I am beyond excited to say that my family has just closed an offer to purchase a wonderful 101 acre property in rural Quebec. It has everything we could dream of in a homestead (including a waterfall!!) except for a definitive solution for high-speed Internet. I’ve checked with an Xplornet installer in the area 40 minutes east of Ottawa and their current offerings won’t reach for fixed wireless. Satellite might be an option if “10 times dial-up” is truthfully 400k/s as the math represents their fine print indicating. However anything that has a daily limit of 500megs and/or monthly limits of 5 gigs total transfer would not support the digital lifestyle I’ve come to know and enjoy.

The same line of site issues also apply to the nearest Quebec provider, Xittel Telecommunications. They may be investing into a new fixed wireless solution that brings expanded regions around their towers into coverage. However as it currently stands, they do not offer anything better than Xplornet. I’ve researched a little into Rogers Internet Stick, but from the little information I have gotten about it, it is not an ideal candidate for home internet provision.

So I put out this open set of questions to any and all who might find this:

• Are there any other local alternatives you are aware of which might support my Internet needs. For the record, those would be 1/2 meg or better download speeds, 128 meg upload or better upload speeds, 30+gigs of monthly transfer, monthly fees no more than $75 / month.
• Are you aware of any satellite solutions which meet the requirements above?
• Are there any other new technologies that will be available within 2 - 4 months that you believe would?

In each case if you could provide web links or contact information for any companies / services you are referencing, that would be greatly appreciated. Thank you Internet

People talk about having the Christmas spirit, but going to the mall is an exercise in frustration:

• lack of parking
• bad weather drivers
• long lines at the checkout
• Christmas Zombies

What’s a Christmas Zombie?

It was the word of the day today on Urban Dictionary:

Days before Christmas, people become blind and get tunnel vision, casuing them to only see what is in front of them, putting them into a trance like state while looking for the perfect gift. This effect usually happens two days before christmas.

It is a perfect summary of the reasons that I chose to try and do as much of my holiday shopping this year online as possible. More specifically, it inspired me to write this post which is a summary of those online shopping experiences for THE GIFT for one particular person.

Step 1: Fill the shopping cart to the high heavens

I searched through Thinkgeek and found quite a few “maybe” gifts. But the things which made it into the digital shopping cart weren’t ones that I felt confident would get an “omigod, omigod, what? how did you??????? THANK YOU” response. After paring the cart down I realized there were two or three solid stocking stuffers. Might as well buy them to get that aspect taken care of to leave my focus on the big present.

Unfortunate side effect of online shopping - hidden costs!

I was feeling rather good about myself, especially when the package arrived less than 48 hours later! Hubris is a dangerous friend. Let’s go mastercard style for this one shall we?

• Purchase price: $94.94
• Known shipping charges: $24.57
• US dollar sub-total: $119.51
• Amount charged in CDN to my credit card: $152.94
• Getting hit with an extra $40 in ‘at door’ charges for duty, etc - Not priceless!

Suddenly those 6 small items I had purchased for people had taken up a larger than expected cost.

What do you mean you can’t ship to me?

After searching further for that super-fantastic-most-excellent-gift, I found it at Amazon.com. I won’t describe it now - lest a certain someone read this post before Christmas Day - but will update this post with photos of the gift and reaction. Unfortunately Amazon couldn’t ship the item to Canada for warranty reasons? WTF? I could understand that if it were a laptop, a game or something that actually could break down and one would be genuinely upset about. But a toy is a toy is a toy - one only expects them to have a limited shelf-life and no real recourse even if it does breakdown.

The alternatives and the waiting game

This stunk, but thankfully I was able to source out another from a non-Hong-Kong supplier on eBay that actually had a reasonable shipping cost (total purchase price $31 CDN). With the power of paypal I felt that the online shopping expedition had been a success. I just had to sit back…and wait….and wait….and wait. With every passing day I was feeling more paranoid that what was intended to be the most fantastic gift of the holiday season was going to end up being another picture on a printed piece of paper with a “coming soon” on it. That is an understandable gift giving method if you are buying skates or other items that are very personal, but for a toy? Sorry, getting black socks are better than getting a “Christmas has been delayed” card.

There are still companies that understand the importance of customer service!

USPS claims their Standard Flat Rate Shipping Service should be 3 - 5 days. Now at day 8 since purchase was made, I sent off an innocent email request to the shipping supplier, SkylineDist.com, “You could call me one of many paranoid online Christmas shoppers wondering if packages will be delivered on time. Do you have a tracking # or any status info on this order?”

