One of the items that we tried to drive home at our meeting with Aliant Mobility a couple of weeks ago was the model we are used to, and the model we are comfortable with, for bandwidth, be it wired or wireless is “we rent the pipe and do with it what we will.”

It’s quite clear that the business model for Aliant Mobility (which is, of course, not alone in the industry here) is pushing is “we rent you the pipe, and then charge you in various ways for using it.”

Witness their new picture messaging service. If you add together the big print and the fine print, here’s what you get:

• 50 cents per picture, plus the applicable Mobile Browser charges based on the photo size.
• Average photo size is 32 KB.
• In addition to the price of the upload, Mobile Browser usage will be charged for the time spent accessing the service and for the uploading process. Mobile Browser usage is billed at $0.05/KB or according to your Mobile Browser bundle.

So I take a picture. They charge me 50 cents for the “service,” and then some non-defined charge for “time spent accessing the service,” and then 5 cents per KB, or $1.60 to “upload” the picture. Total cost, then, is somewhere north of $2.10. Per picture!.

That, to my mind, is insane. Am I missing something here?

I find this website of random photo pairs (explained here) by be quite addictive.

You may recall that I’m partial to expedition tales. I’ve just finished reading Offbeat in Asia: A Journey Along the Russian Frontier, by Michael Alexander, and I’m part way into First Overland by Tim Slessor. Both are tales of expeditions out from London towards the east in the mid-1950s.

Curiously, both books go on at some length about the Istanbul Hilton which appears to have been something of a hotel wonder. Alexander’s book has an entire chapter devoted to the hotel, and Slessor’s several paragraphs.

I believe this may be a message to me that I should proceed at once overland to Turkey.

Tangents: 1. I purchased Offbeat in Asia on a rainy day in May at The Travel Bookshop during this visit. It was featured in this movie. It really is a delightful bookstore. 2. First Overland was purloined from the Burka family library by the helpful Daniel. 3. For a time, the guest book on Allan Rankin’s website was overtaken by spam advertising in hotels in Turkey.

Following a pointer from Daniel Von Fange, I’ve installed refer, a simple and easy-to-install referrer log reporting tool from textism. You can see the results here (or by following the Statistics link in the sidebar later on).

If you are using, or have used, Apple’s Safari browser with this site, and have experienced problems with the browser freezing up, please let me know: I thought it was a local network problem, but my mother says it’s happening to her too.

It appears that if you download the new iTunes update, and you’ve got an existing AOL account, with an AOL wallet, you can purchase iTunes songs from Canada, which is otherwise not possible.

The Five Minute Herald is a page on the Miami Herald website that’s a concise easy-to-scan miniature version of the paper. That’s a good idea.

Here’s an observation from my recent experience: users who are subjected to the authority of computer security schemes will relish the opportunity to defeat and/or work around those security schemes in equal proportion to how capricious those security schemes appear to them.

In my current situation, I am faced with the need to access a particular server that is behind a firewall, controlled by others. After several attempts to address the proper authorities in the proper manner — i.e. “doing the right thing” — and having been exposed to their seemingly arbitrary authoritarian methods, I’ve simply decided to give up, and use a technical fallback that allows me to achieve the same ends without their say-so.

I’m not suggesting that all authority is capricious, nor recommending trickery as a universal response. However it would do all computer security authority figures well to consider how their schemes appear to those that are subjected to them, for that, at least in part, will determine how effective they are.

The Royal Geographical Society publishes a variety of books related to expedition making. On their books web page, several of these that are now out of print are available for free download.

I’m especially partial to Desert Expeditions, which is described as follows:

Planning critera, equipment, vehicles for desert terrain, Fuel, food and water, personnel and training, Driving and vehicle recovery, Photography, vehicle maintenance, modification and tyres, medical and Survivial, navigation, maps and rescue aids.

I’m reading it right now. Here’s my favourite quote right now, speaking about sources for obtaining government permission to travel to a foreign land:

Embassy in UK/Europe of Country Concerned. Of variable use. Frequently staffed by ‘city slickers’ unfamiliar with regions you wish to visit and unsympathetic or suspicious of anyone planning to go there. However can be helpful.

Followed by:

Appearance. Being on an expedition is not a mandate for being unwashed, unshaven and scruffy - there are cheaper ways of achieving that. Keep fresh clothes to change into before entering towns after long periods out in the desert -especially if you seek police/immigration permission for the next leg. They are not normally impressed by unwashed foreigners.

Since moving in to the new palace of digital pleasure a week ago, I have been without a telephone. As chronicled earlier, I’m moving the old phone number over here, and switching service to Eastlink at the same time. Everything is scheduled to fly on Tuesday next.

There are, however, no phone jacks down here in the Green Room. But there are plenty of Ethernet jacks. Which has prompted me to invest in a Sipura SPA-2000 device from Pulver Innovations.

Having earlier acquired a Digium Wildcard X100P, which is sitting upstairs in this webserver waiting to be called into action, my plan is to plug the Sipura into the Ethernet jack here in my office, the X100P into the Eastlink phone line, and then to use Asterisk to manage my calls.

In theory, I should be able to take the Sipura with me to Yankee, plug it into Ethernet there, and have my office phone ring through.

Watch this space (or Labs, depending on degree of difficulty) for details.