Who You Calling A Jesse?

In part one I talked about the general format and in part two I looked at the technology used during my graduate education experience through distance education. In this part I look at the time I put into it and overall benefits with this style of education.

Time put in matches or exceeds a full-time Msc program

On average I would say that 16 hours a week went into any given course. With eight weeks a course, eight courses, around 1024 hours was spent just on course work. My dissertation required an additional 175 or so dedicated hours I believe (probably the same spent thinking/dreaming about it). That, rounded up to account a little for the conservative time estimate, is around 160 work days which, for the sake of argument, could be considered a normal years worth of dedicated time required in a typical UK Msc program. I completed that in two and a half years. I also worked (35+ hours a week) at a busy job and tried to have a life.

No matter how you look at that it is a crazy amount of time to dedicate to an ‘additional’ something (and I was paying to do it!!!). At first it was a novelty but around the third course in a row (~18 weeks in) I found the time commitment required to get decent marks started to put a strain on everything else in my life. I had to learn how to shape my evenings and weekends to allow for uninterrupted time otherwise assignments would drag out and my grades would suffer.

The pace was intense. If you ever get more than a week behind in a course (the instructors usually allowed that given life circumstances) the catching up became impossible. With the way the program is set up you can’t drop the course after 10 days without having to pay for the make up either. As it ends up, before you get 1/4 of the way in you are locked in (not entirely unusual practice in higher ed).

“Why did I do this to myself and why the f*#k was I paying to do that to myself?” That really hit me around course number four when an arrogant instructor that gave no feedback and was impossible to get a hold of nearly had me dropping out. Laureate (the people managing the program) did nothing to help other than to offer sympathy as well (again no different than any higher education experience I have had). I had to suck it up, focus, and get my stuff done in a way I had not experienced before.

Higher education is about more than specific knowledge gains

Looking back, when things hit that low I believe I gained the most from the experience. Sure I can hammer out 500-750 words with references in half a day, I know more about different internet based technology than I did before, and I found out that I just should never code because I was successfully completing my Java coding assignments but still have no idea how they actually worked. Like with my undergrad, I learned how to research and present it with confidence that I actually do know what I am talking about. But unlike my undergrad, I had to suck it up while sucking up a whole lot more at work and in life then I ever had too in my early 20’s.

I still need to focus to achieve that quality where confidence is well placed but I can call on that focus in much more productive bursts than ever before. I think that I am much more skilled at time/task management, learned how to harness my insane bursts of productivity, and had a good time on the journey.

What would you get out of distance education?

• Expanding your learning skills through formal academic experience is beneficial regardless of level and location.
• It requires a purpose: do not pursue graduate level education unless you really want to… it gets boring, frustrating, and you feel dumb. Then you finish.
• If you can’t afford it today but want to do it, do it. Worst thing that will happen is that you have to drop out… but at least you tried.

I do want to continue on and do research on web technology and how people interact with it. However, I don’t know where I could do that. Three years ago I would have never considered it though, it’s kinda cool my need to learn new things has come back… after a bit of rest this summer I am looking forward to getting into all kinds of crazy things again ;)

Not sure if this makes sense to anyone but me… just needed to get my thoughts out there. My next post on this should be my dissertation which was on ‘Microformats’ and assessing potential for their application on your home page.

This past week the front-end team that I lead (it includes GUI makers, User Advocates, and UI folks) along with the rest of the team (SOA enablers) are religiously entering a scrum cycle for the remainder of the summer. We have broken into two groups along the lines already mentioned.

The problem I am having is that my group is a mix of the pigs and chickens and I am not entirely sure how to have them all involved. My approach for the moment is to have the UA/UI folks participate as observers in the first 15 min daily with the UI folks really taking the time to go over their tasks from yesterday, for today, and tomorrow. They leave, then the UA/UI folks do their thing for 15 min.

The other challenge as I see it is that we can’t ‘lock in’ tasks for a two week period as the expectation is that clients are giving feedback and expect to see some adjustments on a very short cycle. To address that I have set up two days of ‘respond to feedback’ where we tackle any tasks that can be done in those two days. Anything that can’t fit goes on the list for the next cycle.

This is going to be a bit awkward at first I think… not entirely sure I have it organized properly yet. Hopefully by the next two week cycle I will get it ;) Wondering though, anyone have a similar problem? How do they handle front end development of web applications in a scrum cycle?

In part one I talked about the general format of my graduate education experience through distance education. This part will talk about the technology that was used to conduct the course.

The software that ‘did it all’ from running the courses to interacting with fellow students was from managed by Embanet, FirstClass, and is from OpenText. My first impression of it was along the lines of disbelief. It seemed like a really bad newsgroup manager with a clunky interface and slow beyond belief. After a few settings changes and things got better. Once I learned about some of the more useful features like ‘unsend’ messages I was less annoyed by it. It has a clunky UI but it works. Just this spring the program switched to blackboard, not sure what I think about that but I am glad I didn’t have to make the switch.

How we used the software was very similar to a newsgroup with a managed space for shared files. The courses had their own ‘group’ that was broken down to sub-groups that were based on each week. All assignments, group work, and correspondence with the instructor was done in that style. A shared folder for each week that was essentially just another newsgroup that gave only posting access is where assignments were handed in. The software did allow for live chats with classmates, audio chats, and a really useful set of collaboration features.

However, there was nothing in the software that I could not do in MSN, facebook, a newsgroup, blog, forum, etc. I am pretty sure the experience would have been better if they had a process that utilized tools that are more flexible than the software they gave us. I am not sure how you can manage distance education without a centralized ‘kitchen sink’ system to control access to content though. With on campus courses where students use online tools to compliment lab and/or classroom experiences I don’t know why you force students to use ‘kitchen sink’ software like blackboard if only to enforce control on access to content. Sadly if students try to do something in an environment they find useful academics can re-act in bizarre ways.