Within two hours I had received the following response from Aaron at SkylineDist.com:

It left our warehouse on the 10th. I have refunded you the total amount of your invoice to your paypal account as we understand how important it is to received your purchases in a timely manner during this holiday season. When you DO receive your order, you may keep it free of charge.

While it wouldn’t solve the shipping situation, it was a very nice jesture and something that was far above and beyond what I ever expected to happen. Even better, I woke up this morning to find another package delivered, without unexpected shipping costs, that was the product exactly as ordered!

Overall, I’m not sure if trading mad malls for incremental shipping costs was worth it. There is something to be said for the convenience of shopping on my schedule and - in truth - the product I bought would have been a very hard find locally. But at the end of the day, you do what works for you to make the childhood Christmases of others as great as you remember yours.

If you have any particularily memorable stories about online shopping, either for good or bad reasons, feel free to share them in the comments! I would love to know of other places like SkylineDist.com that would appreciate my business given the chance in the future.

Ho Ho Ho!
Santa Jamie

Growing up, games like Lemmings or The Incredible Machine were ones that I found most interesting. The challenge to solve a puzzle using only those resources you have at your disposal mixed with a god complex of a creature / society was fantastic. I took detours to first person shooters like Hexen or Quake 3: Arena, to the occasional real-time strategy game like Warcraft. The clickity-clickity-crack of Diablo II would capture my attention for quite a period, but the single-character driven story didn’t hold my interest. RPG’s usually were too mundane with their levelling systems, although Eternal Sonata brought quite a few enjoyable hours playing co-operatively with Alex.

This year in particular, it seems like there are more games hitting the market which hit the sweet spot of strategy, tech trees, limited battle and quests. While Spore didn’t necessarily live up to the height of expectations that were surrounding it, it was a great game that the whole family played. It was permissible to talk about games at the dinner table again I don’t think I have yet finished the game, because other games have drawn my gaze. One late night impulse purchase because the demo did such a good job of demonstrating a novel concept was World of Goo. I could try to explain it, but would be better off by just letting you discover. Just don’t blame me if you stay up until 3AM wondering how to get the OCD bonus on each level

But the latest digital crack to find it’s way into my life is the most innocent and simple. It’s like someone mixed the harvesting requirements from Dune / Warcraft with the building structures of SimCity and a dash of non-violent civilization and the Sims for good measure. The game is called Kingdom for Keflings on the XBox 360 Arcade.

You play as a giant who helps a village of Keflings. It sounds very straight forward, mundane and tedious. Yet - when you see a sheep sheard of it’s wool for the first time you can’t help but giggle. All of a sudden you feel compelled to build a school to make smarter little people. Occasional frustrations can be taken out by kicking your Keflings which is oddly satisfying when you realize it’s 2AM and you’re up playing a game about building a digital kingdom for creatures that don’t actually have feelings.

My singular complaint with this game is a glaring omission - there is no co-op mode that can be played with two people on the same 360 system. My fiancee has developed the same unhealthy love for the little people as I, but we cannot help them together. It has to be a case of share the controller and coach without either of us saying “You’re doing it all wrong”. We’ve each started building our own kingdoms but it would be much better if that could be a shared gaming experience.

If anyone from NinjaBee should read this, PLEASE MAKE THIS HAPPEN!! I won’t go so far as to say that my marriage depends on it, but it would make for a much better gaming experience if we could share the experience of building a world for the little people. Or play soccer with them perhaps.

There is a saying in the world of technophiles, “it isn’t a real party unless it involves some wiring”. That could be DJ turntables, an A/V projector or even just plugging in your laptop for a lan party, it seems there is always wiring to be done. I’ve often joked about wanting someone to invent “wireless wireless” to solve this challenge to let the geeks of the world move on to higher order fun. Sure Intel has a prototype, but that doesn’t do me any good when I want to watch a video from Hulu on my projector tonight now does it?

So this weekend, I sought a solution using the primary piece of “next generation” technology at my disposal: XBox 360. I had tried in the past to use Windows Media Center to connect between PC and console, but always run into one problem or another. I made reasonable headway this time in getting connectivity between the two with the default Media Centre Extender solution. However, I ran into a codec conundrum as Microsoft is not a fan of non-proprietary file formats. A lot of the media I have is not in Windows Media format, and as such would require a format conversion of every file before watching it. This is no more efficient than copying it over to the laptop.

