Canadian Telecom News Bits - Sunday, Jan 13th 2008

• Telus Is Considering Switch to GSM Network Bloomberg.com: Canada
  
• Shaw moving into Thunder Bay- Shaw Communications launched its digital phone service in Thunder Bay.  Shaw's goal is to claim 25 percent of Thunder Bay's home phone market.  The entry of the Western Canadian giant into the city has been at the center of a massive marketing campaign over the last few months and Shaw is hoping to capitalize on what it sees as a market ready for a new option. This is the first real competition municipally-owned TBay Tel has ever faced.  www.shaw.ca www.tbaytel.net
  
• Telus gets competition approval to acquire Emergis - Telus Corp. says it has received Competition Bureau approval for the company's friendly $766 million takeover of Montreal-based Emergis Inc., an information technology company that provides software and data management services to the health care and financial services sectors. Telus said Tuesday the Commissioner of Competition has advised the company that she does not intend to challenge the transaction under the merger provisions of the Competition Act. www2.telus.com
  
• Kenora Municipal Telephone System sold to Bell Aliant  - The City of Kenora and Bell Aliant announced  that they have entered into an agreement under which Bell Aliant will purchase the assets and business of Kenora Municipal Telephone System (KMTS). Bell Aliant says the acquisition is a natural fit since Aliant already serves customers in Jaffray Melick and other neighbouring areas of Kenora in Northern Ontario. The proposed transaction is subject to final approval by Kenora's City Council following a public information meeting which will be held in Kenora on January 15, 2008.  www.aliant.ca

Check out The Fox Group for additional details.

Dealing with Images in Multiple Buckets on the Internet

What do folks do with the plethora of online images that they have, that may be strewn about the internet? Am I the only loser who's got images with Flickr, with Picasa Web Albums and with Facebook?


I use the different buckets to help differentiate usergroup permission, and to deal with the fact that some folks aren't using some applications, and to also simply simplify some of the Picasa things that I do.

Some may say that it's ok to have multiple copies of the same photos on multiple image applications. Me, I think that's just adding digital litter to the internet. In a perfect world, there would be one bucket, and I could choose which apps to dole out images to. Images would reside in one place, and be *pulled* as needed into the various apps that would become a vehicle for delivery, as opposed to being a vehicle for storage.

What do *you* do with your images? Are you disciplined enough to have only one image application?

Digital Ghosts Remain When Folks Pass Away

In this era of digital personas, profiles, accounts, applications and media, how does one keep track of all the online lives they have, so that in the event of a terrible, unfortunate incident, these digital accounts can be closed off and taken care of. This morning, i bumped up against a scrap of digital ghost-iness from one such lovely lady.

I re-read her out of office message in Instant Messenger, and it brought back the proverbial flood of rememberies and goodness. And then it made me think.Do we need to have digital estate executors? Someone to tidy up after us, after we’ve gone on to new adventures?

Do *you* know all of your on-line accounts? Your Linked-In, Flickr, eBay, iTunes, online banking, PayPal and Facebook accounts can keep going for a *long* time.  Would a loved one be able to housekeep for you? Do you have a file saved with all your on-line accounts and passwords? Does it really matter? Likely it matters, if only to keep those folks still in the analog world from rubbing up against your digital personalities in the future. Me, I’m going to set up a digital estate executor.

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Tags: digitalexecutor

TELUS announces competition approval in connection with acquisition of Emergis

TELUS announces competition approval in connection with acquisition of Emergis Yes - this is newsworthy, the fact that it looks like TELUS will be able to move forward with the Emergis purchase.  But the wee bit that sparked my interest was that Fox Business News picked up the news story from Canada Newswire.It's atypical that a US news conglomerate would take on a press release like this. Curious.:-)

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Alibris: The Best Book Selling Application

I’ve been an Alibris customer for about a year now. I was looking for a specific book., “The Last Canadian” - one of those books you have to read in elementary school. It’s about one last Canadian man who manages to survive a global plague.  I’m a post-apocalyptic fiction geek. It was easily obtained on Alibris, and for a song. OF course, I can’t find the book again anywhere ;-)

Over the Christmas holidays, I decided to take a hard look at my library, and realized that I needed to cull, in order to allow for room for more books :-)  I joined the Alibris Seller hub, and enlisted the assistance from the chickadees to read out ISBN numbers, which i then plugged into Alibris to create my inventory. 184 books later, and I’m about 1/2 done.  The Alibris Sellers Hub matches what you’ve got to sell with what other folks are looking for, and voila! Already I’ve made one sale! You can set your prices, choose the quality characteristics of your materials and the ISBN number takes care of the rest of the details! I only had a handful of books where the ISBN number couldn’t be found, and Alibris still lets you add to your collection, it’s just a bit more manual.

