The CBC is reporting that technology company CGI will create 150 jobs in Prince Edward Island. Towards the end of the story it says:

The company is also creating about 300 jobs in Russell County, Va. and 200 jobs in Bangalore, India. George said India, where the company is constructing a new facility, has a lower cost of labour as well.

Is this what’s ahead for Prince Edward Island: taking the work from upstream because we’ll do it on the cheap? Has “Cheap Province” replaced “Smart Province” in the prospector’s toolbox?

You may have read this Globe and Mail story this morning, especially the part that says (emphasis mine):

Bell Canada’s wireless high-speed Internet service will be available in coming days in markets across the country, including Vancouver, Calgary, Hamilton, Montreal, and Charlottetown, the source said.

And you may have thought to yourself “wow, wifi all over Charlottetown — that’s cool.” You may have entertained visions of checking your email at the waterfront with your wifi-equipped laptop. Using [[Plazes]] everywhere. And who knows what else.

Alas, this isn’t wireless Internet as we know it. Here’s the real story, courtesy of Telecom Update:

Bell Canada and Rogers Communications have both begun offering wireless broadband Internet service in 20 cities across Canada, using “pre-WiMAX” technology developed by NextNet, a U.S. company owned by Craig McCaw. The underlying wireless network is owned by Inukshuk Wireless, a Bell-Rogers joint venture formed last year.

There’s more information about the technical side of this, from the source, in this Bell news release:

Sympatico High Speed Unplugged uses a small, portable wireless modem which connects to a customer’s computer. The modem, in turn, connects wirelessly to the Inukshuk network using Aliant cellular towers in the region - providing Internet connectivity. The service is an integral part of Aliant’s continued investment in its broadband and wireless networks, and related services, in the region.

This “portable wireless modem” isn’t the wifi card that you’ve got in your laptop that you use to jack into free wifi at the local coffee shop, it’s a $250 ($99 with a 2-year contract) proprietary device that’s about the size of a paperback book and requires a power outlet to operate. In other words, it’s not actually portable at all.

Oh, and it’s not free either: rates start at $45/month, which gets you 512 Kbps of bandwidth with a cap of 2GB combined up/down usage every month.

This distinction is important to note because, to the uninitiated (i.e. almost everyone) wireless is wireless is wireless. So when they read “Aliant Launches Wireless Broadband Service in Atlantic Canada,” they read “wifi, everywhere.” I know this to be true because, by coincidence, I was at a meeting this morning at [[Charlottetown]] City Hall to talk about the possibility of creating a free wifi zone in the city’s downtown core and the Globe article was brought out to demonstrate that “perhaps the market is taking care of this.”

Now I actually think that there’s not a huge rationale for the city becoming involved in publicly funded wifi, mostly because the problem seems to be taking care of itself, and free wifi doesn’t do too much for people who can’t afford a computer to begin with (which is the real digital divide problem that public bodies should concern themselves with). But it’s important to distinguish between “public wifi” and “proprietary for-fee Internet from a private company.”

The ability to roll out low-cost wireless networks using cheap hardware ([[Dad]] bought a wireless access point at Future Shop for $9.99) has been a revolutionary thing. Revolutionary because, at least in a small way, it’s moved us towards thinking of ubiquitous Internet access as we think about air and water, and not as we think about telephone and cable television service. When companies like Bell and Rogers make plays like this, it is, make no mistake, the dying attempts of legacy network providers trying to, yet again, attach proprietary meters to their pipes. The pipes might be invisible this time around, but the meters are there nonetheless, and that’s not a Good Thing.

If you surf eBay a lot, you inevitably run across the phrase “will ship only to PayPal Confirmed Addresses.” It took me a while, but I’ve finally been able to understand what this means.

When you first sign up for a PayPal account, and give PayPal your bank account information, you go through a process where you identify the amounts associated with two small deposits that PayPal deposits in your account, therein proving to them that you are the owner of the bank account. Once this process is complete, your account becomes “Verified,” and you can do certain things you couldn’t do before.

However this doesn’t mean that your address is “Confirmed” with PayPal. To get “Confirmed,” you have to add a credit card to your account, and then go through a similar “identify a code that PayPal includes in the transaction details on your credit card statement.” Because PayPal can tap into the credit card world’s address verification system, through this mechanism they can “confirm” your address.

Except when they can’t.

Address verification doesn’t work for all locations for all credit cards. PayPal’s help system says:

Please note that because not all credit card companies are currently able to confirm an address, only some UK and Canadian addresses may be confirmed at this time.

