significant impact on traditional mass media. While this impact will increase in the future as this technological change challenges traditional social discourse in a post-modern fracturing of the social equilibrium, there are also signs that normative effects may tame this publishing free-for-all to some extent over the next decade, along with the possibility of increased legal constraints and attempts at greater corporate control of the medium.

The Rise of Blogging Technology

Blogs have become an increasingly prominent means of communication on the Internet, and continue to proliferate rapidly. "A hundred thousand new blogs are created every day, more than one new blog per second, says Technorati, a firm in San Fransisco that tracks the content of 20 million active blogs" (Lyons, 2005, p. 131). Many companies, including major Internet players such as Google and Microsoft, offer free blogging services that allow users to easily post text, photos, and audio and video files to a blog simply by using forms through a Web browser, without having to know the underlying markup languages. Blogs typically present a series of chronological posts with the latest at the top of the page, with earlier entries being pushed downward, and eventually archived onto separate pages. Bloggers usually provide links to news or events or products that they write about, and commonly include RSS feeds that enable readers to monitor new posts to blogs they are interested in through automatically updated aggregators on their computers, or through Web sites that offer such aggregation services.

Blogging's Impact on Traditional Mass Media

The free-wheeling, personalized phenomenon of blogging exemplifies a post-modern world driven by technological change. "According to Marx, the capitalist class – the bourgeoisie – control the 'production and distribution of ideas' because of their control of the 'means of material production'" (Williams, 2003, p. 37), yet these days, anyone with access to the Internet can have a free or inexpensive printing press. The blogging phenomenon was enabled by technological change, and in turn is forcing mass media to modify long-standing journalistic practices. While Internet access is far from universal, technology has enabled individuals to challenge traditional mass media in ways that were impossible as recently as a decade ago.

The development of blogging has enabled individual reporting on events from a personal point of view, and when masses of bloggers question or directly confront reporting in traditional mass media, their collective power can be persuasive. For example, bloggers focused attention on racist remarks by former U.S. Speaker of the House Trent Lott, elevating a back-page story to a campaign of criticism that forced his removal (Kahn & Kellner, 2004). In another case, bloggers created "a media frenzy over the dishonest reporting that was exposed recently at the New York Times… (and) set upon the newsprint giant, whipping up so much controversy and hostile journalistic opinion that the Times’s executive and managing editors were forced to resign in disgrace" (Kahn & Kellner, 2004, p. 92).

According to post-modern media theory, audiences have the power to passively or actively resist media messages, and they cannot be fooled or manipulated by the mass media (Williams, 2003). Now, with the interactivity and personal publishing of blogging, mass media are facing a "community (that) is far from shy about going after journalists for offenses real and imagined, shocking thin-skinned journalists unused to being scrutinized the way they scrutinize others. Everything… is now subject to public analysis, comparison and fact-checking" (Singer, 2005, p. 180). Williams (2003) writes that the liberal theory of press freedom posits that "the smooth operation of the political system depended on the free expression of public opinion" (p. 39), and that the press acts as the voice of the people, and is accountable to them, as the fourth estate. Blogging is to some extent removing this intermediary function, and is putting the power of the press into individual hands. Blogs go beyond the structures of traditional journalism, drop much of the gatekeeping and filtering done by mass media, do not rely on corporate sponsors, and are even scooping the mainstream press (Wall, 2005).

Yet traditional mass media are not going away, and are not losing their influence. Bloggers often cite, and link to, material provided on Web sites run by huge media conglomerates. Research about war blogs that mushroomed after the invasion of Iraq in spring 2003 shows that nearly half of all links were to "mainly mainstream news outlets, primarily from the USA and the UK. In the USA, this included outlets such as The New York Times, CNN, etc." (Wall, 2005, p. 164). As for blogs run by mass media outlets, of 20 sites examined in one study, only three allowed direct commenting from readers, indicating they were unwilling to give up their gatekeeping role, so "it is still about vertical communication, from journalist to user, rather than horizontal communication that positions the journalist as a participant in a conversation" (Singer, 2005, p. 192).

Wall (2005), however, points out that the popularity of the war blogs arose at least partly because "mainstream media, as is historically its pattern during war, became less critical of the government and military actions and more prone to repeating propaganda…. leading increasing numbers of Americans to turn to the Web" (p. 153).

Are Blogs a New, Post-Modern Journalism?

Is blogging a new form of journalism? Are bloggers changing how mass media report the news? Wall (2005) argues that blogs are post-modern journalism:

This analysis suggests that these blogs represent a new genre of journalism – offering news that features a narrative style characterized by personalization and an emphasis on non-institutional status; audience participation in content creation; and story forms that are fragmented and interdependent with other websites. Ultimately, these shifts suggest that some forms of online news such as blogs have moved away from traditional journalism’s modernist approach to embody a form of post-modern journalism (pp. 153-154).

Traditional journalism is supposed to be objective, or at least fair, yet the "voice of the typical current events blogger is personalized, opinionated, and often one-sided. Indeed, an opinionated voice is a hallmark of blog writing and those mainstream journalists who fail to reflect this are criticized as not being true bloggers" (Wall, 2005, p. 161). Readers of newspapers and watchers of TV tend to be passive; however, "on blogs, audiences are often invited to contribute information, comments, and sometimes direct financial support. In effect, audiences sometimes co-create content and also serve as patrons" (Wall, 2005, p. 161). While journalists are taught the inverted pyramid of story writing, "with blogs, the story form has changed into a fragment, one that is often incomplete without following a link and, thus, is seemingly never closed" (Wall, 2005, p. 162). All of these hallmarks of blogging make for a very different experience than reading or watching the packaged stories provided by mass media.

Kahn & Kellner (2004) propose:

Bloggers have demonstrated themselves as technoactivists favoring not only democratic self-expression and networking, but also global media critique and journalistic sociopolitical intervention…. blogs make the idea of a dynamic network of ongoing debate, dialogue and commentary central and so emphasize the interpretation and dissemination of alternative information to a heightened degree (p. 91).

While mass media may be retaining their influence and their audience, the post-modern fracturing of the mostly one-way communication of traditional media into the millions of inter-linking blogging voices has created a new openness and the ability for individuals to share their personal interpretations of the world to potentially global audiences. Bloggers are providing alternatives to mass media. "Large political events, such as the World Summit for Sustainable Development, the World Social Forum, and the G8 forums all now have wireless bloggers providing real time alternative coverage" (Kahn & Kellner, 2004, p. 93).

