Favourite Films of 2011

I had a quick look around because I was curious and it seems like Tree of Life is topping everyone’s lists this year. We have it in the queue but haven’t got around to watching it yet. I’m curious now though and I wonder if it would change things if I were to watch it first.

The curious bit, however, about the two films that did make my list is that both feature the unmatched Paul Giamatti as the leading actor. This wasn’t intentional but when I looked at everything I’d watched this year and boiled it down to just a couple of my favourites… Do I have a particular bias towards anything that Paul Giamatti does? Perhaps. Is he undoubtedly the best actor working in Hollywood right now? Yes, sir.

Barney’s Version

Barney’s Version is a brilliant take on the novel by Canadian literary heavyweight Mordecai Richler. I remembering having to read The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz in my O.A.C. (Grade 13) English class. I probably only understood about a third of what I read at the time but I can certainly appreciate a heavily nuanced and deeply moving plot a lot more now that I’m older. Barney’s Version is a movie about love, marriage, family, and memory. It’s wonderfully-acted (duh), well-written (duh), and unfolds itself in a fantastically pleasing fashion distilling all the very best parts of a well-developed Woody Allen movie. Complicated, comedic, and charming sums it up pretty well too.

Win Win

Win Win follows in the same genre of comedy as another of my all-time favourite movies Lars and the Real Girl. I’ll sum it up like this: Small town, quirky characters, social conundrums, and the kind of plot that sometimes seems like something you couldn’t make up if you tried. Like Lars, we’re treated to ninety minutes of some truly great and wholly surreal story-telling about people, a place, and a number of situations we’d never even thought about before. In this film, Giamatti plays and small-time lawyer and high-school wrestling coach as if he were born for the role.

Favourite Music of 2011

I have to be honest here, I’m losing my touch a little bit. It used to be that I’d troll around the Internet for hours every week seeking out new musical entrees to dig my teeth into. This past year, between teaching, walking the dog, union work, and taking a couple of extra courses online I haven’t had the opportunity to avail myself of a whole lot of new music. I worry I might’ve missed something great—it keeps me up at night.

Paul Simon, So Beautiful or So What

If you ever get a late night phone call from a heavily-disguised voice saying they’ve got me hostage and won’t release me unless you pay $1,000,000 the first thing you should do is ask some kind of question that only I can answer, just to prove they really have me and that I’m alive. If you asked who my favourite artist of all time is the answer, bar none, is Paul Simon. If the hostage-takers say differently then I’m probably already dead.

I didn’t love Paul Simon’s 2006 Surprise. Musically it had a lot going out and I loved that but Simon felt vocally weak, tired even. I don’t like tired Paul Simon. I used to put on Surprise and long for the Graceland days when Paul was younger and more energetic and I worried that maybe, finally, the great Paul Simon was on the out and out. Of course, I was absolutely wrong.

So Beautiful or So What is Simon’s greatest album since Graceland. It’s a guitar album—which is a pretty awesome direction for Simon—and features a lot of songs driven by virtuosic guitar melodies. It’s clear that Paul Simon has some serious guitar chops and he didn’t want us to forget. Both lyrically and musically this album is an absolute powerhouse. It runs the gamut from slow, lyrically rich near-ballads to lyrically rich up-beat, foot-stomping tracks and even some songs that are both.

tUnE-yArDs, w h o k i l l

Be honest, the first thing you think when you see a band name stylized like that is, “Avoid!”

Fortunately for me, when I first year about tUnE-yArDs it was on the CBC Radio’s Q—if I had actually seen their name first I probably wouldn’t even have given them a chance. Prejudice avoided!

tUnE-yArDs is mostly New England-based Merrill Garbus and a whole lot of loops. Her first album, I gather, was recorded entirely on cassette tape and was a one-woman show. 2011′s w h o k i l l is studio-produced and features help from some of her friends as well.

How to describe how great w h o k i l l is? I’ll say a few things. First, Garbus evidently spent some time in Kenya, a place that I’ve been to as well, and adapts a lot of African percussion rhythms into her music. Second, there are saxophones. Third, well OK, tUnE-yArDs is like a jazz, afro-funk, nouveau politique explosion that packs so much power I feel like you could take this record, play it for the people of North Korea, and instantly the entire country would rise up, overthrow their government, and democratically elect a new leader. Oh, and it’d be a she.

Bon Iver, Bon Iver

I missed the Bon Iver craze the first time around. Despite the best efforts of my good friend Andrew, I never really bothered with Justin Vernon’s 2008 For Emma, Forever Ago. I heard all about the mystique of being locked in a cabin in the woods, writing and recording using an old reel-to-reel recorder or something like that. I liked the idea but, for whatever reason, not enough to actually do any investigating. Finally—through what must’ve been an act of compassionate grace from the God—I decided to check out Bon Iver’s self-titled second album.

What how.

