This is why I’ve been using an IP Telephony service (from Ubity in Montreal) for a year now. With such a service, you can plug your phones anywhere there’s an Ethernet jack.

Location, location

The location where I’m at doesn’t matter. I could be in Mexico, in Europe, wherever and when I use my phone, it’s my office phone calling locally from Montreal.

So, I have a phone plugged in at my office, I have one at home and I have another one at my cottage. When the phone rings these 3 phones will all ring at the same time and I can answer like I was at the office. When I call someone, I always look as if I was at the office. I can be at my cottage and answer as if I was at the office after a day of skiing.

Not only that, I also have software phone support. So, when travelling, I can use my laptop at the hotel to make calls: I just plug in my iPhone headphones (which as a microphone) and I still appear as being in the office when returning calls from clients!

I’ve also installed a VoIP application on my iPhone called iSip. Unfortunately, it does not allow to make calls over the 3G network yet. It only supports Wi-Fi. The cool thing is I can be having a glass of port and smoking a cigar on my terrace and use the phone to call back clients or partners while still looking as if I’m at the office!

The day I’ll move my office, I just need to plug the phone somewhere else and I’m instantly ready to make and answer calls.

Features

This kind of service has all the usual telephony and corporate voicemail features for an affordable price. Calls in North America are free (1000 minutes per months) and calls to countries the other side of the Ocean are ridiculously cheap. On top of that I have features such as “find me” where in my corporate voicemail, people can press a button in my inbox to find me. They get to speak their names while the service calls my cell phone. Then, when receiving the call on my cell phone, after listening to who’s calling, I can press a button to accept or ignore the call.

The downside is I’m extremely reachable. But I often need to be.

The upside is that I can enjoy the pleasures of life a bit more and work where it’s more practical and enjoyable while looking like I’m never leaving my office and even sleeping there!

Posted via email from Jerome’s posterous

Another friend, Philippe Martin, tweeted about an article from France that talks about the 3 strikes law they are looking to adopt in France. In France, some suggested an amendment that propose to intervene only when the downloaded content is already available on the Internet. Interesting idea. In another tweet, Philippe points me to “Quebecor Opens Door to Canadian Three Strikes Policy”.

With the CRTC currently investigating net neutrality and being lobbied by companies such as Quebecor for a law similarly abusive than what a few countries like France want, I decided to play the role of a legislator and ask myself:

What would be the perfect anti-piracy law?

I don’t know if it’s perfect, but I think I came up with a damn good one.

Please note that to simplify the language I loosely use the term content owner. I am targeting the music and movie industry when referring to content owners.

Here’s the draft of my perfect anti-piracy law:

• An individual can download and share digital content from any source unless:
• the content has already been made available for download by the content owner
• the content was never released for personal listening or viewing by the content owner
• the content made available by the content owner is not copy protected

I haven’t talked about any coercive measures. That wasn’t the point. I wouldn’t wish for ISPs to spy on individuals. The point is that if you make content available for download through purchase (or freely with advertising), you are answering the needs of the consumer. You wouldn’t have any excuse to pirate and it would be easier to go against real pirates (those who profit from piracy).

Such a law would be progressive because it forces the music and movie industry to rethink their business model.

For example, no more region locking. If Hollywood wouldn’t make a movie available for download in Canada but would in the USA, it would be fare game for Canadians to download and share freely. It would force them to review global licensing issues.

It would also incite Canadian content owners to offer their content for download across the globe. I think it would benefit artists and everyone involved. I am confident artists would increase their royalties through increased sales.

It’s also important to allow individuals to be able to play the content the way they want to play it. To simplify things for consumers, content should not be copy protected. If I want to play my purchased movie through an iPod, the computer, an XBox, whatever, I should be able to. If I want to play a digital movie I purchased on the TV screen instead of the computer, I should be able to. Hollywood is just realizing, though the Hulu/Boxee saga that digital content can be played on the TV and want to control how users play Hulu’s content. It’s laughable since it is technologically easy to have a browser control play content on any screen, including the TV.

