Here’s a little screen snip from the Eastlink DVR page:

I naively assumed that when I clicked on the big Order Now button, and filled out this online order form, I was actually placing my order.

It appears that this “order online” exercise is simply a cleverly disguised hoax, however, as almost 48 hours later I received back this email:

Dear Peter,

Thank you for your email.

We contacted you regarding the dvr installation. The monthy fee for the dvr rental is 14.95 plus tax and the installation would be 19.95 plus tax if you were to order before November 31. To get more information on appt. times or other services please call our customer care line at 367-2800 or 1-888-345-1111 and we will be happy to assist you.

Thank You,

Customer Care

So to actually place an order, I had to get on the phone, wade through the telephone tree, give over my identifying information (phone, name, address), and describe what I wanted to order. At least in theory I have now “ordered.” We’ll see what happens next.

In the annals of Air Canada’s deceptive practices, this one takes the cake. Here’s their quote, direct from their website, for a return flight from Charlottetown to London at the end of November:

The base fare is $556, and the “fuel surcharge” of $168 is 30% of the fare. Shouldn’t the fuel surcharge just be called “part of the fare?” It’s extremely deceptive to lead customers through a process of booking a flight and then, at the last step before payment, dropping in an extra 30%.

Apparently Air Canada agrees; witness this news release from January, in which they say:

“Customers want a simple fare that includes all charges and by incorporating the fuel surcharge into our base domestic fares, we are taking the first major step in that direction,” said Montie Brewer, Executive Vice President, Commercial. “The incorporation of the fuel surcharge will help our customers truly understand how much they are paying for their travel.”

Apparently for international travel it’s not important that we “truly understand how much” we’re paying for travel.

As an experiment, I’ve created an iTunes enhanced AAC version of the plain old Live From the Formosa Tea House, Session Five, that contains chapter markers, images and links to websites we mention. Here’s what it looks like:

Because of the AAC encoding, and the embedded images and links, this is a much larger file than the regular MP3 version (32MB vs. 12MB). But it also sounds a lot better. Feedback welcome on whether this is worth it.

We recorded Live From the Formosa Tea House: Session Five this afternoon over lunch.

The focus of this episode was on Zap Your PRAM 3, the next incarnation of the Zap Your PRAM conference we organized in the fall of 2003. Zap3 is running February 16 to 19, 2006 in Cavendish, PEI; details forthcoming shortly on the new Zap3site.

There is, alas, an annoying bit of electrical interference that runs throughout the episode — it’s most noticeable at the beginning. I tried various methods for filtering it out, but they all made Dan, Steven and I sound like drunken fish. Here’s a rundown of what you’ll hear:

• 00:00 - The intro and extro stingers are from Royalty Free Music.
• 00:15 - We start off with a somewhat dorky and stilted introduction to Zap Your PRAM (early-episode dorkitude seems to stike us every time). We get better as we go along. 
  • Video and Audio of Zap Your PRAM One
• 19:45 - The “people standing in from of webcams” phenomenon.
  • The Island Cam (Dan stood here).
  • The YankeeCam.
• 21:15 - People at silverorange buying digital SLR cameras?
  • Canon EOS Digital Rebel XT
  • Canada EOS 20D
  • Nikon D200 (with GPS capabilities)
• 22:30 - Peter takes a picture of Steven with his T610 camera phone (either Peter or Steven was moving, so the photo is more jiggly than it would be otherwise).
• 24:00 - What podcasts do we listen to?
  • Peter: Daily Source Code, The MacCast, Meet the Press, BBC Podcasts, Yankee Foliage Podcast
  • Steven: LugRadio, Diggnation
• 26:45 - Peter’s television addiction leads him to rent a Eastlink DVR.
• 28:00 - Steven and Dan love Homestarrunner.
• 28:30 - Steven to make a LongBet with Ray Kurzweil?
• 28:45 - WikiPEI, Wikipedia, Tourism PEI Website RFP.
• 32:00 - The Rukapedia pages for Dan and Steven and the compromising photo.
• 34:45 - Interactive Charlottetown Bus Map, RealCharlottetown.com and Open Locations.
• 41:02 - Dan has an “unbelieveable hate-on” for Web 2.0 so we avoid talking about it at all costs.
• 41:44 - Steven talks about going to The Gnome Summit in Boston: Springboard and Tango Project.
• 51:44 - Queen Street Commons update from Dan.
• 54:15 - silverorange releases Swat, a PHP web application toolkit.

In addition to the RSS Feed for the Podcast, we’ve also registered LiveFromTheFormosaTeaHouse.com where you can always find show notes, links to previous shows and more fun.