Bon Iver (2011) is like a sonic dream that Brian Eno would be envious of. What sets this album a part from everything else released in 2011 is the kind of depth packed into every track. The songs are stories about people and places set to music that can only be described as something out of someone’s wildest imagination. It’s soft and subtle and you kind of just float a long but there’s so much going on at the same time that you’re swept away just trying to take it all in. Not to mention Vernon’s now-trademarked vocal delivery which is, also, like something out of a dream I had once.

R.E.M., Part Lies, Part Heart, Part Truth, Part Garbage (1982 – 2011)

It turns out that half of my picks this year were thanks to one particular friend with very good musical tastes.

I’ve always liked R.E.M., kind of in the background. Growing up when I did I missed my chance to like them when they were at their very best so whenever I thought about accessing their catalog of music it always seemed a little bit daunting. Where to begin? I knew, from loving Taking Heads, that I would like their early stuff but I was dying for some kind of career retrospective, something to serve as an overview.

Thankfully, Part Lies, Part Heart, Part Truth, Part Garbage came out and it was a steal on iTunes—40 tracks for $16. As far as retrospectives go, you really can’t go wrong here.

Favourite Television of 2011

It’s been a decidedly good year for television and if I’ve been remiss when it comes to seeking out good new music I think I’ve compensated in terms of what we’re watching these days. There’s a lot out there so it’s been a bit of a challenge picking out just a couple but here they are.

The Good Wife

The Good Wife is a legal drama with a lot of layers. Underneath the normal case per episode format is a pretty hefty plot line about politics, adultery, and corruption—a depth that sets it a part from all the other legal dramas that came before it. It’s as much a character study as it is a series of cases to be solved and that’s what I like about it. It’s timely and relevant and tackles big issues with a great cast of characters.

Once Upon a Time

From some of the people behind the epically successful LOST, Once Upon a Time takes a bunch of fairytale characters and plunks them down in the real world with absolutely no idea who they are. Like LOST, Once Upon a Time plays with the idea of alternate universes, alternate identities, memory, and mystery. I’ll say this: Finally, a show that we can really sink our teeth into.

Honourable mention goes to shows that have become reliable stalwarts like Modern Family (which never ceases to be funny) and Being Erica (which ended its run in dignity after jumping the shark mid-season).

Today, the creation of a local station came one step closer to becoming a reality, but it’s a bit of a bitter one.

About a year later, my wife and I have bought a house and are now living a mere five minute walk from the Grand River in beautiful Cambridge. We love it here. But we’re disappointed with today’s announcement: that a new CBC station for Kitchener-Waterloo won’t include Cambridge or the townships.

Disappointed because if we were to take a breezy five minute drive we would be in Kitchener. Disappointed because we share a bus service, a mutually-accessible library system, a government, and two rivers. Disappointed because we’re all part of the same region and many of us identify as such. Disappointed because the University of Waterloo, arguably the hub for our region’s intelligentsia, now has affiliated campuses in both Cambridge and Stratford.

With transit initiatives bringing the whole region closer together, one has to wonder why a new CBC station would service only Kitchener-Waterloo.

But there is still time for a rethink. With a station launch proposed for the fall of 2012 there is plenty of opportunity for those outside of the official coverage area to have a say. I suggest getting in touch with Kirstine Stewart, Executive Vice-President of English Services or Susan Marjetti, the managing director of CBC’s Toronto and Ontario regions. I will be doing the same!

Susan Marjetti
Telephone: (416) 205-5791
Susan.Marjetti@cbc.ca

Kirstine Stewart
Kirstine.Stewart@cbc.ca

Don’t get me wrong, a local CBC station is great news for Kitchener-Waterloo but it could be greater! Those of us who feel a little left out in the cold need to have our say, so speak up! An expansion of the station’s mandate to the whole of Waterloo Region only makes sense.

Yesterday morning I received a strange e-mail. It was welcoming me to Groupon. Thing is, I already have a Groupon account, I’ve had it for a while, and I was welcomed a year ago when I first got it. Why another welcome?

I thought, first of all, that it must be some kind of phishing scam but after checking the e-mail headers (you can do this in Gmail, to a limited degree, by clicking on “more details”) I realized that this e-mail had actually, really, come from Groupon.

I didn’t have a lot of time to wonder why I’d received a random welcome e-mail when I received another, this one was an actual coupon. A coupon for a gym membership in Virginia. Now I was completely puzzled.

I checked and this e-mail too had actually come from Groupon, it wasn’t a scam, but then was someone trying to scam me? Had someone used my credit card and account to buy a gym membership coupon? That was my initial reaction, but a quick read of the e-mail showed that the coupon had been purchased using a credit card ending with -133, and it was a Visa. That’s not my credit card.

Now, I have to admit I love a good mystery. Maria and I obsessive eat up most British detective television and we’re both huge Sherlock Holmes fans. To me, this was a mystery that begged to be solved!

My first call was to my parents, and it took some strange explaining. Sometimes, my Dad has purchased coupons for Maria and I, but he’s always bought them on his own account and forwarded us the coupon. And, well, the obvious being that it would make absolutely no sense for him to buy us a gym membership in Virginia. Unless he were becoming senile. I guess my phone call should’ve been, “Dad, are you becoming senile?” Anyway, it wasn’t him.

