Seriously. It's a massive slap in the face to be on hold for over an hour with a company while they're playing on-hold advertisements talking about how much better their customer service is than everyone else's. My internet has been slowing down consistently month after month to the point where it's become nearly unusable. I'm paying for one of their higher end packages which is supposed to give up to 15 Mbps downstream and up to 1 Mbps downstream. Here's what it's been like for the last few weeks: Right now I'm getting 4 Mbps downstream, and only 76 kbps upstream, with ping times of around 400ms ...

We're in the process of moving some servers around right now, and one of the things we need to do is move mail accounts around. I've been a big fan of IMAP over POP for a few years now, mainly because the messages are kept up on the server, which ultimately keeps every machine looking roughly the same. The unfortunate aspect of that is that when you move servers you have to find a way to get the messages over to their new home. One of the more obvious ways to move messages is to proxy them through your own personal machine. To do that, you simply need to set up both accounts in a mail program ...

This weekend was pretty uneventful. I wasn't feeling overly ambitious, so I hung out close to home mostly and rented a few movies. I'm not sure if there really are no movies, or if Apple TV is exceptionally crappy right now, but I hardly found anything to watch at all. Back in September I wrote a post about switching to Server Beach. For the most part, it's been pretty rock solid. We have a dual core server there with cPanel on it, and it's been relatively pain-free. One of the reasons we opted for a dedicated server was to make our lives a lot easier. Prior to setting it up, Dale and I realized ...

I get enough of these types of emails that I basically don't even really read them any more. Hi Duane, For the release of a future worldwide success story, I'm urgently looking for a Linux debugging expert with very strong knowledges of C/C++! They're implementing the ANDROID (Java) mobile operating system running on the Linux kernel, then looking for someone who knows Android architecture and API's. To resume: -Strong C/C++ knowledges -Experience with Linux Kernel development, and various Linux distributions -Testing, and Linux/Unix development skills You love Brussels, are excited by working ...

Gillian Shaw had a great article today in the Vancouver Sun about what it means to unplug nowadays. I think as the penetration of computers, especially mobile internet, continues to spread, it's going to be more and more relevant. Without a doubt, I think people spend way too much time online these days. In fact, if anyone is guilty of that, it's me. I was recently trying to think of memories from before the Twitter and Facebook eras, trying to remember what I used to spend most of my time doing. I remember having a lot of nice dinners with my ex, and also going for long walks from time to time. ...

Gillian Shaw had a great article today in the Vancouver Sun about what it means to unplug nowadays. I think as the penetration of computers, especially mobile internet, continues to spread, it's going to be more and more relevant. Without a doubt, I think people spend way too much time online these days. In fact, if anyone is guilty of that, it's me. I was recently trying to think of memories from before the Twitter and Facebook eras, trying to remember what I used to spend most of my time doing. I remember having a lot of nice dinners with my ex, and also going for long walks from time to time. ...

I was just cooking myself lunch, and an old memory came back to me. It was probably around 2001, and I was working in Ottawa. A company in Silicon Valley called me up and asked if I wanted to come down and interview for a fiber optics job. I was only mildly interested in the job, but I hadn't been to California in a long time, and I thought I'd hear what they had to say. I didn't really feel like traveling alone, so I asked if they'd be interested in pitching my friend Rob also, which they agreed to. So anyways, one Thursday afternoon I was sitting in Rob's apartment in Ottawa, drinking a bunch ...

I was just sitting here, watching a bit of Lost on the DVD player and also doing a bit of research. Like most evenings, I usually wind down my evening by reading about the state of the world, or sometimes about the latest technology. I came across this interesting article about how the US Navy is toying with the idea of turning seawater into Jet Fuel. The reason they are considering this is because the United State's oil production is on the downward slide. In fact, the United States reached peak oil production sometime in the 1970s I believe. Of the 30 or so countries that produce significant ...

Just for yucks, I integrated Google Latitude into the sidebar in my blog section. Google latitude, for those that don't know, allows people with GPS-enabled devices to share their locations with their friends (I think it can do it based on geo-IP as well, but that's not super exciting IMO). I'm not entirely sure showing a map with all my friends on it is particularly useful to be honest, but I thought I'd toss my location up on there for something to do. Far better, in my opinion, would be integration with services such as IM, such that I can see my friend's list sorted by distance to me. That ...

