David Akin’s On The Hill

Edmonton suffered a freak flood/hailstorm earlier this week. From a report prepared by CTV's online staff: “The heavy rainstorm started Sunday afternoon, dumping 150 millimetres of rain on the city. The storm blew in with little warning, flooding homes and turning roads into lakes. Environment Canada called it “a one in 200-year storm. It also created flooding inside Canada's largest shopping centre, the West Edmonton Mall. Around 20,000 people out for a day of Sunday shopping were evacuated.” My CTV colleague Todd Battis did a piece on this for CTV National News. The link to Todd's piece is at the link above. Meanwhile, a friend of my aunt, who lives in Calgary, sent along these photos. Freaky, man, freaky. And then, just a few days, later, Ralph Klein declares that Alberta is debt-free. Coincidence?

Reuters reports that MSNBC.com, the joint venture between Microsoft Corp. and General Electric Co.'s NBC unit will turn a profit for the first time in the quarter which ended June 26. MSNBC.com says it was helped by record revenue of $45-million (US) for the entire year. There are no details in the Reuters report about revenues for the quarter.
Microsoft could likely fund MSNBC.com even if it never sold a single ad for, as Reuters points out, Microsoft's revenue for a single quarter is around $9-billion and MSNBC.com apparently needs less than $10-million every quarter or a little more than 1/1000th of what the software company.

Writing in the excellent industry newsletter Telemanagement, published by the Angus Telemanagement Group Inc. of Ajax, Ont., John Riddell reports that Bell Canada is keen to phase out all Frame Relay and Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) services over the next decade. No new Frame Relay or ATM contracts are being signed although Bell says it is honouring all existing contracts.
Riddell, reporting a conversation with Paul Rowe, Bell's VP Enterprise Marketing, said Bell installed 88 Frame Relay endpoints on corporate networks in 2003. In the first half of 2004, Bell has installed two.
Rowe says the number of IP endpoints is up 40 per cent year-over-year; Ethernet is growing in double digits; while ATM/Frame Relay declined by one per cent.
Bell wants to do this to save money. CEO Michael Sabia has said that if Bell can put all its networking services on an IP network, it stands to save 20 to 25 per cent a year in operating costs.
Bell says its corporate customers, too, will save money, and enjoy more secure, flexible and simple service.
Lots of international carriers are moving to replace the ATM networks but Bell is a bit ahead of the curve in this regard, Riddell reports.

EDS Canada, the unit of Electronic Data Systems
Corp. of Plano, Texas, has appointed Brian Brewer as its new chief
financial officer. Brewer was the CFO for Acklands-Grainger Inc. and before
that CFO for Xerox Canada Inc. He's also worked for Imperial Oil.

TD Bank became the first of Canada's big banks to say it will replace its aging fleet of 2,400 bank machines. TD execs and some industry analysts say that they expect all the banks to upgrade their ATM network within the next few years. Banks want their ATMs to do more than just take deposits and dispense cash. They also have to comply with some regulations. For example, payment groups like Mastercard and the Canadian Payments Association are insisting that ATMs communicate financial data using triple-DES encryption. Right now, the ATM network protects data with single-DES encryption.
From a story I have in today's Globe about this:

Toronto-Dominon Bank said yesterday Hewlett-Packard (Canada) Ltd. will take over responsibility for the bank's automated teller machine network, the latest example of a Canadian bank trying to cut costs by hiring specialized technology partners.
Industry players and analysts said ATM operations, in particular, are ripe for back-end consolidation and aggregation, as banks try to manage cash, maintain an aging fleet of ATMs, and comply with new financial regulations in the face of increasing competition from white-label ATM operators.
The TD deal is also being seen as an example of the way Canada's banks will continue to invest in capital equipment while avoiding technology choices that create additional costs for a future merger or other business combination, such as the acquisition of a full-service insurance company. . . . [Read the full story]

Next month, Toronto hosts the annual conference for the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication . This is a big group, about 3,500 members, mostly Americans, and they've taken over some downtown Toronto hotels for this event.
As part of the pre-conference hoopla, the Canadian Newspaper Association and the Public Journalism Network has organized an afternoon-long workshop which I'll be moderating. We'll be talking about blogging and how it can inform ideas about participatory and public journalism with some pretty influential journalist-bloggers, including, I'm told, Dan Gillmor, Jeff Jarvis, and Rebecca MacKinnon. Apparently, Jay Rosen is among those who plans to attend. I hope he does because I'd like to hear more about this subject from him.
Here's the blurb from the PJNet site:

Exploring the Fusion Power of Public and Participatory Journalism

August 3, 2004, Toronto, Precedes AEJMC Convention
Participatory journalism tools in the form of weblogs and other electronic communications are changing the face of mass media, but are complementary to public journalism. These are powerful tools as Howard Dean’s campaign proved by using weblogs and MeetUp to get 170,000 people nationwide to sign up for face-to-face meetings. The Daily Kos, a citizen run weblog, has 1.5 million unique visitors a month. These are just two of many impressive examples. Learn how we can borrow from or incorporate these tools to improve the state of journalism.
Walk Away Knowing:

•  What journalists can put to use now
• What questions researchers should be asking
• What journalism professors should be teaching
• How citizens around the world can practice participatory journalism
• How to begin building information communities.

