Later today this blog will be moved to it’s own URL:
http://www.threesquirrels.com.

Please adjust your bookmarks and RSS feeds accordingly.

Share This

At 11 am this morning I arrived at my local Hertz agent to pick up a rental car. Specifically a van which I would drive cross country to Vancouver. Everything went swimmingly until I gave them my PayPal Mastercard to pay for the rental - all $1,230 of it.

The balance in my PayPal account is currently over $1,600, so of course the card was declined. I was not in the slightest surprised. It is PayPal after all.

I had forgotten to bring the super secret PayPal toll free number 1-888-221-1161, so I bit the bullet and called the long distance number on the back .

11:47 am - phoned PayPal’s Nebraska number. Fought though the voice prompts and waited on hold.

12:01 pm - some guy in India picks up, takes my details. At least he speakes English, unlike Bell Mobility operators.

12:10 pm- After another wait on hold he tells me that the server had timed out between PayPal and whoever is the middle man for credit card processing. Possible but seems unlikely.

12:15 pm - I am noe told that the card has been reset and will work fine. I am told that no, there is no dollar limit of charges. I am told that yes for sure the card will work.

12:16 pm Card is declined. Guy in India offers to transfer me to someone in the Debit Card department. I ask if they can phone me, thus saving long distance charges. He takes my number and assures me that I’ll get a call right away.

12:50 pm - arrive home. No call from PayPal.

1:00 pm - connected to Paypal via the super secret toll free number - 1-888-221-1161 waded through a mass of loathsome voice activated prompts (PayPal refuses to accept 0-0-0-0 as an excape route to a real person.) and wound up on hold.

1:10 pm - astonishingly PayPal is experiencing high call volumes. They try to pawn me off onto the web site where surely all my questions will be answered. Ya, right, how green do I look?

1:16 pm - Having dealt with Pay Pal before I take this chance to cook and eat lunch.

1:22 pm - Vicki answers. At least she seems to be in America not India. Apparently the funds need to be in the US Dollar side of the account, not the Canadian dollar side of the account. Another important PayPal secret.

1:30 pm - I have hung up after berating Vicki and requesting a refund for my time and expense in dealing with this. I have also requested that they e-mail mail me to confirm that I will receive a refund. I am not holding my breath.

1:38 pm - Transfer funds into the US dollar side, then call Hertz to see if we can give this one more run.

1:43 pm - Hertz needs manager approval because “every time that a credit card is declined we’re charged twenty-five dollars.” Really, who makes up this stuff?

2:16 pm - Hertz calls, card is accepted. Still no word from PayPal.

3:00 pm - only five hours late I have a Chevrolet minivan. Despite both CAA and Hertz promising Sirius satellite radio, the local branch says “We can’t do that here.”

Share This

It’s been a couple of months at least since reporting back on the Primus WIMAX trials here in Hamilton. I’m preparing to move so these will be short takes.

1) There is a consistent lag in loading pages, especially if I reload several tabs at once in Opera. Whether this is WIMAX specific, or just the result of server configurations at Primus is anyone’s guess.

2) Download and upload speeds seem less than satisfying using FTP and Bittorrent. The former is bit better with Filezilla on the PC than with Fetch on the Mac, but still seems less that I would expect from DSL. Bittorrent rates improved quite a bit when I turned on encryption in Azureus. That suggests that Primus has been throttling Bittorent traffic.

3) VOIP - Primus has promised VOIP service through their Talk Broadband program. I haven’t seen that yet. Last month I downloaded a VOIP client from FreePhoneLine.com. It is recommended by a number of people who find it works fine. From my Windows PC though it is unable to connect to the server. I’ve worked through router port settings, WIMAX modem port settings - everything really - and it’s a no-go. Everyone concerned claims that it’s not their fault. Well, Primus says they’re not blocking the ports in question. ZyXel, who manufacture the WIMAX modem simply don’t respond to e-mail. Honestly after all is said and done my guess is that Primus‘ systems are blocking these specific VOIP ports. For now I’ve abandoned VOIP. Perhaps at some point I’ll have time to try out the WIMAX modem as a SIP client, but not this month.

It’s worth noting that communication from Primus, who have been running these trials, has been almost zero. If I write to report a technical issue I’ll generally get something back, but details are sparse and there doesn’t seem to be real effort to solve issues. I really would appreciate a regular bulletin telling me what’s working, what’s not, and what to expect as the trial moves ahead.