The down side is that you are forced to use one of these operating systems and the WMV codec isn’t all that good – compression is not that great and although it’s becoming more popular these days, DivX and Xvid are preferred “DVD backup” choice codec’s, shall we say? These lesser mainstream codec’s offer better compression and many folks on the darker side of the Web mostly use this format to distribute movies around the Internet since they are the most 1337 choice among enthusiasts.

Enter TVersity

After discovering my codec conundrum I started to google and found two different tutorials espousing the benefits of Gizmodo.com, is a high-level tutorial answering questions about solutions for media on all 3 major consoles (PS3, XBox and Wii). The second is a very comprehensive solution from Tweaktown specific to the 360 and the source of the quote above.

You see, the folks at TVersity have a bold but well-intentioned ambition to, “empower individuals to organize and personalize their home and Internet multimedia collection (audio, video and images) and have universal access to it anywhere (at the home or on the go) anytime and from any device.”

After a few trips up and down the stairs to test out my efforts, I can now watch any video stored on the PC upstairs on the XBox which is hooked up to the rear-projector downstairs. No more wiring or even having to find the receiver remote to switch input sources. The 360 is now good for gaming, DVDs and digital content delivery. More importantly, it frees me from the singular task of being the only person in the house who can actually make everything work!

Lest my hubris get the better of me, I still have atleast one more wiring challenge ahead. My 360 has not wanted to operate in HD mode for an unknown reason for the past few months. It works in standard mode just fine, but the technophile in me isn’t satisfied with that. Atleast my past project of a - home theatre renovation - means that finding the source of the problem behind the receiver won’t be a physically challenging one this time.

I won’t be quitting it anytime soon, but will probably transition my efforts into Idealien Studios once it is launched. The same creative soul will shine through, with a more defined branding to sell freelance design services under.

While the full-scope of my plans for Idealien Studios have not yet been implemented, the blog is live and I have started to focus what time I have available to blog towards that rather than this domain. Which presents an interesting question that I have finally been able to answer.

What does the future hold for Oastler.ca?

• Convert current content to static pages
  Convert the existing content on the site to static pages will ensure it doesn’t fade from the search engines which bring in reasonable traffic. In doing so, I can augment each of these with a pre-amble to let visitors know “If you liked this content please visit my new blog at …” to bring some residual traffic to the new blog.
• More personal pages
  A big factor in making this switch is that my own world has had a big shift in priorities of late. That has made writing about web design and work-related things when my mind is focused elsewhere a tough process. After a false start of an experiment with another domain I’ve decided to make this site into something that remotely resembles a content portal for my immediate family. Here’s a few pictures of what has been on my mind lately:
  
• A recipe for success
  The first incarnation of this family-focused idea was to create a recipe website. At that point in time, I didn’t feel like the amount of customization / lobotomization I could do to the admin side of Wordpress was sufficient to make posting recipes as easy for my aunts and uncles as it is for them to write an email. Or to do that and have every recipe end up with consistent presentation (ingredients, directions, pictures, comments, etc). With 2.7 (and the great plugin flutter) it looks like that might now be possible.
• Focus on the family
  The recipe functionality will be the digital equivelent of the kitchen, the hub of a home where people gather together and discuss recent events in their lives while preparing or enjoying great foods. What the most wonderful woman in the world made me realize about ABT was that it would be very hard to talk about things relating to sustainability and environmentalism that I had experienced without making it a very personal project. While Survivorman might be okay sharing all aspects of his life to anyone who has an interest, I would be better off keeping my random ramblings to those who have a one or two degree connection. So the blog(s) which get created on the site will be private in nature.

And it shall be called FamilyPress

I can see a strong potential for other families who have members on all corners of the globe to be interested in what I am tentatively calling Familypress. I have yet to decide whether this will be a pre-defined set of categories, templates, plugins, etc for a default WP installation or a WPMU installation or possibly even an out-of-box implementation of BuddyPress. In any case, my goal with the next incarnation of Oastler.ca will be to build the tools and technology to serve my families’ needs with a mind to being able to offer that service to others in the future.

I hope you have enjoyed reading my computer and web related blog efforts on this site thus far and that you will continue to follow those efforts on my Idealien Studios blog.

Cheers,
Jamie

WordPress Q: is there a WP function available to templates to distinguish a new vs. returning visitor? If not, what cookie to look for?

The most popular solution to this challenge that I could find was the oddly named plugin What would Seth Godin Do? which aims to show new users additional information (RSS feeds, etc) and remove it for returning visitors. As the author Richard Millar writes, “after 5 visits the message disappears. You can customize this message, its lifespan, and its location.”