So I e-mailed Groupon and after a short exchange the mystery, to my slight disappointment, was easily solved. As it turns out, someone had signed up for a Groupon account using a slight variation on my e-mail address. They’d added a period in between the first and last name so instead of my full name at Gmail dot com, it was my first name, period, my last name, at Gmail dot com. Using Gmail, however, you can add as many dots to your e-mail address as you’d like and it’ll still work—Gmail ignores the dots.

This guy put in the wrong e-mail address. He got his e-mail address wrong.

What he did get right, though, was his credit card number and his billing address. And I could access it all.

What happened here was simple: Some guy named Keith Little signed up for a new Groupon account and bought a coupon, but put in the wrong e-mail address. As a result, I got his coupon and, along with that, full access to his Groupon account containing credit card information and his billing address.

After my first e-mail exchange with Groupon, when they explained that I actually had two accounts, one with the “.” and one without, I tried logging on to the “.” account. I couldn’t. But I could request a password reset and that’s what I did. The e-mail with the password reset link, of course, was sent to my e-mail account. After resetting the password I could log into this account, see that this coupon was purchased, and see all of the other Keith Little’s credit card information. Alarming, and all because he had put in the wrong e-mail address.

It left me wondering about good security and privacy practices. It left me wondering how this could’ve happened. How, first of all, someone could get their e-mail address wrong. It’s like giving out the wrong phone number, or the wrong birth date. Granted, maybe this person just got a computer, or the Internet, or e-mail, but they were savvy enough to figure out Groupon—or perhaps not.

But it’s interesting the way that security, in this case, was off-loaded to the user. See it’s up to the user to get their e-mail address right, and Groupon assumes that they’ve done this from the start. Once you sign up there’s no confirmation e-mail—like a lot of services use—to verify that you actually own that e-mail account. And once you’ve signed up, if you ever need to reset your password, they don’t require a security question or a PIN but send an e-mail with a link.

If you get the e-mail wrong, you’re sunk. In my case, someone used my e-mail address by mistake and I could log on, see their credit card information, and do whatever I wanted with their account. If I wanted to.

So, I wonder. Who is responsible for security in this case? Is it the user’s job to make sure they’ve input the correct information? Is it Groupon’s job to verify that that information is true? What if someone intentionally signed me up for Groupon and I didn’t want an account, without requiring e-mail verification anyone could sign anyone up for an account. Is this a security flaw?

Whatever the case, poor Keith Little in Virginia will never know what happened to his Groupon. All he will know is that he bought it, it was refunded, and his account password was changed; I logged in to disable all notifications so I stopped receiving updates for coupons in Virginia.

In 1982, the brilliantly-named Institute for the Future, an agency under America’s National Science Foundation, published a study that was written about in the New York Times. The aim of the study was to predict what the North American household might look like in the future. Like most attempts to see the future, the predictions run the gamut from hilarious to naive to, in one particular case, down-right accurate.

For the most part, the article deals with some technologies that never really made it out of the starting gate back in the 1980′s: Teletext and Videotex. From what I can understand, this technology allowed a television screen to act as a kind of web browser, retrieving different “pages” that were broadcast by cable companies. In some cases, these pages could be stored and read later, in other cases it was up to the provider to decide what to show and when. It sounds like one of many precursors to the Internet. It also sounds an awful lot like 1984.

But, it’s the predictions that we’re concerned with, not necessarily the technology.

What the Institute for the Future predicted a society using Teletext and Videotex would look like is, in the end, a lot like what our society looks like today.

The first concern the article picks up on is the issue of privacy. Not only can the consumer choose which pages they want to view on their TV but their service provider can, in turn, see what they’re viewing as well. Funny, that this kind of privacy concern was so daunting in 1982. Today, through Facebook and Google alone, we allow that kind of information to flow freely back to advertising companies without even thinking twice.

The second concern of the article, however, is what I really want to touch on and this is work/life balance.

In a number of places, the New York Times article mentions that this kind of technology would allow the home to become the office as well. Data could be retrieved and sent and work could be done exclusively from home, it predicts. In several places though the article issues some dire warnings as well. This technology would enable a person to work from home but would also blur the lines between work life and home life; between family obligations and employment. And even if this particular Videotex technology never came to fruition, the study was accurate in predicting that technology itself would begin to blur those lines.

A couple of months ago I had the opportunity to attend a Strategic Planning meeting for the school board where I work. We sat around tables and talked about things the Board is doing well, things the Board can improve on, and things that the Board needs to be aware of moving forward. At every discussion technology came up. During the latter two discussions technology was a big issue, and more importantly, the idea of a work/life balance.

At a table where almost everyone had a BlackBerry attached to their hip or hiding in their purse it was interesting to talk about expectations around technology, around connectivity, and when the working day is supposed to end. Here was an employer, the largest employer in our Region, and its employees, talking about how to achieve a proper balance between being available and accountable and turning technology off. This is what the article predicted would happen: as technology (never mind the brand of technology) made it easier to work from home, to be available, the line between when I’m at work and when I’m at home would blur. And how.

