Grand Central was a terrific product. First off, I get an American number. Yay!

They had a little web site that you entered the number you wanted to call.

Grand Central phoned you.
Grand Central phoned the number you wanted to call.
Grand Central plugged the two calls together. Fantastic.

Google buys them. All of a sudden the ability for them to call back my cell phone doesn’t work. Damn.

But I can’t accept defeat that easy.

So, here is what to do if you are in Canada and want to make a lot of phone calls for free from your cell phone.

1) Get unlimited incoming calls on your cell phone (probably $10-$15 a month from Rogers or Fido… I imagine Bell and telus are comparable). The catch is that Google Voice CALLS you when you make a phone call. Every call is an incoming call.

2) Get a VOIP provider. An example is http://les.net but there are others. What you want to buy is a DID (Direct Inward Dial) phone number in the US. So you are buying a phone number in the US that you will forward to your Canadian Cell phone for 1¢ a minute.

3) Forward your Google voice number to the DID you just purchased.

4) Done.

So now basically when you make a call with google voice (which you make from their web page or a mobile app)

The call goes from Google -> Your Google Voice # -> Your American VOIP # -> Your Canadian Cell

The nicest part about this is that if you use the Google Voice App for iPhone you can also send and receive unlimited SMS messages. Nice to be able to communicate with your American friends…. but if your Canadian friends message you back our horrible horrible rates apply.

Good luck!

Is that true?  Since this drive had both connectors on I decided to fire up Drive Genius and run a benchmark test.

As you can see, the Firewire connector performed consistently better across all tests.

I ran the firewire test first.  The firewire drive is shown in BLUE in all the tests.  I disconnected the firewire (FW400) cable and connected the same drive with the USB cable, plugged directly into the back of my iMac.

The USB tests are shown in green.

When it works nice?

However, I’m guessing they are so oversold on their services that the web page can take 10 minutes or more to load.  Not the type of thing you want to do a quick change to?

Overall, I think I’m at the point where I’m saying “Stay AWAY” from this service until they fix their problems.

By this I mean they do not have some special portal that allows them to extract more hours from the day than anyone else.  They have the same amount of time in a day as you or I.

It amazes me that people still have a childlike perspective that teachers arrive at 9 and leave at 3:30.  No.  That is what the students do.  Teachers put in much longer hours.

But the economics of education is screwed up.  Let’s assume a 10 year teacher is making $90,000 in Ontario, Canada.  That’s about $45 an hour.  Decent pay for any occupation.

I’ve never seen an industry where there is more time wasted than by teachers and administration.

Picture this scenario.  Report cards go home and when the parents sign them they get returned and filed in the office.  Seriously?  You are paying someone $45 an hour to push report cards into folders?  Copying work in the morning.  Seriously?  You are paying someone $45 an hour to photocopy papers?

As a teacher, you have limited time in your day.  As boards offload a lot of this work onto the teachers as ‘cost savings’ by not hiring administrative staff, they see it as ‘money saved.’  However, the time comes out of somewhere.

It comes out of a quality program.  It comes out of decent assessment and planning.  It comes out of marking.

I worked at one secondary school.  The administration INSISTED that we walk down and check our mailboxes before school, at lunch, and at the end of the day. The reason was there might be some important information in the boxes or some papers that need to go home for the students.  More often than not, the papers that needed to go home were LAST MINUTE “Oh shit, we need to send a paper home about the winter carnival tomorrow.”  There was no surprise the winter carnival was coming up… It’s been booked for months!  Give me the papers in the morning so I don’t need to go down in the afternoon.  Other times the notes were things like “The library will be closed tomorrow.  Staff Meeting Wednesday.” Now, I’m not being lazy… but high schools are big places. It took me 10 minutes round trip to walk to the office and back - assuming my time is not wasted by other people along the way.

10 minutes of my time at $45 an hour is $7.50.

Doing this 3 times a day cost $22.50

Doing this 3 times a day for the 60 staff members at the school is $1350 PER DAY.

180 days in the school year: $243,000 per year.

Almost a quarter million dollars a year in wasted time checking a damn mailbox!