Canadians interested in this event (and you don't have to be a journalist to attend and participate) can download a form and register through the CNA.
The registration includes dinner and cocktail social!

It took 12 years but the Royal Newfoundland Constabulary is sure it's got the bad guys in its sights. The bad guys, in this case, happen to be just about anyone and everyone who ran a cab stand in St. John's, Canada's oldest city and the capital of the great province of Newfoundland and Labrador.
The Constabulary, working hand-in-glove with the g-men from Canada's federal competition bureau, believe that six taxi companies and a seven individuals conspired to parcel out government contracts in a period from 1992 to 2004. It seems that Dale Bugden or Dave Gulliver or the guys behind Lockey Haven or you-name-your-St.-John's-cab-company would wink and nod at each other whenever a big government or commmercial contract came up so that everyone got their turn at the trough: “Awwright, boys, whose year is it to get the hospitals contract? And who's got the Avalon East schools this year? They ain't been payin' enough.”
This, of course, is anti-competitive, alleges the law enforcement authorities, because the customers in question would not have been enjoying the benefits of price competition from their purveyors of taxi services.
There's a marginally reasonable CBC story on this online and a less-than-reasonable story in the Telegram (no direct link available but see if you can find it by drilling down on the 'News' link), the daily paper in St. John's.
By reasonable, I mean a story that gives us a great little narrative.
But after reading both, I wanted to know if there were other cab companies in St. John's. Is that it? Are there more than six? Neither story had any reaction from the cabbies. Now, if there's one group of people who aren't shy about giving you their opinion, it's cab drivers — and Newfoundland cab drivers are a particularly bold lot. Isn't this the kind of colour we dream of finding for our stories? And here they are, the star attractions — and yet, no word from the cabbies.
I'm surprised the assignment editors at both outlets didn't get their reporters to phone up the school board, hospitals and other big institutional users of taxis. Surely they must have complained. How much money have the cab companies ripped them off for? Or, even better, perhaps the feds don't know what they're talking about, that you'd get a bunch of government agency types who say their cab contracts are great and the companies compete like dogs for their business.
(Mind you, to give the Telly and CBC the benefit of the doubt, I'm only getting the online reports. Who knows what's actually been in the papers or on CBC radio and TV from St. John's? Both outlets might very well have had all that great colour and, if so, I'm happy to be corrected.)
Perhaps two newcomers to the blogosophere — Newfoundlanders I know from way back — will pass on the gossip on this scandal. Mind you, neither John Gushue, a CBC'er, nor Greg Locke, photographer-for-hire par excellence, have anything on their blogs about this last I checked but, from their posts, it sounds like they've been terribly busy. And besides, maybe this scandal isn't the talk of George Street and environs.

In 2001, Ontario's Ministry of Natural Resources (MNR) discovered that 90 employees were surfing porn sites on work computers and often e-mailing the contents to others. At least one porn-filled e-mail was sent from an Ontario government e-mail account to employees at Chrylser Corp. The Chrysler folks complained and the MNR began an investigation.
As a result of that investigation, more than 60 MNR workers were disciplined, with punishment ranging from a letter of reprimand to dismissal.
The six who were dismissed, though, convinced their union, the Ontario Public Sector Employees Union (OPSEU), to take up their cause and grieve their firing.
This week, the employees won when a provincial arbitrator ordered the six — all men — to be re-hired. They are back on the job this week.
The provincial arbitrator did not release the reasons behind his decision, saying they would come later along with his thoughts about back pay and alternative punishment.
I did a piece on this for last night's CTV National News but my Globe and Mail colleague Christie Blatchford led the way on this story, breaking it in yesterday's paper.

[Clipped from Tom Coates' blog. These are his ideas, not mine and that's one of the reasons they make so much sense 🙂 ]

So I've been thinking a lot about ubiquitous home networks recently, and the ways in which various appliances might start hooking up to the internet and through the internet to other people – social hardware if you will – and the problem keeps coming back to how you introduce the network into the home in the first place. There needs to be a way of wrapping all the core parts of a home in a network without it being something that requires complex set-up and specialised hardware. It also seems to me that the key to true ubiquity is to detach the networking completely from a its current reliance on a computer. Your home network of the future should not require a perpetually-on computer in a cupboard. Your gran should be able to have the benefits of internet enabled appliances without having to figure out the configuration of modems and puzzle their way through a complex OS-based interface . . .

[Read the rest of Tom's post]

I saw Chris Hill's spoofs of Apple's Switch campaign a while ago but Doc Searls reminds us of them again today. If you've not seen them yet, go pay a visit to Chris' site. The “Switch to Mac” spoof is here and it's great but I think the “Switch to Linux” spoof is even funnier. Mind you, the geekier you are the funnier Chris' humour is.