My grades, course information, and handbook was all handled in a web based solution that was just a .NET application with some simple tables displaying information. An odd management of documents had HTML files located on the web app but anything that was in Word documents or other templates was found over in the embanet software.

In courses themselves any software used was generally Open Source and/or platform independant. I only had one course that was VB.NET focused and it was XML Web Applications that focused largely on SOAP and XSLT, no the irony still isn’t lost. The IT Project Management course required MS Project but supplied a licence for it but not much for this OS X user. Thankfully I had an Intel Mac with Boot Camp so I managed the course.

Part three will talk about the time requirements and what I see as the benefits of this style of graduate education.

Another TODCon has come and gone in a haze of mojitos, great food, and great company. This year it was back in Orlando—my favorite place for it even though it was really hot and humid, I am getting bored with Las Vegas. This year had an amazing line-up of presentations which had little to do with ‘Adobe stuff’ and more to do with developing rich experiences on the web using whatever tools you use. Sure there was some from folks from Adobe showing off some things in CS4. Greg Rewis from Adobe gave a sneak peek of Flash CS4, there was a demo of Fireworks CS4 from Alan Musselman, and some discussion on Dreamweaver CS4.

Really looking forward to next years conference already as I think there are some changes afoot that will make it an even better community focused conference.

My two presentations were on AJAX strategy and Web Project Management. I have stuck both sets of slides up on slideshare but I don’t think they make much sense without the whole presentation ;)

It has been just around a month since I handed in my final paper (on Microformats, might post that soon) to complete the requirements for a Masters of Science, Information Technology from the University of Liverpool. Overall it was a really good experience, better than my undergraduate experience at the University of Waterloo but I am fairly certain that any graduate experience is better than the undergraduate experience at any school. Your mindset is different, at least mine was. Maybe its just my age and lack of anxiety over ‘when I grow up’ (as that will never happen and I embrace that). This experience was entirely different than ‘typical’ higher education as well, the entire experience is delivered through online tools.

The course format

Every course (there are eight of them) is broken into eight, one week sections. A week is broken into an initial reading period (Thursday-Saturday) with at least one discussion question (DQ) that requires just over 600 words of an opinionated response with citations to back up your opinion from at least three or four sources. Those had to be in on Sunday.

I then had until Wednesday to respond to at least two different posts from classmates with a total of about a dozen ‘significant’ contributions expected. On top of that you have an assignment due on Wednesday night.

Grades were handed out for each week and broken down to assignments, participation, and a grade for the initial discussion question responses. At times the grades felt they were arbitrary until you look at the ‘answers’ from the previous week. Usually that was the top answer from someone else in the course. I wasn’t sure were people found the time to create the documents they did.

Class mates

People in your class (around 14 people at most) are from all over the world. I had one course with people from India, Dubai, Kenya, Germany, England, Jamaica, United States, and Canada. It was a diverse group. All IT professionals from different areas of IT, facing different challenges in different parts of the world. That adds tremendous value in my mind as it exposes you to very different problems and solutions than what I would see locally or within my contacts.

Everyone I met was really nice, I only wish I kept in better contact with them.

Instructors

The people running the course really do make the particular valuable or not. For seven out of eight courses I had really good instructors. They engaged the class, challenged each student, and offered insights beyond being simple graders. None of them were University of Liverpool profs though. They were from all over the world with the majority located in the US for the courses I took.

One negative experience was with a particular instructor that was an ‘expert’ in a particular technology and bound to a particular way of utilizing it. In this case it was using Visual Basic to tease out XML services. This instructor was more concerned about the Visual Basic then he was about the architecture of XML based services and applications. Given my lack of Windows (Mac guy here), writing what were essentially ASP with VB Script apps was pretty hard. I got penalized for my ASP programming even though the course was supposed to be about XML service architecture.

That one negative experience was pretty bad and my program manager was of little help. In a distance education setting there isn’t an effective appeal process for marks (or it doesn’t feel like there is) and you can’t exactly go talk to the prof. Email isn’t an ideal way to communicate either when one party is not responsive.

A second negative experience was with an instructor that I already had a good experience with in a previous course. I went on vacation during my final course and had limited access to the internet and time to do my work. He seemed to understand that for one week by heavily penalized me for the second week. That took away my chance at getting a ‘distinction’ on my Msc which really left a sour taste. Again no appeals process.

My next post will cover software used and how the program is managed.

Adobe has made available a public beta of the next version of Dreamweaver. Go give it a try! Scott Fegette has a bit more about the release on his blog.

It is really good to see Adobe do this after they let Photoshop CS3 out in beta last year. The next version of Dreamweaver is a big improvement over CS3 for front end developers although I would like to have seen a bit more for application developers.

We are just a week away from the third StartupCampWaterloo at the Accelerator Centre on North Campus in Waterloo. If you work for, own, or are thinking about having anything to do with a startup in the Waterloo region you should come out and meet other like minded folks. All are welcome.

StartupCampWaterloo is a community run event that gives startups a chance to test their ideas on their peers. Everyone who wants to present is given 60 seconds to get the audience interested in hearing more. The audience then votes and we try to give at least the top five a chance to present and get some feedback from everyone.

If you just want to see what this all about and get some free pizza and chocolate bars, you are welcome to that too ;) Please sign up on either the wiki or the facebook event.

I noticed today that Fido (a Canadian mobile telco that is part of Rogers) is now offering the Nokia 6301 with UMA enabled if you buy their UNO router. The router thing is kinda dumb. Its just a crap average wifi router than might have some software installed to point your session to Fido/Rogers servers? Or maybe its just a wifi router for $80?