Here’s a solution.  Email me the notice about the staff meeting.

Here’s a solution.  Have a pair of students walk the sheets to a class if - on the one day a week - they need to go home.

If you aren’t concerned about money, consider the time.

10 minutes round trip, 3 times a day = 30 minutes. With sixty staff that is 30 lost hours DAILY.  Over the year 5,400 teacher hours lost.

And that is just ONE item.

It’s 2009.  Why am I the *only* teacher that walks around with a laptop?

On average, teachers do not have computers on their desks.  Yes, some schools force this, but many don’t.    If we worked in an office wouldn’t we have had computers in the late 80s?

School administrators have virtually (or actually) no business training.  The concept of lost time is foreign to them.  From their perspective firing a $25,000 clerical person looks like a savings.

Rebuild the system from the ground up.

1. My status updates aren’t writtten directly to you personally.  If I say “Seasons greetings to everyone” or something similar, keep in mind I’m wishing this to everyone.  You don’t need to comment with “Thank you.”

2. The wall is visible to all my friends - and your comments are probably visible to all my friends.  If you have something to say to me that everyone (and I mean EVERYONE) needs to see, then the wall is a good place.  “Congrats on that new baby.” Don’t write things like “Is your boss still being a dick?” “What time are you coming over?” or “Hope your diarrhea has stopped.”  This is what EMAIL is for.  The kid I went to 8th grade with does NOT need to read about my diarrhea problems.  Think to yourself “Do the 100 people on their list and the 100 people on my list REALLY need to read this?”   When I noticed that my wall had hit 100 postings, and 50 of them were from one person I decided to remove that person from my wall.

3. Status update.  Make it meaningful.  Make it newsworthy. If you feel like crap and you write “I feel like crap.” that might be news once.  Daily?  No.  I don’t need to read the news feed and find out that you are tired - again.  Most importantly, make it about you.  I don’t give a crap if your neighbour’s cat is recovering from emergency hairball removal surgery.

4. Photos.  Edit them first. 10 pictures of the cat playing with a toy, 5 of them blurry?  Pick one good one and put it on.

5. Comments.  Not every damn thing deserves a comment.  Don’t need to write “Great Pic” under every picture.   Pick a good one, that’s it.  Note:  Leaving one ‘Great Pic’ comment daily doesn’t solve this problem.  It just causes irritation over multiple days.

6. Virtual enabling. Facebook is a great place to find enablers.  “I feel sick today.” Be prepared for “Oh you poor thing!” from your favourite enabler.  More importantly look back at your status postings.  Are you a negative person or a complainer?  No?  All denial aside, are you a negative person?  Negativity is an easy disease to catch.  Don’t want that person on my list.

7. Inviting me for an application.  Guess what, you like Scrabulous, but you don’t need to get me playing it or the 50 other things you play.  That easily gets you the ‘BLOCK ALL INVITES FROM THIS FRIEND’

8.  Chat attack.  Don’t try to chat with me every time I appear online, especially if you have nothing to say.

9. Unfriending someone after a disagreement.  Well, we are humans and we have different perspectives.  Remove me from the friends list and consider it permanent.

10. My news is my news. If I’m pleased about an accomplishment I’m putting it here for people on my list to see. You don’t need to start posting my news elsewhere for your friends to see.

Overall, things are about balance.

However, it still required a phone call to Fido to have this removed from the bill.  How many other users are they billing who just don’t notice or don’t call.  Good old Rogers quality service.

Decided on the 6oz signature burger with chocolate shake and shared a poutine.

It’s 100% angus beef. It is written in about 30 places in the store so that point is hard to miss.

Inside is a nice industrial décor. Music playing and not too loud.

The shake: cold, malty. Good stuff.

The burger: definitely a good burger. Nice tender beef.

The poutine: nice fries. Nice gravy. Good curds

Two shakes, two burgers, one poutine. Total price. $25

Service: adequate. The one guy at the counter talked on his phone the whole time, even when I picked up food and asked him questions.

Overall: good, but probably won’t be a regular due to price. 4 oz burgers start at $5 and go up to $10 for 8 oz

But worth a visit!

