From my friend Stephen comes a link to whichbook.net, a site that claims to give “readers an enjoyable and intuitive way to find books to match their mood.”

There have been many other kicks at this can, perhaps most famously the firefly project that came out of MIT.

Unlike commercial services that seek to use aggregated reader/listener/viewer preferences to drive sales, whichbook.net is a non-profit setup, run by librarians.

While I’m sure this service will be useful to some — Stephen says “I threw in some criteria and got books that i had read that fit the bill perfectly and some books i hadn’t read.” — I’m perplexed by this set of selections. Do people really choose books this way? Do you say to yourself “I could use a good read, something extremely gentle, a little disgusting and very bleak?”

I realize that my random “books that have interesting covers” method is prone to failure, but this seems a little too intentioned for my tastes. Like genetic engineering for books.

I think the Charlottetown let’s hold a very loud rock concert on the waterfront era is coming to an end; there’s simply going to be too much public pressure from disgruntled downtown residents to allow it to continue for another year.

I’ve heard reports that last night’s Nickelback concert could be heard in Brighton and Sherwood; here on Prince St., 5 blocks north of the concert site, I could have sworn that the band was playing in my front yard.

Sources tell me that City Hall received a lot of complaints on Monday morning after the equally loud Blue Rodeo concert Sunday night, as did the City Police.

It now seems clear that the tourism mandarins at The Capital Commission, whose attitude towards downtown residents is mostly “deal with it,” will be forced to either shut down completely, or scale back heavily to quiet, daytime-only concerts.

If you live downtown, and think things have gotten out of hand, here’s a handy list of email addresses you might use to let your feelings be known:

• The Capital Commission (general email)
• Holiday Inn Express (concert series sponsor)
• ATV (concert stage sponsor)
• Harry Gaudet (City Hall CAO)
• City Police
• Nancy McMinn (City Parks Superintendent)
• Donna Hurry (City Tourism Officer)

The term 1xRTT is a new, needlessly complex term that means “faster data on cell phones.” If you’ve ever tried to use the “wireless web” on your cell phone, you’ll recall that it was slow: slow to set up, slow to browse, slow to navigate. This is because the prevailing method for getting bits and bytes from phone to web and back is clunky slow.

1xRTT is a new standard for sending data over cell phones that’s supposed to be much faster — Aliant says “at speeds of up to 86 Kbps”. That might not seem very fast (and, in the grander scheme of things, it isn’t). But in cell phone terms it is fast. And that gives you some idea of how slow the current mechanism is.

Now, if you cut through the marketing bullshit (full of phrases like “Now you’ll enjoy richer graphics, and advanced features such as customization and faster Internet connections”), it’s not such a bad thing to be able to grab data from the air through a phone. WiFi is good, but so far it’s far from everywhere. Whereas 1XRTT is everywhere (at least on PEI, so Aliant claims).

In theory, this should mean that with a 1xRTT-equipped cell phone, and, optionally, a laptop, one should be able to use the web anywhere on the Island at speeds roughly approximating somewhat more than those one would obtain with a 56K modem over a phone at home.

And, indeed, look at the cool guy, lying on the beach, on this page (model is either Rick Schroder or Jonathan Torrens): he’s lying there, surfin’ around, enjoying the richer graphics, the advanced features, the customization, all without the nuisance of wires.

So far, so good.

And then we get to the question of rates, which start at “$10/month for 1MB and $10/additional MB” and go on up to “$100/month for 100MB and $3/additional MB.”

Now back in the 1970s, and even on into the 1980s, we used to think a megabyte was an pretty huge amount of information, the sort of data equivalent of “the distance to the moon and back.”

But I just linked to a 46MB QuickTime video, and didn’t think twice about it. The 1xRTT cost of downloading that video from the beach? $460 with the basic plan down to “only” $100 with the $100/month plan.

And that’s one file.

Imagine the amount of data that flows in and out of your PC in an average day — email with attachments, web browser, streaming audio, streaming video, file transfers. I’d hazard a guess that an average day of being online sees 10 to 15 GB go in and out of our line here. Or, in Aliant 1xRTT terms (using the cheapest 1xRTT rate package), approximately more than $30,000/day.

Now perhaps if I was lying on the beach, and not working as intently as I would hear in the office, I could chop that down to, say, $10,000. A relaxed 5-day beachside work week, and my wireless data bill comes out to about $200,000 a month.