Share This

From the The Rural Blog, a digest of events, trends, issues, ideas and journalism in rural America, from the Institute for Rural Journalism and Community Issues.

Daylight Saving Time starts March 9. For years, most of Indiana refused to join the rest of the country in moving clocks ahead one hour, “in part because farmers resisted the prospect of having to work an extra hour in the morning dark,” writes Justin Lahart of The Wall Street Journal. In 2006, Indiana began participating in the annual switch that has long been considered an energy-saver. Now, research using data from before and after the change says “springing forward may actually waste energy.”

“Their finding: Having the entire state switch to daylight-saving time each year, rather than stay on standard time, costs Indiana households an additional $8.6 million in electricity bills”

Share This

This week the Canadian Association of Journalists (CAJ) issued a Press Release calling for news organizations to be excluded from Canadian Human Rights legislation. The events that precipitated this were two complaints by Islamic groups against the now web only Western Standard, and against Macleans Magazine.

I have yet to be convinced that journalists, much less publications like Macleans, need to be “protected” from Human Rights Commissions. Since the Commissions in question haven’t even hinted at a decision in these cases I cannot see how the CAJ can claim that they pose a threat to journalists.

For human rights protections to be effective they must be as close to absolute as is possible, and exceptions must be rare and exceptional. Nothing in the CAJ’s complaint meets those standards.

Why shouldn’t the media be held accountable if it is felt that they are exhibiting bias against one group or another? Do publishers and broadcasters have a special privilege which allows them to present material which defames a minority community? Do they not have an obligation to explain their choices, and even to apologize if needed?

The Alberta Human Rights Commission has dealt with similar complaints (1) (2) in the past and from a cursory reading were careful to address the concerns of the media as well as the complainants.

Perhaps things are different in the rarefied atmosphere of Toronto newsrooms, but out in the real world the word “Muslim” has become near synonymous with “Terrorist” and “Evil.” Dr. Elmasry’s claim that “Muslims in both Canada and the U.S. have now replaced Blacks as the number-one minority group being demonized in the public square, in books, in the print and broadcast media, on movie screens, and increasingly in the Internet and World Wide Web...” is not far from the truth. Certainly for many in the Muslim community, or even the “looks vaguely like they could be Muslim” community, these suspicions are a part of daily life.

The CAJ feels the imperative to defend Canadian journalists against Dr. Elmasry and the Canadian Islamic Congress, and the Western Report against critics of its publication of the Jyllands-Posten cartoon. Where though were the CAJ critics when in 2002 the Western Report was being accused of defaming the Jewish community, or when in December of 2007 the Red Deer Advocate was found to contravene the code when they published a Letter to The Editor entitled “Homosexual Agenda Wicked”?

The CAJ archives are incomplete, but I can find no news release defending either of these publishers’ right to publish materials offensive to the gay and Jewish communities. It does look as if there is a double standard at play.

I fail to see any legitimate reason why publishers and broadcasters should not be held to the same standards as all other Canadians. “It costs us money” is not a reason, nor is “It’s a nuisance.”

After reading Margaret Wente’s column in the Globe and Mail this weekend and December’s Tyee column by Terry Glavin I am left to wonder why members of the media are suddenly so very interested in undermining our Human Rights commissions. If there is a significant problem why I aren’t I seeing real investigative reporting instead of veiled criticisms and anecdotal complaints?

If Canadian media are to line up and attack our system of Human Rights bodies, they need to lay out hard facts demonstrating that injustices have occurred on a recurring basis, not just vague complaints that Human Rights Tribunals are not courts of law.

Or if what media organizations seek is the complete and unfettered right to print anything that they choose, then let them stand up and say so, and accept the criticisms that will follow.

Share This

Remember last year, when I wrote about Bob Gourlay? Well, this just in.

Hello Barry - I was blown away last year when I read your Blog, and I want to warmly thank you for not forgetting those programs! I never ever dreamed that the show would have an important impact on those terrific young kids in Kelowna during the 1960’s early 70’s.

Thanks to your Blog, I am doing now the Crystal Sound Barrier on www.cronicaradio.com

Every 2 weeks or so I do a new 30 min show! THIS WEEK, FRIDAY, I will be doing a SPECIAL SHOW dedicated to YOU and the kids of Kelowna who remember those songs. I will be talking this week about SEX - something I could not do on CKOV! I will be playing a record that echoes the feeling
of those wild flower power 60’s!

