Personal

SU – Vote Now!

It’s election day(s) at the U of A! If you’ve opted to not actually check out any of the candidates, you might chose to participate in my experiment in social-media-totalitarian democracy, and vote the way I do! (Yeah right) but if you really have no clue and would like some tips from someone who went to the Horowitz forum (and took notes!) here’s the lo-down.

Don’t bother ranting in disagreement in the comments or anything, because if you have opinion already, this post is not for you!

VP Academic
Who to vote for: Tom L’Abbé
Why: Of the two, Tom seems to have a good plan to improve faculty association-SU relations, and understands that following prof evaluations are not some magic ticket to better teaching. Also, he seems to be more experienced.

VP Student life
Who to vote for: Rory Tighe
Why: For student life, you probably want someone who is bubbly and entertaining, and Rory definitely wins in this category. He also seems like someone who would be on my side in the bringing of Pizza back to SUB, which Kayla seems to have forgotten is important.

VP Op & Finance
Who to vote for: Zach Fentiman
Why: He’s your only choice, plus he’s pretty adorable. Have you seen his campaign posters? Luckily he’s a good choice.

VP External
Who to vote for: Jon Mastel
Why: This was a tough one, but Jon seemed the best experienced to me. They all seemed qualified, but Jon just seemed to emit the least BS.

Undergrad Board of Governors Rep
Who to vote for: Craig Turner
Why: Besides the fact that Sangram wouldn’t shut up about his completely ridiculous concept of informing the student population with video blogs (not even joking, this is basically his platform), Craig seems to be experienced and good ideas to bring to the table. It looks like this is a boring position, and he’s going to dutifully keep it that way instead of spamming my Facebook Inbox with things I don’t care about.

President
Who to vote for: Nick Dehod
Why: As the brief incumbent President, Nick knows a little bit about what he’s doing. He also didn’t try and tell me that he was “endorsed by Stephen Mandel and Daryl Katz” (BS ALERT) like Adam Zepp did, and didn’t seem to be over-focussed on improving the online calendar of events like Vickram. All three candidates are looking to ditch the $550 fees, so that’s a tie anyway.

Millennium Village Referendum
What to vote: Yes
Why: While I understand the reasonings behind “no” (it’s not a direct benefit to the students, it’s not charity unless you’re giving, etc.) I’m just to far left to say no to this one. The fact is most people don’t care, and if I can force this one through so that the people outside Starbucks right now help out a kid in Africa instead of buying another XL Latte, so be it!

U-Pass Referendum
What to vote: Yes
Why: You like your U-Pass right? Vote to keep it going. Or else.

PAW Fee
What to vote: No
Why: I really don’t understand why we get to vote on what students 5 years from now will be paying for. The fee would fund/pay for a new Rec/Activity centre, but would only apply once it’s built…which would be after your time here. I agree with the idea that we shouldn’t be creating costs for future students, so on that basis, I vote No.

Edit: Vote here!

Facebook spam easily covered up

This morning I woke up to find a pair of interesting Facebook messages from a friend of mine. After a while I came to realize they were spam, but there’s three things I found interesting:

1. Use of Digg links

The spam link itself appears to be the link to a digg entry. I immediately assumed it would be a digg article page, but was actually a redirect service digg offers, similar to http://bit.ly and the like. Above, the link took me to a berry diet site of some kind. Obviously these links are simple to make by just submitting a story to digg, and they immediately look credible. It’s weird how as the web becomes more and more share-y and more susceptible to spam, we’ve somehow managed to make it MORE dangerous with all these redirection services that can fool even the most savvy users. 

2. Mutual friend names

You’ll notice that the message from Mitchell includes a reference to “Alana,” which might be simply a random name, but more likely the spambot looked up the mutual friends between Mitchell and I and found the first one (A) and included it in the message going out to his address book. This provides another level of authenticity to the message, and further convinces the user that it isn’t spam.