The lifestyle that our parents enjoyed in the 1980′s, during the time that this study was published, was largely one of going to work, coming home, and repeat. By and large, when most people got home from work there was a distinct separation there. The boss wasn’t going to call at 10pm, it was considered inappropriate.

Today, most of us are connected and plugged in most of the day, even when we get home, and whether its a BlackBerry, an iPhone, a SmartPhone, or old-fashioned e-mail we’re available, outside of typical office hours, to receive messages and to respond to our bosses and colleagues. And more and more frequently, there’s the expectation that we do respond.

The discussion that came out of our Strategic Planning meeting was interesting:

In the end we, meaning employers and employees, set the parameters around availability and our expectations. The technology is a tool, an enabler, and isn’t setting the agenda. We get to decide when we want to be available but it needs to be clearly communicated and mutually agreed upon. I know people who have walked away from a career because it demanded too much of their family time.

A major emerging concern with technology is that it enables us to do a lot of things, and we just do those things, without thinking about the consequences of our actions or even the actions at all. Case and point, answering cellphone calls during the middle of dinner. Priorities. Just because it rings doesn’t mean you have to answer it. We set the agenda, not the technology, and that’s incredibly important to remember.

Interestingly enough, this isn’t a new discussion. Obviously it was a concern in 1982 when technology began to ramp up its assault on modern society. But we still somehow seemed to get lost. We adopt new technologies without thinking through the effects that they’ll have on social society. We live in a world where if its newer it must be better but those two things don’t always go hand-in-hand. There are deep philosophical issues and questions here if you really dig deep. Questions of what drives our society, how we define progress, and what we value, but suffice it to say, if I can make a prediction or two, we are heading for a place where work/life balance, where connectivity and availability, becomes even more blurred, even less distinct but we have to remember, it’s up to us to decide.

As I sit down the write this article I have a whole bunch of tabs open on my shiny new installation of Firefox 4. A couple of national newspapers, a local one, the CBC, and Twitter. It’s a regular political war room and, in my opinion, without the last site on my list it would be embarrassingly incomplete.

Twitter matters this election, and for you naysayers, buckle up.

There’s no doubt in my mind—and I think you’d have a hard time finding anyone to disagree—that Twitter is fundamentally changing not only the way we communicate but the way we do news, around the world. No bad for a tiny little bird. The importance and prominence of Twitter was highlighted during the earthquake in Haiti, the earthquake and tsunami in Japan, the political uprisings that continue in the Middle East and North Africa, and, of course, our beloved election. As Twitter is rapidly becoming more mainstream it’s becoming the go-to place for breaking news, updates, and information. That’s because now, more often than not, it happens on Twitter first then becomes news.

When a mild earthquake struck parts of Quebec and Ontario last year it was on Twitter first. Traditional news media—television, radio, and even Internet news sites—picked up the story only hours afterwards. When news of the earthquake and tsunami in Japan began to trickle out CBC Radio cited Twitter feeds as sources for their updates. It happens on Twitter first. And when Stephen Harper announces a new platform plank or when Jack Layton gets off the bus if he trips and falls it’s breaking first on social media, on Twitter, and then everywhere else.

That’s because in this election those on the road with our politicians, and those at the press scrums, the photo-ops, and the policy announcements are on their BlackBerries, their iPhones, or their Android devices and they’re tweeting. They’re live from the scene all the time, online.

But, OK, say you’re not a politics junkie and you can wait a few hours for the latest breaking news from the campaign trail. There’s still reason to pay attention.

Twitter matters this election because it’s being used. Every politician, every journalist worth their weight these days has jumped on “the Twitter”. That means they’re tweeting. When Jack Layton stops the bus and gets off in Anywhere, Alberta before he addresses the crowd a staffer somewhere tweets, “Layton in AB, big policy announcement coming up!” Twitter matters because the candidates are using it. They’re using it to announce platform planks, they’re using it to respond to voters (critics and supporters), and they’re using it to communicate with each other.

If you’ve missed the debate debacle over the last 24 hours then you missed Stephen Harper challenging Liberal Leader Michael Ignatieff to a one-on-one debate. Ignatieff’s response, and then a bit of back and forth, all took place in the Twittersphere, online. Presently, the fallout from Harper backing down from his challenging is exploding across the social media site and that too is important.

This election Twitter matters because our politicians and journalists are using it, and because it’s what’s making the news. Twitter is the news. A story on the debate debacle, for example, isn’t just a story about two party leaders making threats then backing off it’s about those two party leaders, their threats, and the response of Canadians… online.

Never before has the Canadian news media been able to aggregate the opinion of Canadians and work in actual feedback into their news stories so rapidly. Now, instead of a simple story about the debate that almost was it’s a story about the debate that almost was, and then the firey response from party supporters on the Internet. On Twitter.