Blogs Surpass Mass Media in Raising Political Consciousness

In addition to offering an alternative to corporate mass media, blogs are raising political consciousness in a manner traditional media have been unable to do. Because blogs are personal, they have an ability to attract readers in a way that traditional media do not. This is shown by the experience of Blog for America, the blog that helped galvanize Howard Dean's campaign in the U.S. primary race starting in March 2003.

Alternately informative, cheesy, silly, self-absorbed, innovative, and brilliantly effective, Blog for America turned tens and perhaps hundreds of thousands of people into political activists and united them in collective action that extended beyond cyberspace…. This is something mainstream journalism could never accomplish (Kerbel & Bloom, 2005, pp. 20-21).

Blog for America may be viewed as a revival of the public sphere described by Jürgen Habermas. "Central to the operation of the public sphere is the free flow of information and communication, and media institutions are essential to its effective working" (Williams, 2003, p. 68). Williams (2003) goes on to say that eventually "the public sphere became corrupted by the growth of the power of the state, the emergence of corporate capitalism and transformation of the media into commercial operations" (p. 68). Blog for America became a forum to foster and harness the free flow of information in the public sphere, revitalizing the political process.

However, here too, there are cautionary notes.

As a third-tier candidate with few resources, Dean had little to lose by doing things unconventionally, and as we noted, discussion on the Dean blog became more conventional as the candidate started playing for keeps. For blogs like Blog for America to become routine, future campaign managers will have to weigh the obvious benefits of cultivating a loyal, active following against the potential loss of message control inherent in a decentralized campaign structure where anyone can participate. What is clear is that without some degree of decentralization, blog communities cannot thrive. It is the nature of the technology to buck centralized control, and it is the thing that generates feelings of empowerment (Kerbel & Bloom, 2005, p. 24).

Post-Modern Blogging

So while on one hand it appears that blogs are impacting mass media by providing alternative forums for shared self-expression, by confronting and challenging conventional journalism, and by enabling public discourse in a global manner heretofore unheard of in history, on the other hand it is also apparent that at least so far mass media are retaining much of their authority. Yet blogging may just be getting started, and has the potential to further spread its influence in the future as more citizens around the world come online and share their individual, unique perspectives. It will be interesting to see how this plays out, for as with any technology, it cannot simply be assumed that blogging will only lead to greater good. Overall, however, the benefits could outweigh the drawbacks.

Today, blogs embody the contradictions of postmodernity – they may balkanize interest groups and cater to partisan audiences but they may also encourage the creation of a multitude of virtual communities in which ordinary people feel free to participate and discover their own political voices. That is, blogs may ultimately pull more people into public conversations and perhaps provide opportunities for collective problem-solving. Those who fear the demise of the great society created in part by national media are perhaps overly nostalgic for a media that rarely reflected the entire community or allowed ordinary people much of a voice (Wall, 2005, p. 167).

Conclusion

While blogging's Wild West milieu has already had an impact on traditional mass media, and will continue to require mass media corporations to adjust to the onslaught of individual voices, there are doubts if the medium's free-wheeling nature will last forever. Blogs may undermine societal equilibrium, and to take a page from functionalism, "all components of society including the media are organized and structured and operate to maintain social stability" (Williams, 2003, p. 50). While blogging may fundamentally be of an individualistic, fractured, post-modern nature, in five or ten years some of the regulations that apply to traditional mass media may be extended to cover the Internet, and bloggers.

Indeed, Lyons (2005) describes the anonymous slander of individuals and corporations by packs of bloggers, and cries out for means to control them:

Google and other carriers shut down purveyors of child porn, spam, and viruses, and they help police track down offenders. So why don't they delete material (from blogs) that defames individuals? Why don't they help victims identify their attackers? Because they are protected by the Communications Decency Act of 1996, which frees a neutral carrier of Internet content from any liability for anything said online (p. 136).

Lyons (2005) goes on to cite a victim of a concerted smear campaign who "argues that Yahoo and other carriers should step up: 'They make money selling ads on these message boards, and the controversial material generates the most traffic. So they're benefiting from this garbage. I think they should take responsibility for it'" (p. 138).

While millions more blogs will be created over the next decade, and Web sites run by mass media corporations will gradually offer more interactivity and more opportunities for reader feedback, pressure from corporations and political forces that fear the libertarian blogging environment will likely lead to the imposition of regulatory restraints on the Internet, and by extension the blogging medium. There will be bloggers who will continue to resist any attempts at control, and a technological war will continue for decades between those who attempt to impose restraints, and those who will seek ways to outflank them.

References

Kahn, R., & Kellner, D. (2004). New media and internet activism: From the ‘Battle of seattle’ to blogging. New Media & Society, 6(1), 87-95. Retrieved November 17, 2005, from Communication Studies: A SAGE Full-Text Collection database.

Kerbel, M. R., & Bloom, J. D. (2005). Blog for america and civic involvement. The Harvard International Journal Of Press/politics, 10(4), 3-27. Retrieved November 17, 2005, from Communication Studies: A SAGE Full-Text Collection database.

Lyons, D. (2005, Nov. 14). Attack of the blogs. Forbes. 128-138.

Singer, J. B. (2005). The political j-blogger: ‘Normalizing’ a new media form to fit old norms and practices. Journalism, 6(2), 173-198. Retrieved November 17, 2005, from Communication Studies: A SAGE Full-Text Collection database.

Wall, M. (2005). ‘Blogs of war’: Weblogs as news. Journalism, 6(2), 153-172. Retrieved November 17, 2005, from Communication Studies: A SAGE Full-Text Collection database.

Williams, K. (2003). Understanding Media Theory. London: Arnold.

Northern Voice Blogging Conference Day 2

Northern Voice 2006 Day 2

Starting With Fire: Why Stories are Essential and How to Blog Effective Tales
Presenter: Julie Leung

Moving presentation on the power of storytelling and its importance to blogging.

Sifry on the Blogosphere
Presenters: Dave Sifry from Technorati and Tim Bray

Why did I build Technorati? I wanted to know what are people saying about ME. It’s a social thing. We tell stories, interact with each other. Even someone who disagrees with me probably has a lot in common with me. Searching the web uses the language of libraries, we talk about pages, indexes, directories.

