There has been much hand wringing this week here in Canada over the decision by the CRTC that allows large network operators to charge their wholesale customers – generally smaller Internet service providers – using a “usage-based billing” model. What this means, in simple terms, is that wholesalers who’ve been paying companies like Bell Canada for unlimited access to an Internet “pipe” of a certain diameter are now going to also be billed for how much data “flows through the pipe.”

It’s a move similar to that being implemented by the City of Charlottetown’s water utility, moving residential customers from a flat-free billing, where we pay a fixed amount and can use all the water that we like, to water-meter-regulated billing, where we pay for what we use.

Much of the hand-wringing this week – take this rant by George Stroumboulopoulos – is simple-minded and makes it appear that the CRTC decision is much broader than it actually is.

But usage-based billing isn’t something new, and usage-based billing by the large networks to their retail customers is not only not new, but it’s also something that the CRTC doesn’t regulate: “The Commission notes that carriers’ retail UBB rates are market-based and are not subject to prior Commission approval – that is, they are forborne from regulation.” writes the CRTC in its decision. The decision only applies to wholesale customers, and so while consumers will be affected, it’s only consumers of smaller independent ISPs that will be affected directly.

While I’m the first to admit that using the Internet with a meter is a completely different experience than using a free and unlimited Internet – I still have visceral unpleasant memories of using dial-up when I was paying “by the minute” – I strongly believe that we have only ourselves to blame for the situation we’ve now found ourselves in.

We didn’t have to end up with an Internet controlled by a few large companies: the Internet is designed to be a cooperative, decentralized network, and if we (the people) had been more active and alert in the 1990s as our Internet access future was being plotted, we would have advocated for a cooperative, decentralized Internet – we would have built our own Internet, in other words – rather than lazily outsourcing the task to the incumbent telecommunications companies.

Where we ended up instead is with an Internet not unlike the telephone and cable television systems that preceded it, with not only the billing and the usage rules beyond our control, but the very nature of the network itself.

Back in the early 1990s, when the Internet was ours to build, those of us in the thick of it had to become versed in routers and switches and bare copper circuits and the mystical incantations of TCP/IP. Much of that knowledge has died on the vine in the intervening years, and we’re now all content to simply plug in an Ethernet cable to a port controlled by an opaque third party that handles all the messy bits.

Metered Internet isn’t good Internet, and I’m as concerned as the next guy about how this trend is going to affect how we all use the network.

But those who are protesting the CRTC’s decision, like those behind SaveOurNet.ca, appear to want the private-sector companies that control the network to operate on some loftier public-minded plane, and that seems completely unreasonable. Large network operators should be able to charge as much or as little as they like for their services, using whatever billing mechanism they want.  If Eastlink decides that it wants to charge me $5 more to watch a movie on streamed Netflix, why shouldn’t it be able to do that? Companies are supposed to be greedy: that’s their mandate.

The answer to this quandary lies not in regulating the private sector Internet, but rather to realize that ultimately the only way the Internet is going to be a truly revolutionary force is if we rebuild it as non-profit public infrastructure, free from market forces. There’s no technical reason that we can’t have unlimited, unmetered Internet running into every home in the country; to get there, though, we’re going to have to do it ourselves, and not gripe endlessly when private companies, well, behave like private companies.

I know, I know, I promised to stop it with the business cards, calling cards and other letterpress personal ephemera. But I decided I needed to put the Reinvented logo engraving to a practical use. And I also needed to start printing again, lest I forget how. So I whipped up this card, printed on several colours of pre-cut business card blanks from Paper Source in Cambridge.

Regular readers may recall the annual photo-with-the-Premier that’s been taken since 2004 at the Premier’s Levee at the Confederation Centre of the Arts on New Year’s Day. Well, the 2011 photo arrived last week, and I’m happy to say the it’s my least-dorky-looking yet:

I think you’ll agree that I got my colour coordination perfect this year (in last year’s photo I was wearing way, way too much red)  I’m even wearing and Island Tartan tie.

For the first time this year we took [[Oliver]] to the levee – just the Premier’s, for a start; he’s too young to be exposed to the Masons and the Bishop – and so here’s the first in his own series of photos-with-the-Premier:

It’s a pretty good start – compared to my high level of dorkitude on my first go especially – and I think you could make the case that his colour coordination hit an even higher level than mine. Just got to work on the “when you shake hands with someone, look them in the eye” technique and he’ll be set. But he’s got the stance down.

It was a nice touch that the Premier’s Office sent Oliver his photo in his own envelope (the office amazes me every year in its ability to figure out where to mail these photos; I don’t believe I’ve ever given them our address).

For a long time I’d end up in a different “spare” office at [[Yankee]] every time I visited, but for the last couple of years I’ve settled nicely into the “crow’s nest” office high atop the Sagendorph Building on the Yankee campus: it’s the little extension on the 3rd floor that you can see to the right of the chimney in this photo:

Inside, the office looks like this:

The office plays double role as a meeting room for the web team, so I never have to leave the office to go to meetings. It has the benefit of being near everyone, having a nice big table (Yankee, true to its corporate ethos, makes its own tables), has a monitor already available, has a pleasant view of central Dublin, NH, and has all the electricity and wifi I need. The only downsides to the office are the variable temperature – sometimes stiflingly hot, sometimes chilly – and the occasional emergence of cluster flies if I happen to time my visit to their dehibernation schedule.