I also think we should force download availability as a prerequisite of content availability. Streaming-only technology put limits on the way we can play content (we need an Internet link). So, if a content is only made available through streaming, downloadable copies should be fare game to individuals.

What do you think?

What would be your perfect anti-piracy law?

The iPhone is the perfect companion for such events, but you need to be careful with the data usage.

For example, the default data roaming fee for Rogers in the United States is 6$ per MB. Since I use maybe a MB or two per day (or even more), it can add up really fast. I was glad to learn Rogers has a new data roaming plan for the iPhone which costs:

• 10$ per month
• 1$ per MB

As far as I could see, this plan is not yet advertised on Roger’s Web site. When I called Rogers a week ago, I was told this data roaming plan was just recently added.

This means if you think you will be using more than 2MB during a stay in the United States, the plan begins to make sense. You can remove the plan when you come back so you don’t pay 10$ each month.

During my trip I must have used about near 25MB of data. With the 10$ monthly fee and data usage fees, this amounts to 35$ of data roaming fees. It does not come cheap, but it would have cost me 150$ without the plan.

To further monitor and control your data roaming usage, here are must-follow tips for your next trip in the United States.

1. Don’t forget to call Rogers about voice roaming packages if you plan to make or receive many phone calls
2. Call Rogers to enable the iPhone United States data roaming plan
3. Before the plane takes off from Canada, when asked to shut down cell phones, you can activate Airplane mode in Settings
   
4. To minimize unforeseen bandwidth usage while abroad, go in Settings/Fetch New Data and set Push to “Off” then Fetch to “Manually”. This way, you will only download new emails when going to look at your emails.
   
5. In Settings/General/Network, set Data Roaming to “Off”. If you plan to use only Wi-Fi you would leave that there always when abroad. However, even if you plan to use data roaming, it’s a good idea to disable it before arriving at your destination.
6. Clear your usage statistics. Go in Settings/General/Usage and press the “Reset Statistics” button. You need to scroll down the Usage page to see this button. This will clear your Cellular Network data usage.
   
7. When arriving at destination, leave the Airplane mode and put back data roaming to “On”.
8. During your stay, you can monitor your usage statistics to keep track of how much you will be paying for your stay.
9. When coming back to Canada, put back your Data Roaming to “Off” to be sure it’s off if you ever go to Europe or another country where data roaming rates would cost you a pension.
10. Don’t forget to call Rogers again to remove your data roaming plan from your account.
11. Remember that browsing Web sites can consume a lot of data. Refrain from visiting too many graphics-heavy Web sites. Try to browse iPhone optimized Web pages or use specialized applications. You will consume a lot less data and it will reduce the extra fees that will appear on your invoice.

EDIT 2009-01-22 23:34

1. Funny thing! A few hours after my post, my wife, Kim Vallée, independently posted on the same subject here. We didn’t even knew about each of our similar posts! Of course, we had extensively discussed the subject, which explains the eerie similarity of our posts.
2. Highlighted some key words and the title after some tweets. Seems the new US data roaming plan is news to some.

The webcom-Montreal conference arrives soon. I had to pick winners to the contest. To make it fair, I used a proven technology that you can inspect in the photos below. And the winners are.

• Geneviève Lefebvre
• Nathalie Rivard

Congratulations! See you at webcom! I will email the winners get their contact information so that the organizers can prepare their passes. Unless I can’t contact one of them, these are the final winners!

Français

La conférence webcom-Montréal arrive à grand pas. Il fallait choisir les 2 gagnants au concours. Pour choisir les gagnants j’ai opté une technologie éprouvée. Voir les photos qui suivent. Et les gagnants sont.

• Geneviève Lefebvre
• Nathalie Rivard

Félicitations! Je vais envoyer un courriel aux gagnants pour leur demander leurs informations de contact pour les organisateurs préparent leurs passes. À moins que je ne puisse contacter un des gagnants, ce sont les gagnants finaux!

