teabowl

The New York Times, in its fascinating blog “Measure for Measure,” currently has a great piece by Suzanne Vega about how her song, “Tom’s Diner,” played a key role in the development of the MP3. The engineers at Fraunhofer Institut in Germany used it to iteratively eradicate noise artifacts from the MP3 compression algorithm.

One day in 2000, I dropped my daughter, Ruby, off at nursery school and was approached by one of the fathers I didn’t know very well. Imagine my surprise when he said, “Congratulations on being the mother of MP3!” he said.

Full story at New York Times.

I’m sure everyone else knows about this already, but I’m so delighted that I just had to ‘report’ on it anyway :)

Starbucks Canada is offering 2 hours of free wireless on their Bell Hotspots for Starbucks Card customers who have registered their Starbucks Cards. So not only do you get free soy milk and/or flavour shots if you register your Starbucks Card, but you can also spend a delightful two hours working/surfing at Starbucks if, like me today, you find yourself with an unexpected couple of hours away from your desk between meetings and don’t want to cough up the exhorbitant Bell Hotspot fees.

Apparently, Starbucks is introducing a Stabucks Rewards program this fall, and the free wireless offer will be transitioned into that - I wonder if you’ll have points to spend on wifi access?

Anyway, go get yourself a grande soy latte and some free Internet while it lasts.

It feels like a bit of an old topic. It’s been discussed many times before, and the outcome is pretty much always: be cautious. Don’t steal someone else’s Internet access. Depending on where you live, it could be a criminal offense to just jump onto an unprotected home wi-fi router and connect to the ‘Net. And, since you’re using someone else’s resources - presumably without their knowledge and consent - we’re told it’s just plain not very nice.

The other piece of advice that always goes with this is for anyone who has high-speed Internet access and uses a wireless router/access point to distribute it to various laptops, desktops and devices around the home: protect your network. Most wireless routers these days are trivial to set up, and their manuals make it child’s play to enable WEP/WPA, so there’s really no excuse for not practicing safe wi-fi.

And there’s the rub: unless you don’t want to - or can’t be bothered. In which case, my personal opinion is that anyone can jump on your ‘public’ network because you’ve made it fair game to do so. Again - in my personal opinion - I think you’ve made your network into just another node in an increasingly accessible wireless infrastructure that’s pretty pervasive, especially in large cities, especially in North America.

Being in a public spot in downtown Toronto (as I am right now), somewhere where there are lots of high-rise condo and office buildings, you really shouldn’t have to pay for wireless Internet access. Your challenge is more about where you are located physically and whether you have a high-enough, open-enough vantage point so that you’re within range of unprotected networks (most of which are residential).

There’s a slight security concern about making your traffic go through someone else’s network, of course. My sense is that you have three primary factors in your favour:

1. 90% of the time, your ‘provider’ won’t know you’re using his or her network.
2. Home routers are notoriously poor at logging network activities or data packets moving through them (and those are are good at it are operated by people who really know what they’re doing, and those people wouldn’t not protect their wireless networks)
3. If someone isn’t protecting their wireless network, there’s about a 50% chance they’re okay with it being used by anonymous users.

Now for the question of what’s okay and what’s not. We don’t want to get our ‘provider’ in trouble, and we don’t want to get in trouble ourselves. So here are some suggestions of what not to do when leeching wi-fi access:

• Download or upload gratuitous quantities of software, music or movies
• Use weird peer-to-peer protocols
• Download/upload porn or other materials for which someone could (maybe) get in trouble with their own access provider.

I think that using ‘borrowed’ networking time for email, surfing, reading/writing blogs, etc. is perfectly fine (note that I’m not giving you advice here or telling you what to do; I’m just saying what I think). These activities generate very low impact traffic that can easily piggyback on someone’s network without affecting them. If it gets too much for them, they can turn your access off by simply protecting their network. Until then, I am silently thankful to be borrowing their connection and respectful of their privacy, ethics and risks.

While I can’t comment on other cities, here in Toronto, the alternatives are pretty bad. The only ‘pervasive’ wireless network provider (in other words, not hot-spot based) in the downtown core is One Zone by Toronto Hydro Telecom. And that’s just brutal. Unreliable. Works only half the time (if that). Doesn’t work high up. Doesn’t work low down. Doesn’t work in areas that its own map says should work. Doesn’t work when there are a lot of people on it. Doesn’t work with good equipment. Doesn’t work with so-so equipment. It’s just not worth the money they’re asking for it: something like $30 per month, or day rates of around $10.

Wireless Toronto, on the other hand, is very cool: free wireless, simple rules, lots of access points. Sadly, I’m not really a ‘coffee house’ kind of guy, so the idea of seeking out a specific location to do my surfing doesn’t always work for me. But conceptually, I’m there. If it were pervasive, I’d pay for it under some co-op agreement - its politics are solid and its technology works a lot better than One Zone’s.

On my way back from Seattle last Saturday, I had another small travel adventure (my adventure on the way there is described here).

A blizzard had been announced back in Toronto (it was known by Friday afternoon that we’d get a lot of snow - 30cm+). So I tried calling Air Canada the night before to get some advice and potentially re-book my flight to Sunday. Of course, I had no luck with that as they didn’t pick up the phone (or rather, I hung on for around 30 minutes and decided it wasn’t worth the pain in my craned neck to try any longer).

