My iPhone

Shortly before I left Nova Scotia I bit the bullet and got myself an iPhone.

I had been thinking of doing this for some time, had discussed it with folks at the dogpark in my Toronto neighbourhood, but until the very end of July just hadn't been able to bring myself to do it.

For many years I have had a "Pay and Talk" phone, a very simple cell phone that I only paid ten dollars a month for and that did most everything I wanted a phone to do: I could call people up and they could call me. No texting or taking photos or browsing the internet or downloading my email, just a simple cheap cell phone.

Our resident geek at the dogpark had advised against an iPhone, he disapproved of Apple because they censor the software apps you can download (upload?) onto your phone. He recommended another brand of smart phone, one just like his that had one of those slide-out keyboards for texting. But for a number of reasons I decided to go with the iPhone, not least of which was the fact that Isaac has one and he could help me get started on it.

So I got my brand new iPhone, and my brand new 3-year contract at $50 a month, in July just before I left Nova Scotia. It worked just fine on the trip back to Toronto. I exchanged text messages with Isaac all the way, checked my email while on the road, and everything was just fine. I didn't know how to use most of its functionality but what the hey. I felt like I had joined the 21st century.

In Toronto Isaac ripped a bunch of my music CDs and uploaded them to my iPhone so I would have music on the road. I learned a few things about how to operate the phone, and Isaac got me a neat little attachment that allows me to recharge the phone battery in the truck and play my music over the truck stereo system. Good idea for a long road trip.

Then I set out for BC.

Well.

Somewhere past Sault Ste Marie in northern Ontario my iPhone stopped working as a phone. I could still use it as an iPod, but it didn't work as a phone, I couldn't send or receive text messages, and I couldn't download email or check the internet or use the map and GPS function. I thought my phone was broken.

It took me two days to get from the Soo to the Manitoba border. No phone. At the tourist info centre there the lady told me this was common and I should find that my cell phone works again a few kilometers down the road in Manitoba. But it didn't.

In Winnipeg it suddenly started working again, and I was able to use the map function to find my niece Tara's place. There I called the phone company and gave them hell for the lack of phone coverage in northern Ontario. The fellow I talked to informed me that that was only half the bad news. That aside from Winnipeg, I could expect my lack of phone coverage to continue all the way through Manitoba and Saskatchewan, and I would not see my phone working properly again until I got to Alberta!

What an unpleasant joke. My old $10-a-month phone had always worked just fine through these parts, now I was paying $50-a-month for no coverage over 3 days worth of highway.

Sure enough, the phone kicked in again when I crossed the border into Alberta a couple of days later. And all the way through the mountains of BC it worked just fine. Except in D'arcy, but I knew that about D'arcy, no cell phones work there.

On Gambier Island I told my friends there about this highly annoying problem with my new phone. Dave is recently retired from the phone company that I have my contract with, and he explained the background to why my phone didn't work. It turns out to be all politics, there is no technical reason for it, just politics. And unfortunately the politics involved are not under the control of the phone company, so I can't really blame them for the problem. Although I sure wish someone had told me before I set out on this trip.

Coincidentally Johanna had gotten a smartphone about the same time I got my iPhone, but she got a different brand name, a Motorola phone. We've been comparing phones. Her phone seems to have more features than mine, but the features that I do have seem to be better quality. For example, her camera has a flash and various options for manipulating the image, but mine has no flash and no options. However the resulting photo seems to be better quality and the picture taking action is faster on my phone.

I don't have the slide-out keyboard which looks quite nifty on her phone. Also, we both have bluetooth, but the bluetooth functionality on the iPhone is only good for headphones (apparently) whereas she can use hers for sending photos to another cell phone. She tried to send me a photo but couldn't because my bluetooth wouldn't accept it.

I debated reactivating my old "Pay and Talk" phone for the trip back east, I still haven't decided about that. It will cost me an extra $50 to reactivate and I just don't know whether it is worth it. In the past I have travelled through the USA without a phone and relied on the kindness of strangers when I ran into truck-trouble. I think the kindness of strangers probably works in Canada as well.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

So here are a few of the photos of my trip from my iPhone. Not very exciting, but better than nothing!

Lunch at a rest area somewhere in northern Ontario:


View of Lake Superior, a small inland sea! It was a windy day with breakers on the water:


The Terry Fox monument, just east of Thunder Bay on Lake Superior. Can't not stop there. He's my hero.