I think I’m addicted - I check the Hub every morning to see if anything has sold, and I am also adding more and more books to the wishlist, to fill in the soon-to-be empty shelves in the library! If you are falling out of love with Chapters or Amazon, I HIGHLY recommend giving Alibris a read. You never know what you might find!!!

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Tags: alibris, chapters, The Last Canadian

A Roundup of Neat Technical Discoveries

So - it’s the last official day of vacation for me, and I think I’ve soaked up as much napping and reading and playing as a body officially should. :-)I’ve discovered a few nifty things this week, while playing with some of the new toys: The LL.Bean WeatherfinderThis little beauty is amazing. One neat point of note - it’s designed to synchronize it’s clock automatically with a clock signal. Wait for it…. the clock signal is a WWVB-60 signal - and if you are within 200 miles of the clock with the signal - it’s in Fort Collins Colorado, this feature will work. I giggled, thinking that Toronto, Ontario is much farther than 200 miles from anywhere in Colorado, and manually set the clock. The documentation suggests that it could take anywhere from 12 hours to 5 days for the Weatherfinder to find the signal from Fort Collins. Imagine my surprise - today the little devil found it. Turns out, it’s only 1520 miles to Fort Collins….Amazing!!!

The next amazing tidbit: Using Your Wii to wirelessly stream music from your PC. That’s right. What *can’t* that Wii do?In buying Winamp Pro, I realized it came with Winamp Remote, an outstanding little application that lets you stream music from your PC to anywhere in the world, including to your Wii!! This comes in handy when a significant other has just upgraded the TV sound system, and you want to impress them with quality audio playing ;-)The only thing you need to do is purchase the Internet Channel on your Wii - likely a worthy purchase for 500 Wii Points. Using the Opera Browser, you log into Winamp Remote, and voila, you can see your entire audio connection. You could even stream movies! :-) Right now, I’m sitting in my little library, but I can see all the music on my home laptop. This is going to completely fill the gap that Pandora left behind. :-)

The last bit of interest: I just finished reading *The World Without Us* by Alan Weisman. One of the amazing pieces in this book discusses information that was sent in a *time capsule* into outerspace with Voyager. Carl Sagan and Jon Lomberg put together images and music in hopes that interstellar intelligence would be suitably impressed enough to not blast us into another dimension.  You can listen to the complete 26 song recording that was shot into outerspace, on a golden record no less. You can also do a bit of reading on what was sent into space.Happy Weekend!

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Has Guitar Hero Changed My Ears?

I happily include myself in the thousands of Canadians who got Guitar Hero III for the Wii this Christmas. The Wii came back in July (thanks Keri and David!!!!), theoretically we were one of the early Wii adopters north of the 48th parallel. :-)Now, after playing off and on for the pask week, both the Wiz and I are suffering from GH Ear. GH Ear happens when you are *not* playing Guitar Hero - you're doing normal, everyday things, and you happen to hear a song, a commercial, a tune, something off the radio and all of a sudden you are analyzing the song for it's Guitar Hero Play-ability. Songs sound different now. The guitar components have moved to the front and centre of the action. Lyrics are secondary. Your hands move on the imaginary frets, trying to determine the complexity of the notes and the strumming required. You wonder if you can capture enough notes in a row to qualify for *Star Power*.Hey.... did you just hear that?  Wouldn't that song be excellent on Guitar Hero?

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Technical Training As an Employee Incentive?

I wonder how many folks consider training as table stakes when considering employment. 13 years ago, I had the honour of being shipped to San Jose California for 3 weeks for training with Netcom Communication. It was spectacular, but I’m not entirely convinced of how much I learned, aside from how to use xwindows in Unix :-) I was a bit of an anomaly though, and telnetted back to my old job to pop into IRC and say hi to the guys and give them updates on the good and the bad of San Jose :-)

Training has come *a long way* since those days. This week I had to write 3 tests to prove my IP Leadership abilities. Not easy tests, by *any* stretch of the imagination. And to think that the only part I was worried about was subnetting IP addresses. Sheesh.

I know of a few past employers who talk training, but can’t *walk the walk* when it comes to providing knowledge and development for employees. Budgets come, budgets go, and if you are interested in learning, it’s something that you’ve got to pursue on your own time, and your own dime. I am thrilled when companies are recognized for walking the walk.