Reply if you wish to roberto@mailmallorca.com

Wishing all of you only the GREATEST of SUCCESS!

- Bob Gourlay of CKOV’s The Crystal Sound Barrier.

Share This

This week’s book is not available at Amazon.com but can be had used from several sellers at Amazon.ca. I got my copy for fifty cents at the Hamilton Public Library book sale.

Roughnecks & Wildcatters by Allan Anderson is an oral history of the Canadian oil patch, especially Alberta and the prairies. Published in 1981 it collects first person accounts from hundreds of people who created the Canadian oil industry, from investors, to geologists, to the men and women who worked the rigs that brought the first oil out of those farm lands.

I’m not big fan of oral histories, but this is easily as entertaining as the best of Studs Terkel’s work, and I’d argue is an essential book if you want to understand the history and politics that surround the oil industry in this country.

It also shows how the oil boom that emerged during the first half of the last century really was what defined the character of Alberta, with wild and ambitious men and women playing by their own rules in search of the next big payoff.

Get to your local library, who may have a copy, or buy one of the remaining copies on line, or just keep it in mind every time that you’re near a used book shop, especially those big messy ones with no discernible system. This is one book worth tracking down.

Share This

Lord, you just can’t make this up. I had a call this week from the office person at a local non-profit. As is often the case in a small operation, she is one of two people with full administrative rights on the office G4 Imac.

She was trying to figure out how to change the name that appears in the “From” field in Microsoft Entourage. She had already changed the name in the Mac Address Book, which for better or worse is invariably integrated into every other Mac application.

When that didn’t work she figured that maybe what she should do is change the user name that was associated with her Mac log in. So that instead of “Administrator” the log in now read “Jane.” All in all a pretty good guess.

She went to System Preferences on the Mac, and chose Accounts. See the panel below?

That’s what you see on the Mac. Name, Short Name, and the option to Change Password.

Where you see “Chuck” she typed in “Jane”. She left the password the same and clicked the little lock icon and closed everything out. There’s no way to change the Short Name.

Everything looked just fine. She logged out and back in using her new User Name “Jane” and her usual unchanged password. Nothing changed so she figured that maybe she would change the name of here User Folder, the one with her docs and settings. So she went into Finder , found that folder and changed the name of that from “Administrator” to “Jane” too.

When she next logged in all of her desktop and all of her documents had disappeared. Gone, finished. Nowhere to be seen. All of her settings, bookmarks, everything. Gone!

She quite sensibly panicked.

I’ll skip the considerable web research, and tell you what we found.

If you change the name in your User Folder, that change doesn’t show up anywhere else. When you next log in, even though you have the same User Name and password, the Mac goes brain dead, can’t find your data, and instead creates a new User folder with the old name.

So all of your settings and data disappear. You can see the folder that used to hold them (In this case called Administrator), but now it’s empty. You can also see the User Folder with the new name (Jane), but there’s no way that you can log in to use it.

I think we fixed this by changing User Folder Administrator’s name to OLDAdministrator, and User Folder Jane back to Administrator. Everything came back after another log in.

The secret is that the unchangeable box for Short Name, above, is really showing you the name of your User Directory.

Share This

It’s snowing in Toronto today. Really…

IT’S SNOWING IN TORONTO!!!!!!

All over the media breathless announcers are devoting most of noon time news shows to the panic and destruction sure to ensue when the expected 20 centimeters (nearly 8 inches!!!!) of snow arrives.

CBC seemed immune to the irony of the next news story they broadcast, about Prince Edward Island, where thousands of people have actually been out of power since a big storm a few days back.

While Torontonians were behaving as if Armageddon had arrived, people in PEI were making sandwiches and chili and delivering lunch to the crews fixing power lines!

Yes, while grown adults in Toronto were closing schools and cancelling plans, senior citizens in PEI were carrying on, making lunch on their Bar-B-Qs, and just plain being neighborly.

The Toronto area has been populated by non-indigenous people for about 220 years, when United Empire Loyalists negotiated the the Toronto Purchase with the Mississaugas of New Credit. I don’t have all of the historical data, but I’m sure that it has snowed during at least during 219 of those winters.