Anyway, kinda lame in how this is going out. I have heard Rogers is rolling it out as well. Perhaps it pains them to use Nokia devices to roll this out since Nokia likes to offer unlocked devices in the US for the same price Rogers sells them for with contracts? It is really cool technology and could, in theory, reduce costs all around. But pushing 802.11 routers that are special seems to be a bit odd.

UMA is: “Unlicensed Mobile Access or UMA, is the commercial name of the 3GPP Generic Access Network, or GAN standard. GAN is a telecommunication system which extends mobile services voice, data and IP Multimedia Subsystem/Session Initiation Protocol (IMS/SIP) applications over IP access networks.” Wikipidea.

My past few months have been complicated by issues that every new parent has had to deal with at some point. It all centres around daycare… They aren’t new to more experienced parents but they are new to me, so I post.

A certain local daycare that is on or very near campus finally called us up the other day after two years on the waiting list to say they have an infant spot in September for what will be our 19 month old son. Their recommendation was to stick him in the more expensive spot with cribs, supervision, and day plans, etc. What they don’t know is that our little ‘infant’ can tackle a four year old already. I don’t think he would do well in an institutional style daycare with kids younger than him… but who knows. We won’t find out as he isn’t going.

Currently he is in a home care environment with a an amazing family. He gets to play with all older kids that don’t really care he can’t speak a language they know yet. It is not ideal in that there is no back up if she is ill but in my mind it is a lot better experience. However, finding someone you trust is a lot harder. Finding someone at all in Waterloo is pretty hard.

Then there is paying for it. Generally Waterloo salaries are at a professional level with both parents working (when there are two parents). Even so, the cost is close to a mortgage payment if you find a spot. Do any regional employers help out employees with that? Sure you get some back in taxes but that first year is hard.

Even with daycare, kids get sick (a lot) and you don’t work

Then there is the issue of the bugs these kids share. It doesn’t matter what you do, the moment kids start interacting in groups they start sharing bugs.

The Baby started daycare in January of this year, by the end of the month he had his first cold. Four weeks of coughing later with fevers that would last a day or two then go away for a few days, he clearly had something more going on.

A whole rant on the good and bad service you get out of Ontario’s health care system could fill this void but lets just sum it with: three rounds of antibiotics, a few visits to emerg, and many days off of work later was topped off this weekend with the messiest of all viruses that had two newb parents celebrating solid poo in the nappy.

On a positive note we did get a week and a half away with no medical drama. Funny enough, the baby wasn’t in daycare for 5 days leading up to leaving on that trip… Having to live through virus spreading period of daycare has left me scrambling for time to do anything.

My wife and I are lucky though. We work at the University of Waterloo where generally you can take time to deal with things like a sick baby. What do other people do? Take vacation?

What could be fixed?

Not sure. I have a suspicion that larger employers in town do not do a whole lot to help out the young professional family starting out in the world but I could be wrong. University of Waterloo does nothing to help its staff or faculty get spots in daycare or afford them. It does try to encourage an environment that does give you time to deal with family issues though and that is worth something.

I think the ideal would be to make daycare a taxable benefit from the employer coupled with the ‘family focused’ environment for staff that allows them the time to at least ‘adjust’ working hours so that issues can more easily be dealt with. Burning precious vacation days only punishes young staff by taking away their only opportunity to actually get away. I certainly feel like I get the time but every month I wish I didn’t have to pay so much to have someone watch my kid so I can earn money so I can spend it to fuel the local, provincial, and national economy. Never mind the future tax payer.

“Suck it up, we had it worse” are normal comments I receive if I moan about this. I know the cost and availability is far worse in Toronto as well so I am thankful to be in Waterloo but it still isn’t great here either.

Our ‘plan b’ is to actually go with a live in nanny when the next one arrives. Its far less money than two times daycare costs!

I have moved my blog over from Textdrive to Joyent. Probably the most difficult part was the Joyent wiki. It has a load of useful, well written information that is easy to follow. But if you don’t watch what is in the URL you might be reading help files for the wrong hosting. Not a big deal unless you are bad at reading instructions like me.

I did stay with Simplelog even though it hasn’t been updated in over a year. It suits my needs and I just don’t want to bother converting over to WordPress or back to textpattern.

Not an overly difficult task for a windy/rainy long weekend Sunday.

Finally managed to take some proper vacation and head on down to Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. On the way we stopped in to see Stef which was a nice way to start the week. She is only 1600 or so KM from where I live, short drive ;) All told we drove 3600 KM and managed a decent 7.1L/100KM in our car. The little guy seemed to like the drive as long as a bottle of juice was close at hand.

I would certainly go back there around the same time next year. The weather is about a month ahead of us and its nice to jump a bit ahead for a week or two.

After two full days of meetings I think taking only 1.5 weeks off was nowhere near enough. On the task list for me in the coming weeks is a bunch of stuff ranging from fixing this blog (it crashes way too much) to mapping out the GUI development for the summer on the new jobmine system and a bunch of blog posts that are floating around in my head.

In August of 2005 I was bored and frustrated. I decided to check out graduate education options even though my undergrad experience pretty much sucked. After looking around I decided to try out the University of Liverpool’s Masters of Information Technology. At the time it was a relatively new program and I was hesitant to take a Msc via distance learning. Plus I couldn’t afford it and work wasn’t going to pay.

Ignoring all that, I went ahead and applied. Since then I have hit highs and lows—distance education is a lot of work and takes a lot more discipline than I thought I had to get things done. But now, 2.5 years later I have just made my final submission for my dissertation. I hated it and I loved it… I certainly had the best education experience I have yet to have in my life and would do it again.

Once the paper is graded I will post more about that. I did it on Microformats ;) Nothing too exciting, just looking at how they could be applied… in 91 pages with appendices!

