The broadminded team at the Office of Research Development at the University of PEI are spearheading an effort this winter to get researchers out of the lab and into the public sphere.

As I’ve long lamented the “never venture south of Belvedere Avenue” nature of the institution, that they decided to hold this event at Mavor’s, deep in the heart of civilian Charlottetown, is an excellent development. And so even though the subject matter of the first session – “new atheism” – isn’t exactly my cup of tea, I decided to take one for the team and show my support.

As it turned out, “new atheism” turned out to be rather interesting (I wasn’t won over to the dark side, but Dr. Joe Velaidum is nonetheless a pretty good spokesmodel for faith). And that there was a healthy, diverse crowd of more than 50 people was quite heartening to see.

Of course you might argue (and I did) that moving from the Faculty Lounge down to Mavor’s is simply trading one effete enclave for another. But you gotta start somewhere, I suppose. Things will really start to get exciting, though, when the talks move out into the small halls and the regular everyday folks start showing up.

In the meantime, there were more than just the usual seminar-going-suspects in attendance last night, and I got to meet some interesting people and hear some interesting ideas batted around.

Things fire up again in the new year:

• Monday, January 11 at 7:00 p.m. - “Package Deals: Exploring the History of Tourism on PEI” with Dr. Ed MacDonald. (I heard someone refer to this as “talking about them after they’ve left,” which I think would make a much better title).
• Tuesday, February 9 at 7:00 p.m. - “Relationships, Trust and Revenge” with Dr. Stacey L. MacKinnon.

Both will also be at Mavor’s, and events are scheduled for March and April too, with speakers to be announced.

Back in June when we were living in Malmö, Sweden for two weeks, Catherine and I had the pleasure of being shown around Forskningsavdelningen – Swedish for “Research Department” – an urban “hacker space” that our friend [[Olle]] is a member of. Located inside a larger facility called Utkanten – “an open space for a broad specter of alternative cultural, social and political activities” – Forskningsavdelningen is a group of people interesting in machines, technologies, and society. And so touring around their space you come across everything from old PCs taken apart to copies of the Whole Earth Catalog.

As related here, this past Saturday Utkanten was raided by the police:

At 20.45 on Saturday the 28th of November the police raided the social centre Utkanten in Malmö, where the hackerspace Forskningsavdelningen is housed. Twenty officers in full riot gear and ski masks broke into the space through the entrance and a backdoor, using crowbars. Shortly thereafter twenty to thirty more showed up, mostly dressed as civilians and some of them IT technicians from Länskriminalen (county police), who are suspected to be interested in the hackerspace. They stayed in the building for about six hours.

Although their nominal reason for the raid was to investigate an alcohol violation – there was a punk concert happening in another part of Utkanten at the time – they quickly expanded the breadth of their raid to include Forskningsavdelningen, and walked away with a good chunk of the group’s kit: PCs, wireless routers, a digital camera and even 5 bottles of rum and a pocket calculator.

Why should you care about this?

Raiding Forskningsavdelningen is tantamount to raiding a public library and carrying off the books on suspicion that they might be used for nefarious purposes. While the space may look rough around the edges and somewhat sketchy and un-public-library-like, at its heart Forskningsavdelningen is about people educating themselves and each other about technology, a mission it shares in common with libraries, schools, universities.  And with me.

Raiding Forskningsavdelningen is an affront to our right (and responsibility) in a free society to understand and interpret the world around us.

And that’s something we should all take seriously: right now it’s the rum-swilling Swedish hackers in the anarchist space that get raided; how long before the police come knocking at my door because of my map-mashing, corporate database-hacking, rabble-rousing?

Forskningsavdelningen is looking for donations to help them replace the stolen equipment; I’ve just donated and I encourage you to.

Annie B. Copps is one of the great talents at Yankee Publishing, and her new Annie Cooks series of videos is particularly good. In the most recent episode she shows how to make Potato Bread from leftover Thanksgiving mashed potatoes:

Disclaimer: Yankee Publishing is a client of Reinvented Inc. But this is an unpaid endorsement: I really do like Annie’s videos.