On Saturday morning, I got up at 5am, received an SMS from Air Canada (good use of technology there, btw) saying that the flight was delayed by about 30 minutes, and made my way to the airport. Everything went very smoothly, and before long I found myself at the gate, Starbucks and muffin in hand. Flight AC540 is the regularly scheduled Seattle-Toronto non-stop flight, and it’s become a bit of an old friend.

So we embark on the small but comfortable Embraer plane (the new Brazilian planes Air Canada uses on these flights) and get going. The flight takes 4 hours and 30 minutes gate to gate. Everything seems suspiciously smooth.

When we get to the Toronto area, the trouble starts. We circle between Toronto and Waterloo at least twice (I think it was maybe three times), but they close runway after runway at Pearson Airport, and our fuel - I assume - gets lower and lower. Finally, it’s decided that we’re being diverted: we’re going to South Bend, Indiana. It turns out this isn’t too far from Chicago (not that I knew this when I was there… all I saw was a bleak but dry airport).

In South Bend, we don’t get to leave the plane… we’re refueled and Air Canada practically auctions off the last remaining pay-for food items to the highest bidders. According to Air Canada’s website, we’re supposed to be leaving there within the hour and arrive in Toronto at 8pm. We were originally scheduled to arrive at 3:15pm or so, but okay - there’s a blizzard.

Two problems: they need to transmit the flight plan to us, and we don’t have take-off instructions for South Bend, Indiana. This is not an airport Air Canada typically flies to, so our planes don’t have the South Bend, Indiana, runways programmed in their on-board computers.

How are these things transferred to us, you ask? Glad you did. By fax. Yes. We’re living in the 21st century, and flight plans and runway descriptions are faxed from airport to airport.

As it turned out, Toronto faxed them, but United’s fax machine in South Bend, Indiana, ran out of toner halfway through. So we waited an extra hour or so.

I was home at around 11pm. At the luggage carousel, someone cheekily (I assume) changed the display board to alternate between saying ‘AC540 Seattle’ and ‘AC540 South Bend.’ Since that’s not an airport Air Canada officially flies to, I thought it would be a good picture to capture for posterity. Sort of like a Moment of Zen (thanks to The Daily Show).

So here I was, early for my flight, as it turns out, at Toronto Pearson Airport, e-ticket in hand. You know the drill (well, if you’ve left Toronto by plane then you do):

• Use one of the little electronic kiosks to check in and get your boarding pass;
• Stand in line to get your luggage tagged if you have something to check;
• Stand at a little pod desk and fill in your US Customs form;
• Stand in line to go through US Immigration;
• Drop off your luggage on a conveyor belt;
• Stand in line to go through security…

And then… I realized that I was a bag short. My laptop bag had mysteriously gone missing! I felt naked, exposed, that moment of panic when you realize it’s not a bad dream but you actually left your bag standing in an airport somewhere and it’s probably been taken by now.

I go up to a cluster of Peel Regional Police people, and one of them kindly offers to take me all the way back along my track to see if it’s still there. I am certain I left it at the pod desk where I filled out my forms - it’s not there. I trace my steps back to the luggage tagging counter - it’s not there. Then, I see something green out of the corner of my eye… my bag! It’s still standing where I left it: at the electronic check-in kiosk.

I say to the Peel Policeman, “I guess this proves that Toronto is really a safe city. Or I’m just lucky.” He goes, “I’d go with option B on that one.”

He tells me that they’ve done ‘tests’ with phone books in laptop bags in this airport, and apparently people regularly just steal them. One woman walked all the way out of the terminal: past security, past police, into the parking garage. They nabbed her just as she threw the stolen ‘laptop’ into the backseat of her car. Her excuse? “I was going to turn it into the police when I got home!”

So… I hope this isn’t an omen for how this week will go. One week in Seattle filled with various Microsoft conferences. But I’m staying at a great hotel and the weather’s much warmer there than in Toronto :)

At the gate, I glance into the distance and see the billboard above. Treo seems to be encouraging this laptop-forgetting business :)

This is pretty sweet: Sign up for a jajah.com account, and you get Skype-like telephony but on your home phone. The calls are initiated using the web site, and both parties’ phones ring. Essentially, the service carries the long distance portion of the call using the Internet and feeds the ‘last mile’ through the local phone network under fair use inter-telco agreements.

It’s incredibly cheap from and to most de-regulated countries: $1.50 for an hour from Germany to Canada :)

http://www.jajah.com

Recently observed at a Starbucks inside a Chapters (sorry for the crappy Blackberrycam pic). There’s practically nobody in this picture who’s not using a laptop. It’s a little puzzling and disorienting: there used to be a time when I would have thought this was really cool. You know, wireless network access, everybody collaborating or telecommuting (or just hanging out with their buddies on Messenger :)

These days, these people strike me as a little… I don’t really know what word to use. It’s just a really far cry from what the Viennese café society or the salon were meant to be - public spaces (or, in the case of the salon, invitation-only spaces) to hang out and debate. I somehow feel they should rather be talking to each other… but of course there are few suburban scenarios where that would happen :)

Spending time in a McCoffee shop staring at a laptop screen seems a little sad when you think about what a coffee shop represented about 100 years ago.

And I don’t mean to come across as all Luddite here - I’ve done it too. Although I’ve always resented being ripped off for wifi access.

And, well, at least the two in the foreground appear to be pointing animatedly at their laptop screen. Wonder what they’re talking about about. Maybe the next big web 2.0 startup :P