According to the Huffington Post, zunes everywhere are failing en masse.  A massive problem for the people who couldn’t afford to buy a real iPod, or perhaps a big hoax?  Who knows?

Update: account finally came through a week later. Some response - any response would have been good.

The service works well. Good transfer speeds, but fluctuates wildly. Some private trackers show they cannot connect properly and that say that nat is not configured properly.  Several times my downloads stopped even though many seeds and peers were showing, but could not connect.  If I tried the same torrent at my house, things would go.

The web interface is usually slow, but at times extremely slow. Typical is a one to two minute wait between clicks. Not the type if thing to log in and out of rapidly.

But the price is cheap. Then again you get what you pay for.

Overall - when it works, it is good.  But I think this is a small operation set up by a tech person with not a lot of concept of customer service.

Update: January 18th, 2009 - The server has been down for 36 hours with no response from the tech support people.

• Intelliscreen:  Great app.  My phone is asleep.  I press the button and the screen that normally shows the battery power or SMS now shows me my email, SMS, weather, and calendar.  Admittedly, this was a big selling feature for me to jailbreak.  I was irritated hearing the email beep, unlocking the phone, going into the mail and seeing my latest AirMiles e-newsletter.  Now I glance at the screen. Done.

2) Backgrounder.  OK. This is cool.  For an IM program or a program that normally sits in the front and does nothing (I love GPS tracker on long trips).  Have the program run in the background.  Very cool, but not foolproof.

3) Blacklist.  I don’t know about you, but some people I would sooner not hear from (collection agencies, families, work calling asking “Why aren’t you here today”, etc.)  Blacklist stops the phone from ringing if certain numbers call.  Wonderful.

4) VOIP over 3G.  My provider gives me free incoming calls ‘in my local area.’  However, their customer reps can’t tell me where that ‘local area’ is.  Their billing system seems to have no problem. Now I have Skype and my Gizmo account setup using a cracked version of Fring for 3G.  VOIP calls away!

5) Tethering.  Admittedly, with the phone I can check most of the stuff I need to.  But there are times when I would like to see it on the big screen, or open an emailed file in a program other than the supported ones.  The ability to hop online using my iPhone 3G as a modem is handy.  I don’t do it much.

6) Springboard / Winterboard.  This isn’t a dealbreaker, but the ability to change themes is kind of nice.  It’s something I never do on my computer, but I do like doing on the phone.

7) Terminal.  Yes, I am a geek thank you. Copy things to / from the phone

Cycorder.  Turns the camera into a video camera.  Now with audio.  How much was that?  Oh, it is free.

9) Cracked apps.  What’s that? Apps that you have to buy from the app store can be loaded on free? Maybe I should have looked into this before buying all the apps I have!  Now I know this isn’t right. We do need to support these developers.  But there are so many I would have liked to try before I bought.  Some of the apps aren’t even worth the 99¢ they charge!

10) Searcher: Another free app.  Type in a term and it searches your address book, safari, calendar, SMS, notes.

11) Attachments from a URL?   So I’m standing in the elevator with Steven Spielberg.  I pitch my script to him. He likes.  I go to email him my script… oh wait, can’t.  But drop in a free addition and put a link to your script and it pulls it from the link and attaches it to the email.  Steven gets off the elevator and my script is waiting in his inbox.  Even if you aren’t on the elevator with Spielberg, the ability to send PDFs (sales catalog, articles, etc.) can be pretty handy.

Downsides…

•  It’s a little slower.  I can see why Apple doesn’t let applications run in the background.  It simply can’t do it effectively all the time.  Booting up (is it slower too?).

• It can be buggy.  Mind you, I found my regular iPhone buggy too.

• It’s not for everyone.  If you are a geek and you don’t mind doing the SSH stuff from time to time, OK.  Otherwise, it may not be for you.

———

Will I keep the jailbreak? Not sure if I will keep it longterm, but so far I have to say I enjoy it.

Bell Canada Traffic shaping DSL Lines

I’m not a Bell customer, yet I’m still being shaped.