The Sleeping Giant as seen from the Terry Fox monument.


Crocheted cobwebs in a tree at The Forks in Winnipeg:


Bathroom stop somewhere in Manitoba.


A river in the city of North Vancouver. Where else do you get a river like this right in the city?


Leia hunting rocks in the river.


I took no photos in Alberta or BC on the trip because there was no point, it was too smokey. I probably should have taken photos of Saskatchewan grain fields or oil wells in Alberta (actually the first oil well I saw in operation was in southwestern Manitoba) or other picturesque stuff like that, I am just not very good at whipping out the camera when there's something interesting to catch.

A weekend of time travel, 40 years into the past

Back in the 1970s, it was apparently considered a good thing to store camera pictures as slides instead of photos. So I did that, and through that decade managed to accumulate many many slides.

The problem with slides though is that you can't keep them in photo albums or even shoe boxes to haul out and look at whenever you want.

Slides usually end up in stacks of little plastic boxes that never see the light of day unless you have a projector, screen, and captive audience.

Mine did at any rate.

A couple of winters ago Isaac and I started talking about scanning my slides. A couple of years before that I had bought a scanner with an attachment that allowed you to scan slides, but never got around to trying it out, because I found the software that went with that scanner quite user-unfriendly, so I only used the scanner when I absolutely had to. Isaac tried it and found it completely inadequate.

However, he played around with different techniques, finally settling on projecting the slides onto a large screen and then photographing the projected images. So we did quite a few slides that way.

The images were recognizable, but not very good quality. We didn't know whether that was because of the technique, or because the slides had just deteriorated that much. They are mostly 35-40 years old. So we discussed it off and on, and thought about other methods of digitizing the slides. Last winter we were going to project them again and be more careful about focussing the camera on the images, but we never got around to it.

Several weeks ago we picked up the conversation again, this time looking at getting the job done professionally. But the cost was prohibitive. I have around 350 slides, and the cost of scanning them is anywhere from $0.50 to $0.90 per slide, plus taxes and delivery costs. Finally, Isaac suggested renting a bulk slide scanner.

We looked into that and it turned out we could rent fairly good equipment for $125 per day, and the rental company considered a weekend, even a long weekend, a single day. Last weekend was a long weekend here, the Family Day weekend. So on Friday afternoon I drove to the rental place (Vistek) and picked up a Nikon ls-5000 slide scanner and Nikon fs-210 bulk slide feeder (that's what you're seeing in the above photos).

Vistek is on Queen St East, in an older building. It's easy to drive right by it without seeing it because although the building is quite large, the store entrance is off an inner courtyard that you can only get to by a coach entry. Out on the street it just looks like an old office building.

The store is huge inside, and apparently well known among photography professionals. Every kind of photographic equipment imaginable is available there for rent. And for those in the know, the Friday before a long weekend is an excellent time to rent equipment: you get three days for the price of one. So when I went there it was very busy.

There is a long rental counter on one side of the store, with several cash registers devoted just to the rental business. Behind the counter was a huge stack of equipment in various padded bags and cases. In order to rent my equipment I had to make a $650 security deposit and hand over my passport and credit card for scanning. They also took a picture of me.

Before renting this equipment I did a bit of research about it on the internet. I found out that although it is considered very good, there are definite problems with it, particularly with the sf-210 bulk slide feeder. Apparently it is very prone to jamming, and when it jams you have to shut down the entire scanner and software and restart it all. Also, there are problems running it in Windows Vista, which is what my desktop computer is running.

The alternative is, well, nothing. There is no alternative, or none that I can afford. I decided to go ahead anyway and just steel myself for a long frustrating weekend of feeding 350 slides into a recalcitrant scanner. Fortunately it was not as bad as it could have been.

The scanner itself can be made to work in Windows Vista (Nikon has a driver for that), but the bulk feeder cannot. My netbook (Dora) runs Windows XP and both the scanner and the bulk feeder were fine with that.

About half of my slides have plastic frames and the other half have cardboard frames. The bulk feeder had no problem with the plastic frames so I could scan up to 50 at a time of them with no problem at all. However for logistical reasons I did them in smaller batches.

The software is quite sophisticated, it can clean up dirty slides, and adjust for fading and other problems. However I was slow to pick up on what it could do, the manual didn't really explain it all, so I ended up spending all day Saturday scanning and rescanning the plastic-framed slides as I figured out the settings.

