In my final year of high school, John Fowles, my Science Communications teacher, drilled into us that all good writing (and all good communication) involves knowing your audience. Know your audience, he would boom in his stentorian voice. Over and over and over.

So tonight Catherine and wee Oliver go to their first meeting of the La Leche League, a local breastfeeding support group (and an excellent international organization to boot). During the go ‘round at the start of the session, everyone is introducing themselves and their child and Catherine introduces Oliver accordingly.

“That’s not wee Oliver is it?” Catherine is asked, echoing the term of endearment I reserve for Oliver and use in public only here online.

“Why yes,” responds Catherine. And it then becomes obvious that among the members of the the audience for this website are the nursing mothers of Charlottetown and area. Or at least some of them.

If you add that to my mother and father, three brothers, my mother-in-law, an old college professor, several far-flung friends, clients in two countries, ruffians from silverorange and Kevin O’Brien (to say nothing of the people who accidently stop by while searching for places to stay in PEI or New England) I have the daunting challenge of writing for an audience that, on any given day, I have a fairly good chance of boring or offending one section of or another.

The answer to this quandry, of course, is to simply write about that which intrigues me, in a style I find comfortable. And then let the chips fall where they may.

On an average day there are about 314 of you stopping by for a read. Welcome, nursing mothers, family members and strangers all.

The wise Matthew Scott (who, when he was my brother Steve’s roommate in the last century, I used to call either Morty or Hooper — I can’t recall which), checked in with a potent observation on selfsame Steve’s website. He says, in part:

Although I could watch “The Simpsons” for three and a half hours straight every afternoon, more often than not, I simply flicked from channel to channel, always convinced that there must be something better on one of those other three hundred stations.

Morty’s (or is it Hooper’s?) sister has a website of her own which, oddly enough, has a picture of selfsame Steve playing his guitar while dressed business casual.

Because I was going to be away in Bangor, Maine this past weekend, away from Reinvented HQ for three days and without regular Internet access, I decided to explore the possibility of managing my ‘net life using a Handspring Visor.

Like the Palm devices on which it’s based, the Visor is a tiny handheld computer with a tiny screen, a tiny amount of memory, and tiny little applications. It works well — and is wildly popular — when used to store addresses, datebook and to do lists. By strapping a tiny modem to the back of the Visor and connecting it to the Internet, I was taking things a little further: trying to make a Tiny Computer do a Big Computer’s job.

It worked, sort of.

On Thursday night before heading out to Bangor, I bought the Visor Platinum and the Xircom 56K Springport Modem Module from Futureshop in Charlottetown. The experience was as soul-sucking as most Futureshop experiences — the usual razmataz about extended warranties, etc. But I got out alive.

When I got home, I installed the desktop software and the cradle that plugs into my Big PC. Then I tried to sync the data on my PC with the new Visor. Didn’t work. Tried again. Didn’t work. Finally, after futzing around for an hour or so, and uninstalling and reinstalling the software, I was able to get things to work.

Next I needed to find a dial up Internet provider with service in Bangor. I looked at AOL, Earthlink and Prexar but none of them had what I was looking for: a low-cost account for occassional use. AT&T, however, had exactly what I was looking for: a $9.95/month plan with 10 hours of usage included. I was able to easily and quickly sign up online, and had my account information in hand within 10 minutes: very slick and the way all Internet providers should work.

Then I tried to get the modem on the Visor to dial in to AT&T. It worked. Then it didn’t. Then it did. I tried dialing in to ISN for comparison and got the same flakiness. It was getting late, and I was facing a long drive to Bangor, so I decided to leave the finer points to Bangor. I finished up by installing some slick Palm applications: the Eudora Internet Suite (for email and web) and Ton Gun SSH (to connect with remote computers).

Friday, it was off to Bangor.

On Friday evening I was able to successfully dial in to AT&T’s local number in Bangor, pick up my email, surf the web, check my server and so on. However the flakiness of the modem continued, and I could only get a connection 1 out of every 10 times.

