Diary of a Wimpy Senator

With their parents just minutes away, Greg and Rodrick have to figure out how to fix the damage from their illicit party.

There’s a scene in “Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Rodrick Rules” in which Rodrick hosts a party at his house while his parents are away. His little brother, Greg (the “wimpy kid” in question), gets involved with the event, so they’re both complicit in the damage and mess that ensues.

In the morning they find that someone has graffitied the bathroom door. In a rush to cover it up before their parents get home, they swap out a spare door they find in the basement. The problem is: the new door doesn’t have a lock on it.

The two spend the rest of the movie duping their parents into believing that the bathroom door never did have a lock on it.

This situation with Senator Mike Duffy and Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s chief of staff Nigel Wright reminds me a lot of this scene.

The bathroom door is the $90,000 cheque, which Canadians are supposed to conveniently ignore the irregularity of.

The childish antics of Duffy and Wright remind me of the hilarious behaviour of Rodrick and Greg as they desperately struggle to build and maintain a lie.

The senate, then, might just be the toilet, which we all now just want to sit on and take a dump.

Exposure Scales of Social Media

Reblogged from Geek Life:

Here's my mental model for how publicly exposed I consider myself when using different types of social media, along with comparable real-world social environments:

There are two ways to look at my scale. The first is: how private do you want to be? The second is: how popular do you want to be perceived to be?

Read more… 942 more words

Just got into a discussion on Google Plus about the value of Path in light of Plus' circles feature, and recalled posting this about a year and a half ago. I still think the perspective is as valid now as it was back then, so thought it was worth drawing renewed attention to it.

Drones: Coming Soon to a Sky Near You

Drones are “unmanned aerial vehicles”, or UAVS.

Drones come in all shapes and sizes, each being designed for one of two purposes: surveillance or warfare.

The two best-known drone models are at the extreme ends of the scale.

The average citizen can use an iPhone to conduct neighbourhood surveillance with the Parrot AR Drone 2.0. This stylish unit packs a flight guidance system and an HD video camera into a form factor about the size and weight of a large pizza.

You can pick one up at The Source for just over $300. (And, yes, that would make a tremendously appreciated gift for yours truly.)

If bombing Al-Qaeda hideouts in Afghanistan is more your style, you’ll have to join the US Air Force or the CIA. It’s only within those organizations that you’ll get the opportunity to pilot the massive, missile-laden $56 million Reaper from the comfort of a base in Nevada

Where Are Social Media’s Seat Belts?

In 2011, 15-year-old Rehtaeh Parsons was allegedly raped by four teenaged boys who were never charged or prosecuted for the crime.

One of those teenaged boys shared a photo of the incident with friends online. The photo was distributed widely among their school community and beyond.

As a result, Parsons faced intense bullying on Facebook and other social media. Boys would anonymously proposition her. Girls accused her of being a slut. She was repeatedly slandered.

Unable to further bear the ceaseless assault, last week Parsons hung herself in the bathroom of her family’s home.

If the story sounds familiar, that’s not surprising.

It was only last October that Amanda Todd’s suicide drew our attention to the perils of unregulated social media use. She also took her own life after facing intense online bullying as a result of a sexual assault.

Who’s next? Perhaps the 16-year-old girl from Steubenville, Ohio, who was drugged and brutally gang raped by members of the local high school football team last year. As with the other incidents, pictures were spread via social media.

Chances are, social media will kill her too.

Windows 8 (the touch part) is iPad, circa 2010 (barely)

The Windows 8 “Start Screen”: beautiful, but ultimately hollow.

The iPad celebrated its 3rd birthday the other day. Funny how dominant it has become in just 36 months.

I was taken back to those first moments with my first iPad back on April 3, 2010, as I explored Windows 8 on a Lenovo Yoga 13.

Not to suggest that the Yoga 13′s touch experience is as good as the first iPad’s, because it’s not. I’m referring to the act of digging through an app store to see how third party developers had pushed the capabilities of a new, unique device.

In the case of the iPad, I found the most amazing apps three years ago. The game Fieldrunners brought tears to my eyes. Omnigraffle made flowchart building physical and real. Stuff that blew my mind.

There’s nothing that awes me in the Windows 8 Marketplace. Nothing’s even made me smile. Most of the touch apps are reworks of existing (and better, and more capable) iPad apps rejigged aesthetically for the colourful Metro interface. It’s a collection of half-baked app ideas and pure, unequivocal junk. There’s no other way to put it.

I’m disappointed by this. I’m sort of blown away, actually. That in all this time, Microsoft barely managed to scrape together a response to the iPad that only begins to address the iPad experience of 3 years ago. Even worse, what little Microsoft managed to cook up has met with a dismal response from app developers. Clearly, Windows 8 excites no one.