Upside: it’s nice that Charlottetown’s newest pedestrian signals talk to you; much better usability than the anonymous bleeps and bloops and other “accessible” signals have, it would seem. Downside: all the signalization in the world won’t keep you from getting run over by a quarter ton truck that chooses to ignore the signals.

About five years ago [[Catherine]] bought me an L.L. Bean winter jacket for Christmas, an olive green (officially “dill”) Gore-Tex shell with a warm removable lining and a pleasant array of zippered pockets. Warm enough for the coldest Prince Edward Island cold, I wore it faithfully from late fall to late spring every year. It was a good coat.

Except that the zipper never worked: some small defect at the bottom of the zipper prevented it from fully “meshing,” and so, unless I zipped the jacket up carefully and with some degree of magic finesse, I would often find myself with a jacket unzipping from the bottom on my way out the door.

I liked the jacket so much, though – and had nothing to replace it with – that I just put up with this problem and continued to wear the jacket year after year.

Until last Friday.

I found myself sitting on the on-ramp to Route 128 North in Burlington, MA faced with stop-and-go traffic all the way to Boston when I remembered that there’s an L.L. Bean store south of the highway in the Wayside Commons. I pulled off the highway to wait out the traffic and went jacket shopping.

I tried on a lot of jackets, including one, the Weather Challenger, that was very close to my old jacket, but I ultimately settled on the Bigelow model, a little less “outdoorsy” looking than my old jacket and with a better fit. And a much, much better zipper system.

Up at the cash register I noticed the “100% satisfaction” guarantee displayed prominently, and so I told the cashier the tale of my zipper. I was honest about my situation: I loved the jacket, had been wearing it for many years, and would have happily kept wearing the jacket should the zipper have worked. I showed her how the zipper unzipped itself. I told her that I wasn’t 100% satisfied, but I was certainly, say, 85% satisfied. I would have been happy if she’d knocked $25 off the cost of the new jacket.

But before I really knew what was happening, she’d accepted my old jacket as a “return,” looked up it’s original retail price, refunded me the entire amount, processed the sale of the new jacket, and handed me the new jacket along with a gift card for the difference owing me because the new jacket was less expensive and on sale.

So I walked out the door with a brand new jacket with a working zipper and an $86 gift card.

That is amazing customer service, a true implementation of “100% satisfaction,” and L.L. Bean deserves to be commended for standing behind its products and its guarantee.

I’m just back from a week on the road, one of my quarterly visits to my colleagues at [[Yankee]]. Here are some notes from the road, in reverse chronological order:

1. Flying out of Boston’s Logan Airport on Air Canada Jazz through Terminal B means that you’ll be passing through a security line that serves only 3 gates; as such it is never busy, and so, unlike other flights you might take out of Logan, you can show up for Air Canada flights a lot later. I left my hotel downtown at 9:00 a.m. for an 11:00 a.m. flight and had 60 minutes to kill at the airport once I got through security.
2. If you’re looking for “facial tissues” in a U.S. drug store, don’t look in the “paper products” section, look in the “medical things” section. Apparently Americans consider Kleenex to be a medical device, not a paper towel offshoot.
3. If you’re in North Boston shopping for coffee beans at Polcari’s – and, let’s face it, you really should be if you’re in Boston – don’t be off put if you show up at 8:30 a.m. on a Saturday and they’re not open, even though the sign in the window says they should be. Just walk up Salem Street a few doors to Boston Common Coffee Company and have a snack and coffee and come back around 9:00 a.m. and Polcari’s will be open.
4. The AMC Loews Boston Common is a great place to watch movies when you’re staying in central Boston – indeed it’s really the only movie theatre downtown. With 19 screens, there’s always something on, and it runs shows from late morning until after 10:00 p.m. I saw Blue Valentine (stunning tour de force) and Black Swan (over-rated shlock). The theatre is a 15 minute walk from almost anywhere in central Boston, so if you’re staying in a hotel in the Back Bay, Quincy Market or Fort Point Channel area, you can be there on the spur of the moment.
5. As a rule I do not eat hamburgers, but UBURGER, just up the street from the Loews, makes very good burgers, and it’s open until 11:00 p.m. I became particularly fond of the Boom Burger: chipotle sauce, cheddar cheese, lettuce, tomatoes and fried jalepenos.
6. I stayed at the Parker House hotel – $95 on Priceline – and, to my surprise, really really enjoyed it. It’s a grand hotel, but not too grand to feel comfortable in. My queen-size bed was very comfortable, and the room was well-appointed and clean. Close to everything, including transit (Government Center and Park Street T stops are both only a couple of blocks away).
7. I spent an hour in the Bob Slate store at Porter Square. It’s a stationery store without peer, and I found paper and pens there that I’ve not seen anywhere else, along with very helpful staff. If you’re a stationery junkie like me Bob Slate is a must-visit in Boston; two stores at Harvard Square along with the one I visited at Porter Square.
8. Down Massachusetts Avenue from Bob Slate at Porter Square is Abodeon, one of my favourite stores anywhere. They sell a combination of new and “vintage” well-designed items, everything from 1950 rosewood bottle openers from Denmark to business card holders from Italy made from reconstituted leather mixed with rubber (yes, I bought one of each). It’s easy to spend an hour browsing there, and very hard to walk away without buying something.
9. Also at Porter Square and interesting: Ward Maps, which sells antique and contemporary maps, specializing in public transit maps; Greenward, selling “eco” things, from bamboo forks to reusable mesh fruit and vegetable bags; Paper Source, which sells paper, rubber stamps and novelties (it’s not quite as much a wonderland as you think it will be, but it’s still worth a visit); and, especially, an interesting collection of small Asian food stalls inside the old Sears store that’s now home to Lesley University.
10. If you’re traveling down Route 3 from New Hampshire to get on 128 North up to Rte. 93 south to get into Boston around supper time and find yourself stuck in traffic, or facing the prospect of getting stuck in traffic, there’s lots to see and do in Burlington, MA: the Burlington Mall has an interesting collection of higher-ends shops (Apple Store, Nordstrom, etc.) and, across the highway and one exit closer (Cambridge Street) to Boston there’s an L.L. Bean and a Border’s on Wayside. Wait out the traffic for 60 minutes and you’ll be rewarded with smooth sailing all the way into the city.
11. The Courtyard by Marriott hotel in downtown Keene, just a year old, is almost perfect in every way: modern, clean, well-appointed, free parking, free wifi, a 5 minute walk to good coffee. I didn’t relish the daily 30 minute drive from Keene to Dublin, and I did miss the personality of the Jack Daniels Motor Inn in Peterborough, but I’m almost certain to stay there again.
12. I’ve been eating at ChiangMai Restaurant, on 101 just west of Nashua, NH, for a long time, and it just gets better and better; I recommend it for great Thai food if you’re in the area.

