Those Ideas I Have

I’ve fallen in love with OmniOutliner for keeping track of mental meanderings like that.

Interesting. I look forward to reading more ideas…
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Another idea I have that is related is making the entire province of PEI a local calling area. At first you might think this would really have a big impact on Aliants revenue. But two points to consider are: Long distance sales are divided among many companies not only Aliant; And calls within the province must be a small fraction compared to calling other provinces, the US, or overseas.
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I wonder if the politicians have the power to make provincial calling local?
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Finally, I wonder if it would bring islanders closer and have any positive effect on local business?
And would Charlottetown girl’s talk more and date more Summerside boys?

I had a chat with an Island Tel insider on making PEI a single calling district (pre-Aliant). (If I recall the details correctly…) At the time Island Tel was in favour and it was the competitors in LD who balked since it would cut them entirely out of this market. The CRTC ruled in the CLECs’ favour. Naturally Island Tel wanted higher local rates to do this. ISN would have gotten a big boost had Island Tel prevailed.

I see how dialup Island wide would have levelled the field for all ISP’s.
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Back to Peter’s free call idea, here is something like it, based on advertising in Manhattan…

Sometimes I think good new ideas are just old ideas that bubble around in your brain until something pops them to the surface. My evidence:
Several years ago on the CBC Radio show Basic Black, they made this very offer to listeners: We’ll give you a five minute phone call free if you let us record it and broadcast it. My source does not remember what the uptake was on this offer but the winner was a father who called his son (or maybe the other way around). The conversation was not that interesting. The tape was edited and played.
And many more years ago than that, I was at a fair in Ontario where Bell Canada offerred people in the crowd the same thing - a free phone call if it could be broadcast.
The first person I saw do it was a little boy whose only long distance relative was an uncle in Winnipeg. Neither were what you’d call chatty and the whole experience was so embarrassing I wandered away.
When I cam back, there was a much chattier lady talking to a much woman. The conversation went something like this:
How’s Ginny?
Oh, good - you know what she’s like.
Yeah - how about Stella?
Oh about the same, considering.
What about Theresa?
Oh she’s great…

…you get the picture. I was about to leave when they came to Sherry, who had just had a knee operation which we heard about in excruciating detail.

Maybe the people who take you up on your offer will be more interesting. But what if they spend their time making allegations about other people? I can see a sticky wicket ahead?

I am interested too (in reference to your post about your cellphone at Rogers) that you feel much more protective and sentimental about the machine (which is all it is) than the content the machine enables.

A Spanish conceptual artist Guillermo Trujillano actually tried something very similar to this at the Mendel art gallery in Saskatoon a few years ago as part of this exhibition (http://www.mendel.ca/indivisua…. With the cooperation of Sasktel, he set up a phone booth in the midtown plaza shopping centre where the caller could phone anywhere in Saskatchewan (not the whole world but a nice, quadrilateral segment of it) for free for five minutes (http://www.indivisuals.org/htm…, with the caveat that the call would be broadcast in an exhibition space in the gallery. I believe he was going to continue with this and try it in other locations.