3. Facebook deleted the messages

So this is all fine and dandy, but what I find especially disconcerting is that, while I had seen the two messages this morning, they had disappeared from my Facebook Inbox by tonight. I didn’t touch them, and was going to ask Mitch about them later, but found them gone online. The above image was from my iPod which I snapped before turning my WiFi on. Obviously it’s no big surprise that Facebook, as the totalitarian messenger service, Facebook has the power to wipe out any spam they see cropping up on their network, with or without your consent. This probably isn’t a big deal to most users, but make no mistake that Facebook is by no means a replacement for email, because email by definition works in an adhoc manner. Mail jumps from one server to the next to get delivered, and there is very little one single provider can to to stop the flow of that email, which is not the case with Facebook messages.

I’m no one for huge conspiracy theories, but I haven’t been a huge fan of Facebook’s invasion on my life, despite by habits of using it excessively. Remember that Facebook can screw with your mind more than you think. Stay aware folks!

Gallery Updates!

This photo is one of my favourites 🙂 

I realize that I’m not posting enough to the good old jole gallery, which, after all has been the cornerstone of jole.ca since the very beginning and the “jolephoto” monicker. It occurred to me today that there are a fair amount of people who come to my site to look around, but will just go straight to the gallery out of fear of my technical bloggy goodness, so I might as well keep it fresh for them. 

Often I have photos that I’m quite proud of but that simply don’t have enough energy to go through and name and describe. While names and descriptions would be nice, I’m pretty sure it’s the photo that counts. So moving forward, I’ll be just uploading the pictures as-is with just the plain-jane DSC-o-rama title and (no description). I may however provide a brief update such as this one that describes some of the photos in the upload.

  • The ones from February 2010 are mostly of Snow Valley which lights up overcast skies beautifully with its bright white light. I’m not sure the photos I took did it justice, but I found it pretty neat.
  • Some are from Vancouver such as the one in the post and the trees by the ocean. 
  • The sepia-looking shots are in fact not sepia-adjusted but actually the true colour with all the sodium lights illuminating the night at that time of day. I could adjust them to look white but then they simply look like day shots, so enjoy the feeling of a chilly Edmonton at 7pm. 

I’ve been having urges to rework flickrer a bit, which I may or may not do at some point in the future, but for now just enjoy the photos I’ve dug up from 2009 and a few fresh ones from this month, and look forward to more frequent (albeit less descriptive) photo updates.

Finally, a shout out to the Edmonton Journal Student Photo Contest. Submit one photo from 2009 to the journal for a chance to win some cool prizes! (Students Only). I’ve already submitted mine!

WIND is Here!

Well the long wait is finally over. After some very dramatic overruling of the CRTC by Tony Clement, WIND is now in the market and has launched their products. The prices and concepts are impressive as expected, but the service of course is less than inspiring: for now.

Right now WIND is operating in a”WIND HOME Zone” type of billing structure, and for good reason. They’ve setup their towers in Calgary and Toronto and can charge what they need to in those areas, but when it comes to covering customers in areas outside those cities, they have to rely on (what seems like) the Belus network to provide “AWAY” Coverage as they call it. Obviously TELUS isn’t going to be giving them a stellar deal for those borrowed minutes, but as WIND grows, that will surely change.

Screen shot 2009-12-16 at 1.52.37 PM
Look familiar? I suspect WIND is using Belus' new 3G+ network for coverage outside Calgary for now.

Today is not revolutionary. WIND is truly in its infancy and is by no means offering a seamless coast-to-coast coverage solution that Belusrog offers. That being said, they are a beacon of hope of the things to come, whether it be from a nationwide WIND that will come in the next 6-18 months, or from the big three who are being pulled down from their thrones and forced to compete for once. No matter what it is, there’s no denying that this is game changing:

  • No post/prepaid discrimination – no need for credit to have Data in Canada!
  • No contracts
  • No charge caller ID
  • No charge incoming texts
  • No need to pay for voice time all you really want is Data
  • No long distance charge for calling the Airport from the City (Province-wide calling, not just “local” if that even means anything anymore)

On AWS…

Definitely not the AWS logo at all.
Definitely not the AWS logo at all. More like the American Welding Society...