Early last year I posted a review of First Overland, a fascinating tale of a mid-1950s overland voyage from London to Singapore. Since I made the post, Antony Barrington Brown, one of the expedition members, has made several helpful comments, the most recent of which came today with news of a First Overland Reunion.

The reunion is being held in London (England) at the Royal Geographical Society on Friday, 25 November at 7:00 p.m. and will be introduced by Sir David Attenborough. Tickets are free and available from Tim Slessor at 37 Southdean Gardens, London SW19 6NT, telephone 020 8788 7054 or email timslessor@aol.com, and from Antony Barrington Brown at 26c Upton Lovell, Warminster, BA12 0JW, telephone 01985 850 106.

I know it’s wrong to make generalizations about international travel and Canadians. But every time Air Canada produces a list of “sample round-trip fares” for one of their seat sales, I find it odd that they seem to pick the most unlikely of city pairs:

I can understand there being a good amount of “Calgary - London, GB” traffic, but how many tickets is Air Canada expecting to sell on the “Saskatoon - Duesseldorf” or “St. John’s - Bogota” runs?

Of course if they left out such seeminly obscure city pairs, you’d probably find me complaining that they were making generalizations about international travel and Canadians, so I suppose they can’t win with me.

I noticed a green “Exchange” sticker on the ATM machine at Metro Credit Union yesterday, and stumbled across the reason why on the Metro website. The most interesting part of all this:

In addition, we anticipate by November 30/2005 our member owners will have access to ATMs with HSBC Bank, National Bank and Canadian Western Bank, as these financial institutions are all on the EXCHANGE Network.

…which seems to suggest that we’ll finally have surcharge-free access to cash here in downtown Charlottetown, as there’s a National Bank branch on Kent St. Additionally:

The EXCHANGE Network will offer access to thousands of ATMs as well as an extensive Point of Sale network in the US.

I think that means I’ll be able to pay for groceries with my Credit Union ATM card at Stop &Shop when I’m in New Hampshire.

The Exchange Network has its own website that has more details.

This helpful, if disclaimer-rich, page on the Motorola website is uncharacteristically open about the option to hack your Motorola DVR and get the video from it to a PC:

...but some people on their own have devised a way to access digital recordings on the DCT6208 or DCT6412 and offload them to a PC hard drive or Digital High Def VCR... Here's how to transfer non-copy protected recordings via IEEE1394/Firewire...

I wish all manufacturers were so open an honest about the hackability of their products. The DCT6412 (or is it the 6408?), by the way, is the DVR that Eastlink offers here in Prince Edward Island for $14.95/month.
Here's how to do much the same thing with a Mac.

Learning to swim is one of my earliest memories. I can’t even remember where it was, but I remember going with Mike to an outdoor pool somewhere in Burlington — must have been the early 1970s — to take swimming lessons. “Motor boat, motor boat, moves so slow…”

Tonight Oliver went to his first night of swimming lessons, so another torch has passed to the next generation.

The CARI Pool uses the new Red Cross set of programs; in this regime, Oliver ends up a sea turtle: “3 years of age or older, and just starting out, previous lessons not necessary.”

There are two other kids in Oliver’s group, both a little younger but somewhat more “put my face in the water” comfortable, so it all seems to balance out. Tonight’s session contained a lot of “aimless wandering down the pool” activity by Oliver, but then again it was “assess their skills” night, and the mere fact that he was in the water and not clutching on to Catherine or I for dear life was a big achievement.

On first blush Oliver appears to have a “relaxed hep cat” approach to in-water movement; imagine Joe Camel, but in the water.

The biggest shock of the evening came when I realized that my presence was not, in fact, required and that I was to retire to the sidelines to watch the lesson play out. First of many, many hours on the sidelines, I imagine.

We’re back in the water on Thursday. Or at least Oliver is.

Remember the whole “portal” craze? A couple of years ago everything on the web was about aggregation and “one stop shopping.” Here in Charlottetown we taxpayers wasted a good part of $4.5 million creating VirtualCharlottetown.com, a “Charlottetown portal.” Hell, even I jumped on the bandwagon.

Thankfully, though, portals went away when it collectively dawned on us all that the browser and the web are the portal; we didn’t need an additional layer of intermediating abstraction pasted over it.

Microsoft, however, doesn’t appear to have been listening; witness their description of their new “Windows Live” project:

Windows Live is a set of personal Internet services and software designed to bring together in one place all of the relationships, information and interests people care about most, with more safety and security features across their PC, devices and the Web.

Smells like a portalization play to me. Not just a portal, either: a Web 2.0 portal. Yawn.