Apple’s iPhone SDK Prohibits Real Mobile Innovation. I agree completely.

You may recall that when Kevin O’Brien and I talked about the sale of ISN to Eastlink back in January, Kevin suggested that ISN customers with “@isn.net” email addresses would be able to take them forward to Eastlink. I’ve talked with Kevin since, and he’s confirmed that this was his understanding at the time, based on conversations he’d had with Eastlink about this specific issue.

Over the years that ISN was an independent ISP, Kevin often needed to convince prospective customers that they weren’t taking a risk by moving to ISN, and one of the ways he did this was by reassuring them that, even if they left ISN, the company would forward their email for them. ISN didn’t have to do this — indeed locking customers into an email address is one of the tricks that many ISPs use to ensure they retain their customers. But Kevin’s sense of fairness trumped any business need to ensnare customers, and so the policy stood (I think if Kevin were writing this he might say something about “not wanting to have customers that didn’t want to be customers.”)

The sale to Eastlink went through, and the transition is now rolling out. And this week ISN customers got an email telling them, contrary to what they may have understood, their “@isn.net” email address is going to be deactivated and replaced with an “@eastlink.ca” address. As I understand it, the deadline for this is April 15, 2008.

There’s nothing on the new Eastlink-branded ISN home page about this.

This morning at the [[Charlottetown Farmer’s Market]] I had conversations with two vendors, both longtime customers of ISN, who were up in arms about what to do about being forced to change their longstanding email addresses; one of them was in a situation where his ISN email address is one of the cornerstones of his business, and is printed on brochures and business cards and has been widely distributed for a long, long time.

While it may be unreasonable to expect Eastlink to keep the ISN domain alive forever, expecting customers, many of whom have had an “@isn.net” email address for more than 10 years, to change their address with 30 days notice is simply bad customer service. There’s no technical reason they need to do this: while it would make their transition more difficult technically, keeping the isn.net domain alive to receive and forward email is an essentially simple technical exercise, and something that Eastlink should, if only as a matter of common courtesy and a gesture of goodwill to the ISN customers they’re adopting, proceed with.

If you’re a former customer of ISN, and it’s going to cause you problems to give up your email address with such short notice, here’s what I recommend you do:

1. Call Eastlink’s office in Charlottetown (367-2800) or Summerside (724-2800) and ask to speak to a Manager, and let them know that you think it’s unreasonable for them to ask you to change your email address with 30 days notice.
2. Send an email to Eastlink expressing your displeasure: Mike Corkum is their “Director of Consumer Sales.”

In either case, you can let Eastlink know that, if you’re going to have to change your email address anyway, you might as well consider changing your Internet provide to Aliant while you’re at it.

You may also want to start the process of getting your own domain name for your email just to ensure you don’t get stung this way again. I’ve had a few questions about the specifics of this process, and I’m considering offering a brief lunchtime seminar next week for those interested in seeing the process walked through and getting any questions answered face to face; let me know if you’d be interested in this.

I have every confidence that, if they hear loud and clear from ISN customers, Eastlink will come to their senses and realize this is bad customer service and not a way to treat the devoted customers they’re inheriting.

I’ve just booked a two-week trip to Copenhagen for the spring, in part for reboot, a conference that hasn’t yet even been formally announced (I’m hoping that my having committed to non-refundable air tickets will magically conjure reboot into being).

This year I am safe from the clutches of Air Canada, as I’m taking advantage of Icelandair’s flights from Halifax, which start up again this April. Total return fare, taxes in, from Halifax to Copenhagen, with a day in Reykjavik on the way back, was $933.

While making the booking I was presenting with this weird warning message, in blazing red:

NOTICE: You must type in your last name before your first name. If a name is spelled incorrectly, or the last name/first name format is reversed, do not hit the back button - you must start over! Either use the Start Over button at the bottom of this page or close the window and open a new one. If you hit the back button and change the names, the changes will not take and a correction fee of USD75 or equivalent will be charged. Name changes (i.e. Mary Smith to Cynthia Anderson, etc) are not permitted.

This seems like an obvious case of humans being slaves to the eccentricities of technology. We can make computers do anything we want; why not make them do sensible things, like allowing us to correct our mistakes?

Things have not started off well today.

It began at 3:00 a.m. when [[Oliver]] came into our room complaining that his feet hurt. He insisted that I turn the light on to look at them, and would take no “well, everyone’s feet hurt sometimes” explanations to get back to bed. Ultimately the issue was solved by the application of socks, which didn’t seem to make his feet stop hurting, but at least changed the subject for long enough to get him back to sleep. (Kelly reports that her daughter complained of hurting feet earlier this week too, and that other kids at her school had similar reports; perhaps there’s an childhood epidemic going on with this as a subtle symptom?).

