My open question asking about anyone’s Experience with Explornet has consistently been one of my top commented and top visited articles since being published last year. Now I’m hoping to draw on some that SEO karma and see if people could recommend alternatives to Xplornet?

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

I have come to realize that as much as Christmas is about the getting of gifts, the older I get the more joy I get from giving of gifts. I’ve noticed that the excitement which used to built inside me about opening presents on Christmas morning has lessened. It might have something to do with the fact that as one of the primary gift-givers in the household, I already know what the bulk of the presents are. I still get excited with each passing day of advent calendar, but it has more to do with giving presents being a joyful way to express my feelings for friends and family through thoughtful gifts.

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

I was just teasing a friend the other day about his World of Warcraft addiction and all of a sudden I have an addition. I could try to justify a few redeeming factors that make my vice far more interesting, but in truth a game is a game is a game. If you enjoy it, and can afford the time to play it until midnight or later, who is to say that’s wrong? Although if my gaming experience has taught me anything it’s that I’ll play compulsively over the short-term so that I don’t want to play the game religiously over the long-term.

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.

Recently, we decided to re-locate the primary home PC from the basement to the office upstairs. While this has led to a more productive and social lifestyle for both myself and my StubleUpon Anonymous partner (aka wifey), there are a number of unexpected trade-offs which I am not a fan of. Most notably the increased time to prepare to watch a movie due to copying media between machines and the wiring bane of my existence - hooking the laptop up to projector and receiver.

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 isnt all that good compression is not that great and although its becoming more popular these days, DivX and Xvid are preferred DVD backup choice codecs, shall we say? These lesser mainstream codecs 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.

Earlier this year I pondered should I quit blogging? At that point in time, after evaluating the benefits and costs of blogging, I decided that blogging has been an incredibly valuable exercise and I would continue to write regular blog posts. I have sustained a consistent posting pattern of 2 - 3 posts per week since then and very much enjoyed the process. However, I left one comment in the thread which foreshadowed changes ahead:

I wont 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

I saw a question in Twitter from ccarmichael that I figured would be worthwhile to answer here as well. He asked:

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?