Illya posted some thoughts on Agile Release & Testing Procedures and instead of writing a big long comment I figured it was worth a blog post. At the University of Waterloo I have had experience deploying a number of different applications for a variety of audiences… it is next to impossible to get all the details in a post but here is the general truth: there are no enforced institutional wide procedures for web applications. You might think the lack of procedures is bad but it is a result of the relatively low risk environment (even though the campus community has a low tolerance for bugs and changes). There are rarely formal teams of developers, it is mostly the loan coder building a specialty application – enforced procedures would frustrate them.

When you are dealing with a simple web page, say the uni home page, I have essentially covered the typical user acceptance, performance, and stress tests when the page goes live. I go through the gamut of web browser testing, try some OS variations out, and then get it out there. There is a relatively low risk here as the users don’t interact with a database or a whole heck of a lot client side. Once rendering issues are dealt with, it is pretty much unlikely to have other issues. This is with 30 000 or more people seeing it within a short period of time too. I had relative success but I think it was more luck and the fact we kept web pages simple.

Stepping up the development a bit, throw in a Ruby on Rails or PHP application. My testing procedures involved pretty much the same as the web page testing: poke away at it, fix bugs as they appear, and get it ready to go off of the development server to production. We (co-op student and I) never really sat on changes very long. The thinking was that if it went bad on the production end we just roll back the version, fast. When I made the jump to Ruby on Rails development with Capistrano and SVN that became so easy it was scary. On many occasions we had new versions going up two or three times a day. Minor changes, but they add up. This meant a lot of bugs made it out to the community version but as a whole the community appreciated seeing the progress. Our harshest critics were few and usually the type of people that would sit on things until they are perfect, the web is never perfect.

Now I find myself in the .NET/C# development world. I am happily hacking away at the JavaScript on the front end but I still live in the development environment. Here we have a solid team, a lot of developers, some serious tools, and totally different requirements from the client relationship/expectations end. At the moment we are doing limited testing that makes sure it works and then pushing it to an environment that a group has a ‘sanity check’ and gives us feedback. Releases are going out on a weekly build routine with a daily routine for an internal release. The whole process is evolving as we go but in a very general sense we are aiming to maintain a weekly build schedule for one set of users, daily internally. Our goal is to not leave the application in a non-working state and at any time the build could go live. This habit takes time to develop though… I don’t expect us to be in the groove until over the summer.

That is the nutshell version of what I have had experience with, I suppose it is Agile without the buzz terms. Personally I don’t see a reason why any web application couldn’t work on a daily build process. If you break the big change down to a lot of little changes you reduce the risk of breaking it and you ensure stability (so the theory goes). The problem is that in order to break a big thing down to a bunch of little things you need to take the time to talk it out, plan it out, and scope out what goes into a big thing. It is a way of thinking and it doesn’t happen overnight, most people need experience thinking that way.

I am interested to know what other higher education folks are doing with release and testing procedures.

I have been using Minefield (Firefox 3 beta) for a little while now and just didn’t use any extensions. It is just too fast and way better than Firefox 2 I just couldn’t go back. Now extensions are starting to work – Web Developer now does and all I need is Firebug and life will be back to normal. Decided I should try out ScribeFire too. Using Simplelog means I can’t find a blogging tool that works (why don’t I just use Wordpress??? I like pain I guess) and it crashes every few days but generally I like it ;) Anyway, lets see how this post looks.

Update: seems to work well beyond not turning on comments, see what editing a post does (it removes comments, odd because they are set to ‘on’ by default).

This Saturday is BarCampWaterloo (number 6!) from 1pm to around 7pm (we may retire to the pub before that) at the Accelerator Centre. A much more toned down event compared to StartupCampWaterloo, BarCampWaterloo is where people come to explore ideas and maybe get themselves ready for a DemoCampGuelph (which happens to be April 9th at the Albion in Guelph). I might show some of the stuff I have been working on this weekend ;)

DesignCampWaterloo is March 26th (Wednesday)27th (Thursday) starting at 4:30pm in the Tathum Centre on the University of Waterloo campus. The first one was a bit difficult to follow being in the SLC and all so I am really looking forward to it in the TC. Plus I just have to go up two floors from my office to attend!

There is also a RailsNite next week on Monday at Ceaser Martini’s. Not sure of the start time but I think 7ish might work.

Update: RailsNite does start at 7pm and there is a Facebook event created for it.

Another update: Rick Segal is not coming to Waterloo for his VC roundtable, but he is coming to Guelph on April 28th… Perhaps Ali is influencing people now.

Yet another update: DesignCampWaterloo is Thursday not Wednesday.

You work on something for a couple weeks and then the due date comes close. There is a realization that you won’t meet the milestone unless you get a lot of code written today and deal with whatever UI issues and browser bugs you can. You order in some pizza, fill up on caffeine, and push through a 16 hour or more work day. There is something about that role you get on when you don’t leave your computer, things just make more sense.

My GUI team of co-op students have been pushing themselves this past week and this evening I think they achieved more tonight than all of last week. People will have to wait until May 1st to see it but our internal deadline is much earlier (demos to some stakeholders first and we need April to bug hunt). Maybe I will demo a bit at DemoCampGuelph in April or BarCampWaterloo ;)

Just wanted to post a just over mid-term thanks to Daniel, Shawn, Allen, and Michael for the commitment. They have gone from CS or Engineering students to fairly good AJAX developers in a very short time period. They have made some cool stuff, can’t wait to show it off.

Interesting conversation today that started off with (edited for dramatic effect):

• me: “I am pretty sure what we are doing is not going to be accessible and is going to cause us grief” (me went on about Ontarians with Disabilities Act, University’s commitment to accessibility, etc)
• softeng1: “What will? AJAX? I am sure it can be made accessible” – goes to google, pulls up an article from Juicy Studio
• softeng2: “What exactly is not following the law?”