Just took this picture this morning of Montreal’s new geek police. The perfect occasion to make use of my new iPhone 3G and upload to Facebook.

Let me tell you that I wasn’t the only person taking pictures of the policeman. I wonder, as a friend asked: “Are these made by Segway”? Another friend thought that if he would get arrested by this policeman, he would be laughing and searching for the hidden cameras.

Anyway, if you are looking for the chic geek look, you surely can’t go wrong with this contraption.

Yesterday, I discovered Grafitti CMS and it looks like just what I need:

• SEO optimized
• Dead simple
• Easy to customize the design
• Easy to add plug-ins for
• .Net engine

Since most of the content is outdated and I want the new Web site to be dead simple, I will probably start from scratch with new content. Since we have our own servers on W2K 2003 and IIS and that I’m fluent with C# and .Net, the new engine will be easy to expand or write widget for if the need arise.

For the transition, I will also be using ISAPI_Rewrite, which is an Apache mod_rewrite compatible ISAPI module for IIS. I will use it to do redirects for outdated URLs. Also, I will take the time to make sure all variant of the fully qualified domain name will be properly redirected.

Granted, since her primary occupation is writing, specially for her blog At Home with Kim Vallée, her computing and software needs are not really constrained by the operating system.

Software

1) HyperSnap DX

On Windows, Kim loved HyperSnap (v.3), swore it was the best and she was afraid of not finding a snapshot software on par with it. Well, she now swears by OS X’s integrating snapshot keyboard shortcuts which are as capable for her need… plus you don’t have to start a snapshot software, it’s always available.

2) Microsoft Office 2008 & others

Between Pages and Word, she came back to Word. She liked Pages, but I suppose she prefers Word. In any case, the transition from Windows to Mac is not really a problem when you are using the pretty much the same software. The same goes for other applications available on both operation systems. Bonus to Microsoft for having the Home and Students edition, which makes the repurchase very affordable.

3)  Windows Live Writer

Kim’s killer application for blogging is Windows Live Writer. It makes writing posts a breeze, it supports almost any blogging platform and allows you to write offline and publish when you want. She hasn’t found an acceptable software alternative yet for her Mac. During dinner yesterday evening, our friend Jon Husband pointed us to Qumana. It almost can do the job perfectly for Kim, but she depends on Live Writer’s automatic photo-paper effect that get applied to pictures that get uploaded in preview and higher resolution mode.

4) VMware Fusion

To support Windows Live Writer, I installed VMware Fusion on her MacBook. It is quite impressive how well Windows runs on it. It also supports drag-and-drop and copy-and-paste to and from OS X. As a bonus, she’ll probably use it to connect to our remote VPN when she needs to modify her blog’s design. Windows Live Writer installation solved!

Hardware

On the hardware side, the MacBook Pro’s is fast, the DVD drive is silent enough, the battery life is acceptable, the keyboard is incredibly comfortable and silent and the Multi-Touch trackpad is quite responsive and useful.

The only few gripes are due to Apple’s obsession with minimalism. The Delete key, in reality, is a backspace and there’s no delete key. You also notice that you depend a lot on the mouse’s right button which is absent. Both problems a remedied quickly enough with the use of the function key and you get used to it quickly enough. For the mouse, you can always plug an external mouse too.

Getting used to OS X

Overall, OS X is a great operating system.

However, there’s a single thing I really do not like on OS X and its applications menu. This is more my opinion than Kim’s because she does not depend that much on application menus.

Having the applications’ menus always at the top of the screen is quite inefficient, and, in my opinion archaic. It dates back to the first Mac and was never changed. I could see the rationale this design choice when all we had were tiny Mac monitors. But with higher resolutions and secondary monitors, it becomes an annoyance. When you add an external monitor, the menu still stays at the top of the primary screen so if you drag an application on the second monitor, you have to navigate your mouse back and forth from one monitor to the other to get to the menu bar and back to the application. On Windows, menus follow your applications’ windows. It is much more practical and ergonomic.