For a political junkie like me Twitter is the ultimate tool. With so many candidates tweeting and so many of the journalists who follow them around reporting live we’re treated to unprecedented access to the campaign trail. For everyone else, this access, take it or leave it, is changing the way that politicians act, react, and the way news is made.

I was fairly dumbfounded after reading the latest article on Usage-Based Billing in Maclean’s Magazine. So dumbfounded, that I’ve found myself having to weigh in, if nothing else to correct some pretty audacious myths that they’re continuing to perpetuate.

First of all, Maclean’s Magazine is owned by Rogers, one of the heavyweights in the UBB discussion. To their credit, the magazine discloses this in their article but it clearly colours their commentary pretty heavily—I can’t imagine why else they’d resort to such mythologizing.

To summarize, Maclean’s editors are towing the familiar party line that UBB is necessary to prevent the heavy Internet users (e.g., geeks, nerds, gamers, etc.) from congesting the lines for regular users. People should pay for what they use, Maclean’s says, in order for the Internet to be fair for everyone.

But, let’s break it down. First, our dear editors insist that,

Billions of dollars of private capital have been invested in building and maintaining Canada’s high-speed Internet network. And more investment is continually required as demand and new services grow exponentially.

Of course this, by itself, isn’t a problem: it’s what’s implied.

The problem that Maclean’s seems to have is that the Internet’s heaviest users are riding on small, independent ISPs who lease their lines and bandwidth from Bell and Rogers. So, the editors are implying, those tiny companies aren’t the companies putting out “billions of dollars of private capital.” It’s implied that those indie ISPs are getting a free ride, and this has been asserted before by Bell, Rogers, and the media. But is that true?

Certainly not. Independent ISPs are allowed to rent lines from Bell and Rogers because the federal government helped Bell and Rogers to lay down their lines in the first place. The reason why nearly every home in Canada is wired for cable and telephone service is because the federal government helped to subsidize the installation of those lines. It’s the same reason why Canada, up until recently, was one of the most connected countries in the world: our government paid huge amounts of money so that we’d have the infrastructure that we do today. This is also why they crafted law, and required Bell and Rogers to lease their lines to competitors. The other option would be for the government to subsidize any new Internet start up looking to lay down infrastructure, which isn’t feasible.

Of course, the big ISPs will argue that government subsidy ended long ago and they’re still being forced, out of their own pocket and profits, to install all kinds of new infrastructure. Bell points to it’s new “Fibe” network. But, as these ISPs are liable to forget, they’re paid for their wholesale bandwidth—the bandwidth they sell to the smaller ISPs who lease their lines—and a portion of that payment could easily go towards infrastructure development, it’s all in how they use it. If you’re leasing a vehicle it’s up to Toyota to decide to put $10 from your lease payment each months towards Research & Development and if they don’t, they can’t blame you for driving around their cars and not helping to fund research into making new ones.

The second myth is one of congestion. Maclean’s puts it this way,

And in the same way that roads become congested during rush hour, Internet networks also become clogged at peak times due to these heavy users. Solving this situation requires a means of reducing congestion.

Reducing this congestion, according to the network experts editors at Maclean’s can be successfully done through a usage-based billing system. If the heavy users, they suppose, the ones who are gobbling up all that bandwidth, are actually charged for what they use than the system will even itself out. If we’re going to follow their own analogy further, those driving the biggest cars will be the ones to pay to have the roads enlarged.

Except, it isn’t that simple.

The bigger ISPs already have a means of reducing congestion during peak times, it’s called packet shaping and it’s a pretty fancy kind of road toll. Essentially, during peak usage hours the kinds of Internet traffic that congests the tubes the most is slowed down. So things like massive file downloads and streaming video are slowed for users trying to do these things, and all other users experience no difference in their service. Both Rogers and Bell introduced these practices a few years ago, and both have had success with it, forcing heavily users doing more interesting things with the Internet to only do it during off-peak hours, like at 3AM.

If congestion is going to be the argument then, there’s already a solution and it isn’t UBB. Packet shaping would mean that ISPs could still alleviate congestion without touching people’s bandwidth limits. If congestion is the argument, UBB is simply a lame solution.

The charge that the smaller ISPs are along for a free ride on the backs of the infrastructure-developing bigger players is rubbish. The smaller providers pay for the bandwidth they use. Similarly, the notion that usage-based billing is the only way to unclog the Internet during peak hours is simply untrue. The bigger ISPs have been packet shaping for years now to decrease network traffic during peak times, a practice which they extend to their wholesale resellers (the smaller ISPs) as well.

At everyone’s best guess, an extra gigabyte really costs the ISPs about a penny, charging upwards of $5 for that gigabyte is nothing short of information superhighway robbery, if you ask me.

If you aren’t familiar with the concept of the big Internet providers forcing the smaller ones to adopt their pricing structures and to charge users based on how much Internet they consume, I wrote a piece about it here that you might like to read.