Search engines don’t understand the concept of time. Google news and Yahoo news are the periodicals section of the library. Library is enormously powerful metaphor

Documents are created by people at certain times. So build something that goes beyond keywords and hyperlinks as votes of attention. Page rank still uses library concept.

Blogs can be thought about in a new way. They are the remnants of a person’s attention stream over time. When you write you are spending the most important thing that you have – your time. So you can understand who a blogger is. So rather than look at pages look at people. Who is linking to whom. I built it because I wanted to know who was talking about me. And many other people and companies wanted to know who was talking about them.

Look at the Web as a living thing. Doc Searls calls it the World Live Web.

What are the blogging stats today?
• Technorati is tracking 27 million blogs
• 75,000 new blogs created every day
• How many people are still actively blogging after three months: just over 50%
• 11% blog once a week or more
• Just under a million blog at least once a day
• About 50,000 posts/hour
• The news cycle cannot be measured in hours any more
• How do I make sense out of all of this?
• Blogging is incredibly many to many.
• Top bloggers become one to many, turn off comments etc. or else they are overwhelmed.
• There are about 115,000 blogs in the magic middle: they have between 30 to 1,000 people linking to them. Authorities in niche areas.
• Such bloggers become local authorities yet remain very two-way because the traffic is manageable enough to carry on a conversation.

What if we look at two important things. Do you really write about what you say you write about. And do others who write about what you write about link to you? Open this up to the world. People started tagging themselves. 870,000 have tagged themselves. Over 2,500 interesting tags on which bloggers are writing.

Tagging is a sloppy thing. Clay Shirky writes about this. As long as you make it really easy to tag and make people accountable, an emergent system starts to occur. Greater than the sum of its parts. As long as there are people who can tag in multiple languages, relationships start to form. The system itself become more intelligent.

Bray: what are you worried about, what could go wrong?

Sifry: This can’t go on if you extrapolate the rate of growth. It has to top out at some point. We are still very much at the beginning of all this. Spam is a problem. Comment, trackback spam. Splogs. Cory Doctorow: all healthy ecosystems have parasites. The cool thing about blogging is that it always resolves back to a web page somewhere, and that leads to some accountability. What I write becomes part of my permanent record. I can temper what I know about you by all the things you’ve said over time.

Concept of network neutrality. Potentially most dangerous threat to the ‘Net. Collapsing of number of backbone providers. Now these companies are saying we deserve to be able to do preferential pricing. You’re going off our network so we’re going to charge you 6 cents a minute. If you want to do video streaming, you’ll have to pay extra. Preferred providers. This is enormously bad for innovation. Protects the winners. These guys are going in front of Congress and saying of course this is the way we have to go. Only we can prevent this. They won’t hit consumers, they’ll go to companies behind the scenes. But that will hurt the small guys in the garage startups.

Bray: I have no idea who’s reading my stuff through RSS feeds.

Sifry: RSS is not really push. Your RSS feeder is constantly downloading stuff, but are you reading it? Feedburner uses graphics to ping back to show that someone actually read something. But still don’t really know. The way Bloglines understands things are read is different from NewsGator understands things are read. People are waking up to this issue. Hope to start resolving these issues cross-company soon.

Crowd question: What about federated blogging?

Sifry: Poor pay. Some coops are developing to split income more equitably. Natural outcome of shift in publishing economics. But a lot of people don’t have the skills to do marketing, advertising etc. Guild system developing. Can you write with quality? Can you make enough money? Right now people are spending 70 of leisure time online, but only 4% of advertising is online. This should start to equalize, so there are enormous opportunities here.

Snow White and the Seven Competencies of Online Interaction
Presenter: Nancy White
See her slides at link above -- a lot of great stuff I have no space for here.

What are competencies we need to interact online?

Blogs are developing faster than any other tool. When we go online we lose f-t-f cues. We are global. We may no longer have a shared cultural context. Bridging language, belief systems. A world of small annoyances. In f-t-f life our presence as a human being is still there. We need to bring that into online interactions. Bring heart and soul and spirit into online life.

Sometimes we go online and choke and die. We move too fast online. I wrote it so you must have understood it. The new medium goes laterally rather than top down. This freaks out organizations. Networks can totally disrupt organizations. Open source learning.

Competencies are emerging: Scan, See patterns, Write, Image-inate, Vocalize, Intuit

When do you stop scanning and go deep? If you can’t write you’re screwed. Think about multiple modalities that help people have an experience.

Approach online life with an open hand and let people take your stuff.

We glorify expertise, but by being unknowing we learn so much.

Online you don’t have to participate. How do you create an invitation that people will respond to? Online we are in a fundamentally open space.

I have to speak from a space from which people can hear me. I cannot always speak from my default culture. Go live in the world. Learn other languages.

Shouting that I’m right and that my issue is right, is not working.

A lot of us come from a single domain. Engineer, Economist, Artist… We have to be able to switch our inner context.

Outsiderness is a gift. We’re all outsiders, and if we embrace this we can use it in a positive way. The magic of the periphery.

The most importance competency is self-awareness

We all bring both bright and dark things to the world. Self-aware vs self-absorbed.

See: openspaceworld.org

The Changing Face of Journalism
Presenters: Mark Schneider, UBC School of Journalism;
Robert Ouimet, At Large Media;
Michael Tippett, NowPublic.

The news is dead long live the news

Tippett:

Tectonic shifts in the marketplace
Fundamental economic shifts in how news is produced and consumed
Audience is now becoming a supplier
News orgs have to change relations with readers
Readers can make their own news.

Does it make sense to have readers contribute news. Why are people participating? Hyper-local, know their neighborhoods. We have numerical superiority.

Shift from network to cable news. Same thing is happening with people. If you happen to be “there” and have a camera, you can report the news.

Shift is happening faster than big media expected. Tsunami, Katrina. Latent army of citizen journalists everywhere waiting for something to happen.

Ownership of news has passed into the hands of the public.

Ouimet:

Internet driving big companies crazy. Look for landmark moments in the way in which people consume content. I’ve never been in a room with so many people using so many computers taking notes, and I used to be a professional journalist.

Profound changes in which content is consumed. In old days big media owned all the parts. People are gathering and transmitting stuff like crazy in this room.