The 3:00 a.m. wake up, combined with a late hour to bed the night before (damn you Lost) and the start of March Break meaning no pressure to get Oliver to school, left me sleeping in until 10:00 a.m.

Just before I headed off for coffee I checked my email on my iPod Touch, only to find that our mail server here at the office offline. Further investigation revealed that our server was dead in the water. And so I changed my vector to point to the office instead of [[Casa Mia]] and set out to find out what the problem was.

Into the server room, a quick reboot, and we seemed to be back in business. Then, 10 minutes later, everything went black again, and this time the server wouldn’t power back on.

It’s times like these when you wish you already had a strong coffee and a banana muffin in you. But I didn’t, and so was operating on fumes.

Thankfully, [[Computer Dynamics]], our local computer shop, and the source of the server itself four years ago, is just around the corner, and a quick phone call and they agreed to let me bring it in to see what was the matter.

So I lugged the machine over there (they are housed in the old movie theatre on Grafton Street, at the end of a rabbit warren’s worth of passageways) and dropped it off. They promised to phone my mobile when they had a diagnosis (the office phone system being offline as it too is run by the same server).

Over the [[Casa Mia]] where I was happened upon by Rob and then Sebastian and then Cynthia, thus providing me with enough entertainment and distraction to wait out the dark period.

An hour later and I called over to Computer Dynamics: dead power supply, it seems (first time for me in 25 years of PC ownership, which is not a bad batting average). Around the corner to pick it up ($65 for the power supply, $15 for the install, man am I ever happy to have these guys in my neighbourhood), lug it back to the office, and turn it on.

So at 2:00 p.m. the server came back to life, the email started to flow again, this website lit up, the phones were back in business, and all was right with the world.

I am the least spiritual person I know, and yet I am convinced that there are mischievous ripples moving through space that, if we live life Koyaanisqatsi style, conspire to fiddle with the knobs on the human operating system enough to shake us back to our senses.

Now, back to work.

Historic Places of Prince Edward Island is an interesting website that heretofore had escaped my gaze. Although I played no direct role in its creation at all, under the hood it’s using the code that drives the Province of PEI website, code that was once near and dear to my heart (no doubt it has has been significantly evolved and enhanced since my days). It’s intriguing to see the code extended to use in such a different visual environment.

I ended up there looking for information about Isaac Smith, who built our house at [[100 Prince Street]]. Turns out that he rates a page of his very own; it says, in part:

People with [Smith’s] skills were in short supply in the Island capital and this became more acute with the death in 1820 of John Plaw, another Englishman who had come to PEI and left his mark designing public buildings. Plaw’s courthouse/legislative building was standing proud in the centre of town on Queen Square. He had also drawn plans for a round market to be built next to it, but this was left undone at the time of his death. By 1823, Isaac and Henry Smith were given the task of completing Plaw’s market. They also were building private homes in the City, including one that still stands at 100 Prince Street (1827).

Interestingly, every Saturday morning [[Oliver]] and I eat our smoked salmon bagels at the modern [[Charlottetown Farmer’s Market]] with a painting of that selfsame round market hanging on the wall beside us. I’d no idea that the brothers Smith had played a role in its construction.

Another interesting Island heritage resource I’ve stumbled upon lately is Architectural Plans at the Public Archives and Records Office, an online exhibition of digitized architectural plans.

Included in the set are Smith’s 1856 plans for Government House and a set of drawings for Province House.

When in doubt, ask the wise all-knowing readership: where did Milton Acorn go to elementary school? Please add a comment if you know. Or know who might know.

Lori Joy Smith and Paul Lopes and their daughter moved from Vancouver to Charlottetown. Seemingly just because. When we in the intelligentsia have our secret meetings to talking about building out the creative class in Charlottetown, I think this is what we have in mind. Neato.

When I got home from work today there was a voicemail from Eastlink, our phone, cable and Internet provider, asking us to call their Accounts Receivable department. So I got on the phone and talked to an agent who ultimately had no idea why they’d called originally, and suggested that I was the victim of their system placing random calls to innocent customers.

When I got off the phone I went to use the Internet, and found that we had no service. I did the usual checks of the wifi access points and the cable-modem, but nothing jumped out at me. Later in the evening I phoned technical support, explained the mysterious call earlier in the day, and was assured that there was no problem with my account. They asked me to call back when I could be in front of the cable-modem.

So, just now, I trudged back down to the basement, got tech support on the horn again, talked to a different (and very helpful) chap who told me that my “modem had been deactivated” on their end. He put me on hold for 5 minutes and came back on the line to explain what had happened.

When our ISN service was switched over to Eastlink service last week we ended up with the original ISN-provided cable-modem when Eastlink replaced it with their own. The installer made mention of the fact that we should return it to ISN, and told us to call them to find out where. So a few days later I called ISN and was told that I had to return it to the Charlottetown Mall Eastlink kiosk.