What I’m especially disappointed with, though, is the drag that the included Windows Desktop puts on the Metro interface. You really can’t use a Windows 8 device without regularly visiting the Desktop, whether you want to or not. Metro apps redirect you there without warning constantly. It’s a dichotomous, dizzy experience that confuses and frustrates. Imagine Apple had built a “MacPad” that constantly tossed you between the Mac OS and iOS. To make matters worse, most apps have a Metro version and a Desktop version, each with a different use model, and you often don’t have control over which app will open when you want to access a resource.

But at least I understand now why Microsoft had to ship the Metro UI as a mere shellac over the traditional Windows desktop. There’s so little value to the Metro UI, and so few apps to leverage what limited opportunities it expresses, that any device shipping with just that touch interface alone would be, by and large, useless. Windows Desktop has to be on these devices just so users can actually do something with them. In short, Microsoft has no response to iOS.

I also get why Windows geeks are finding ways to hack Metro off of Windows 8. It’s largely superfluous.

Which is incredibly disappointing because I lovelovelove the Metro UI (who cares about the fact it’s not called that any more; it’ll always be Metro to me). Really. I love the idea of live tiles, and I love the organic nature of the interface, and I love the colour. It makes iOS look like a drab grab bag of stale chocolates in comparison to its joyful display.

So I’m heartbroken in a way. I wanted to fall in love with Windows 8. In fact, I preloved it. But as I use it more and more, it drives me away. It’s a selfish King Julian, all full of itself, that forgets to pay heed to the needs and interests of its loyal disciples.

It’s clear that Microsoft flubbed this one. Big time. They are so close to a compelling alternative to Apple’s system, the ideas are all there. The execution is dead wrong, however, and ultimately fails.

Northwestel’s New Internet Packages: Are They Good Enough? [UPDATED]

Northwestel introduced new internet packages today. Compared to the company’s old packages, on pretty much every level the company has upgraded the speed slightly, upgraded the data transfer volume slightly, while also nudging the price down by a hair. A little bit more for a little bit less is good, right?*

For sure. But the real question is: how do the new packages fare against comparable offerings in other regions of Canada? Let’s consider Northwestel’s packages against a relatively local service provider (if you consider mile 0 of the Alaska Highway local), Shaw, along with the Ontario offerings of Northwestel’s owner, Bell.

First off, the entry level of the service spectrum.

Provider	Package Name	Download Speed	Upload Speed	Data Volume	Price	Over-use Cost
Northwestel	Internet 1	1 Mbps	256 kbps	1 GB	$41.95	$5 for 1 GB
Shaw	High Speed 10	10 Mbps	512 Kbps	125 GB	$50.00	Bump Up
Bell	Fibe Internet 50/1	5 Mbps	1 Mbps	20 GB	$39.95	$5 for 25 GB

While you can get internet access for a relatively low cost of $42 a month, the service you receive is ridiculously minimal – to the point of being insulting. Consider that, with Shaw, for just $8 more a month you’ll get 125 times the data volume each month at 10 times the data transfer rate. Then further consider the fact that if you exceed your monthly data transfer cap, with Shaw you’ll just get temporarily ”bumped up” to their next account level rather than raked through the Northwestel’s over-use penalty coals of $5 per GB. So in this instance with Shaw you’d pay an extra $15 that month for an additional 50 GB of data — about 30 cents a GB. That’s a huge difference.

But how do things look at Northwestel’s high end?

Provider	Package Name	Download Speed	Upload Speed	Data Volume	Price	Extra Volume Cost
Northwestel	Internet 50	50 Mbps	2 Mbps	150 GB	$110.95	$5 for 1 GB
Shaw	Broadband 50	50 Mbps	3 Mbps	400 GB	$75.00	Bump Up
Bell	Fibe Internet 50/10	50 Mbps	10 Mbps	175 GB	$82.95	$5 for 25 GB

Here the disparity is even more obvious, especially when you consider that this isn’t even the high end for Bell or Shaw — these packages are just mid-range by national standards. 150 GB of data per month is simply not enough data for contemporary use. With Shaw, for example, you can get as much as 1000 GB per month for just $5 more than Northwestel’s top plan.

My biggest disappointments with Northwestel’s new pricing structure are the lack of improvement on maximum uploads speeds and the company’s ridiculously expensive over-use penalty fees.

The extreme constraint of just 2 Mbps for data uploading cuts customers off from using essential online services like data backup and file storage. Plus, there’s no indication that Northwestel has resolved its service’s inability to allow simultaneous uploading and downloading, nor for its modems’ propensity to lock up when significant uploading takes place (I just spent the better part of an afternoon having Northwestel unlock one of my client’s modems that had been locked up due to heavy data uploading).

The largest ongoing problem with Northwestel’s service structure, of course, is the company’s over-use penalty fee of $5 per GB. It deserves note that Northwestel over the past couple of years has pushed this down from $10. But when Shaw and other Canadian providers currently offer unlimited data packages for around the $200 mark, and even Northwestel’s owner Bell will sell you 25 GB of data for the same price Northwestel charges for just one, it’s inarguable that Northwestel’s over-use penalty fee is nothing short of gouging a trapped customer base.