Below, though, is a great clip from The Agenda contributor Tony Keller, who compares usage-based billing (UBB) to fast food restaurants. It’s a great explanation of what UBB means for the Internet industry and for ordinary Canadians:

For those looking for more techno-political drama, The Agenda also assembled a panel debate on the issue. As a way of cliffnotes, it’s 37 minutes long, altogether pretty interesting (if you’re into this kind of stuff), and in the end the Bell representative winds up coming across as an greasy snake oil salesman.

With the enormous groundswell of protest building up amongst the Canadian population, it seems as though Internet metering (or usaged-based billing) is going to wind up as a mere footnote in Canadian telecom history. At least, let’s hope that’s the case.

The concept of billing Internet customers according to how much bandwidth they use isn’t a particularly new concept. Years ago, I signed what was a early version of the current Stop the Meter petition to call on regulators to say ‘no’ to companies setting strict limits on their customers and then charging enormous fees for overages. Back then, it was the big Canadian telecoms, Rogers and Bell, who moved to reduce the amount of bandwidth their customers could use and hitting them with fines for every gigabyte they went over. The rationale then was that the Internet was growing too fast and that a select few customers were “hogging” the pipelines. These so-called heavy users were the kind of geeks who lived in their parents’ basement and downloaded full seasons of television shows, full-length movies, and pirated music. At first, they were painted as sinister delinquents who wanted to ruin the fun for everyone else. But then Rogers and Bell rolled out even more strict limits on downloading and the “regular” users began to feel the pinch as well.

With study upon study revealing that more Canadians are ditching their landlines for cellphones, and abandoning their cable and satellite subscriptions for Internet-based movie and TV streaming, strict limits on how much Canadians could actually download every month became a growing concern. Rogers and Bell argued that their limits were generous and that the average user would never come close to their cap each month, but others disagreed. Anyone who’s signed up for Netflix, downloaded TV episodes of iTunes, or even tried to use services like Rogers TV to stream World Cup matches or stream television from CBC will know that the tiny bandwidth limit imposed by the big telecoms is quickly eaten up.

Like lots of Canadians, when Rogers and Bell began setting caps we jumped ship. We signed up with a small, local Internet provider who rents their lines, wholesale, from Rogers. Instead of the tiny 25GB/mo limit imposed by Rogers, we’ve been enjoying a generous 200GB/mo. This allows us to use Netflix, stream Internet TV and Radio, and play as much Minecraft as we want. But now, as you may have heard, these independent Internet providers are being asked to fall in line as well.

That’s because a ruling by the CRTC, the body that governs Canadian telecoms, has ruled that Rogers and Bell have the legal right to impose bandwidth restrictions on the lines that it rents to its competitors. Not only that, but they’re now allowed to pass along their overage fees as well. While I used to only be charged $0.50/GB when I went over my cap with my current indie service provider, they’re now being forced to charge more than $2/GB. And my 200GB/mo limit is going to shrink back to a mere 25GB/mo sometime in July. Or maybe not.

The sheer tidal force of the anti-metering campaign is down-right astonishing. The CRTC ruling forcing the small independent companies to follow their wholesale provider’s policies came down early last week and what was a fairly small and only mildly successful campaign exploded. OpenMedia, the group organizing much of the movement, has been getting press on all the major news networks, the papers, and everywhere you look online. As of writing this, a petition at Stop The Meter, has an incredible 228,000 signatures making it the largest Internet movement in Canadian history. What’s more, the anti-metering camp now has the support of not just Jack Layton’s NDP but of the federal Liberals as well.

Conservative Industry Minister Tony Clement, overwhelmed by the movement, is now in the process of reviewing the CRTC’s decision and reserves the right—a right he’s exercised in the past—to overturn the ruling altogether. For a government who places a significant emphasis on open, competitive markets, I have a hard time believing they will let this decision just sit. Still, Clement’s own proposed copyright law, back before Parliamentarians this session, demonstrates that the minister does have a history of catering to big business when they come knocking.

Regardless, a movement 228,000 Canadians strong with the backing of both federal opposition parties during what’s ramping up to be an election season is surely going to force some movement on Parliament Hill. Let’s just hope, as I started off by saying, that this whole capping of the Internet thing ends up being a painful, but brief blip in our country’s history.

When our credit cards were defrauded a couple of months ago, I took careful steps to update all of our utility bills that are normally charged to our credit cards every month. Two of those automatic monthly charges were our cellphones, which are always charged on the same day, in the middle of the month. To make sure we didn’t miss any payments I either paid the bills by another means, or I updated the account information with our new credit card number before the bill had to be paid. In the case of our cellphones, I updated our payment information with the new credit cards two days after the “your bill is due in 5 days” warning that’s e-mailed out every month. So, despite our credit cards being defrauded, as far as I knew I had paid our cellphone bills, with the new credit card, three days before the bill was due.

So Maria was taken by surprise when in early November, about fifteen days later, she suddenly couldn’t use her cellphone anymore. Every time she tried to dial out, no matter the number, her call was forwarded to Bell’s Accounts Receivable department. Puzzled, she e-mailed me.