At this point I probably got annoying because the problem with accessibility is that it is an art over a science. Laws are vague for good reason—there is no black and white, if there was technology would make the law redundant quickly (thinking PDF being a ‘bad technology’ in Australia). I went into the fact screen readers have a heck of a time when things change and there is no page refresh and how stuff not working, at least a little, without js is a problem.

The conversation went on with the software developers insisting there is a software solution. Which is understandable but that is because I got annoyed with the brush off instead of going into the problem. Making a web application accessible isn’t only about using screen reader, I missed that but I am not sure that would have helped…

After the conversation dragged on for a bit we started talking a similar language although the focus was on fixing it with software and testing. I am all for testing but I certainly don’t want to go back and test it in a year and then fix it. I would much rather consider it now. Making a web application accessible is as much about a philosophy as it is the technical considerations.

This left me thinking, my approach was wrong for how these folks think and their experience. Plus I was annoyed by the number of JavaScript reliant things we have already. My concerns are that even though we are spending a lot of time on user testing and usability analysis, technical accessibility would be sacrificed. Are my fears warranted? Probably given the amount of JavaScript, however if we approach it smartly from start we should be ok—that means now.

I have run into a similar conversation quite a few years ago when the web developers on campus weren’t sure what to think about web accessibility. They were far more open to the problem though, not software engineers (or Computer Scientists) as they can build a fix—so they think. What is missing from their world is the appreciation for how annoying web browsers can be and how people interact with them. With software there is more control over presentation and the user expectations are different.

I will need to think about an approach to ensure that the issue of accessibility is more relevant to them. Taking away their mice as they navigate the app might be a good start ;) Or degrading its performance. Most web developers seem to get the problem now but they have likely spent time reading about in the context of the web. Curious as to how others have approached this situation with those that build software, not web apps.

First I think I need to get a few good nights of sleep. The lack of that lately does not help!

With our second StartupCampWaterloo behind us here in Waterloo we hit a milestone. Over 100 people were in the main area of the Waterloo Accelerator Centre to talk with Startups and help each other with ideas (quick estimate based on 88 chairs in the room plus Ali’s colourful chairs). I am pretty sure all those that demo’d got some useful information and experience out of the evening.

A big thanks to Stefanus De Toit for opening up the evening and breaking-in the crowed by sharing insights like: Turning academic research into a product is hard if you don’t keep your paperwork in order; hire your friends; wow people with lots of 3D chickens to get investment (actually prove your concept with a solid demo). Another big thanks to Austin Hill for closing off the evening with a great presentation which included: don’t be afraid of sharing your ideas because someone already tried it – it is your execution that is important; Canada needs more of its successful entrepreneurs re-investing in the startup scene; beware the vulture investors; do a startup while you are a student; it helps to work for a startup if you are thinking about a startup as startup culture is infectious.

What was learned from this one is that 60 second intros with voting works out really well. Keeping things short and keeping the slides out of it kept the conversation interesting and focused. The big buzzer also helped. Only took one person being caught by it—no one else dared challenge their time limits. Plus it kept us on time, mostly.

I had a lot of good feedback and now can relax—until the next one. What are we going to do next? BarCampWaterloo is on March 29th, a DemoCampGuelph will be in April, and StartupCampWaterloo3 will be sometime in May. If you can’t figure out if you want to go, I have a post coming up tomorrow that will cover that ;)

Other folks to thank for making the trip from places afar and/or helping out last night… The Toronto folks venturing outside of the GTA in their large 4×4: David Crow – thanks for the books and disruption, Jevon McDonald,  Jonas Brandon.   Ali Asaria brought some chairs and name tags and Simon Law for came down from Montreal. The other organizers Simon Woodside and Mic Berman ensured that we appeared as unconference as possible ;)

Most importantly, the night was good because of the folks that were there. Waterloo has a great community.

It is interview time here at Waterloo. It happens once every four months, thousands of students and employers enter a dating game for talent and experience. Waterloo is a bit unique having a building dedicated to the process (just happens to be where my office is) and a frequency of three times a year for the process to run. Large companies like Google, RIM and Microsoft are hear hiring large numbers of students but so are local startups like AideRSS and Semacode along with all sorts of companies from different fields and different sizes. Posters on the walls with all the different information sessions show all the opportunities for students.

Why do the companies come here? Waterloo has the talent and I would argue there is far more and better talent than Stanford (update: Larry disagrees or does he?). Our students go to the Valley or Seattle or Boston or Ottawa and all points in-between to work for big names and get started on their carriers while they are working on their undergrad (or grad) degrees. A lot them stay local (Google and RIM are in Waterloo, along with a lot of other interesting employers) and even more would like to stay local for a term or two if a great job can be found.

For local web/tech startups this is a great opportunity. If you developing an idea and you need someone that can code and wants to contribute, for around 10K you can get a junior student for four months to do that. Senior students are more but you get higher quality and more experience. Just to prove a startup concept though, a junior co-op student is inexpensive and hugely beneficial.

The project I am working on depends on the quality of Waterloo Co-ops. We are building a new system to run the job/dating game and have a great bunch of students to do that. They code, they ask questions, they learn, they are excited, and they build really cool things from your ideas. Over the years I have worked with a number of different students and all of them made me look good—which is what you want when you hire someone, right? ;)

There is a side benefit to local startups hiring students I think as well. If you keep the students here, keep them engaged, and get them excited about trying out their ideas you help the local community build resources. I think it’s one part of the puzzle that may help Waterloo’s stealthy startup scene become even more open and exciting.

If you are wondering how to hire a co-op, contact CECS and they will have you set up in no time.

If you are in the Greater Waterloo Area (roughly Milton to Woodstock in highway 401 terms) and have a thing for startups you should come out to the second StartupCampWaterloo on February 26th. Our first one attracted a great group of participants and inspired similar events in Toronto and Montreal. The event is free, the refreshments are provided thanks to sponsors, and there is working wifi. All you need to bring is your expertise, ideas, and an open mind. We have undergrads, grads, alumni, startup inclined people, technologists, and other various characters in-between that make up a large group of people all eager to share and develop ideas.