That was OK, after all the reading I had done about how frustrating this job was going to be, I had mentally planned on spending all day Saturday just working out the bugs; so the fact that I actually got half of my slides scanned in the process was a bonus.

The cardboard-framed slides were another matter. Essentially, I had to feed them into the scanner one at a time. However, I figured out a way to use the bulk feeder to do two at a time without jamming, and since each slide took two minutes to go through the entire scan and post-processing routine, that meant that I could actually leave the scanner alone for up to 4 minutes at a time, allowing for such things as doing laundry and making tea and sandwiches as needed.

By Monday afternoon all the slides were done. I also found a box full of old negatives, and since the scanner also had an attachment for processing 35mm negatives, I thought I'd try that as well. Going through the box I found a few "rolls" of negatives that I never got printed (back in the day when I was playing around with a darkroom and thought that I would print them myself). So I scanned in about 50 negatives as well. The software processes the negatives into positive images.

I put all of the processed images up on our home network and Isaac downloaded them onto his computer and tried his hand at enhancing the images with his Mac iPhoto program. He did some impressive work! iPhoto is way better than anything I have on my PC. However I do have a program that does batch conversions of TIFF files to JPEGs, so I did that for all of the images that Isaac enhanced.

So now all of my slides are digitized. The images are way better than the ones we did a couple of years ago using a projector and camera, but they do show their age. It was a massive job but now it's done!

Returning the equipment to Vistek was almost harder than renting it from them in the first place. I arrived at the store on Tuesday morning shortly before the deadline, and the store was full of people returning equipment. There was a long line-up of people with large boxes and bags of stuff. The rental staff checked everything quite thoroughly when it was returned, and it took over half an hour for me to go through the line-up and the check-in procedure.

But it was a productive weekend and definitely a learning experience! I suppose if you put a dollar figure on my time then it was not cost-effective, I really only saved about $75 over the cost of having it done professionally. But I ended up spending three days poring over slides and negatives I had not looked at in many years, it was quite an experience. Not to mention learning about ICE, GEM and ROC technology for enhancing digital images. Not that I plan to use that new-found knowledge any time soon!

Here's a little taste of what was in all those slide boxes:

Visiting Everdale

Lindsay butcher boy

Fooling around in the grocery store

Fooling around in a Toronto office waiting room

My mother

My parents walking their dog Cinnamon

Eli having his very curly hair brushed
Erecting a teepee
Wenegans gardening

Our campsite while building Nimrodell
Nimrodell half built
RL getting her hair hennaed

Dora's back

For those of you who are disgusted by the 2010 Olympics in BC (I count myself as one who is disgusted by the Olympics in general), here's some good news: the Red Tent Campaign.

Yes I know that the Olympics provide wonderful opportunities and motivation for young athletes---every evil has an upside---but as far as I am concerned the evil of it is overwhelming. I could go on for awhile about why I feel that way, but I digress. Go visit the Red Tent Campaign article and website for news of an innovative and heartening initiative.

And yes, Dora's back, with a brand new motherboard. This is her first post, and so far so good.

I was at Sam's place in D'Arcy when Dora the Teeny Tiny computer broke down, and I had my browser home page set to the Environment Canada local weather page, Pemberton, when it happened. So it was kind of nostalgic and interesting to get that weather report from another world when I first fired up the internet connection. I have the Toronto weather as my browser home page on my desktop computer; it's kind of fun to have the Pemberton BC weather report as an alternative. Toronto is below zero, Pemberton is above. Pemberton has snow, Toronto does not. I find the friggin' cold with no snow a little bizarre, but apparently this is normal here.

But Wiarton Willie saw his shadow today (he shoulda been in TO, no shadow here!) so it's six more weeks of winter!

Downed in D'Arcy

The Teeny Tiny computer went belly up last night. It's been just over six weeks since I bought it and it appears to be kaput.

Wow. Probably the shortest lived computer I've ever had.

I called the store where I bought it and they said bring it in to the nearest outlet and they'd see what they could do for me. Because I bought the extended warranty the fellow I talked to said they would attempt to go the extra mile for me. Technically it's still under manufacturer's warranty so I'm supposed to deal with the manufacturer.