About a year ago, I was down in the United States attending WordCamp San Francisco. While there, my friend Jason lent me a little USB dongle that let me basically surf the web from anywhere. It was a CDMA device that basically piggybacked data onto the wireless towers such that you could use the internet wherever you could get cell access. I was so impressed by it (remember, this was before the iPhone came to Canada) that I've been constantly on the lookout for something like that that I can also use down in the USA, since the Roger's roaming data rates are fairly absurd. When I looked last year, ...

I'm up at Cultus Lake now, doing some weird cross between camping and working. I honestly wasn't too sure if I'd get 3G up here, and had planned to head back into town during the days. But given how I have four bars on my phone, and that 3G is working great, I might just work from up here. To that end, I went back home a while ago and picked up my 15W solar panel and my 75Ah deep cycle battery. Right now my laptop appears to be drawing about 25W, which is fairly awesome considering I'm charging it and also working on it at the same time. At 120V, that means it's currently drawing roughly 0.2 ...

So, I gotta ask, and I'm probably going to get raked over the coals for doing so. I'm curious as to why there are so many technology events that focus exclusively on women? Some of them actually look pretty good, and I'm actually a bit disappointed that I can't attend. In fact, some of the people I really look up to in the community are female, which makes it all the more disappointing that I'm excluded by nature from some conferences. And that's really my question I guess -- why can't I attend some of these events? Obviously there are a lot of women in technology these days. I'd be the first ...

I've been using Twitter for a long time now, and the one universal constant in that time period has been the flakiness of the Twitter service. Even today, at least a year after some of these problems started cropping up, you still get the occasional "Fail Whale" when the servers can't keep up. Some of the other random problems I've witnessed lately are: disappearing avatars the inability to upload a new avatar missing background images on profiles flaky service (i.e. the Fail Whale) messages that appear 30 - 60 minutes after they were tweeted Obviously running a service that can handle ...

I'm always amazed when I see what the larger voice over IP (VOIP) companies are charging these days. Last time I looked at Vonage, I believe they were charging around $30/month, plus an activation fee and equipment fee of around $70 at the start. So while you do get a lot of bells and whistles included in that price (caller ID etc), it's still rather expensive in my mind. If you're looking for something cheaper, and you have an Internet connection at home, here's what you can do. First, you'll need either a SIP softphone or an analog telephone adapter (ATA). A popular SIP softphone is CounterPath's ...

As I'm pretty beat, I'll post in more detail about WordCamp Whistler over the next few days. But I wanted to just say that it was a really great success in my opinion, and for the most part, went off without any hitches. I want to thank John Bollwitt and Rebecca Bollwitt for all their hard work over the last two months to help make it possible. I also want to thank all of the sponsors, speakers, and of course, the attendees who came up and made it a success. Photo by John Biehler We were hoping that at least 50 people would ultimately show up. The official turn out was somewhere around 105 people, ...

WordCamp Whistler is just around the corner, and we've already seen an increase in ticket sales these last few days. If you're interested in coming, you should go ahead and buy your tickets now. Right now tickets are $35, but as of Friday, January 9th, they'll increase to $40. The following Friday, January 16th, they will increase to $50, and shortly afterwards they will no longer be available. If you'd like to purchase your tickets, please visit our EventBrite page and pick up your tickets now. Included in the price of your ticket is a full day of WordPress-related talks, complimentary lunch, ...

Boris tipped me off on Twitter to a few articles about VoIP to ring in the new year. Here are a few: 2008, The Year That VOIP Died VoIP is not dead ...

For two years in a row now, I've missed out on going to SxSW. For those of you who don't know what it is, it's pretty much the largest technology / music conference in North America, and it happens once a year down in Austin, Texas. Last year, while watching everyone talk about it online, I decided that I would go this year and check it out. That being said, I still haven't done anything about it, nor am I entirely sure I could afford to go to it (although I *do* have a pre-paid flight ticket in the US, so my flight is pretty much covered). Pretty much all my friends from Vancouver end up going, ...

I was briefly mentioned in Buzz Bishop's technology section today in the 24 newspaper. You can check it out here. ...

How do you feel about that? I read this article with the CEO of Ford today, where the interviewer basically pummeled him. When asked about Ford's strategy with regards to electric cars, the CEO had this to say: We are working on that [fully electric cars], but let me just share with you the Ford plan about that. Our No. 1 priority is to improve the internal combustion engine, and that's why the turbocharging, the direct fuel injection, we get a 20 percent improvement in fuel mileage and a 15 percent reduction in CO2, but we get that across all of the engines, across all the vehicles. Then we ...