This would be my first call to Bell regarding this particular issue, but it wouldn’t be the last.

A grueling forty minutes later, my entire lunch break at work, it was made clear to me that the payments for our cellphones hadn’t gone through and that they had been put on ‘hold’ until the bills were paid. Despite loads of questions on my end, and very clear explanations as to how and when I updated our payment information, the customer service representative (CSR) that I first talked to could offer no more information on why those payments hadn’t gone through or what he happened. Frustrated that our cellphones had been simply put on ‘hold’ with no warning and no explanation all this particular CSR wanted to do was to update my payment information again and get our bills paid. At this point, I didn’t have time to argue or press my concerns because the lunch bell rang, the kids were coming back in from recess, and I had to get back to work.

Days later I was still frustrated by the situation and I knew I had to get some answers.

As far as I had known, I had updated our payment information on time and there was no reason why our accounts shouldn’t have been paid. What’s more, when they weren’t paid I couldn’t understand why we weren’t warned in advance that our phones were going to be put on hold. We received no warning of any kind, and that bothered me. The scenario that kept going through my mind was what if Maria was stranded somewhere—at the side of the road, for example—and was trying to get a hold of me, or get a hold of a tow truck, or call 9-1-1. All of our calls were being forwarded to Accounts Receivable, and they hadn’t even warned us in advance.

My second call to Bell is worth mentioning only so far as to say that I couldn’t understand the representative behind his incredibly thick Irish accent and I had to say ‘thank you’ and ‘goodbye’.

But it’s my third call to Bell that really takes the cake and that warrants this as being the worst customer service experience I’ve probably ever had.

The receiver of my third call to Bell Mobility was someone named Heidi and if there was ever a call to record for customer training purposes, this must’ve been it.

To make a very long story short I spent my entire commute home, from Kitchener to Toronto, talking on my hands-free device to my new friend Heidi. Once I got home, my cellphone died, but thankfully when I had it plugged in again, Heidi called back and we spent another thirty minutes on the phone. Over 1 1/2 hours, all told, with several instances of me being put on hold without warning and great swatches of time, 5 minutes once, where I just sat in complete silence having to ask, “Are you still there?” and “May I ask what you’re doing?”

The conversation went back and forth between me asking why our phones were shut off with no warning, and Heidi explaining that we were given warning: a text, a letter, and a phone call. When I explained that I had received none of those things, she would repeat that Bell sent a text, a letter, and phoned us to warn us that our bills were not paid. She was obviously following a script, but to repeat back to me what she had just explained, and what I had just said I hadn’t received was frustrating. In the course of the conversation I learned that, actually, my phone hadn’t been shut off it was only Maria’s. When I asked why, I was told that I should talk to my wife and find out why she didn’t pay the bill.

Really.

After already speaking to this representative for something like half an hour at this point, and having explained the whole story with the credit cards, etc., she recommends that I speak to my wife about why she didn’t pay the bill. When dealing with members of the public I try to be a patient person.

I explained to Heidi that I was the primary account holder on both accounts and that I didn’t need to speak to my wife. I asked again why only my wife’s cellphone had been shut off for failed payment and mine hadn’t. Well, she explained, there was no problem with your payment. No Problem? I explained to her that both accounts took payment from the same credit card and it was impossible that mine was paid and hers wasn’t. She replied that mine was paid without a problem and my wife’s wasn’t. I explained again that that was impossible.

At this point I only really wanted to know two things: why didn’t we receive any warning and why was Maria’s account shut off and not mine?

I was getting nowhere with Heidi so I asked to speak to a supervisor. She put me on hold and came back to say that her “support team” had given her the same answer that she was giving me. I told her that was unacceptable and that I needed my two questions answers. I repeated them. She repeated her earlier answers. Bell had sent me a text, a letter and had phoned me. Why hadn’t I received them? Maria’s account was shut off because she did not pay her bill; mine was paid for. How is that possible?

This continued, back and forth, until I arrived home. I demanded twice more to speak to a supervisor and twice more I was put on hold, only to have Heidi come back and tell me that her support team had nothing more to add. Finally, in the parking lot of my building I was put on hold again. When I asked what I was being put on hold for Heidi told me that she had to “check something”. I waited twenty minutes and then my phone died.

A few seconds after I plugged my phone in, to their credit, Bell Customer Support called me back. It was Heidi and she was prepared to transfer me to speak to someone in the Accounts Receivable department who could answer my questions. Within five minutes after speaking to the representative in Accounts Receivable I finally had at least a half-way answer (more progress that I had made in the entire hour and twenty minutes prior).

I was told that they couldn’t explain why I hadn’t received the text-message, the letter, or the phone call. I was told that the phone call is automated and if an answering machine picks up sometimes the message isn’t received properly. When I told them that I have text-messaging blocked on my phone (because Bell charges for all incoming texts) they said that Maria’s phone should’ve received a text as well, along with a phone call. Neither of us received texts or phone calls. When I asked about the letter they said they couldn’t explain that. The woman on the phone did mention that she was going to make a note about the fact that we didn’t receive our phone calls, and that the system should be reviewed.