Media fragmentation. Pie is becoming increasingly fragmented. Big media have smaller and smaller market shares.

Schneider:

The news is really sick. It makes us sick. There is a toxic quality to what we are consuming. Noxious vapour. Crazy human instinct to want to be frightened.

News should help responsible citizens be citizens. There is a huge appetite for change.

So what can be done? How can we rehabilitate news? Blogging and journalism best practices. There are still valuable skills that journalists have. If you make mistakes, you’re instantly under the spotlight. Have to have an open mind. Can’t go in with mind made up. That does not produce quality journalism. Practice of corroborating evidence, sources. Journalists have an incredible urge to get the story, even putting themselves in danger. Yet journalism is tired. It needs waking up and perhaps you are the ones to do it.

Very rare to hear of journalist on the take, still a miraculously clean profession. Almost a dichotomy with stats on public distrust of the mainstream press.

Things we can do together:
• Create news wikis and other ways to collaborate
• Insist on more transparent media
• Support news certification (see definition below)
• Share skills and support one another

News certification: what went into the story, and what was left out. What couldn’t we answer, and invite public to fill those holes. We’re at a very primitive stage in this yet.

News ml: news markup language. Helps the good stuff rise to the top.

We’ve always been attracted to intelligence and creativity. We feel deeply compelled to tell our truths. Create tools to find the brilliant in blogs.

Audience comment: when you tailor newsfeeds you can totally miss what others are talking about.

Ouimet: We have this notion about this open mass media but it’s crap. You never know what was NOT printed. Editorial focus is about rejecting.

I want to be surprised I want to be challenged. People are smarter than we give them credit for.

Mainstream media can be brilliant because it has the resources to actually throw in a trained, skilled observer…. To ask questions that the neighbors never even thought to ask.

Northern Voice Blogging Conference Day 1

Northern Voice 2006 Blogging Conference Vancouver

General Comments:

A stimulating event that brought together big blogging names and tech gurus along with interested members of the general public. The first day was a series of relatively informal, self-organized sessions, followed by a more structured conference on the second day. Participants included XML developer Tim Bray, Microsoft blogging guru Robert Scoble, Technorati founder Dave Sifry, etc.

I’d say over half the 250 odd people present were banging away on laptops, blogging the conference in real time and uploading photos to Flickr. (Enter the tag “Northern Voice” to see thousands of photos of the conference.)

Due to time pressures, this report has a minimum of structure and formatting, and will tend to be a collection of rambling notes. Follow the URLs for more info, presenters’ blogs, etc.

Moose Camp, Friday, February 10, 2006
(Relatively informal small-group sessions)

Personal Media Outlets – We Are the Media
Presenter: John Anthony Hartman multimediame.net

We now have the ability to make and distribute media. We can create our own personal media outlets. We are redefining how we make and distribute media. Content on demand.

This shift is sending shivers down the spines of media executives. Afraid of material being stolen. But people don’t need to steal what is free.

Shift from major media monopolies. Major media outlets need to get onboard now. They no longer have a grip on media. People are looking to more sources.

The web is evolving into rich media. It is empowering individuals. The power of the web and individuals is unstoppable.

Time-shifted media is now available. Want to shift media because of premiums on time. Mass media caught in proprietary codecs.

Individuals now have power of editors. $100 MIT laptop project to give poor people everywhere hand-crank powered laptops with mesh networking built in.

Blogs are more than just the written word. Mashed up culture. Take stuff and repurpose it. Creative Commons copyright licensing means I tell you how you can share my stuff, not how I prevent you from using it.

Look up video blogs by Josh Leo, Jay Smooth.

Ourmedia.org puts up your content for free. “The Global Home for Grassroots Media”

Real Time Reporting
Presenter: Michael Tippet of NowPublic
“The News is Now Public”

Anyone can be editor, photographer etc. Stories ordered by popularity. Collaborate in building news together. Share news you’re reading, writing, etc. News as conversation. Can add your own photos and videos. Can send stuff in from camera phone. Had 2,000 people reporting on Katrina. Can comment on items that others have submitted. Or get permission to use other people’s material.

Relationship to “professional” journalists.
Dan Gilmour, Howard Reihngold are NowPublic advisors.

Traditional journalism is less important. This is reporting from a first-person perspective. Gilmour trying to elevate blogging into better journalism. Or educate readers. Is it really true? Learn to question the news. Take everything with a grain of salt.

Are there any copyright issues? Don’t cut and paste entire stories, simply point to them. Just take a snippet of a story and add your own value-added commentary. People are happy to get traffic.

Can post comments to stories and make suggestions for corrections. Are thinking about making stories Wiki-able.

We’re All Journalists Now
Presenter: Mark Hamilton, journalism instructor

Everybody is walking around journalizing their lives. I felt naked when I discovered I’d left my house without my camera on the way to the conference this morning. The whole world is being recorded.

We have this combination of professional and amateur coming together to create a new media world. Lone reporters can do text, audio and video. Walls are breaking down between print, TV journalism. Newspapers, TV stations do both on their websites.

Now individuals can do broadcast quality video.

No longer reliant on traditional media structure to talk back. But what does this all mean? What does it mean for journalism? What does it mean for how we are finding out about the world? Breakdown of one to many media to many to many media.

Every year it’s getting harder to filter and edit.

Professional journalist have lied all the time, we just never had the power to correct them.

Yet there is an education level and an access level to blogging that many don’t have.

Extensive coverage of niche topics now that were never covered before.

In terms of mass media we have never been as involved as we are now. Mass media still has a lot of flaws, but it’s not as bad as many people make it out to be. Some really good community journalism being produced. Going out and talking to people. Collectively people are smarter than any one journalist. The human voice is coming back into media.

Dave Weinberger (RSS/blogging guru) on tagging. Speaking a few years ago he said tagging was very messy. Mass media right now is messy. Newspapers are freaking because circulation is dropping. TV viewing is dropping. Movie attendance is dropping. It’s changing the metrics of the system. It’s messy. Dave said maybe it’s going to be messy forever. But is that so scary?

Non-Profits Taking Advantage of Bogging
Presenter: Nancy White

“A Place to Capture and Share Ideas and Links about Online Interaction, Community, Distance Learning…”

Online community is just another channel for face-to-face communities. Some are pure online communities.