I have not backed up this computer since I left Toronto, but I don't think I've lost a lot. All my photos are still on my camera memory card, and my email on a Yahoo server. A few small files that I have downloaded might be lost but the fellow I talked to seemed to think they could recover the data from my hard drive at a reasonable cost. In the meantime Sam is loaning me the use of his laptop while I am at his place. After I leave here I'll be netbook-less until I get back to Toronto as I really don't have time to drop in at the nearest computer store outlet to have them look at my computer. And this still being the Christmas season I imagine they are terribly busy right now anyway.

It does feel weird though, not having my little netbook. You know you're an addict when a brief period of no access sends you into a tailspin! Really should do something about that, but I am at a loss as to what.

Aside from that setback things are fine here, we're just hanging out with the dogs.

Hiro is wounded and although he is feeling fine any rambunctious behaviour stresses the stitches and the wound is not healing properly. So we are trying to keep him more or less immobilized. Might be do-able if it were just him, but Hapi really really wants to play with him, so we have two very big, very frustrated dogs here.

This afternoon Hiro got loose just when I was trying to bring Hapi in from a walk; the two dogs took off in a great play fight all over the field in front of the cabin. I spent several minutes chasing them and yelling at them to quit that, which of course they had no intention of doing. I finally managed to collar Hiro but Hapi kept trying to attack him anyway.

I think it's going to take another couple of weeks for Hiro's wound to heal enough for him to be free to play again, I am sorry I will not be able to witness that.

Goodbye SippyCup, Hello Dora

I just bought a Teeny Tiny computer to replace my old laptop. The laptop is over seven years old, a venerable age for any computer but positively ancient for a laptop. Even though I am happy with it and would much rather just get it repaired than replace it, I also like the idea of getting new(er), faster (maybe) technology, so I went out and bought the Teeny Tiny computer.

I give my computers names. My last desktop was called BamBam, and its replacement is too. My old laptop is SippyCup, but I decided not to give the new computer the same name so its name is Dora. As in Dora the Explorer.

As it turned out, Dora was not entirely "all there" when I brought it home; it is supposed to be a netbook but it couldn't access the net. What kind of netbook is that?!? As it turned out the store had not installed all the drivers so I had to take it back on a day when the technician was in to get that done.

The netbook comes with a CD of drivers but no CD drive, so unless you also purchase an external CD drive, the CD of drivers is kind of useless. And if you're missing the driver that lets the netbook access the net, downloading software from the net becomes a bit of a Catch 22. Can't access the net without the driver, can't get the driver without the net access.

Anyway, with that taken care of then there's the whole day and more of loading favourite bits of software, all my data and whatever personal configuration I want. It really takes the edge off the initial pleasure at acquiring new technology! Dora is no longer a shiny bright new toy but rather the source of seemingly endless work and aggravation.

The Teeny Tiny keyboard is actually only slightly smaller than the laptop keyboard, but for some reason it has extra keys that I don't know the use of and get in my way. The Shift keys seem to have moved so I can't hit them intuitively but have to stop, look and carefully place my fingers on them. The mouse touchpad is OK but the two buttons for it have been replaced by a single button that I find hard to manipulate.

Then there's the Teeny Tiny screen! Well whatever, hopefully I'll get used to it.

But what I really like about Dora, is its Teeny Tiny weight. Sippycup weighs in at six and a half pounds, Dora at a little over two pounds, or one kilo. Sweet.

This post comes to you from the keyboard of BamBam, Dora is still a "work in progress".

Brrr!

Last night at 10pm all the lights suddenly went out. Looked out the window and the street was dark, it wasn't just us! After groping around in the dark for a few minutes looking for flashlights and candles, we all decided it was bedtime. From my bedroom window I could see some lights on in an apartment building on the other side of the train tracks, and the CN Tower still lit up. So it wasn't the whole city, just our neighbourhood, but I couldn't see how far it extended.

I kept waking up in the night expecting to see my clock radio flashing at me, but no. Fortunately I had piles of duvets on the bed so under the covers it was warm, but by morning the temperature was 12C not just in my bedroom, but in the entire house. Using my headlamp I got up to make porridge and tea (thank goodness for a gas stove!) and then went downstairs to commiserate with the rest of the household.

Phelan has been sick since yesterday with stomach flu, he's still sick and completely miserable. He refuses to wear warm clothes and cries for food which we have to refuse because he just throws it back up. Isaac manages to get internet service on his iPod Touch, sufficient to know that this blackout is serious and widespread.

Gretel gets on her cell phone (once again, having no landline, only VOIP, we are handicapped as far as phone service is concerned) and calls a friend outside the affected area to see if she can take the kids there for the day. On the radio they are saying service may not be back for up to another 24 hours, and this is one of the coldest days so far, -30C with wind chill!