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Tags: Training, TELUS, Netcom

Will GrandCentral Ever Come to Canada?

Funny that I should ask about a phone 2.0 service, all things considered ;-)
That being said, in the past 3 days, every where I turn around, someone, somewhere is writing about how terrifically awesome Grand Central is. What is it, you ask?

It’s a universal phone number. It goes anywhere, does pretty much anything. One number to rule your world. It’s also a recent acquisition by Google (summer 2007), which is pretty darned neat, considering the last time I poked around at it (early-2007), it was just a wee innovation.

You can route your number to various phones, mailboxes and applications. You can route based on originating number, you can assign different ring tones, you can prompt the caller to *explain themselves* before you decide to answer the phone - this would be hilarious with telemarketers. You can have different voice mail greetings depending on the caller (this would be *really* helpful for me, considering I’m using the same VoIP system for work and for pleasure.

Alas, Grand Central’s still only allowing folks to reserve numbers in America.
Grand Central folks - give me a call - I can help set you up in Canada!!!  It’s easy!!! :-)

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Picnik: Best On-line Photo Editor

I’m a bit of a geek when it comes to photo editors.  A lazy geek. I don’t want to spend hours with PhotoShop, and I don’t have a Mac (yet) to be able to play with Aperture. That being said, I’m pretty picky about post production work on photos.

I’ve been a hard core Picasa gurl. I’m addicted to the *glow* enhancement in Picasa. I’ve also been pretty hot on paint.net… but for some reason, I don’t have enough reserve memory to make it run smoothly on all my machines. (My fault, not Paint.net’s fault). Paint.net has got some outstanding plugins for softening portrait pictures.

Before Christmas, I stumbled on Picnik. I’m in love. So much so that I’m using it almost as much as I use Picasa. So much so that I even opted for the uber-membership. Picnik integrates itself nicely with Flickr, Facebook, your Picasa Web Albums, and any other on-line photo infrastructure you might have adoped.

Picnik’s got features, flexibility and some really neat creative tools. Think Lomo-styling, or Holga, or the Infrared filter I’ve been trying to recreate. Utterly goof proof. Now that I’ve shared the secrets, I’m sure amost everyone who thinks I’m a reasonable photographer will begin second guessing my so-called skills.  Really, it’s all about the tools ;-)

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Jules' Predictions for 2008

2008 is only 9 hours old so far - just old enough to start thinking about what it wants to be when it grows up.


Predicting the future, always a party favourite.  With my fingers and thumbs in assorted interesting pies, how about these predictions for 2008:

1. Facebook will merge with a VoIP provider, making an all-in-one phone service with your friends.
2. A new iTunes competitor will hit the iPod wireless mp3 screens, offering a different choice for *media on the go*.
3. Rim and Google will partner together to buy wireless spectrum in Canada. *Grim Wireless*?
4. Smaller Canadian cable companies will begin to band together/merge to create a force to better compete with Shaw, Rogers and Cogeco.
   
5. The Ministry of Transportation will build wi-fi towers along commuter roads. Commuters will be able to download and drive on the Don Valley Parkway.
6. Telecom Providers without their own *owned* infrastructure will partner with wireless providers for last-mile access to business and consumer customers.
7. Despite AT&T knee-jerk reaction to pull back on telecommuters, remote workers will continue to thrive, and employees will make flexibility a mandatory requirement for employers. Gasoline shortages will continue to drive home the teleworking requirement.
   
8. Skype will come to market with a TV set-top box that allows for easy video conferencing for grandparents. Likely will only work for folks who have cable and cable internet service. :-)
9. Consumers will demand more interactive technologies from their grocery stores, and Canadian food producers will be held more accountable for transparency in the production of *Canadian* foods.
10. Likely the percentage of accuracy of these predictions doesn’t surpass 2%.

Happy New Year!!!
:-)

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The Post-Christmas Review

The stockings are packed up for yet another year. The recycling is almost complete. Toys are being played with, and a few of them have broken.

Learnings to share over this Christmas:

1. The Creative Zen Stone Plus MP3 Players never worked. Not once. Don't get them. Don't try them. Leave them in the store. You can charge them till the cows come home, and they will still never work.
   
2. Pizzaville, from *It was a rainy day in Pizzaville* is going through some cost cutting measures and has now taken my postal code out of their serving area. You have no idea how disappointing that is. It's worse than not getting a pony for Christmas.
3. Do *NOT* ignore the best before date on Eggnog. Ever.
4. Wash red things before you wear them. Nuff said.