Yes, paying slightly less money for slightly more service is a good thing. But I would argue that these new packages are nothing more than a political response to pressures from the CRTC and the Yukon Government. Were Northwestel truly a competitively-spirited company working in the best interests of customers, we’d see our rates change to be more in line with national standards.

Even with Northwestel’s moderate package improvements, it’s clear that internet access in the North still lags far behind other regions of Canada in every respect and desperately needs significant improvement.

Finally, on a pragmatic note: Northwestel’s new internet packages do not automatically replace the package you currently subscribe to, as many people I spoke to today expected they would. Your old account fees and service levels will remain in place until you call Northwestel and specifically request the new, better valued services. So make sure you do that.

* UPDATE: As Patrick Goruick pointed out in a comment on the Geek Life Facebook page, these new packages aren’t really much of a deal or a change at all. For the two lowest-level packages, there is no change whatsoever. Only the two highest-level packages experience moderate increases in download speeds, usage caps, and a moderate decrease in price. Shockingly, as Patrick points out, for subscribers to the top three packages who bundle their service with television services, prices will go up (I don’t subscribe to television, which is why I didn’t notice that important fact). While I regret being remiss in recognizing these facts, they only serve to reinforce the core message of this post: when it comes to internet services, the North deserves and needs better than Northwestel.

Panomania!

I love shooting panoramic photographs. “Oh, he’s shooting another one of those panos,” was a common refrain from my mom while I was traveling with her through Cambodia recently. I’ve been doing it for years, ever since stitching photos together to make a pano was a largely manual, finicky process on a Mac. Check out this one of Main Street in Whitehorse, Yukon, from December 21, 1997.

Nowadays pretty much every camera and smartphone can automatically create panos. I mostly use my iPhone 5, which is capable of producing near-perfect panos no matter what. I also use a Google Nexus 4 which has a new feature called “Photo Sphere,” but that’s generally pretty hit and miss. But when it hits, the results can be spectacular. Just for fun, here are a few of my favourite panos that I’ve shot recently. Despite the technology, though, panos are extremely prone to error, which is one of the things I like about them. The visual aberrations often make for interesting results.

Edmonton’s economy seems to rely on liquor. Really, every second store seems to be a liquor store.

This is a shot of a big new park with an outdoor swimming pool on the island of Taipa in Macau.

This image is a great example of what you can do with the “Photo Sphere” feature on a Google Nexus 4 phone. This is inside the Venetian casino in Macau.

Cole and I went a bit off the beaten tourist path at Angkor Watt to explore this temple.

One of the most shocking things we saw in Cambodia was the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum. Formerly a public school, it was converted to a detention and interrogation centre by the Khmer Rouge. Here’s my son Cole standing in a room that was used for torture and interrogation, left largely as it was found.

At the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum, they’ve left the facility as it was found. This is a classroom that was converted to a crude jail. Instructions to prisoners were still on the chalkboard.

Hong Kong airport is already impressive with its vaulted ceilings that seem to curve around you. Shooting a pano of the environment just accentuates that.

Panos are often meant to be sweeping, but not always. Here Cole and I crammed into the bathroom on an Air Canada jet during our flight back to Vancouver from Hong Kong.

I shot this pano of Lost Lake just the other day. It’s another great example of the Nexus 4′s Photo Sphere feature.

Find a Comfortable Seat for the Future

The surface of BRC Designs’ Binary Chair is completely covered with a collage of motherboards, computer chips, lcd screens and hard drive disks held in place by sheet metal screws. The chair also has an interactive quality as the hard drive disks can be spun, the telephone keys and other buttons can be pressed, and the antennae raised and adjusted.
Credit: Benjamin Caldwell, BRC Designs

A couple of years ago Benjamin Caldwell of BRC Designs introduced us to his Binary Chairs.

Arguably more sculpture than furniture, they are constructed entirely of second-hand computer guts – things like circuit boards, CPUs, hard drives, wires and data ribbons. While the chairs are inexplicably beautiful they don’t look particularly comfortable.

The Binary Chairs are wonderfully emblematic of our modern world. Just as they are totally built of tech detritus, so is technology itself now built into everything. It’s naturally part of the daily fabric of our world.

And while that fine weave of life and technology can be a beautiful thing, it’s also full of jagged edges and unexpected sharp surfaces.

That harmonious conflict between humanity and technology will be under the microscope at an important conference in Toronto this June.

The 2013 IEEE International Symposium on Technology and Society will address “the social implications of wearable technology and augmediated reality in everyday life.”

Holy crap, sorry, that was a mouthful. So I’ll just paraphrase it a bit: as technology integrates itself ever deeper into our lives and alters our view of reality itself, how do we adapt to it and manage its effects?

Let’s start investigating that question with something familiar: the smartphone.