Communities of like-minded people. Very powerful sharing. Levels of engagement change over time. Context is everything. See: shareyourstory.org.

Activists. Different rhythms of engagement. Activism is campaign driven. You have to have a core group. People self-select themselves. Get them involved in your project. All you need to do is support them. People are catalysts. Events are catalysts. Evoke a need to do something. What’s going to change my behaviour.

Katrina, tsunami, Pakistan, were responses by individuals. How can I be a catalyst for a network of individuals to respond?

We need to develop a new set of competencies to live in the online world. We’ve been perfecting face-to-face for millennia. It’ll take time to figure out this online stuff. It helps to have blogging buddies. Practice writing all the time. Read all the time. Just do it.

Getting away from a model of control over messaging. Online you can get your message out in diffuse ways. Your PR person may not be comfortable with giving up control over your message. Have to learn to let go. You might lose some control of your message but you’ll gain so much energy.

The official message isn’t an effective blog. Yet there are times when a top-down message is very useful. You can’t confine yourself to any one approach. Combine approaches. You need the dry research combined with human stories.

Organizations that use blogs have to be thick-skinned. You’ll get feedback that you have never gotten before. We can only see so much, feel so much, experience so much. You can hold much more sand in an open hand than in a fist. Be humble. Willing to be wrong. Don’t take yourself too seriously.

Get organizations more open to the craziness of the online world. Most non-profits are still in very early stages of becoming comfortable with online world.

What happens when you get too much negativity? Need to have it part of your communications strategy. What if people slag your donors? Need to have guidelines in place. You can’t argue. The world is a much more open place than it’s ever been, yet you need to monitor what other people are saying about you.

Tools for monitoring blogs:
technorati.com
pubsub.com
icerocket.com
feedster.com

Tools that help us to visualize conversations. You might have a constituency out there that you don’t know about.

If the object is to keep as much sand in your hand as possible, you keep it open, but you might need to shelter it from the wind a bit. There are negative people out there who will try to take you down.

Netsquared.org
“Remixing the Web for Social Change”

Knowledgegreen.com
"The idea is to share knowledge that we can use to support our work for social change and achieve greater work/life balance.”

Blogging and the Future of Media
Presenter: Kurt Cagle, Mercurial Communications

Things are changing dramatically, authority etc. Foundation of an entirely new way of dealing with social infrastructures.

Rebellious people at this conference. Undermining the infrastructure of authority. Changing the nature of media. Mass media are very scared. We are shifting the rules of the game. M. McLuhan – when he was writing there were few channels of communication. The way information is presented has a huge fundamental impact. The mechanism of passing symbols. That was 50 years ago.

Channel characteristics c. 1960s. In 1960 dominant media was still print. Minimally interactive. Expensive presses and distribution costs. Radio and records. Minimally interactive. Expensive… TV and Movies, minimally interactive, studios, distribution. All previous are 1 to many. Telephone 1 to 1, moderately interactive.

This resulted in the formation of privileged gateways. High entry costs. Ease of collusion. Centralized control. The gateway companies were able to create large, structured media.

Fast forward 50 years to the Internet. Is not just another medium. Complete and total change to old media rules. Ability to link, to persist, to establish relationships. Every single channel that was out there has migrated to the Internet. The old media still exist, but the rules are changing.

Gateways are disintegrating. Low barriers to entry. Evolution of open standards. Elimination of distribution costs. Production costs drop to labour costs. Networks reroute around obstacles.

Authorities are getting scared. When it gets down to lawsuits you know they’re running scared. The problem is basically one of copyright. We have to rethink what we mean by ownership. We are trying to use rules that apply to an old situation. Many new competitors. Markets are fundamentally different, kids are aware they are being marketed to and don’t want to be pigeonholed.

Blogging and Building Communities
Presenter: Nancy White

What does community mean to you? What is the language of blogs and communities? Community is linking.

Love the extended community. Know few people locally, feel closer to people who are geographically distant. It takes somebody to instigate to keep things going. The process of invitation. RSS is a sort of invitation. Community means you’re actually trying to understand the other people. Ephemeral micro-communities that come and go.

Corporations are turned off of blogging because of the community aspects. Too personal. That view is starting to change. With that mindset they are bound to fail. The tipping point came in 2005, when companies started understanding how to use blogs.

I will give you credit for being human even if I disagree with what you write about.

Blog Sees More Visitors

This blog received 336 unique visitors on Jan. 26, a new record. I know that's not much, but I still wonder who they are :-). I usually get about 110-180 unique visitors per day, so that was a significant blip. The post that day was a couple of photos of a mayfly.... Hm...

Tedious Task of Fixing Mom's Computer

My mom's computer began behaving oddly a week ago, with programs slowing down and freezing, and instances of Internet Explorer opening spontaneously with offers to download files. Norton AntiVirus was complaining, saying certain of its files were corrupt, and by the time I was called in to assist, I soon came to the conclusion that a reinstall of Windows XP Pro from scratch was in order.

I tried a few other steps but the OS seemed to be hosed with some virus. I could not access the Task Manager to see what was running -- it almost seemed like something was blocking access to several administrative tools. The rollback function also was not working.

I tried uninstalling Norton, because it was saying that the subscription had expired even though it had been installed in August of this year, with no success. I even downloaded several uninstall fixes from the Norton website to no avail. Reinstall of Norton AV 2005 kept crapping out halfway through, and so did attempts to install a new 2006 version.

I also had a heck of a time getting all of Norton Security off of my wife's computer awhile back when I had to uninstall it -- it leaves hooks and processes all over the damn place. I'm ready to try a different AV product...

Anyway, rather than waste more time, for $62 I bought her a new hard disk, that at 80GB was twice the size of her old one, and reinstalled Windows and all of her programs.

What a tedious job! In the end it took about seven hours. Just installing Windows XP on the new drive and then getting all the service packs and updates took several hours.

Thankfully she had been backing up her data to Zip disks, so she didn't lose anything. The data on the old drive was still accessible, however I didn't want to take the chance of installing it as a secondary drive to copy the stuff over, and instead played with a bunch of Zips to get her data back.

Even though people consider me a computer geek, I hate these episodes!

Frustrating Future Shop Website Order

I've had such a frustrating time with the Future Shop website over the last few days that I doubt if I'll ever order anything online there again.