Saturday morning I got a phone call early about some changes required to a server in Boston. I set up the gear again and just couldn’t get the modem to connect. In frustration, I popped over to Staples and bought a CardAccess Thinmodem. Back at the hotel I slid it into the back of the Visor, and my connection problems disappeared: I got rock-solid connections every time I dialed.

Using a combination of Eudora’s web browser and email client, and the Top Gun SSH client, I was able, over the course of a couple of hours, to get my work done. Because I wasn’t using a keyboard, but was rather “writing” everything into the Visor using a shorthand they call Graffiti Writing, I was working at about 10% of the speed normal. My hands wore out pretty quickly (one from holding, one from writing), but I was able to do everything from browsing the web to running vi.

So far, so good.

Unlike the Xircom modem I started with, which has its own (bulky) battery pack, the CardAccess modem draws its power from the Visor’s own batteries. As a result, using the CardAccess makes the Visor’s batteries wear out much more quickly — especially when you’re online for a couple of hours. So my next step was to go to the Bangor Mall to buy some more batteries. A bought a pack of a dozen AAA’s just to make sure I didn’t run out.

When I got back to my hotel, I decided I’d better change the batteries in the Visor as they were getting low. I knew that I had about a minute of grace time to insert new batteries once removing the old ones or the Visor’s memory would get erased. Unfortunately I misread the little “-” and “+” signs inside the battery pack, inserted the batteries the wrong way, fooled around trying to get them in the right way and, in the process, lost the contents of the Visor’s memory: addresses, datebook, to do list, notes, applications, everything.

It was my own damn fault, of course (although those +/- signs are awfully tiny!). However all was not lost (I thought): the CardAccess modem’s software gets re-installed automatically when you attach the modem, so I could just dial in to my Big PC at home and do a “network HotSync” (the Palm term for moving information back and forth between Big and Little computers). I would shortly be back in business.

Or so I thought.

Alas every time I went to do this, the Visor would crash with a weird “Line 2793: SerHwControl Error”. I called Handspring technical support and spoken to a confusing technician who informed me that such an error was not possible unless there had been a hardware failure (this sounded suspicious, esp. given that I could still use the modem to dial out to the Internet!). He went on to tell me that all I had to do was to return the unit to the place I bought it and a new one would be sent to me within 14 days.

Being as though I was in Bangor and all (to say nothing of the time limits involved), this wasn’t an attractive option. Unable to withstand any additional technical support frustrations, I returned the CardAccess modem to Staples, and then carefully packaged up the Visor and the Xircom modem. I returned them to Futureshop this afternoon upon my return to Charlottetown.

The moral of the story? It is possible to do real work, if slowing, over the Internet using a Handspring Visor. But if you slip, like I did, you can easily create a situation where you lose all of your data without a way of retrieving it, even over the wire.

I’m just glad I was in Bangor, and not in the middle of some European journey where getting back home to the Big PC I type this on would be a more difficult and costly proposition.

So I’m now searching for another more robust mobile solution. I really, really don’t want to lug around a big (or even a small) laptop — I don’t need to burn CDs and write novels, just check my email and surf the web. Suggestions welcome.

WVOM, the Voice Of Maine, is the radio station that most closely resembles that now defunct odd duck CKO. Fans of Canadian talk radio will recall that CKO was an all news radio network strung across the country in rag-tag fashion.

Like CKO, WVOM is a patchwork quilt of syndicated and local features — in the case of WVOM this means everything from the genial Bruce Williams to the strident pair of Rush Limbaugh and Dr. Laura to (and I’m not making this up) a show I heard tonight discussing the “Global Elite Information Control Complex.”

Apparently this group not only controls ABC News, Taco Bell and the minds of our children (which we already knew) but also is responsible for the Fallen Angels.