It’s not that much snow, not that windy, and not that cold. It’s a regular winter day. So I have to ask, if half of every newscast is about the weather, what news is being ignored?

And perhaps more importantly, how would the people of Toronto react to winter if the media stopped spreading panic? What if they just said “It’s winter, it’s snowing. Go for a walk in the park and clear your sidewalk.”

Oh yes, dare I forget Mel’s finest hour?

Share This

Today on the MaplePost e-mail list I found myself drawn into yet another discussion about what musicians, especially folk musicians, can do to battle on-line music sharing via peer to peer and other technologies.

The irony of course is that in the same day I was in the process of moving my entire CD collection onto my computer using a lovely CD ripping program called CDex. I place the CD in the PC and CDex reads it, looks up the artist and track information at the CDDB database, and then converts the whole thing into a folder of high quality MP3s. It’s taking maybe 20 minutes per CD, but that’s unattended so really it’s no big deal.

You see, sometime this month I realized that I had more music in digital format (much from emusic.com) than on disc, and I was listening to five albums on the computer or MP3 player for every one that I heard off of CD. Moving everything to digital just made sense.

So I’ve taking to telling folks that instead of offering the age old complaint that musicians need to get paid (with which I don’t argue) you need to tell us all how to make sure that that happens in a technologically changing environment. Wishing won’t make it so, neither will bullying, so what does the music industry (and/or performers) need to do?

As is the case with spam, the technology will always stay one step ahead of the government. For instance, many of the big ISPs have been throttling or otherwise crippling traffic from Bittorrent clients, even though many quite legitimate and legal downloads are well suited to using that technology. The solution turned out to be relatively simple. Most Bittorrent clients now offer the option of encrypting traffic so that it can’t be identified as Bittorrent, and speeds pop right back up.

Beyond that there is a generation of music lovers who have grown up with file trading and peer to peer, and who either see nothing wrong with up and downloading songs, or who at least see it as just one of the acceptable ways that they may acquire music. Just as my friends and I traded mix tapes, these kids trade songs and albums on-line.

The horse is out of the barn. The change has happened. Success will go to those who embrace it, not to those who try to stop it.

Share This

With world markets plummeting, a major recession around the corner, and some commentators even making reference to the crash of 1929, it’s a time when I really do think about what I purchase.

My old MPIO Mp3 player was having increasing problems, and I really needed to replace it. My needs are simple, as I only use it when running - I need to dump songs on it, have them play, and have it be small and light.

Things were looking bleak - Ipods start at $85 for a 1 gig Shuffle; $44 for a 1 gig Sandisk player; Microsoft Zunes starting at $149 for 4 gigs.

Finally I wandered into Factory Direct, a store best known for selling cheap refurbished electronics and a selection of no-name Chinese products.

There I found just what I wanted - An Xi MP3 player, manufactured by Creative Universe Electronic Technology Limited in Shenzhen City in China. It’s tiny, the picture above is actual size, just one inch wide. It’s simple - no calendar, no shuffle, no LED readout, no iTunes support, it just plays songs in the order that you’ve loaded them on the player. It has a rechargable Lithium Ion battery, and it even includes a charger, a USB cable, and the world’s goofiest user manual.

Best of all was the price - $29.99 for 2 gigs. Exactly what I wanted! In pink!

You can buy it at Factory Direct.

Share This

Immense thanks to Bill Doskoch for revealing the truth behind the “new” Ogopogo.  As I expected, the Ogopogo of my youth had been replaced my a friendly new Disneyfied version!

Hang your head in shame tourist industry!  Check Bill’s blog for pictures!

Share This

This week’s favorite book has been Our American King: A Novel by Washington writer David Lozell Martin. Our American King is another in the string of post-apocalyptic post 9/11 novels that seem to be springing up all over the place.

The premise of this book is that the entire American infrastructure and government collapsed in a very short time - weeks instead of years - leaving DC and environs, and indeed the entire country, without water, sewage, food distribution, mail delivery, or electricity. The US government simply disappeared, and the very rich have barricaded themselves into well supplied and well defended compounds to keep out the starving masses.

Yes, another descent into anarchy novel, but one that is well written and very well thought out. I liked it a lot.

Anyhow, I was reading along, enjoying myself, getting to know the characters, who, led by their king Tazza, had a small army camped out near DC. They had repelled an attack by returning US Government forces, sending out women and children who the young American soldiers refused to shoot.