Phelan being sick is a problem, we know he his pretty contagious and don't really want to expose other people's kids to him, but what else is there to do?

Even Dobby is feeling the cold, we are all huddled on the couch, Phelan in Gretel's lap, Tristan in Isaac's lap and Dobby in mine. We are planning for the day, getting the kids someplace warm and leaving taps dripping to prevent pipes from freezing. School and daycare are of course closed, they will have no heat until the power is back.

It feels very strange, very isolating, having no idea what is going on, no access to the internet or radio or TV. Our cell phone batteries are not well charged, we are trying to be careful using them. I manage to find enough batteries to power one radio, the radios here sure need a lot of batteries! Our sole source of heat is two candles. We can't use the gas stoves because they have some safety mechanism that prevents you from lighting the oven without electricity. The gas furnace won't work without the electric fans. We can however use the stove burners to make coffee, tea and porridge.

Gretel calls the daughter of Ross, the older single man across the street, to find out if she has checked on him. Turns out she took him to her home last night before the power outage, and she lives outside the affected area.

While Gretel is talking to her, the lights flick on and the furnace starts up. Yippee, power!

In another hour or two, I'll take off the gloves and hat, the house is slowly getting back up to warm.

The mayor has been on the radio telling people what to do, there are warming stations set up in the affected area. Turn the tap on! Check on your neighbours, especially seniors and the health-challenged! Move your cars off main streets! Go someplace warm!

Around 100,000 people have had their power cut, and Ontario Hydro is gradually restoring service. We were among the lucky 11,000 who got power back before 9.00am. The problem was caused by flooding of a power station at Dufferin and Bloor, they must have been working on the problem all night. The subway could run, but it couldn't stop in our area, it just ran right through to the other side. Streetcars couldn't run at all, they had shuttle buses instead. The affected area is from somewhere west of High Park to east of Spadina, and from St. Clair in the north to Queen in the south. The Bloor subway won't stop between Jane and St. George. That's a long way!

More off-grid, kind of

Yet more drama on the phone/internet front. Huge cell phone bills attempting to get problem resolved. As it turns out, the issue is entirely with the ISP, even the bits of our internal system that failed can be put at their feet. They insisted it was our problem not theirs and we dutifully made changes to attempt to resolve "our" problem, only to end up screwing up a perfectly good system. Argh!

The worst of it was, tech support folks who said "do this, it will work for sure" and ended the call there (and of course "this" didn't work at all), and who promised to call back in a couple of hours and never did. Three times. Someone eventually did call back late last night but the household was in bed, exhausted from frustration and the contemplation of huge cell phone bills racked up troubleshooting a problem that wasn't ours in the first place.

We heard, via our friendly young dog walker, that others in the neighbourhood were going through exactly the same process, being assured by the same ISP that the system was just fine thank you, the problem must be with them, the customers. Also getting the same assurances of a callback within two hours and nothing happening.

So now the system appears to be functional, but trust is completely out the window.

Would that we could simply shop somewhere else!

Off-grid, kind of

A couple of days ago our ISP went down in our neighbourhood. Initially they said they had fixed it within the first day, but that turned out to be premature, they were still working on it late last night. Today it is fixed, we think.

Problem for us is, our phone service is VOIP. In order to make that work my son has created a complicated arrangement of modems and routers (involving many many many wires). When it works, it works beautifully, but when it doesn't, oh boy!

To compound the problem, my son is not only out-of-town but out-of-country on business, many time zones away. Not due to return for at least another ten days. He's the one who set up the system and really the only one who understands its intricacies.

The nice thing about living in a neighbourhood of small houses crowded together is that we have several overlapping wireless networks here, and some of our neighbours don't see the need for security. So we have been able to piggyback off our neighbours' internet service, in part because they get it from another provider. But that doesn't give us back our phone service. The ISP has resolved their problem, our modem is getting an internet signal, but it doesn't appear to be continuing on from the modem into the morass of routers and wires, we still don't have our phone service back.

So, here's the thing about VOIP. It's cheap and it works great when it works. The very few internet outages would be OK, but when it triggers a catastrophic failure of the complicated home system, an ISP glitch of maybe a few hours duration turns into several days of head-scratching and hair-pulling. I'm not so sure that that is worth it.

OK now, where does this wire go to...?