Oliver and I came up with the following “Guidelines for Chatting” together, after encountering some challenges; they’ve worked well.

1. Do not type “hello hello hello hello.” Once is enough.
2. Be patient.
3. Type interesting things, not nonsense.
4. Read carefully what the other person types.
5. Don’t chat to people during inconvenient times (too early, too late, during work, etc.) Remember the time zones.
6. Be respectful of other people: if they are too busy to chat, don’t get angry or frustrated. This might be hard, but it’s important.
7. Don’t chat to people just because you are bored. Make sure you have something to communicate about. Or, find something else to do.
8. Don’t chat to one person too much: remember that people’s time is valuable.
9. Sometimes email is better than chat: if you email, people can answer when they have the time, even if they are busy right now.
10. You could try scheduling a chat with someone by email first: suggest a good time and ask them if they are available then.
11. No strangers.

Oliver has dedicated, international collection of iChat/Skype friends, and it’s an important part of his life. Becoming one of the group, as any will attest, requires patience and commitment, and for that generosity we are truly grateful.

Sometimes you come across a book shop that seems, somehow, to exist in a parallel universe, with an entirely different set of books, organized in some novel way, and with a variety that makes book megashops like Indigo and Borders seem like Walmart.

The Globe Corner Bookstore in Boston has a selection of travel books and maps the likes of which I’ve never encountered elsewhere (well, except for the The Travel Bookshop in Notting Hill, which has the added advantage of star power). The Highway Book Shop in Cobalt, Ontario is, at least in my childhood memories, like a book-lover’s paradisal airplane hanger. New England Mobile Book Fair near Boston has a section where the books are organized by publisher, which, at least for certain publishers, is very, very useful.

My favourite book store, though, is Toadstool Books. They have an outlet in Peterborough, NH and another larger one in Keene, NH up the highway, and I’ve spent a lot of time over the years browsing through both. I find books there that I don’t see elsewhere: they have depth in travel literature, art and design, transportation and a children’s section, especially in Keene, that boggles the mind (they have a section of “books about horses” for kids).

I dropped by Toadstool on Tuesday night – I’m here in southern New Hampshire visiting my colleagues at [[Yankee]] for a week – and spent ninety minutes, yet again amazed at what I found. Fifty dollars later I emerged with everything from the Moon Handbook to Croatia and Slovenia to Ed Emberley’s Make a World Drawing Book. I could have easily spent twice has much had I the space in my luggage for a book about hand-drawn maps or a book about a Paris café or a book about how to make pop-up books.

Alas the store was deserted: I was the only customer inside its rambling expanse for most of my visit, and I heard the staff lamenting the arrival, in recent years, of Borders out on the edge of town and the continual chipping away of the book trade by Amazon.com.

Which is a shame: Toadstool doesn’t have every book ever printed, and it doesn’t have a Starbucks, but what it does have is a carefully curated collection of books that, together, are unique.  I hope it survives.

Skype chatting to [[Oliver]] later this afternoon about problems he’s having with the “three times table.”

Me: What do you think could make it easier to figure out the times tables?

Oliver: A pencil that has a memory.

I have a brilliant son.