Also from Robert: the first reported case ever of someone “missing a regular dose of Nils Ling.”

Read about the adventures of Robert and his 13 family members, all packed together for two weeks of Christmas fun.

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.