To learn more, drive to Maine and tune to 103.9FM.

Things I learned today:

• the AT&T Global Network has the best prices if you’re looking for occasional global dial-up Internet access
• the Japanese FM radio band uses different frequencies than we use in North America,
• rechargeable batteries (AA, AAA, C, D, etc.) are still hard to find, expensive and have chargers that are too big and cumbersome,
• per capita Subaru ownership in Maine far exceeds that of PEI,
• you can now buy bottled unsweetened iced tea in New England,
• if we are to believe the movie Pearl Harbor, WWII-era military Japan had much, much better aesthetics than the US: Armani-designed uniforms, cool battle planning bunkers with reflecting pools, etc.
• Irving Oil dominates the retail gasoline market in northern Maine.
• Xircom modems suck; CardAccess modems rock.

Spending the weekend in Bangor — my favourite city — and trying out life on the ‘net squeezed through a Handspring Visor.

The effect is like trying to run through a peat bog. But it works, and I was able to diagnose and solve a server problem using a Palm version of SSH. Nothing like using ‘vi’ on a tiny screen with Graffitti.

Off to see Pearl Harbor (leaving me last person on earth to do so?).

It’s almost 3 months to the day that Kevin O’Brien has graced the halls of the Internet with his daily commentary.

While Kevin’s musings are always good (if teeming) reading, they have, to this point, tended to be arms-length from his personal experiences. Which is not to say that they haven’t reflected and been informed by his personal experiences, just that he has tended to move back several layers of abstraction to paint with a broader brush.

Weblogs are most interesting, I think, when their creators manage to smash through this urge to paint broadly and to base comments on what’s happening in their own lives. This is a fine line, of course, and there is an equal and oppossite danger of weblogs becoming too self-reflective.

In any case, I was happy to read this piece from Kevin this morning. While I can’t say that I agree with the broad premise — It may be time to bust some heads… — I think it’s the most compelling thing that Kevin’s written yet.

Tell us more.

Having come very close to walking the line myself (while an apprentice compositor at a Thomson-era Peterborough Examiner and member of the Communications Workers of America), I know what a difficult decision it is to go on strike. Unions don’t strike on a whim; it is usually a result of breakdown in the collective bargaining process, and although it’s a tool in the union arsenal, it is seldom one used lightly.

So best wishes to my brothers and sisters from PSAC who are walking the line today up around the corner from us on Grafton St.

At a client meeting yesterday one of the items raised was the fact that users were typing in their telephone numbers incorrectly on various web forms. The forms are set up to require the user to enter numbers like 9028922556 — in other words, with no punctuation of any sort. Even though it says right there on the form that users are supposed to use this format, some users ignore this instruction and enter their phone number like (902) 892-2556.

The putative reason for the no-punctuation format was because this makes it easier for Adobe Acrobat to format the telephone numbers. In other words, we programmers were being lazy and forcing users to do the work that computers are supposed to do.

I shocked myself, during this discussion, by momentarily thinking “now, how can we force users to use the proper format?”. In other words, the programmer’s desire to be lazy, and hostile to users is very strong.

Thankfully cooler heads prevailed and we made the decision to let users enter telephone numbers in any old format they want.

This episode makes the recent move by Trent University (pimping for Bell Canada) to change their phone system conceivable.

Conceivable, but not forgivable.

The new, upgraded [sic] system does away with people at Trent having bona fide telephone numbers and forces everyone to call a central number and use a speech recognition system to get connected to their party.

In other words, in this case cooler heads did not prevail, and the result is a move from an easy, comfortable user interface (pick up phone, dial number) hostile user interface (dial central number, speak name to voice recognition system, confirm speech recognition).

While the new system has a temporary “gee-whiz” quality to it (hey, the computer understood me), once this wears off we are left with a system which sacrifices usability for showmanship, cost-saving and corporate philandering.

Grassy Hill Radio turned me on to Jonatha Brooke