Last night I decided to buy a Canon SD300 digital camera because Future Shop had it on sale at $299, down from $399. It's a teeny 4MP camera, not the latest model, but I wanted something I could easily carry in a pocket all the time to replace my aging and bulky 3MP Kodak DC4800.

I placed the order online, and chose the "pick up at a Future Shop" outlet option so I'd get my hands on it faster. This morning I received an email saying the camera was not available at the outlet I chose, so I should re-order. Well, the $100 discount was no longer available!

So this morning I decided to go for the 5MP SD400, which was on sale at $379 down from $429, and again chose to pick it up at my local outlet, which the website indicated had that model in stock. An hour later I received an email that no, it was not available at the outlet, so I should re-order yet again!

So I gritted my teeth, and re-ordered for a third time, asking for delivery to my house. An hour later, I received an email asking me to phone a toll-free number to confirm my order. Say what? I buy stuff online all the time and I'd never encountered such a request before.

Sigh. I called the toll-free number, and after asking for my order number, my name, and my address, was told the order would be processed. I don't get it. What was the purpose of this "confirmation?" I just parroted the exact same informationt that I had filled out in the online order form -- there was nothing new to add any extra security to the transaction.

Then, to top if off, less than a minute after I got off the phone, it rang, and I found myself listening to a bot telling me I had to call and confirm the order that I had just confirmed!

Arrgggh! I did receive an email that my order had been processed, but I wonder....

World's Biggest Internet Discussion?

How's this for an ambitious attempt to get people from around the world tackling social issues over the Internet!

"In a lead-up to the third session of the World Urban Forum (WUF), to be held in Vancouver, Canada, in June 2006, UN-HABITAT, in collaboration with IBM and the Canadian Government is holding what it hopes will be the world's biggest Internet discussion to date from 1-3 December 2005."

"...the Habitat JAM promises to give thousands of global citizens, rich and poor alike, a chance to present their ideas on-line for presentation at the Forum..."

"Topics for the online debate include improving the lives of people living in slums, access to water, environmental sustainability, safety and urban crime, finance and governance, and the future of our cities."

You can learn more about the JAM here:

And sign up to participate here:

I've signed up and hope to have time to join in the three-day discussion.

Old Computers Donated to Schools

I finally tired of having three old computers in various states of assembly and/or cannibalization in my office and decided to get rid of them. I searched for computer recycling depots in British Columbia and came across Computers for Schools, which refurbishes old machines and gives them to schools around the province.

I gave them an AMD K6-II 400, a Dell PIII 450, and an Athlon Thunderbird 800. The K6-II had no memory and just a floppy drive, while I gave them 256MB of RAM and CD drives in the other two. I kept all hard drives for backup use in the two computers I have left.

I'm happy some kids somewhere may get some use out of them.

As of this date they are accepting PIII 450 and higher machines. Ones that don't meet that bar will be properly disposed of for a $6 fee. They'll take monitors and printers too, so don't let your old equipment gather dust! The organization has offices across Canada.

Computer Suddenly Dies

About a week ago the clock in my wife's computer became erratic. I figured it must be the button battery on the motherboard, and since my backup computer is identical and was purchased at the same time, I bought a couple of batteries.

I replaced the battery on my motherboard (mobo) without incident, but when I replaced Yumi's, something strange happened. When I shut down Windows 2000, the operating system began the process and then hung on a black screen. So I killed the machine by hitting the switch on the power supply.

I changed her battery, turned on the power supply switch, hit the front panel power button -- and nothing.

Huh? I checked all the connectors, tried again, and nothing.

I had an extra power supply, so I installed it, and again nothing. This was strange. The power LED on the mobo was lighting up, so it appeared to be getting power, but it would not boot.

With work pending, I ended up popping her hard disk into my old compter -- like I said, they were identical machines, so the switch went smoothly, and she was back in business.

We bought a "barebone kit" from NCIX to replace her lost machine, and I put it together and have been installing programs on it as time allowed over the last couple of days. It's a mATX mobo and case (smaller than the regular ATX), so Yumi is happy that it will take up less space under her desk than the tower case she's using now.

Still dunno why her old machine died, though....

IBM T42 Notebook Looks Great

Recently I got a new IBM/Lenovo T42 ThinkPad to replace my aged Toshiba Tecra 530CDT that I bought at a "discontinued" discount seven (!) years ago.

I was still using the Toshiba occasionally on the road, but with a Pentium 166, 64MB of RAM, and a 2GB HD, it was pretty long in the tooth.

I got a nice package deal on the T42, with two batteries, a docking station, a snazzy case, two power adapters, a security cable, Windows XP Professional, and Microsoft Office Professional 2003.

So far I really like the new machine. I got the 1400 X 1050 screen and boosted the RAM to a gigabyte. While I haven't done detailed tests, it appears the Pentium M 1.8 GHz will last in the neighborhood of four hours on one battery.

It's also my first laptop with wireless connectivity, and I immediately added a wireless access point to our LAN. It works great, but the new mobility taking some getting used to.

Adding Storage to Tungsten E

I nabbed a 512MB Kingston SD card for my Palm Tungsten E today for C$49.

I find the pace of techonolgical advancement amazing considering that the first hard disk I ever bought was a 32MB 5 1/4" drive for over US$300 -- and that was 1988 dollars!

Tungsten E Ousts Palm Pilot Professional

A couple of weeks ago I finally upgraded to a Palm Tungsten E from an aging Palm Pilot Professional (PPP).

The PPP had served me well for seven or eight years, but its 1MB of memory and cramped, dark monochrome screen were limiting, and its HotSync cradle connectivity was becoming increasingly flaky.

I got a good deal on the Tungsten E and a wireless Palm folding keyboard combo, and now I wonder why I didn't upgrade years ago. The E is hardly cutting-edge technology, it's been around for a long time, yet I find its color screen and multimedia capabilities enchanting.

I like the ability to load Word, Excel and PowerPoint files on the E. While I doubt if I'd want to do more than cursory editing of such files on the handheld, its nice to be able to carry the odd document or spreadsheet around for reference.

I also enjoy loading photos onto the E.

I wonder how many PPPs are still in action?