When I asked why Maria’s phone had been shut off but not, evidently, mine, I was told that they shut off customer accounts on a rolling basis and perhaps mine was scheduled for shut off but it hadn’t been completed yet. She confirmed that both bills did, in fact, come off of the same credit card and that both had missed payment. I also found out that updating a payment method online will only impact the next billing cycle. This was the reason our payments hadn’t gone through: when I updated our credit card information it didn’t take effect on the current bill.

Finally, when I asked what would’ve happened if Maria had been stranded somewhere with a flat tire and unable to reach me because her phone would only call Accounts Receivable. I asked how Maria could’ve called me, or, more importantly, 9-1-1. The customer service representative told me that she hadn’t thought of that before but would look into it. Is it even legal, I wondered out loud, to cut off someone’s access to 9-1-1 because they hadn’t paid their cellphone bill? (Especially if, for all intents and purposes, they thought they did!)

I had some answers but nothing incredibly satisfactory. I let the woman in Accounts Receivable know that we were incredibly unhappy with our experience and that I, in particular, was incensed at having just spent 1 1/2 hours being talked in circles. I let her know that we wouldn’t be renewing our contracts when they came due. To her credit, she offered me a chance to speak to Bell’s “Solutions” department but I had an appointment to keep and was already going to be late.

In the end, our phones had been shut off without any warning despite the fact that I had updated our payment information online before our current bill was due. There was nothing to indicate that updating my payment the way I did wouldn’t come into effect immediately, and we received no warning of any kind before our phones were turned off. Would I recommend that friends and family avoid subscribing to service with Bell Mobility? Absolutely. Are any of the major telecom providers any better? I doubt it. For now, I’ve filed a formal complaint with the CRTC and I’m eagerly awaiting the end of our contracts so we can shop around and find something, I don’t know, different, at least.

So I made this permanent switch this week from Mozilla Thunderbird to web-based Gmail.

In the past, I’ve used web-based Gmail when I’ve been away from home, or on campus, or on a different computer, say in a library, but I’ve always maintained my e-mail accounts using an e-mail application. In the days of old it was Eudora (see above). In more recent years it’s been Thunderbird. Since as long as I’ve had the Internet I’ve always used an e-mail application.

It began with my Internet Direct and the e-mail account from my ISP back in the mid-90′s. It was a POP account which meant you needed to use a piece of software to access it, there was no website you could go to to read your mail. Included on the Internet software CD-ROM was an early copy of Eudora, which could retrieve my e-mail through POP, so that’s what I used. Later, when Hotmail came along, I had moved on to Microsoft’s Outlook Express because of its ability to access Usenet. Still, I avoided jumping ship to a web-based e-mail when Microsoft upgraded Outlook Express to be able to retrieve e-mail from Hotmail accounts—it even did so ad-free.

When Gmail came along, except for the early invite-only beta portion, I largely managed to avoid the move to web-based e-mail, again. Now using Thunderbird, I still relied on software applications to read newsgroups and to check my mail and with Gmail’s IMAP service I was again able to check my e-mail and keep it synchronized across multiple computers, ad-free. By this time I had racked up more than one e-mail address as well. Thunderbird allowed me to easily check multiple accounts and newsgroups with no fuss and so again I skipped the switch to web-based e-mail.

But over the years it’s been nagging at me. With everything going web-based—e-mail, newsgroups, word processing and office suites—I’ve been seriously wondering why I’ve been such a hold out. Thunderbird, despite being a Mozilla application, hasn’t really been improving over the years in the same way that Firefox has been. The recent addition of a robust search function has been nice but, as far as I can tell, its half-way broken. Maybe the signs have been in the clouds all along because whenever I’ve needed to search my e-mail in a pinch, I’ve gone to the web-based Gmail version. And since the latest version things have been slow. I can wait upwards of thirty seconds while it loads my IMAP messages, at which time it’s completely frozen.

And so it goes. I have no point, or purpose, in using an e-mail application anymore. Thunderbird has become too slow and lacks any compelling features. I realized the other day that the only thing still keeping me tied to a program to check my e-mail was tradition. It’s the way I always did it—but it hadn’t been working in a long time.

So I’ve made the switch that I’m that much happier for it. I’ve realized that Gmail can organize my e-mails better than Thunderbird could; it can search better; it’s address book is just as good, nay, better; and it loads quickly. It can also check my other e-mail accounts, too but I think that I’ll set those to forward to my Gmail nonetheless. The day when your popularity and coolness was gauged by how many e-mail addresses you had (there was a time!) has passed.

It’s funny that for so many years I’ve been doing things a certain way simply because that’s the way I’ve always done them. You’d think for someone who stays on top of breaking technology trends, who likes computers and the Internet and all that kind of stuff, that I would be with it. It’s surprising, then, to realize that I’ve been stuck in the relative age of the dinosaurs for such a long time without even noticing. Huh.