All was going well until I read the following:

But then we suffered a devastating series of defeats from an absolutely implacable force. Parading women and children in front of this new force did not dissuade, in fact these new government troops often opened fire as soon as the women and children showed themselves. You know of course who this was, our new worst enemy - a terrible ally brought in by the government of the United States: Canadians.

(more…)

Share This

Years ago I bought cheap Chinese made table saw. The blade went round and round and it made lots of table saw noises. Problem was it wouldn’t cut straight, the guard wouldn’t stay where it was set, and it jammed constantly no matter how you used it. I always had the feeling that at any moment the damned thing would explode and take my eye out with a large chunk of spinning metal. Although it surely was a table saw, it didn’t do anything that a table saw should do well enough for it to be trusted.

That’s also my experience with Vista. All of the things that worked fine with Windows 98, 2000, and XP suddenly don’t work.

Specifically the Brother MFC-420CN All-In-One printer.

The Brother is connected by ethernet to our router, and is accessible to any computer on the network. For two years it worked dandy with both Windows 98 and Mac OS X machines over the WIFI link.

When the Win 98 machine was replaced by a new HP Laptop with Vista preinstalled we first tried printing using the included Vista drivers. Even though Vista found the printer, installed the drivers, and showed it as functioning in the Printer settings, it wouldn’t print.

We downloaded the latest package of drivers from the Brother website and installed them. Tried to print. No luck.

Finally I started to fiddle with random printer settings. What fixed it was the settings for Print Spooling.

The default setting is “spool print documents so program finishes printing faster” and “start printing immediately.”

We changed that to “print directly to the printer” and voila! we could print, although very slowly.

We then changed it to “spool print documents so program finishes printing faster” and “start printing after last page is spooled.” That works, and is quick enough to satisfy us.

One Week Later

The Vista machine would no longer print. This time I guessed right off what was happening.

The Brother printer and all computers are connected to the router. Each is assigned an IP address by the router via DHCP. This means that the IP address of the printer will change from time to time.

Under Windows 98 and OS X this was not a problem. Under Vista it is.

In a nutshell, when the printer was installed in Vista it had an IP address of 192.168.1.101. At some point during the week either the router or printer were reset, and the router then assigned the printer an address of 192.168.1.100.

Before Vista this was not a problem. With Vista it was. Vista kept looking on 192.168.1.101 and found no printer. Brain dead, it just kept trying, and every time it hit that brick wall with no understanding where that damned printer went to.

The solution was to permanently set the Brother printer to 192.168.1.101, overriding the router’s DHCP settings. Those instructions are not in the User Manual, but are in the Network User’s Guide, which is hidden on the install CD.

The short version is this:

Go to your printer.

1. Press Menu/Set
2. Press 5 (LAN)
3. Press 1 (Setup)
4. Press 1 (Boot)
5. Press the up and down arrows to select Static
6. Press Menu/Set
7. Press Stop/Exit

1. Press Menu/Set
2. Press 5 (LAN)
3. Press 1 (Setup)
4. Press 2 (IP Address)
5. Press 1 to change the IP address
6. Enter the IP address
7. Press Menu/Set
8. Press Stop/Exit

At this point your Brother printer will always have the same IP address, and Vista will always be able to find it.

Share This

Usually I find Sir Richard Branson rather cute and charming, but once in a while his love of self promotion gets out of hand.

Lest you missed some of the subtle beauty of Richard’s outfit, here’s a close up. Is it me or does he bear a striking resemblance to Jeff Bridges in the Big Lebowski?

Anyhow I found this picture by accident on Google, and that in turn led to an article entitled, no kidding, Brangelina invest in Dubai.

From the post on the International Property Investment Blog:

Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie have reportedly invested in Dubai’s The World offshore development. According to sources in Dubai, the Pitts have bought an artificial island of their own to “encourage people to live a greener lifestyle,”

The World is a man-made archipelago of 300 islands in the shape of a world map being built off the coast of Dubai.

You know, thirty years ago this would have been satirical science fiction predicated on the assumption that no one would ever do something this absurd.

Then again Nakheel, the company developing The World announced in May:

Nakheel has announced that it is developing its first island on The World, Coral Island, a super-luxury resort on the ‘north coast of Canada.‘

I don’t know whether to be terribly proud, or terribly conflicted…

Share This