Just over a year ago I released the Charlottetown Bus Schedule by Telephone service, a hack that combined the data from the Charlottetown Bus Schedule with some Asterisk magic and a spare voice-over-IP telephone number to make schedule information for the main University Avenue bus line in Charlottetown available over the telephone at (902) 367-3694.

Like the work I’d done earlier with wrapping maps and mobile apps around bus schedule information, I did this as a free public-service project: I want more people to use the bus, and if it’s in my power to give them information to help them do this, I have an obligation to do so, I reasoned.

Five months later I received the delightful surprise of seeing one of the buses that serves the route re-branded as The Talking Bus, making about as obvious and powerful an advertisement for the telephone service as I could imagine.

The telephone information service has been running for a year now. Here’s a summary of the results so far (information that’s always been available, day by day, over here):

• 2,278 calls have been received in total, or 6 a day on average.
• On the busiest days, October 27, 2009 and September 14, 2009, 26 calls were received.
• There was at least one call received on 334 of 371 days the service has been operating.
• Calls have been received from 651 distinct telephone numbers.
• Almost all of the calls were from area code 902 (Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island), with a smattering from Alberta, Ontario and other places.
• Almost 75% of calls came from mobile phones (exchanges 314, 940, 218, 626, and 393).
• The popularity of the stops for which specific schedule information was requested:
  1. UPEI Student Centre
  2. Confederation Centre
  3. Charlottetown Mall
  4. Atlantic Superstore
  5. Sea Treat Restaurant
  6. Wal-Mart/Old Navy
  7. Royal Bank/Coop
  8. Atlantic Technology Centre
  9. Sobeys/Farm Centre
• The most popular time to call was between 4:00 p.m. and 5:00 p.m. 10% of calls were received during that hour.

The operating cost for the service, which I pay from Reinvented’s pocket, is $3.00/month for the 367-3694 telephone line and $20/month for a share of the digital phone line running into the server room here, for a total of $276/year.  Or about 12 cents per call processed.

By contrast to all of this, the telephone service’s older web-based cousin, TheBus.ca, received 15,381 unique visitors during the same 12-month period.

All in all I think it’s been a successful project, and one that’s worth continuing.  As always, I welcome suggestions for improvements.

I’ve been a “pay as you go” customer of Rogers for a number of years; I use my own devices, don’t actually use my “phone” as phone very much, and I’m uncomfortable with the notion of being locked into a long-term contract.

Generally this works very well; the one place it breaks down is with data, where Rogers has always billed an exorbitant 5 cents/KB data rate. This means that simple things like checking my email can easily cost me $10. Suffice to say, I almost never use my phone on Rogers’ data network.

Which I why I looked forward with much anticipation to the announcement a few months ago that Rogers would be switching to an “all you can eat” daily method for data billing. 

Sure enough, I looked at their website this morning and, hidden in tiny type down at the bottom of the “Mobile Browsing” (big red arrow mine) section I found the text “Effective November 23, 2009 the pay-per-use rate for mobile browsing will be $1/day (24 hrs) for unlimited browsing”:

Just to be sure that this “unlimited browsing” was actually that, and not a hobbled “unlimited browsing of Yahoo Internet Life”-style browsing, I waded through the long Rogers customer support telephone tree until I got to talk to a real person.

I explained that I was using an unlocked Nokia N95, and that I wanted to ensure that the rate for any data usage – checking email, browsing the web, using SSH, whatever – was $1/day, unlimited.

They told me that because I was using a “smart phone,” this isn’t, in fact, the case, and that if my device was detected by their network as a “smart phone” I would be billed at $2.99/day for up to 20MB of data usage.

Setting aside the inane distinctions of “smart” vs. “dumb” phones, I decided that $2.99/day was better than 5 cents/KB and launched a little test.

