Okay, so I’ve managed, through the process of trial and error, to figure out how much [[Rogers Wireless]] charges for data access with a “Pay As You Go” account.

There is an air of confusion over the entire issue because their rates page says only that they charge 2 cents per page for “Surfing on your mobile Internet browser.” They don’t list any rates for data that isn’t “surfing” and therefor doesn’t involve “pages.”

To deduce what they do charge, then, I did a test with my [[Nokia N70]], which has a byte counter (look under Log \| Packet Data) and an IMAP client. I reset the counters, checked my account balance on the Rogers website, checked my email, noted the total of the “data sent” and “data received” counters, and then checked my account balance again.

Total data transferred during the IMAP mail check was 9.92kb, or 10158 bytes. Total charge was 50 cents. So it looks like the data charge is 5 cents per kilobyte.

This is tantamount to “so expensive as to be completely useless.” To give you an idea of how expensive: uploading this photo would have cost me $6.60 and downloading today’s episode of the Daily Source Code would cost $2856.

It turns out that, buried deep within their website Rogers does, indeed, reveal this rate:

Data usage with data devices or integrated phone and data devices on Pay As You Go service will be charged at 5 cents / kb. A minimum account balance of $5.00 is required to access the navigate mobile Internet. Balance is held for the duration of the navigate session and credited back to the Pay As You Go account at the end of the browsing session.

Things get somewhat cheaper if you’re not a “Pay As You Go” customer — Rogers’ consumer plans include one that provide 1MB of data transfer for $7/month, or 0.7 cents per kilobyte, with a 2 cents/kb rate over the 1MB amount. That would lower my Daily Source Code download to the $1000 range.

Obviously Rogers is positioning wireless data as a tool for millionaires and insane people.

Unable to handle the constant chiding about the fuzzy little photos coming out of my T610, I’ve upgraded to a Nokia N70. Here’s the first photo:

If you’re a Rogers “Pay As You Go” wireless customer, you may have found yourself perplexed when attempted to contact a human being about your account. If you call the main customer service number for Rogers, they tell you that they can’t help you. If you call the number for “Pay As You Go” customer service, you appear only to be able to talk to a robot.

It seems, however, that you can punch through to a human being by saying “other options” when you’re asked what you want to do. Then you have to say “how to contact Rogers” and listen to a long spiel that includes the fax number, mailing address and website; only at the end of the spiel can you respond with “Yes” that you have “an urgent issue” that requires talking to a real person.

Back on Island soil just before supper today after a quick jet flight from Montreal. I finally figured out why sometimes it feels like teleportation getting to or from Montreal and sometimes it feels like molasses: the jet takes an hour and half while the old Dash 8s take an hour longer.

The approach into the Charlottetown Airport on this sunny day was stunning, and all the first-timers were agog, finding the aerial beauty of PEI awe-inspiring. Which it is, of course. The approach took us right over the bridge, over Hunter River almost to the north shore, and then around over Brackley Beach and down along the Brackley Point Road into the airport.

The primary obstacle to my grand “work anywhere” plan is turning out to be ergonomics: here in the office I’ve got an adjustable desk adjusted to the perfect height for my aging wrists; out there in the real world most typing surfaces are too high by about 5 inches, and I’m forever trying to rig up chairs with multiple pillows and towers of old Yellow Pages to craft a reasonable facsimile of a good workstation. It never works, and my productivity goes into a hole. I’ve got to figure this one out — perhaps some sort of folding desk that fits in a suitcase?

Working anywhere was one of my themes with [[Bill]] and [[Laurence]] during our day together on Tuesday: their artistic itinerance sees them often setting up in strange places for weeks at a time, and they need an efficient way of creating an “office in a box” that will let them bring email, phone, and fax with them. We’re hatching some interesting plans to this end, and the acid test will come in July when they’re in Cow Head, Newfoundland for a month.

[[Steve]] and I had a good time last night and this morning hanging out. Of special note was our lunch today at Byblos on Laurier. It’s a “middle eastern fusion coffee shop” that serves great food and world-class hot chocolate (among other things). On the next block we found Olive and Olives, a sort of olive oil head shop with a stunning array of oil and related products.

The “returning the car to Thrifty” experience was as depressing as the “picking up the car from Thrifty” experience, albeit with a nicer clerk. I’d filled the tank up at the airport gas station (tangent: kudos to the Trudeau Airport for having a centrally located and obvious gas station that’s reachable on the way to car rental return; that’s rare) but the clerk charged me $23.00 as a “fuel surcharge.” He took me out to the car and showed me that the gas gauge wasn’t reading full, so he wasn’t being evil; but my protest that I had, in fact, filled it up with gas two minutes earlier fell on deaf ears. So he wasn’t in the wrong, but he didn’t do much to win my business for the next time.