Happy New Year!!

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What I learned from My Cabbie

I had to take my first cab last night - all the way up to the north country, from the south, downtown core. It was complicated. It took 3 tries to find a cabbie who would go to the north. Most don't have winter tires. Some don't take credit cards, some simply just won't go above the 401.

And then my savior - a wee independent who accepted all my demands - credit card *and* north. It was going to be a long drive, what, with the belly of bevvies sloshing through me. :-)

I proceeded to pepper my savior with hundreds of questions:

1. How many cabs in his *company* - just 2.
2. How much does it cost to be a cabbie? The general rental for the car is $75/day + gas + insurance. HOLY! The cab owner is making a zillion dollars! And if you are a brand new driver, you have to pay $80/day!
3. How long is the shift? About 12 hours. You can go home in the middle if you want, if you've made enough to cover the cost of the car and the gas. Most days, they just make enough to cover the rental. Some days you can make quite a bit more, but not always.
4. Is the cab owner nice? Ehhh, he's from Ghana. I don't know whether that is *yes* or a *no*, but it keeps me quiet in the back seat for a bit, trying to figure it out.
5. Is he ready for Christmas? Almost. I'm pretty sure this is a universal answer for *No*, but no one wants to admit it.
6. Does he take vacation? No - only Christmas Day is the day he's not going to work.

Questions I wanted to ask but didn't want to freak out the driver:

1. Have you ever had to press the emergency button, alerting people that you were in danger?
2. Have you ever had someone ride and dash?
3. Has anyone ever thrown up in your backseat?
4. Who pays for damages?

Somehow. my cabbie, who has only be in Canada for 7 years - he and his wife immigrated from India and now have 2 kids and live in the east end of the city, is able to support a family of 4 on his cab driving. I am still trying to figure out the finances on that one.

All things aside - it was a good drive, I got home safe, and virtually sober. My cabbie got a good tip. :-)

Technorati Tags: Toronto Cabs

iTunes Gift Card - Quite Possibly the Perfect Pressie

Just got my first Amex statement.
I’m embarrassed about the wee $0.99 charges that litter the bill like puppy footprints on a clean floor.
There isn’t many, less than 10. But there’s got to be a better way. I wish I could set up iTunes so that I could put a “Buy Julie a Song” link on facebook, or jules.ca - Imagine how neat that would be?
Heck - you can’t even buy a coffee for $0.99.  But you could sure put a smile on someones face for a LONG time, if you bought them a song.

Hmmmm - buying a smile for a song(tm). I like that.

The only feature that comes close to what I want is the iTunes Allowance. But get this - when I try to set up an allowance, it doesn’t let me - you can’t set an allowance for yourself. Cripes!!! I’m stuck with puppy prints of iTunes song purchases on my Amex statement forever. I wonder if I can buy myself a gift card. Likely not. Grrr.

You can only set up allowances for other people. But it still doesn’t let me get other people to contribute ;-) Heh. Still - I’d love to purchase songs for other like-minded people - this doesn’t have to be a one way street :-)

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Blackberry in Korea?

There are times when I'm a little too Canada-centric.  It didn't occur to me today that there are places that just don't love the wee Blackberry as much as we do in Canada... In reading a snippet from the Korea Times, my interest was piqued by an article outlining the pressure that the Canadian Chamber of Commerce would like to apply to Korea.

TELUS International is one of the sole distributors of Blackberrys (if not the only one) in South Korea - and one of the bits that makes it difficult to gain any foothold is the fact that the South Korean government has a requirement that all smartphones carry a software standard called WIPI (Wireless Internet Platform for Interoperability).  I don't yet know much about WIPI, perhaps it's a *good* thing to enforce, perhaps it's simply just a method to control the wireless infrastructure of a nation?



Canada Wants Korea Lift Ban on Blackberry(The Korea Times)

``Blackberry is the signature high-tech product of Canada,'' Terry Tuharsky, the chairman of the Canadian Chamber of Commerce in Korea, said in his meeting with The Korea Times on Tuesday, which was one of his numerous interviews with Korean and foreign press this week.``I want to ask you how Korean politicians will act if Canada does not allow Samsung or Hyundai to sell their products,'' he said, adding that ``the storm is brewing'' in Canada already.

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Teleworking, Work-Life Balance and the Future

There seems to be an emerging trend. Yesterday my boss sent me an article on the Globe and Mail about AT&T employees being called back to the cubicles from teleworking. Today I stumble across an interesting Wikinomics article on working at home vs working at theoffice, and the blurry line between working and personal time.