I haven’t not used this plugin myself, but I’m sure it would be relatively easy to emulate the logic from this into your theme file functions.php for more customization of the new / returning visitor changes. Anyone else come across other personalization plugins or code to solve this challenge?

For today, that activity was to finally put Idealien Category Enhancements available for download on Wordpress.org. After much confusion - entirely on my part - I can now track downloads and links via that site. This is really a small step in the grand scheme of things, but as I continue to expand my efforts to build the Idealien brand it is one that should hopefully lead to an influx of traffic.

Next steps:

• Bring the ICE code page into the WP installation for tracking purposes
• Get a few more blog articles that I have 1/2 written polished and posted
• Start implementing the long list of plugins I want to leverage for that site
• Add the service description, about page, and rest of boiler plate content

1. Monday of this week was the Canadian Thanksgiving this year - it is held on the first Monday of October every year. A chance to reflect on all the things we are thankful for, including how fortunate I am to be living in a country that - while not free of poverty - provides a wealth of resources for everyone to help conquer this financial challenge. I also work for a company with less than 1,000 employees that has given over $1 million dollars to United Way and other local charities over the past 5 years. This year I am organizing an event to recycle PCs in partnership with a government-subsidized Computers For Schools program.
2. Yesterday Canadians gave every Canadian the chance to vote in a federal election. While my vote - for the Green Party - didn’t result in them winning any seats, they did raise their % of the popular vote from 4.5% to 6.8%. Unfortunately the initial results indicate that a record low number of voters chose to exercise their right to vote and use their voice to tell government what they think.

The goal of Blog Action Day, to “raise awareness and trigger a global discussion” is very similar to a series of thoughts that had been building in my mind for some time now. There are a great number of things that we as a society can and should be doing to help make a better tomorrow. Activities which can not only make poverty a thing of the past, but also improve the quality of life for every human being. Discussing concepts like sustainable energy, negative carbon footprints, sustainable development, citizen journalism encourage people to recognize that humanities’ continued existing on this planet is a gift, not a right.

With those ideas in mind, I bought a new domain: abettertomorrow.ca. It is going to take me a few days to get the site operational, but in the meantime you can check out the first 6-minute video I recorded which explains my goals for the site. Note that the email address for the domain has not yet been setup, so for the time being comments on this post would be wonderful.

In the mean-time here is the video footage of my presentation Wordpress: Beyond A Blog. Enjoy!

WordCamp Toronto 2008 - WordPress: Beyond A Blog with Jamie Oastler from Mark Wood on Vimeo.

If you want to follow along with the slides you can get a rough cut at Slideshare.net although none of the animation seems to work. In a few days I’ll have a clean copy of the slides up on Idealien Studios.

All things are moving in a very positive direction for the month of September. The stats for the site were all equal to or in a consistent growth pattern building on last month. I’m not sure how I feel about the distribution of source of traffic (pretty chart below) which has over 65% of my traffic coming from search engines. On one hand that is very good because it means that people are able to find my content, but on the other hand it could be interpreted to mean that few of those people who find it interesting are returning or spreading the word. The new visitor ratio and bounce rate confirms that theory to a certain extent. However further investigation reveals that over the past five months the number of unique referrers sending traffic to my site has increased each month.

Separate from the statistical improvements, September has been an incredible month for me on a number of levels:

• Celebrated my 30th birthday with friends and family at Canada’s Wonderland. It had been forever since I’d been to a rollercoaster park and happily found that I still enjoy the adrenelyne rush that taking yourself out of your comfort zone brings.
• Completed the first step of my “soft launch” of my freelance site - Idealien Studios. As I begin to bring those plans into reality, I recognize that blogging on two sites related to the same niche is probably not something I have time to (or want to) do. Not sure yet what changes are in store for Oastler.ca, but there probably will be some as I dedicate more of my effort towards branding and promoting Idealien Studios.
• In fact, a first BIG step towards that goal starts today as I leave for WordCamp: Toronto. The latter portion of September was spent crafting a strong set of slides which justify the belief that I have long held that Wordpress is a strong foundation upon which to build your website especially if you want to go Beyond A Blog. Very much looking forward to the networking potential that comes from this weekend.
• Finding out about Team Camp! If it is anything like I expect it to be - based on past experiences with those involved - this will be a very good opportunity!

Hopefully I will have a post full of enthusiasm next week summarizing the adventures I had in Toronto at WordCamp!