Here’s an interesting quote from this interview with Steve Jobs by Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher. Jobs is talking about raising the “average price per user” of mobile phones, and how cameraphones aren’t having their intended effect:

As an example, carriers make money by putting cameras in their phones — if consumers ship out the photos. But users aren’t sending photos around. Now, whether that’s because until recently you couldn’t send them across carriers or because the user interface is so crazy, nobody knows. I don’t know why, but it’s not happening.

Link from Dragos.

My friend Stephen Regoczei has started to blog. Right now Stephen is at the tail end of six weeks in Nantes, France.

On Grafton Street just west of University Avenue lies a stretch of buildings that used to be home to the Charlottetown branch of R.T. Holman Limited, otherwise known as Holman’s. The buildings are currently sheathed in very modern looking stone (is it stone?), and all trace of their historic facade has been eliminated (although I’m told that it lies, almost completely intact, underneath).

Through his West Prince connections, G. was able to dig up an old piece of R.T. Holman Limited letterhead; in the bottom-left corner is this engraving of what the facade used to look like:

There are three of us traveling. I think this screen says “for only $5882 more, you can save the $30 change fee and get refundable tickets.”

All the people in the photos at the Lass uns Freunde bleiben Plaze looking incredibly hip and exotic.

Olle in 3D.

This could be a long essay. Or a ripping rant. But let me be brief for a change: if the DIY Internet is every going to flourish more widely, we’re going to have to get rid of “system administrators.” It’s time for us to control our own firewalls, servers, and IP pipes; intermediation by “network professionals” might have been okay 10 years ago, but DIY innovation requires instantaneous rollout and waiting around for uninterested third party technocrats to give us permission to implement introduces enough friction into the system to grind creativity to a halt.

During our firewall hacking journey yesterday we happened upon a secret library, far beneath the Confederation Centre of the Arts. My helpful operative took photos:

I spent the day at the Confederation Centre Art Gallery preparing for the Plazes demo this evening. It was mostly a day of banging my head against intractable firewalls, trying to get iChat AV to talk, through the Centre’s military-grade network protection, to Felix Petersen in Berlin. Never did get it to work; I’m thinking of starting a “firewall rights organization” to support all my disaffected librarian and curator friends who are held hostage by the need to protect the network from the Russians, therein neutering much of the DIY potential of the Internet.

In the end we had to be content with a SkypeOut call to Felix’s mobile phone (18 minutes; €3.80; did I mentioned that Skype rocks?). Which actually worked pretty well, all things considered. Kudos to Felix for extreme patience (and for staying up past midnight to talk to invisible strangers about technology). And kudos to brother Johnny too for putting up with 8 hours of “can you hear me now?” iChat testing. And to my mother Frances for looking after Oliver during my distraction.

The day ended around 9:00 p.m. with a 3-olive martini at Mavor’s (I don’t usually drink martinis, but it seemed like the Right Thing To Do). I got a chance to hang out with Serious Art People, which was novel and interesting; they use words like plinth (“A block or slab on which a pedestal, column, or statue is placed.” — they gave me one to balance my laptop on) and maquette (“A usually small model of an intended work, such as a sculpture or piece of architecture.” — art people are drenched in maquettes, it seems).

Nonetheless I was struck with how similar artist Don Gill’s “art stuff” is to the “digital stuff” of my peers: in a sense what he does with scrapbooks is what Plazes does with bits. Which I suppose was the whole point of having us share the podium for the evening.

Amidst all this I picked up a phone message from one of my oldest and dearest friends: he and his fiancée are considering getting married in Berkeley, California at the end of the month and wanted to know if we could come. This happens to be Oliver’s last week of freedom before Kindergarten starts, so it might in fact be the perfect time to travel.

Must sleep now. Although I’m certain I will dream of NAT and default gateways and managed switches and port 5090.