I simply can’t imagine what normal person would utilize 1MB/month of anything — that’s 33KB a day, on average. Or roughly enough bandwidth to download the Reinvented logo up there in the corner of this website about 4 times. What kind of richer graphics, advanced features, and customization is the RickJonathan enjoying there on the beach?

This would all be much less absurd if this was typical North American pricing. However, for example, Verizon’s 1xRTT service starts at $25/month for unlimited usage.

Hello, Aliant, is anybody in there?

FOAF stands for Friend Of A Friend. There are two things you need to drink in to understand what FOAF means. First, watch this Ben Hammersley video [46MB QuickTime]. Second, read this introduction for parsing FOAF in PHP (even if you’re not a PHP programmer, it’s a useful and well-worded description).

Once you understand FOAF, here’s mine. Now, go make your own and send me your FOAF address.

I realized today that I use NetNewsWire every day almost as much as I use my email client and my web browser. Although I’m happy with the free “Lite” version of the product, it seemed like a good idea to support good software, so I upped for the real thing (on sale until the end of today for $29.95US).

One of the great new features of the “Pro” version is the “Combined View,” which is best described with an example:

Here I’m looking at the silverorange labs reader responses in Combined View. Along the left-hand side of the window you can see the list of RSS feeds of weblogs that I use NetNewsWire to read.

Truly a great product, with a imaginative and talented author. If you have a Mac, and you read weblogs, you should have it.

Referenced many places elsewhere, and posted here mostly so that I’ll have a place to refer to myself: video from reboot6.

Well, Dave was able to sort out his difficulties — he had the microphone turned off, of all things — and because he has a video camera, we were able to have a “one way video chat” — I could see him, but he not me. Here’s the result:

Audio quality seemed to degrade a little (as you might expect) when we went video. Video quality was much, much better than I ever saw with NetMeeting — not too much different than watching television on my iMac.

Dave was using a handheld video camera, and this proved the truth of what Steve Jobs said in his keynote: a camera has to be mounted on the top of your monitor, looking at your face, to be really effective as a videoconferencing device.

I had two “callers” take me up on my offer to iChat with audio. A reader from Calgary, who I’d never met (and, ironically, whose name I never remembered to ask for during our chat) dropped by, and we had a good conversation, me on my iMac and he on an iBook. Audio quality was slightly poorer than the earlier experiments, and seemed to get better and worse, presumably following the available bandwidth. It was odd (but not unpleasant) to talk to a real anonymous reader (he found this site from the sites drawer in NetNewsWire); for a moment I felt like Larry King.

Later, Dave phoned, or tried to. Something on his end with audio wasn’t working — I think he was trying to beam in with full video via camcorder — so he could hear me, but I couldn’t hear him. So I talked, and he typed. I felt like Helen Keller. Or like he was Helen Keller. Or something.

Apple released two new upgrades last week, one for their Safari web browser and the other for iChat, which gets renamed iChat AV because it has audio and video capabilities.

Safari has been in beta testing for a while now, and it’s maturing into a very capable browser. I use it by default almost all of the time. However I’m noticing an annoying couple of bugs that popped up in the 1.0 version that weren’t present in the betas. The first one is some sort of GIF image bug, associated with CSS, that causes a random image from one frame to replace the background image in another frame. The second one is more troublesome: I find Safari hangs when I POST to my own Apache server. I can’t figure this second one out, but it does appear to be local, somehow.

I’ve had a chance to use the audio capabilities of iChat AV a couple of times now, once with Steven, who was “up the road” physically, but 22 hops away Internet wise (with traffic from Aliant to ISN being routed through Montreal, New York, back to Montreal, to Halifax and then back to Charlottetown), and today with my mother, who is halfway across the country, but only 14 hops up the Internet. In both cases the audio was equal to or better than talking on the telephone. Installation and connection was dead simple; there are simply no settings, beyond adding someone as a buddy as one normally would.

My mother and I tried several times, when we were both still shackled to Microsoft Windows, to get NetMeeting to work properly, but it not only frequently crashed my Windows 2000 machine (and by crashed I mean “had to turn the power off to keep using the machine”), but also required a cumbersome settings dance that we never completely figured out.

If you want to try out iChat AV, just add me as a buddy and give me a call: my screen name is reinventedpei.

From Telecom Update:

The City of Calgary is now providing free Wi-Fi Internet access in four locations. The showcase sites, and participating commercial hotspots, are identified by a distinctive “Wireless City Hotspot” logo.