I fired up my browser, selected the “Rogers Internet” access point, and used some data: checked my email, browsed the web, launched Google Maps.  I then logged in to Rogers’ billing page to verify that I’d been billed $2.99.  I had not:

Instead of the promised $2.99, I was billed $5.00 for 100KB of data use.  Or the ye olde 5 cents/KB.

Another call, another representative. 

“When you were asked to agree to the $1.00/day ‘day pass’ charge, did you agree?” she asked me. 

I told here I’d never seen a request to agree to a day pass: I just connected to the web and started browsing.  This confused her, but she admitted that they “just been trained” in this new system.

A little more research and the answer emerged: apparently Rogers considers me to have a “grey market” phone, and so my rate for “unlimited on-device mobile browsing” isn’t $1/day, isn’t $2.99/day but is, rather, $4.99/day. It’s not clear whether this includes a 20MB cap or not.

The reason I was billed for “100KB of usage,” apparently, is that the kludge they use for the new “unlimited” method for billing is to use the old 5 cents/KB system with a made-up amount of data usage.

Now in a pinch $4.99/day is still better than 5 cents/KB.

But Rogers makes has no information at all about the various “tiers” of their new prepaid billing model. 

Add that to their artificial classification of my phone as “grey market” because I didn’t buy it from them, and their attempt to manage the Internet on their own terms by classifying phones that aren’t locked down with hobbled pseudo-Internet applications as “smart phones” and billing more for them, and Rogers hasn’t done a lot to win my business today.

I’d consider switching to Telus or Bell now that they have a network that I can use my GSM phone on, but after spending some time looking for the equivalent information about their data plans on their websites, I’m not convinced they had a substantially better conception of the universe than Rogers does.  Witness this online chat with a Bell.ca salesperson (initiated by them in a pop-up window when I went to browse their pre-paid rates page):

Bell didn’t exactly swoop in with a customer service save here.  Add that to the fact that the information I was given here contradicts information I was given over the phone a few weeks ago (where I was told that I can just buy a pre-paid SIM from Bell), and I’m thinking I’ll stay with the devil I know.

Term of the day: scare quotes.

1. Café So-Ban, in the food court of the Charlottetown Mall, seems to be under new management; the food is still good, though, and they seem to have expanded the menu.  Don’t let the “food court” location put you off: they make their food fresh to order, and Café So-Ban has absolutely nothing in common with big-city MSG-laden Asian food court glop.  I especially recommend their dumplings, their sushi, and their shrimp teriyaki.  They’re open from 11:30 a.m. to 7:30 p.m. daily.
2. There’s a kind of “to go” sandwich in the cooler at Leonhard’s Bakery and Café on University Avenue: focaccia with feta cheese. I had it for the first time today, and it’s very good; the focaccia is pleasantly un-cardboard-like.
3. I’m always surprised by how many people don’t know about Monsoon, the sushi place on University Avenue across from the Atlantic Technology Centre, despite the fact that they’ve been open for many years now. They’re open only for lunch, but you can eat in or take out a nice array of made-to-order sushi, with options running the gamut from vegetable-only things like carrot rolls to full-on BBQ eel rolls. They make a very nice miso soup too.  And Ruth, behind the counter, is the nicest person you’ll ever buy sushi from.

There is a man I know only from his slipper-selling-stand at the Charlottetown Farmer’s Market. I don’t know his name, or what he does other than make very nice slippers, and so in my heard I think of him as Mr. Tumnus, only because he bears a passing resemblance to, well, Mr. Tumnus.

Yesterday afternoon [[Oliver]] and I dropped by the Confederation Centre Art Gallery to see the new shows and, while we browsing the Walter Tandy Murch exhibition, Mr. Tumnus suddenly appeared, as if by magic, and started to play  hauntingly beautiful music on the grand piano.

That this music was exactly the same kind of music you’d think Mr. Tumnus himself would play our local slipper-making Mr. Tumnus did nothing to dispell his unearthy reputation.

I surreptitiously grabbed a snippet of the piano playing on my phone; it doesn’t really do justice to the experience, but it will give you a taste.