The confounding thing is that the PayPal website offers no way to tell whether your own address is, in fact, “Confirmed.” I emailed PayPal about this, and their reply was:

When you view past transactions, if you look at the details of the transaction, it will tell you if your address is confirmed.

The problem here, of course, is that if you don’t have any recent transactions, then you’ve got nothing to look at. And this is a problem if you want to buy something from someone who ships only to “Confirmed” addresses. A chicken and egg problem, in other words.

The email from PayPal also told me that my address is “Confirmed,” so it appears the only way to get this information otherwise is to email them with this question. Odd.

Courtesy of [[Dave Peck]], I’m wearing a pair of Bose QuietComfort 2 Acoustic Noise Cancelling Headphones. Dave scored a pair on eBay after the <a href=”http://ruk.ca/article/”3556”>jackhammers started and brought them down for me to try out.

Today is a light day for the parkade construction sounds, so there are really just basic office sounds here in the office. There’s a switch on the side of the headphones that allows you to turn them off and on; turning them on, but not plugging them into an audio source otherwise, is a good way to judge how much noise they’re actually cancelling.

As it turns out, there’s quite a lot of background “rumble” here in the office that I wasn’t otherwise aware of. Here, I’ll switch them off now. Okay, they’re off. Suddenly I hear the fan inside my iMac, the rumble of the air conditioner and servers coming through the floor from the server room upstairs, the occasional footfall, and the low diesel sound of a bus driving by. The sound of my own typing (on an admittedly noisy Microsoft keyboard) is much sharper sounding.

Switching them back on: it’s not “total silence,” but all the bass-end rumble is gone, replaced by a faint white-noise hum. My typing sound is dulled (although still very noticeable). I can still hear Johnny typing in the office next door; when he says something, I can still hear it, although it sounds like he’s two or three rooms over.

Obviously a lot of the utility of the QuietComfort’s is intended for airplane use, and it seems, from the noise they’re cancelling out here in the office — the sort of throaty, engine-like low-end sound — that they would indeed be very good in that environment. Every time I put in a pair of regular foam earplugs on an airplane I’m reminded just how much stressful sound there actually is there.

Alternating back and forth between headphones on and headphones off, I am struck, even here in the office, with how much calmer it seems with them switched on. Would that play out over the long term? Is the benefit they provide worth $300, $400, $500? I’d better give them back to Dave before I’m tempted to find out.

I met with Councillor Kim Devine and Les Parsons from CADC this morning over coffee to talk about ways to mitigate the <a href=”http://ruk.ca/article/”3556”>jackhammering. Les agreed to have the contractor install plywood cladding on the parkade between the construction and our offices, and to forward us a copy of the construction schedule — when they’ll be make noise where — so that we can make alternative arrangements for the worst of it.

Returning to the office now, I find that today is a light day on the jackhammering front in any case, which is nice. However the [[84 Fitzroy St]] alarm system is making an incessant beeping. So I will never be satisfied.

The [[CBC]] has different websites for differnt kids. Their pre-school website is branded Kids’ CBC and their school-age website is branded cbc.ca/kids. Is it just me, or is this confusing?

One thing I’ve noticed since adopting the GTD lifestyle is that it’s important (and, fortunately, easier) to get my email inbox down to zero every day before I leave the office. An email that’s left un-handled one day is just going to scroll out of view the next morning, which is basically like entering a vortex of inattention. So I now take 15 or 20 minutes before going home and empty things out, deleting things that have been handled, and adding kGTD tasks for things that haven’t been.

A pleasant side-effect of all this (and maybe the real reason it’s so important) is that I leave the office feeling like things are in order, not as if there’s a monkey on my back.

I’ve only been using the new version of kGTD for a few hours now, but already I’m loving it. Favourite new features:

Sub-projects: any child without a context assigned becomes a sub-project of its parent. This feature is huge for me because it lets me nest sub-projects in a way that I’m used to:

Edit Anywhere: used to be that you could only edit the properties of an item in the Projects view — any changes that you made in the Actions view got thrown away. No longer: you can edit an item anywhere, and the changes bubble around to the right places as you think they should.

Delete Like Normal: the regular OmniOutliner Delete key method of deleting an item works; no longer need to use the special kGTD-specific button to delete things.

Auto-archiving: no more special Archive button — items archive themselves after a given (user-configurable) period of time.

Document-specific Toolbar: this is actually a feature of OmniOutliner 3.6, not something kGTD-specific. But it’s certainly handy for kGTD: now all my outlines don’t have to have the kGTD icons in the toolbar.

It looks sharp: the kGTD styles in OmniOutliner have been refined. Everything’s just a little bit clearer. Nice.