This event is informal and fun. We aren’t expecting polished presentations. The audience would prefer that you use little to no slides if you present. What you should have is a passion for your idea/technology/etc and the ability to receive open and honest feedback. The schedule is set at the event by those at the event by the participants so be sure to get there on time (starts at 6pm, wiki has details).

Please sign up on the wiki, look forward to seeing you there!

The recent buzz online between WaSP members over IE 8 is approaching lunacy. With the respected Zeldman suggesting WaSP co-lead Drew was not doing his co-lead job of signing an NDA with Microsoft. Lets step back and think about the lay of the land for the moment.

WaSP has a Microsoft Task Force and an Adobe focused Task Force both with NDA requirements, both companies are now seriously competing for the web developer market. The lead of WaSP shouldn’t be NDA’d by either but they should be informed when an announcement is coming and that is the Task Force leads job.

WaSP needs to refocus and those in all the task forces need to shake their heads at recent events and figure out their next steps. Rachel asks what happens now? Well I am inclined to say re-state the goals of the organization, re-evaluate what each task force is doing and how that fits in the goals, and ensure process are developed to maintain a professional presence.

I also commented on Rachel’s blog that I believe SXSW is partly to blame for some of the recent mess. Why? People feel cut out of contributing if they don’t go to Austin. I know I do and what is worse I know that isn’t totally true. WaSP needs to distance itself from all events unless it runs them, at least for now. Let the participation focus around online venues and crank up the advocacy once things are figured out.

The next big challenge is in front of us. IT departments now have massive, poorly developed, monsters of web applications to maintain… or Sharepoint. They don’t want the browser to change, not now, not ever. WaSP, there is your new enemy.

For the record I don’t much care for the meta targeting but I won’t hate it… just think it is a quick fix, not well thought out, but isn’t that what ‘beta’ is for?

In my relative short career I have not had the pleasure of surviving a unionised environment except as a summer student doing landscaping work for the City of Sault Ste Marie. IT related work environments just don’t seem all that interested in a union, I would argue most knowledge workers have little interest in such a club. However here we are in 2008 at the University of Waterloo facing a vote in an attempt to certify OSSTF as a bargaining unit on campus. The vote is today however the outcome won’t be decide for approximately a month due to some dissagreement in who is in the bargaining unit.

The one thing that does get me about this entire process is how the law in this province favours unions over the individual. Maybe in industrial work environments the method used to unionize makes sense as workers generally may be easily replaced and can be easily bullied. However in a professional work environment, where it can take a few months to a few years before a worker performs at top form with higher education credentials, it feels like the whole process tramples on your rights no matter which side of the fence you sit. The behaviour out of the union itself just feels like they are after members, they don’t actually care about the workers otherwise they wouldn’t pursue unionization where the support is 50-50 at best (here it is 60% against, but they need to vote).

This whole experience has taught me a lot and I’d like to think I managed to get through it, up to this point, as President of the Staff Association (the opposing force) with only being called a few names: Meat puppet, lap dog, etc. Oh and apparently I have been paying people to vote… that would mean I had personal wealth large enough to do that. Cool, someone tell my bank manager ;)

Gary Barber, a friend I have only met through Twitter and another friend down in Australia, has passed along a nice “8 things you didn’t know about me” meme. Figure I should oblige…

1. Link to your tagger and post these rules.
2. List EIGHT random facts about yourself.
3. Tag EIGHT people at the end of your post and list their names.
4. Let them know they’ve been tagged.

1. I have been a member (on and off) of the Canadian Ski Patrol since 1992 and was one of the first snowboarders to snowboard will on patrol. At the time no one knew what to do with snowboarders, my patrol leader didn’t mind.
2. On my 19th birthday I sat in a canoe on the snow with a draft ball (a northern Ontario thing – its a ball filled with beer).
3. I have a sister that is 13 years younger than me (same parents), mental age is a bit closer.
4. I lived in Dundas, Thunder Bay, and Sault Ste Marie (the Soo) growing up only to settle in Waterloo (all in Ontario). All in the same Province but 1491km to go to Thunder Bay from here, one way. The ‘Soo’ is what I call home.
5. My first job was driving a Dickie Dee ice cream bike, I was 14
6. To this day my favourite food is the original JuJubes from Dare.
7. I always wanted to be a marine biologist, studied Geography, coded until recently, and now work on user experience stuff. Still not sure what I want to be when I grow up.
8. My dream is to spend my life fishing and hunting away from cities, electricity, and bad drivers.

So who am I going to tag? Not sure I know 8 eight people that might respond but ah well. I will try and pick on folks in the Waterloo area ;)

1. Simon Woodside – Simon and I instigate the BarCamp’s around here
2. Gary Will – I have only met him relatively recently, seems like a good guy ;)
3. Larry Borsato – a general pain, Larry has coded more things in more places than I care to know but I am sure he has an interesting story.
4. Ali Asaria – The guy behind Well.ca
5. Norman Young – it has been a while since he has posted anything… maybe now he will.
6. Brydon Gilliss – A DemoCamp organizer from Guelph
7. Mic Berman – maybe she will have time between Mozilla and local startups
8. Jim Murphy – the ex-pat that has returned to the area, what is his story anyway?

Wow… 8 local bloggers. That’s it, so says the rules.

Over the past year or so the MMNP effort has been working on ways to utilize mobile and media based technology on campus. A year ago a pilot project looked at the possibility of students replacing their land lines in residence is relatively smart phones. Lots was learned (primarily that students are shell shocked by the telco cost and don’t really use them even when a large chunk of costs are covered) and the project moved on to different ideas. One of those ideas was a living environment that doubles as an incubator for entrepreneurial students.