Review - Dreamweaver MX 2004 Missing Manual

Review - Dreamweaver MX 2004: The Missing Manual

by David S. McFarland

Another of the excellent books in the missing manuals series that I read from cover to cover. Yes, I know, there's something wrong with me :-).

It has comprehensive coverage of the powerful Macromedia Dreamweaver Web publishing program. I have yet to put Dreamweaver to use, though I've dabbled with it a bit, however I have a number of sites that I want to spruce up and make compliant with XHTML, so I'll be getting into the program soon.

Review - Windows XP Pro: The Missing Manual

Review - Windows XP Pro: The Missing Manual, Second Edition
by David Pogue, Craig Zacker, L.J. Zacker

Yes, believe it or not, I do read computer manuals from cover to cover :-).

I recently got a new computer running Windows XP Pro after being happy with a Windows 2000 Pro box for over four years. XP is different enough from 2000 that I needed some mental upgrading.

The "Missing Manual" series is excellent. The books are engaging, cover their topics extensively, and are funny to boot.

The series is aptly named as well, considering my installation of XP Pro came with only a 32-page introductory pamphlet. What is Microsoft thinking? Oh, yeah,that it can make more money selling books...

I found the XP Pro Missing Manual to be very useful, as it explained a few things I was confused about, and showed me how to accomplish things in XP that are different from Windows 2000.

Highly recommended if you are new to Windows XP Pro. The content can be understood by beginners who take their time going through the book, yet there is still plenty of useful information for advanced users who can skim the more basic parts.

Review - Macromedia Dreamweaver for Windows & Macintosh

Review - Macromedia Dreamweaver MX for Windows & Macintosh: Visual Quickstart Guide

by J. Tarin Towers

Well here it is, a few days to 2005, and I finally finished this book long after I had installed Macromedia Studio MX 2004, a newer version of the software. Unfortunately I've never gotten around to learning Dreamweaver, Fireworks and Flash, maintaining my mediocre sites with HomeSite and an ancient version of FrontPage that produces really ugly code.

I vow to transfer all of the sites that I maintain to Dreamweaver in the coming year, and take advantage of its clean code and powerful capabilities. I also want to redesign all of my sites with XHTML and CSS stylesheets.

I started this book early in 2004, and found it buried in a corner of my desk a week ago and decided to finish it. It's a clear, well-illustrated guide to the intricacies of Dreamweaver. It's a fairly exhaustive treatment that remains readable and accessible.

Manuals included with software are getting thinner and thinner, and one has to rely on books like this one to learn new programs.

Review - Web ReDesign

Review - Web ReDesign: Workflow that Works
by Kelly Goto and Emily Cotler

This is a solid guide to designing and overhauling websites, with a focus on project management, design and content as opposed to the nuts and bolts of writing HTML/XHTML or setting up dynamic database-driven sites.

The authors do an excellent job of laying out a process that can be applied to almost any scenario, starting from defining the project, to developing site structure, visual design and testing, and production and quality assurance.

The focus of the process is the user, and rightly so. Test, test and test again -- can users use the site easily and effectively?

Highly recommended for anyone who works in the web publishing arena.

More information and downloads can be found on the book's accompanying website. There is a "2.0" version out that I have not seen yet.

Finally Moving to Windows XP

I last bought desktop computers for our company almost exactly four years ago. The AMD Athlon Thunderbird 800MHz processor-based systems running Microsoft Windows 2000 Professional are still going strong, albeit with some RAM, DVD-R/RW and hard disk upgrades.

I used to be a "bleeding-edge" kind of guy, buying a new computer every year, or 18 months at the ouside. However, these Thunderbird 800s chugged along year after year, gradually changing me more into a "if it ain't broke don't fix it" guy.

Yet over the last year or so I was starting to feel that these systems were getting long in the tooth. For example, there were some DVD movie applications that they just didn't have the punch to power.

But I kept holding off until one of our clients came up with an offer I couldn't refuse. While most of our work is translation and editing, I also help out clients with the occasional computer upgrades or assistance with various computer-related problems.

This company had replaced all of its computers with ones running Windows XP over the last few years, and wanted me to be on the same page. That was after hearing me grumble, "this is different from Windows 2000" a few times too many :-). So a few days ago it offered me a $1,000 "retainer" to buy a new computer with Windows XP Professional.

I've ordered a nice 3GHz box with a gig of RAM and dual SATA 200GB hard disks from NCIX, where I've been doing most of my computer-related purchasing since moving to Burnaby.

So I'm finally passing two milestones: getting a computer with a processor measured in GHz, and getting Windows XP Pro.

Review: Benq FP931 LCD Monitor

We bought two Benq FP931 19" LCD monitors today for our company, and are very pleased with them. They take up much less space than the Sony Multiscan E400 19" CRTs that we had been using. They also use less than half the energy.

The monitors are very bright and sharp, and neither appears to have any "dead" pixels.

I like the fact that the 1280 X 1024 resolution is spread out onto an effective 19" of screen compared to the effective 18" (diagonally) on the Sony monitors. That means fonts appear a bit larger, which is great as my eyes enter middle age :-).

With a $50 rebate, the Benqs were $488, a huge drop in a few years. My mother bought a 19" Dell LCD screen a couple of years ago for over $1,000.

I was also shocked to go back into my records and see that we had paid $729 each for the Sony monitors nearly five years ago. Most 19" CRT monitors are in the $200 range now. Yet we got our money's worth from the Sony monitors. Their 1280 X 1024 resolution enabled much more efficient working than the 1024 X 768 17" monitors they replaced.

Now I'm waiting for 20-21" 1600 X 1200 LCD monitors to drop in price!

Adding Attic Insulation

Heading into our fourth winter in our townhouse, my wife Yumi finally convinced me that we had to add insulation in our attic. I hate working up there -- it's dark, cramped, dusty, and potentially dangerous. However, our top floor is heated by electricity, and poor Yumi was freezing in her office as she disliked the cost of electric heat.

Our attic had about 15cm of blown cellulose insulation, which works out to about R20, when new homes in cold climates should have as much as R50. It rarely gets below freezing here in Burnaby, but R20 is on the low side.

After exploring several websites, we decided to add a layer of R20 fiberglass batts.

I figured we needed about 675 square feet of coverage, which works out to 9 bags of R20 23-inch batts. We decided to start with 5 bags, which proved to be a wise decision, as even with the back seats down we barely squeezed 4 bags into our Subaru Outback, and tied the fifth onto the roof rack.