Copy-and-paste Problem – Call to help

There’s only one thing that’s still nagging Kim and disrupting her workflow. It’s funny how, without realizing it, you get used to tiny details.

In Windows, if you highlight some hyperlinked text from a Web page in any Web browser and then copy and paste this in Microsoft Word, it copies the text and the hyperlink at the same time. So the work flow is:

1. Highlight hyperlinked text in browser
2. Copy
3. Switch to Word
4. Paste

In Mac OS X, doing the same thing from Firefox or Safari results in only the selected text being copied in Word (or Pages). Since Kim first writes her article in Word and includes a lot of hyperlinks in her posts, the workflow becomes:

1. Highlight hyperlinked text in browser
2. Copy
3. Switch to Word
4. Paste
5. Switch to browser
6. Right-click on highlighted text – Copy URL
7. Switch to Word
8. Select text
9. Open hyperlink window
10. Paste URL
11. Close hyperlink window

So, Mac professionals or enthusiasts, is there a solution?

Is there a way, a configuration, a hack, anything, that can enable Kim to copy-and-paste both the text and the hyperlink at the same time when highlighting text with an hyperlink on a Web page?

UPDATE: On Twitter, Nini, suggested to click-drag the hyperlink into Word. This drags the URL only. If you highlight the hyperlinked text and drag it, it still copies only the URL. If you highlight a phrase or paragraph that includes some hyperlinks it copies only the text! On Windows, drag-dropping hyperlinks also copies only the URL but drag-dropping a blend of non-hyperlinked text copies the formatting including the hyperlinked text.

Conclusion

Even with an annoyance or two, the Kim’s migration is a success and I do not think she would like to go back.

With that knowledge in hand, let’s see what’s the buzz on the Habs right now as the buzz in Montreal is increasing week after week.

We see a neat increase before the end of the regular season and a huge spike of discussions with the playoffs now taking place. Makes sense! Click on the above picture to see the most recent stats on wall discussions about the Habs.

It’s pretty neat, but I would really like to see some numbers. Maybe they only use samples? In any case, I think the idea is more to compare tendencies.

So, without wasting time, let’s compare between the Habs and the Bruins:

Ahhh! That’s better. No wonder the tickets for the series in Montreal sold in minutes and they were still tickets available in Boston at the first day of the playoffs…

UPDATE: you need to be logged in Facebook before clicking on the images to see the latest stats.

No, I’m not going to say I’ll blog more, because I don’t know if I will be able to follow through.

All my resolutions for 2008 have the goal of making my life simpler and easier.

My first step is to start with emails to stop the information overload. I’ve been using Outlook since 1996. My PST file was now over 5 gigs!

First thing is that I’ve put this file aside and it’s now an archive. I am starting with a blank slate. Then, I imported my contacts for the old file and I will have to delete a few outdated contacts. I also imported my tasks and I them cleaned up so that I only have a few future tasks to do. For the inbox and email folders, I did not import anything. I really want to start fresh. If I ever need something from the past, I will search my archive.

I’ve  also set up my email account so that emails stay on the server for 2 days. Over the holidays, I configured GMail to fetch emails from my server. I already have a Web mail access, but it strains under the load when I keep too many messages. I plan to gradually migrate to GMail to archive my emails instead of using Outlook. This way, I’ll have everything available online. That’s why I’m keeping my emails on the server for 2 days: it is to be sure GMail fetches them.

I’m also continuing to unsubscribe from every newsletter. All of them! I use RSS feeds with Google Reader instead. This way, I will read what I want when I want instead of having my Inbox fill up with things I don’t really need to be distracted with. My goal is that the only emails I eventually see will be from friends and business contacts.

To free yourself from information overload, I recommend reading this post from Tim Ferris: 12 Filtering Tips for Better Information in Half the Time: RSS, Del.icio.us and StumbleUpon