Enter 2008 and the announcement of VeloCity. The Daily Bulletin article covers all the details. From the VeloCity site:

“It’s a place where some of UW’s most talented, entrepreneurial, creative and technologically savvy students will be united under one roof to work on the future of mobile communications, web and new media.”

I was involved with the project early on and it is great to see that Sean has taken his idea and made it a reality. I expect to see some exciting things come from this housing experiment. What a great opportunity for some students!

January first is upon us and after what was a hectic Christmas break I can sit down and reflect on the year that was 2007 and what might come technology wise for 2008. All this happened in my life:

• I became a Dad on January 19th
• finished my course load on my Msc
• changed jobs
• cities I visited outside of Ontario: Las Vegas, London, Cambridge, Oxford, Leeds, Harrogate, York, Liverpool, Wigan, Deddington, Buffalo, Quebec City, Montreal
• Drove 30 000 km (or so) and I live 2 km from work
• instigated 4 BarCampWaterloo’s and one StartupCampWaterloo meeting a load of really interesting people at all of them

…and that is what I remember. Last year I set some goals for myself and had a few comments on technology. If I wouldn’t have changed jobs all those could have been met (I think) but I didn’t foresee that I have an opportunity to work with an extremely talented team on an impossible project with technology I hadn’t ever worked with. That fuels my excitement for 2008.

For this year my goals are just as simple as last year:

• Finish my msc (I have to by April)
• Focus on user experience and UI development
• Spend every moment possible with my son

As far as web technology goes. I thought last year that Spry sucked and AJAX might be more accessible by year end. I think as the year went on Spry got better and folks like Derek figured out some best practices for more accessible AJAX experiences.

This year I think the big technology fight will be between Flash and Silverlight. Microsoft has to figure out how to convince Flash developers why they should forget all they have learned and change technology while Adobe needs to figure out how not to step in it and be seen as an arrogant company that doesn’t deserve the loyalty Macromedia had built. The buzz and reaction over the whole user tracking thing or updates is going to piss people off. How dare customers get upset? Indeed.

Microsoft’s UI with Silverlight trump card might be Sharepoint. This beast of a CMS is (I think) the most extensive and customizable business class CMS out there. It is the best of a really bad bunch and Silverlight could make it suck less from a UI perspective. We shall see.

Should be an interesting year ;)

Ever had a bit of technology your use dictated to you by an IT department? Does it not even come close to meeting your expectations or requirements? Is it usually web based technology that is letting you down? This type of problem stems from what I call a ‘square peg, round hole’ philosophy in IT – when decisions of what technology to deploy is based solely on the ability to provide support, not the requirements of the project and/or an analysis of features required by the user. It seems to happen far more often with web based technology.

In a conversation with a colleague over a beer I tried to understand why this happens. Sadly I still don’t understand why, but I do better appreciate the position of people that decide to hammer that square peg in. But I think it because they don’t understand or have an actual use for the web themselves (that is a totally different post).

I believe this happens in every IT department and it stems from the environment. IT finds itself in a situation with limited resources to hire new staff even though they are tracking time on/and tasks and there is an expectation that IT needs to support everyone regardless of expertise. There is a project or group or department that has decided to use a particular technology. Reality kicks in and the service end has to learn to support the technology so a decision is made to apply that same technology to others that have similar but not the same requirements as that project group.

What happens next is ugly. The clients expect something that usually different because they may want the same features but they would apply a different priority to the features they use/need. This influences their expectations on the total experience. Take a content management system (CMS) for example. One group might put a high priority on workflow management, another on user management, another wants a templating scheme, another wants a forum, and another group really wants a wiki. A CMS can do all these things but I can’t think of a CMS that can do them all as well or anywhere near as good as specialized software.

However, CMS vendors will promise support and the ability to meet the demands of the user. This pulls on the support strings of IT. Rarely, if ever, will you find a CMS that delivers to a diverse groups expectations. What happens is that any number of groups become disenfranchised with the software and the overall project of deploying that technology is doomed to failure or mediocre success at best. The CMS vendor comes off either not being paid and/or looking really bad. The IT department comes off looking unprofessional at best which puts pressure on them to produce, and the cycle continues.

What should happen is that the IT department assesses the features as well as the priorities. They evaluate the technology providers based on that clear idea of what are ‘deal killer’ features for people. If it reaches a thresh hold that makes it impossible to please even 70-80% of the clients then IT needs to break down the technologies and groups not force them all onto one.

The web offers the opportunity for this to be easy. Web services, web sites as your API, universal log ins, etc. all make it possible to integrate different solutions on the data level. Sadly I think IT still approaches web apps as black boxes that work in silos.

The moral of the story for anyone building a web based service is that to really be a hit with medium to larger organizations you need to offer integration and openness in your apps. If you can be the folks that develop the integration tools as well as offer your product you can likely charge more based on a successful track record. At least from where I am sitting ;)

In what I think is a good example for large institution web teams, the BBC has gone and offered an update to their home page. It is very Web two point oh with some widgets and gradients, big images, and larger text so its easier to read in this web world of increasingly high resolutions. They have some cool design elements like a classic looking clock, customization, and all the other bits you would expect on a site… except advertisements. The rationale for the design is offered in a blog post.

Issues to note about the BBC in my mind are:

• It is publicly funded and the public can take an ownership view on its web presence
• They have a large team but an even larger web presence
• Their primary audience is hugely diverse and crosses generations, from pre-teens to WWII vets

What I like:

• Their blog post explains what they thinking with regards to the big changes and invites conversation
• They point out there will be continuous changes (the web is not a static medium)
• It is a big change on look not content so they try to undersell it a little as a ‘lick of paint’ not a ‘redo’

Love it or hate it, its a pretty cool public process given all things.