As I’m not in the habit of going to the Charlottetown Mall every day, nor indeed am I regularly in its neighbourhood, I put the cable-modem on the dining room table with plans to take it out there this weekend.

Apparently this wasn’t soon enough for Eastlink: they decided to punish me for my tardiness by cutting off my Internet service. Without warning. They then made matters worse but bungling the follow up.

I knew that the halcyon days of ISN customer service were gone, I just didn’t realize how quickly and arbitrarily the faceless corporateness of Eastlink would manifest itself.

Sigh. I’ve been a Eastlink customer for more than 7 years, and an ISN customer for more than 10 years. It’s not like I’m selling my second cable-modem on eBay and making off with the proceeds. I can understand cutting off service after, say 60 days and a few phone calls. But after 8 days? 17 years of customer goodwill eroded seriously by a single careless act.

I got another “I’ve switched Internet providers so here’s my new address” email from a friend today. I get several of them every month.

Which prompts me to make a very basic suggestion: I recommend that everyone register their own domain name and use that domain to receive their email. When you do this — and it’s really very simple — then you’re no longer tied to a particular Internet provider or web mail service, freeing you to decide the best way of receiving your Internet and decoupling your Internet service from your email.

Now this used to be something that was very complicated: drenched with arcane rules, complex to set up, and really only possible if you had your own hardware and dedicated Internet connection.

This is no longer the case: it’s now possible to get up and running in minutes.

Here’s what you need to do.

First, go to a “domain name registrar” website — we use both Webnames.ca and GoDaddy.com — and use the prominently-placed domain search box you’ll almost certainly find there to search for possible domains to register. You’ll likely find that almost any common name is already taken, so you have to be creative: if “johnsmith.com” doesn’t work, try “johnsmithrocks.com”.

Once you find a domain that’s available, proceed with the registration and watch out for a feature called, variously, “email forwarding” or “email channeling” and make sure you opt for it (it’s usually free, at least for the first email address associated with your new domain).

Proceed through the purchase process (this is where you’ll find the biggest difference between Webnames.ca, which is more expensive but less drenched in confusing up-sell messages, and GoDaddy.com, which is much cheaper, but mind-numbingly overwhelmed with “hey, why not add this special domain security protection deactivation feature” offers). You’ll have to spend anywhere from $1.99 to $35 a year for the registration depending on where you do the deal; ask your geeky friend who they deal with if you need advice.

Once your domain name is registered you’ll have access to some sort of “domain configuration tool” that will let you set up email forwarding. The idea here is that you’re going to set up your permanent, this-will-never-change email address — say “jorge@johnsmithrocks.com” — to forward any email that’s sent to that email address somewhere else. That somewhere else can be any of:

• The email address that comes with your Internet service — jorge@pei.sympatico.ca, jorge@eastlink.ca, whatever, or
• A free webmail account, like the ones you can set up at Yahoo, GMail, Hotmail, etc., or
• Your work email address.

So, in other words, you’re not setting up a “new place to get your email” — that can stay the same as what you’re using right now — you’re setting up a new way for people to email you there. So you can still login to Yahoo, let’s say, and use your “BarvoBlox23@yahoo.com” address like you always have, but you can give out your cool new “doug@barvoblox.com” address to your friends, and set that address up to simply forward your email onto Yahoo.

They key here is that you can always change where your email gets forwarded by going back to the place you registered the domain and pointing your email elsewhere.

So if Yahoo gets purchased by Microsoft and you don’t like their new privacy policy, you can get a Gmail account, and just point your permanent, this-will-never-change email at your personal domain at your new account. That’s all you’ll need to do, and you don’t have to tell anyone that you’ve done it.

Remember psychogeography, the discipline I’m apparently now a practitioner of? Well now we have agroecology:

…the integrative study of the ecology of the entire food system, encompassing ecological, economic and social dimensions. This definition will lead to a practical approach that encourages researcher, educator, and student to embrace the wholeness and connectivity of systems, and will stimulate a focus on uniqueness of each place, and solutions appropriate to its resources and constraints. The definition expands our thinking beyond production practices and immediate environmental impacts at the field and farm level.

I find it fascinating that the reaction to the intellectual confinement of existing disciplines — “ecology” and “agriculture” or “psychology” and “geography” — is to create new disciplines rather than going all the way and abandoning the walls of disciplines altogether.

I suppose I’m advocating for a “just hang out and do shit” approach that might work extremely well only for obsessive generalists like me; perhaps this new middle ground is required for those uncomfortable with simply knowing a very thin slice about everything, but with a desire to build bridges between existing intellectual towers.

But I also wonder if the desire to name and formalize these new mashups is fed by a need to coddle funders, facilitate business cards and to provide an answer to the “so, what do you do” question. “I’m an Integrative Contemporary Agroecologist” sounds a lot more credible as an answer than “well, I hang around and do interesting shit.”