It’s funny that folks are pointing to the AT&T announcement - holding it up as a shiny example of corporate culture. Ahem. Don’t get me wrong, I love AT&T. But think about this - with likely over 300,000 employees in North America alone, the age of their workforce probably leans towards the folks who are in their last 10 years of employment. Now is the timewhen they should be utterly embracing the idea of teleworking, if only to be sure that they are in a strong position to attract new talent.  My gut says that they were just early in moving towards teleworking, and the folks that they were targeting were well set in their ways as to what worked best for them for productivity. Let me tell you, I was a manager of a 50+ smartie, and tried to get him to work from home when weather was inclement, or traffic was going to be horrendous, and I couldn’t break himfrom the need to be *in the office*. No way, No how, No Chance in France.

We are in the midst of a changing workforce generation.  More folks are entering the workforce with new and different expectations than those on the verge of existing the workforce.  Folks who are used to, and enjoy, being connected 7/27.  Folks who can easily multi-task and have no problem acknowledging that their work styles are just as productive as some else’s if they work from 3pm to 2 am.

The Wikinomics article has neato graphs on hours of work vs hours of personal time. Right now, as an average, we’re working approx 40 hours/week with 20 hours/week of personal time. In the ’90s, we were working 50 hour weeks, with 20 hours of personal time. That’s a difference of 10 hours lost/found in a decade. Did we just sleep less in the ’90s? :-)

Are we more productive now? Maybe.

Do we work more now, but at times when it’s most productive/convenient according to our lifestyles? In the ’90s, I didn’t have a berry. I didn’t have a laptop, and I didn’t have VPN access.  If I didn’t get something done during the day, it waited until the next day. Now, I have the luxury? obligation? of being able to work on critical bits and pieces at home, either until I pass out for exhaustion, or finish the job.

I appreciate the ability to telework, but I also appreciate and welcome office atmosphere at times. I’m certainly more productive in my virtual office, with no loud co-workers, or distractions, or the ability to get up and walk over to see what my Boss is up to. But being able to sit down with someone else, and bounce ideas and diagrams and theories around is certainly valuable, when the schedule permits. Perhaps it’s not a return to the cubicle that AT&T needs, perhaps it’s simply the realization that thenew, emerging generation of workers is simply better suited to juggling work and life together. With the changing of workforce generations, now is *not* the time to revert back to the golden cubicle days of yore.

Technorati Tags: AT&T, Wikinomics, Teleworking

Facebook Feature Wishlist

Jeff Pulver’s got an awesome commentary of invisibleness on Facebook.  The idea being that you could be visible to some, and invisible to others. Like pseudo-lurking, if you will.  Instant Messenger apps have this, why couldn’t Facebook?  Considering the multitudes who use this app, for both work and play, there’s bound to be a time when you wished you could be invisible (Hi Boss!)

I miss the music features of IM - knowing what someone is listening to - sure, there are likely thousands of Facebook apps that support that, but the trick is you have to be using the same music app that your friends are, and more likely than not, it’s not sending a mini-news feed on what they’ve got in their headphones.

I love Iotum’s Free Conference Calls on Facebook - imagine if you could twist that up a notch and have the app do video calls as well? Mmmmm….

What sorts of things would be on your wishlist?

Technorati Tags: Facebook, Jeff Pulver, Iotum

Email Hoax du Jour

There’s nothing that cheers a body up more than debunking forwarded e-mails  on a Monday afternoon…
I got this lovely ditty today, and the only reason I opened it was blind curiosity (I know - shame on me)

Sender: mcox5@wi.rr.com

Subject: We are Canadians Born here
Date: Mon, 17 Dec 2007 14:07:51 -0600
Subject: We are Canadians Born here 

Bruce Allan is on the 2010 Olympic Committee and new Canadians (specifically Hindi’s/ Indian’s) want him fired for his recent comments outlined below;  
“Subject: Our National Anthem I am sorry, but after hearing they want to sing the National Anthem in Hindi - enough is enough. Nowhere or at no other time in our nation’s history, did they sing it in Italian, Japanese, Polish, Irish (Celtic), German, Portuguese, Greek, or any other language because of immigration. It was written in English, adapted into co-founding French, and should be sung word for word the way it was written. The news broadcasts even gave the Hindi version translation which was not even close to our National Anthem. 