We also bought a respirator and some high-quality disposable masks, along with safety goggles.

We ran a halogen work lamp up the hatch, and hauled several 2 X 8s and 2 X 6s up and laid them out to provide walkways. Boosting the bags of batts up was a chore, as they barely fit through the hatch.

We then got to work, starting at the far end. Of course there was an obstacle course of awkward framing to wiggle through. Yumi opened up bags and passed me batts that I laid in place, being careful not to cover the soffit vents.

I have a low melting point, and even though the temperature in the attic was around 7C, I was soon sweating profusely, and my goggles began fogging up. I soon discarded them, trading off itchy eyes for any sight at all. Then my respirator began filling up with sweat and slipping around on my face -- what fun!

When I reached the area above Yumi's office, I was astounded to discover there was no insulation at all above part of her room! No wonder her office was frigid. The bay windows had been repaired some time in the past, and apparently the workers never bothered to replace the insulation above them.

We got nearly half the attic done today, and it already feels a bit warmer on the top floor. My thighs and lower back are stiffening up from all the squatting and crawling around, but Yumi is happy :-).

Amazing Book/Library Search Site

The NewsScan newsletter posted a link to a fantastic book/library search site today called RedLightGreen.

The site searches a database of 120 million books and can be refined by author, subject, language etc. Then you can find out if the books you're interested in are available at nearby libraries.

Check it out!

Telus Website Irritations

I went to the Telus website a few moments ago for my several-times-a-year check to see if high-speed ADSL Internet is available yet in my 101-unit townhouse complex in the same city as Telus headquarters. I've been doing this for three years now.

I'm on Shaw Cable, and am pretty much satisfied with it, yet it would be nice to have some competition available.

I used to click the "Availabilty" link on the Telus site, enter my phone number or address into a simple form, and groan every time when the response was that ADSL was not available at my address.

This time however, I was shocked to be turned away because I was running an "incompatible browser" -- Firefox on Windows 2000.

I copied the URL from Firefox, started IE, popped in the URL, and discovered that to use the Availablity Wizard, Telus wanted me to download and install some software!

What ever happened to simple Web standards? What ever happened to serving the broadest possible spectrum of customers?

Wait a minute -- what if I tried the "Mac Users click here" link, even though I'm on a Windows machine? Say what? There's that simple form where I can type in my phone number, even with Firefox.

Who thought up this site design? I don't get it.

And, by the way, I still can't get it. Telus ADSL, that is....

Quirky Motherboard Strikes Again

I've related before how I've struggled with a quirky Asus A7V motherboard. I resolved USB problems awhile back, and recently I had to deal with gaining access to a new Lite-on DVD+-R/RW drive.

I was having problems burning DVDs, even though I upgraded to the latest version of Nero 6 Ultra Edition. Nero often locked up my Windows 2000 box when trying to burn a DVD, and I'd have to do a hard boot to get it going again.

I then tried Terabyte's Image for DOS program that is supposed to create and burn complete hard drive images onto DVD+-R discs. The program complained that it couldn't even find a CD or DVD writer!

I could read data *from* CD and DVD discs, so what was going on?

I took a look at the BIOS, and strangely there was no entry for a DVD writer in the boot sequence. That got the grey cells stirring as I began remembering that there were issues with the Promise UltraDMA/100 controller and this particular motherboard. The board has four IDE channels -- a primary and secondary UltraDMA/100, and a primary and secondary UltraDMA/66/33. The 100s appear to Windows as SCSI devices, not IDE devices, so perhaps that was preventing the buring programs from seeing the DVD writer as an ATAPI device.

Sure enough, as soon as I moved the DVD writer to an UltraDMA/66/33 channel, Image for DOS happily churned out and burned a complete image of my hard disk spanned onto five DVD+R discs.

Maybe it's time to get a new computer and quit tearing my hair out over this ancient VIA-based system! I've also discovered that the AMD Thunderbird 800 cpu simply hasn't got the juice to handle some of the latest audio/video programs that came with the latest Nero. Honey? Can I buy a new computer?

Busy Summer Sees Blog Wither

Yikes, this blog has gone from near-daily posts to only nine so far in the month of August, and several of those have been rather short.

If I do have any "fans" out there, don't worry because in a way this is a good sign, for we've been very busy with work this summer. July and August both entered the list of top-ten earning months for our little company since we started it in February 2000.

It's nice to feel wanted, however we're back in the old home business dilema -- when you have plenty of free time you have little free cash flow, and when you're making money, you have no free time.

We have prevailed upon our major clients for a one-week camping vacation this autumn, and while we need the break, I also feel guilty as a few smaller clients are quite dependent upon our specialty of on-demand, fast-turnaround translation and editing.

I need a clone, or another translator-editor team I can trust to work to same-day in/out deadlines on occasion, using a variety of different style guides.

That's the other home business dilema -- at what point are you regularly earning enough to subcontract work out? Some months the hours pile up like crazy, however other months we've got plenty of time for streamkeeping activities and other volunteer work.

Well, the queue still has several items stacked up, so enough ruminating. Back to work.

Discount Coupons Boost Computer

I had one of those "Duh!" experiences today. You know, finally seeing an obvious solution to a problem.

I have a four-year-old computer with a motherboard that supposedly supports up to 7 USB ports, and that came with 5 installed, none of which work. Years ago I tracked the problem down to a motherboard bug, and since I had other machines on our network that handled USB devices, I left it at that.

Today I was walking around Office Depot with $40 worth of loyalty reward coupons in my pocket, looking for something to spend them on.

And there it was, a Belkin Hi-Speed USB 2.0 5-Port PCI Card. Duh!

I grabbed it, brought it home, installed it in my USB-deficient machine, and voila -- I had USB connectivity. Why didn't this solution ever occur to me before?

Shaw Email Sucked Into Black Hole

All email sent to our Shaw email addresses disappeared for several hours this afternoon.

I know it happened, because I have our email processed by another hosting provider and forwarded to our Shaw addresses, plus I have our business email forwarded to a Yahoo email account for backup.

This has saved our bacon several times when Shaw's email servers mysteriously die. Our Shaw accounts are working again now, however many messages that the Yahoo account received have yet to show up through Shaw, many hours later.