I’ve been trying to find a simple answer to the question “What is AWS?” and in visiting WIND’s store I think it became clear to me: AWS or Advanced Wireless System Services is just a different bank of wireless frequencies that UMTS or GSM can operate on. In the specifications for their phones, WIND describes it as either “AWS UMTS” or “AWS GSM.” I assume this means that these phones CAN use older generation non-AWS UMTS/GSM standards, but not vice versa, which explains why, for example, the iPhone cannot be used on WIND at this time.

As a future iPhone customer, this is discouraging for now, but as AWS becomes more widely adopted across the world, Apple will likely adopt it moving forward. At that point, it will be technically feasible to get the iPhone on WIND, and that’s all that counts for me. Until Apple releases an AWS iPhone, WIND will keep doing what it does best right now, and that’s drive down costs of competition to make the iPhone plans more reasonable.

Some Links

More Cell Phone Plan Analysis

Screen shot 2009-09-06 at 11.29.40 PMAfter writing yesterday’s report, I woke up in the morning and took another look at TELUS’ fine print. Sure enough, it turned out that Picture & Video messaging is NOT included for free with My5 people. At first this seemed like a big deal, but then I realized that the question that needs to be answered is:

Suppose I send a picture or video message to a friend on the My5 list. Since I have 250 “Anything” messages, does this mean TELUS will just deduct that as a used message out of the 250, or try and charge me extra because I do not get free Picture/Video messaging to those 5 people?

Of course I would need to find this out first, and I don’t think it’s fair to assume either way. More

Latest Cell Phone Plan Analysis

Finding a new and better cell phone plan has been a very long-time activity for me. While wandering around WalMart I picked up brochures from EVERY provider and try to make sense of it all. They seem to be offering some improved plans for prepaid (Such as My5 and other unlimited options for texting) that were previously unavailable. Even TELUS, which has been notorious for offering their excessively simplistic prepaid plans has gotten on the band wagon of offering some prepaid auto-deducting options.

So let’s start out with what I’m getting in my current plan. With my grandfathered solomobile plan, I get the following:
  • 30c a minute anytime
  • 15c a minute evening and weekends
  • Unlimited incoming/outgoing text messages
  • Unlimited mobile browser
  • Caller ID
  • Voicemail
  • $1/day 10-4™ Service (Never used)
Here’s a table of the average amount of money I spend per month. More

Introduction (Travel Notes – Part 1)

Picture 3
Our route through the Western US.

At different times in my life I’ve taken the time to write out my thoughts in some form. On ocassion I’ll go back to them and reread them, but most of the time it’s simply a method of organizing those thoughts in some way. Literary Catharsis, right?

This series of blog posts on my travels through the Western United States isn’t intended to be any sort of useful information. It gets to the heart of what blogging is about: a log for the web. A log of where I’ve been and how this has shaped my thoughts, with little to do with anyone else, but the thrill of knowing that it’s there, for public reference.

I will try my best to include some pretty illustrations in Google Earth snapshot form, along withs some photos, but this is mostly just an exploration of the various ideas that came to me while traveling about the United States. This isn’t my first trip to the US by any means, but it is certainly one of the longest and most elaborate. When I was about 8 I took a trip with my grandparents in their RV through many of the same destinations. Ten years later, it’s a different experience however. Even though I ended up eating fast food way too often like I did back then, I really understand some key difference between American and Canadian culture.

Certainly I have a bias being Canadian, but I don’t intend this to be a critism of the United States as much as an examination of what it means to me to be Canadian in contrast. Often times I feel like Canada is too “americanized”, which I still feel is true, but at the same time I now know that we’re far from ever being the same countries.

These are my thoughts.

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