As is my habit when traveling in strange lands, I surfed the cold beverages aisle of the local grocery last night here in Montreal. This time my great find was a bottle of Bière d’épinette — Spruce Beer — from local bottler Marco Beverages.

And, as you might expect from something called Spruce Beer, drinking it feels just like drinking a forest. It brought back all sorts of memories of my time in the lumber camps (although I had no such time) and was unusually refreshing.

As a special bonus, Marco’s product comes in a hearty brown glass bottle with a ye olde articulated top.

Makes me pine for the old pre-takeover Seaman’s Beverages with its cavalcade of flavours.

I’ve surfaced here in Montréal after a very short weekend in Napanee, Ontario visiting with [[Catherine]]’s family.

My Air Canada experience up was phenomenal — flight attendant Dale should win Employee of the Year for his grace and humour — and arrived 7 minutes later after departing 32 minutes late (I didn’t know you could “make it up in the air” in a Dash 8).

Once I hit the ground things took a slight turn for the worse: luggage took 30 minutes to make its way to the carousel, and I got an extremely high pressure insurance up-sell from the Thrifty clerk (including all sorts of “you know that if you get into an accident you’ll have to buy the car from us right away” and so on). I made my way through all that unscathed, although I noticed that he “helpfully” included a fuel pre-sale on my invoice for me.

The rental car — a brand new Toyota Yaris hatchback — is a thing of beauty and I zipped down the 401 to Napanee and back on one tank of gas exactly, which means I got about 6 litre/100 km.

It was about 3 and a half hours to Napanee from Dorval, getting me there just after 11:00 p.m. [[Oliver]] was surprised, to say the least, to see me there when he woke up in the morning.

Sunday night in Napanee we were off to Catherine’s grandparents’ 40th wedding anniversary, a celebration all the more celebratory as it is the second marriage for both.

And then, almost before I arrived I was back on the 401. Arrived here in Montreal at Noon exactly, and have spent the afternoon fomenting organizational revolution with [[Bill]].

Back to the Island Wednesday; more revolution tomorrow.

It’s been a long time since I wrote anything good about [[Aliant]]. Have I ever? But today I had a very good Aliant customer service experience, so it’s only fair and just that I relate it.

I’m going away for a few days, and I wanted to forward all the incoming calls to our home phone over to the business line so that my messages would go to my email, not to the standalone answering machine we have at home. But we didn’t have “call forwarding” on our line.

So I called Aliant (on a Saturday, no less) and ended up speaking to a woman who was, without a doubt, one of the best customer service people I’ve ever spoken to. Not only was she extremely helpful, with no trace whatsoever of the old school Island Tel “we’re the phone company” attitude, but she also figured out a way of putting the feature on our line for free.

The only quirk in the system was that once she’d done the programming required all she could tell me was that the change might take place immediately, or it might take up to 24 hours. Which is a pretty big window. As it happens, it did take place immediately, and so if you call me at home, you’ll get my robotic agent at the office answering your call.

Oh, and one more thing: if you haven’t taken a look at Aliant’s website recently, and you’re a customer, it’s worth a visit: they’ve got tools in place now to let you do everything from paying your bill to adding new features to previewing what your white pages listing is going to look like. Perhaps this is standard-issue stuff in the telephone company world these days, but for Aliant it seems quite novel given their history of a curmudgeonly attitude towards the web.

So here’s the problem: [[Catherine]] and [[Oliver]] are away in [[Ontario]]. I’m expecting an eBay shipment via Canada Post Xpresspost sometime today. At home. I hung around the house until 1:00 p.m., but eventually I had to get some work done, meaning that if the package comes I won’t be there to greet it, and I’ll have to go to the Post Office after 5:00 p.m. to pick it up.

But how will I know if delivery actually gets attempted?

Download SecuritySpy, install on Catherine’s iMac, point her iSight camera out the front window at the vestibule, and configure to send me email when the camera detects motion.

Here’s me, detected leaving the house:

I’ll let you know if this actually works out in the end.

Anais Mitchell plays Club Passim on June 17th (with Anne Heaton). From her bio:

Part dustbowl rabble-rouser, part Cosmic American poet, Anais remains passionate about the music of her forefathers while growing inspired by fellow rising indie artists. Mitchell fuses a classic, world-weary folk troubadour’s experience of the human condition with postmodern charm and finesse, then wraps it in a sweet lilting timbre and releases it like a mourning dove sent to stir the sound waves and pluck the heartstrings of people halfway around the world.

Year-old vacation-oriented airline Sunwing Airlines is offering twice-weekly flights from Toronto to Charlottetown this summer, with one-way prices in the $120-$130 range. Flights run from June through September. Wikipedia has more information on the airline.