I am not sorry if this offends anyone, this is MY COUNTRY - IF IT IS YOUR COUNTRY SPEAK UP —— please pass this along.I am not against immigration — just come through like everyone else. Get a sponsor; have a place to lay your head; have a job; pay your taxes, live by the rules AND LEARN THE LANGUAGE as all other immigrants have in the past — and LONG LIVE CANADA!”   It’s time we all get behind Bruce Allen, and scrap this Political Correctness crap.  His comments were anything but racist, but there are far too many overly sensitive ‘New Canadians’ that are trying to change everything we hold dear. ARE WE PART OF THE PROBLEM !!!!  Think about this: If you don’t want to forward this for fear of offending someone,will we still be the Country of Choice and still be CANADA if we continue to make the changes forced on us by the people from other countries who have come to live in CANADA because it is the Country of Choice?????Think about it!        

IMMIGRANTS, NOT CANADIAN’S, MUST ADAPT.It is Time for CANADA to speak up. If you agree – pass his along; if you don’t agree — delete it and reap the ill wind because of your complacency!

*************************************************************************************************************** Now - I don’t have any political stand - for or against Bruce Allan, and I’m also not weighing in on anthems, immigration or rabid nationalism. My rant is all about folks who seldom think twice before forwarding on incendiary emails to all their friends in their address book.

My response to this SPAM:

Hi there (names removed to protect the innocent) - and to the rest of the people who have this email in your inbox.

I think you may want to look a little more closely before passing along incendiary SPAM.

The spam you forwarded, from Marion (god bless her, she doesn’t know that her email address has been hijacked by whomever is trying to stir up Canadians, yet again with comments about Immigrants and Nationality

If anyone cares to google the email address for dear Marion - mcox5@wi.rr.com….You will find this:
http://212.14.5.125/~ptforum/viewtopic.php?p=11376&sid=c3b468c2a66c4e29d0686cbcfde57467

Let me save you the time and tell you what’s at that URL.
What you will find is a database of credit card numbers and personal information for folks who’ve had their online and personal identity hacked. My guess is that Marion’s identity has been hacked, and her email address hijacked.  Anyone want to guess why someone would steal your identity, hijack your email address to send this note?

Chances are it’s all fake - and the originator doesn’t want to be identified.

Please feel free to  forward THIS email to all your friends in your address book.  Perhaps with more knowledge, and a better understanding, we can cut down on the crap that falls into our inboxes.  The next time you get email like this - please take a few moments to verify its authenticity before spamming your friends.

Thanks,
Julie
<
—
http://wow.jules.ca
http://www.floobergeist.ca
http://northofthe49th.wordpress.com

Are The Internets Safe?

The first Christmas dinner of the year included an interesting conversation that the Wiz and I had with some friends of the family.  Both the Wiz and I are consummate on-line shoppers - he's more eBay than I am, but I can find things FAST and check out and be onto new adventures.This year, we only bought one thing in a store. And that's because we had to pick it up, (gee thanks Canadian Tire).  That being said - we were able to pinpoint the availability of a specific, purple bicycle using the Canadian Tire site.  Everything else was bought on-line, and delivered to the house. Spectacular.When we were amazing the dinner guests with tales of on-line adventures, one big question kept repeating itself - But Is it Safe?And the only response we could come up with is that it's not any less safe than shopping in real life, and likely may even be more safe, since there's no creepy person standing near you, to peek at your credit card info or your debit pin. Heck - if you shopped in real life last Dec-Jan at Winners, Home Sense or TJ Max, you were completely busted. Your credit cards were cancelled, and really bad things (tm) happened to you.  I've been shopping on-line for a handful of years now. I hate malls. I detest lines.  Strangers with coughs make me cringe.Give me a couch, a laptop and a credit card any day.

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Tags: on-lineshopping, internets, e-commerce

My iTouch Wishlist

Is it wrong to wish that I could *right click* with my iTouch?

Would that sentiment make Steve Jobs cringe and furrow a brow at me?

• Why can’t I turn web apps into icons on the *desktop*?
• Why can’t i get photos or any other images from someplace other than iTunes?
  
• Why can’t i have a flickr application?
• Why can’t my Blackberry wall charger work for the iTouch? I’ve even got a Berry charger that’s USB compatible, so I can use the USB charging cord that came with the iTouch.
• What happens when you hack up an iTouch? Am I just going to do it so that I can get the Etch-a-Sketch application? I’ve done stranger things for less… :-)

I am still bonding, and i think I’m falling in love with the iTouch… but you know chicks - always trying to *change* a new partner and make them better ;-)

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Tags: iTouch, iPod, Apple, Hack