My ‘other job’ at the moment is President of the University of Waterloo Staff Association which represents 1800 or so staff and today I initiated the public part of a process with our members that I believe will make the organization relevant, effective, and very unique. The UWSA is not a union nor does it conduct itself much like a union. People choose to be members of the organization and pay a relatively low flat fee, we don’t do collective bargaining, and we don’t resort to arbitration.

Instead we work with the University Administration to ensure staff have a voice on policies that directly effect them as keep on top of issues like working conditions, pensions and benefits. We also assist staff in navigating those policies, understanding their pensions and benefits, and answer any questions they may have about their employer. Just recently the UWSA finished re-writing the dispute resolution policy making it more ‘usable’ and effective for both staff and administration. Major changes were presented today.

This work along with the expectations of the staff for a level of service have made it nearly impossible to function effectively with the limited resources we have (we collect $5 a month from members currently). I introduced today a strategy that would have a new constitution for the organization approved by members no later than early Feb 2008, a new full-time position of Executive Manager created, and a small increase in resources through a staggered increase in fees in the near future with a an eye on a very large reserve of resources in the future. If you would like some detail, the slides are available in a PDF.

The idea isn’t to be a union but to be a more service oriented organization that has the ability to make some serious moves to assist members if it needs to. With more resources comes the ability to offer services such as (no way near exhaustive list here): interest free loans for education and training outside of UW, daycare subsidies, larger and more student awards for members children, awards for members children not attending UW, heavier discounted tickets for things, build a community presence, etc. This list needs to be expanded and other ideas need to be considered as yet.

With the lack of UWSA blog and/or forum I invite staff to comment here. Yes the comments are moderated (keeps SPAM away) but I will strive to post all comments on the topic. Ideas and feedback are welcome.

Last night I attended StartupCampToronto which was put on by the guys behind StartupNorth. It was a really good event with some intelligent entrepreneurs and a great audience that weren’t afraid to speak up. The format was simple, five minute presentation with roughly 15 minutes for questions. They did let it go over a bit if the conversation was a good one.

It wasn’t until the last presentation that I really go excited though. A couple of students from U of Toronto came with their idea and prototype for a really easy portfolio manager. They had a grand plan for how this can work which had its issues. The crowd jumped on it and offered some great advice which I hope helps them create a successful product. That, I believe, was Simon Woodside’s motivation behind StartupCampWaterloo. When he had an idea for his company/technology it was hard to get that advice to move it along. For students and researchers or anyone else really, it can be hard for them to understand the market their technology might work in. Yes there are organizations designed to help but the community nature of a StartupCamp I believe works better for a lot of people.

A lot of the talk about entrepreneurial learning curve is that you have to fail to succeed. StartupCamp was designed to encourage people to at least try with the support of the community to offer some guidance. Could some failures be avoided by the community helping them figure out the obvious mistakes?

A secondary benefit is the community is enhanced from the fresh ideas and energy out there. With that in mind, next StartupCampWaterloo is February 26th. Looking forward to it.

Next week (December 4th) sees two pretty exciting campus conferences happening. The first is WatITis – a one day conference for IT staff at the University of Waterloo. Would you believe there are just over 300 IT staff at Waterloo working in dozens of different departments? This will be the first year I am not presenting (current job’s stuff isn’t presentation ready yet) and I am not sure I will have time to attend… but it is a really good event.

The following day is the Power of IDEAS conference. This one is open to anyone for a really low price (below $100 for off campus folks, free to on campus people) and focusing on inclusive learning strategies, usability, and accessibility. Derek Featherstone did the keynote for the first one in the summer of 2006, this year he returns for the closing keynote. I will be presenting on building usable web applications and will offer a glimpse of what I am doing in the lower level of the TC as well as some reflection on other higher education home pages and other applications I have worked on over the years.

Keep an eye on the Power of IDEAS conference. Lead by the Office for Persons with Disabilities office, it will only grow (this year there are over 90 people from off campus registered, last year we had around 20). I think it is just great that a conference dedicated to promoting accessibility and usability.

Under what I think is the wrong category, the iPhone is named Invention of the Year by Time. It’s not an ‘invention’ at all though, unless you count the overall phone, PDA, and billing experience. Apple has maybe invented a better process for mobile computing and cellular networks. The iPhone is an enabling technology through its experience, not through its email, browser, etc. It makes the mobile device easy to use and thus inspires a load of developers to mimic that experience on their applications. For that, it is just amazing. The iPhone should get gadget of the year—which it probably will, voting is still open.

Having only played with an iPhone, owned a Blackberry and an Nokia E62, and still have to deal with the moronic customer service of Canadian cellular providers my opinion is purely based on observation but it is pretty obvious that the inability (or lack of motivation) to provide the activation, service, and billing experience that comes with AT&T in the US is what is stopping Rogers from offering the iPhone.

I still want a real keyboard btw… N810 with the iPhone OS would be perfect.

I have been on thing about figuring out coding patterns in HTML. Since I did the UW CLF back in 2004, I have been thinking about a macro-format for content generated on higher education web sites. Any CSS framework uses some abstract naming convention now—so I guess what I have been looking at is a “blueprint” that works specifically for higher ed.

What I did today was grab the code structure from about 10 higher ed web sites (three each from the UK, US, and Canada plus one more). It is just amazing how different HTML can be. Most sites are similar design wise, they have very similar content, and they supposedly trying to provide the same type of experience to the exact same audience.

Only three had Microformats on them, one had errors, and all are ‘valid’ HTML/XHTML. Good and bad ;) Well time for a break then on to more research and maybe even some prototyping. You can call what I am researching is a possible Macroformat for higher ed…

There has been a pretty interesting flame war that has erupted over a posting by Jeff Croft entitled What’s not to love about CSS frameworks? It seems like it has been quite a while since a good flame over web standards and best practices has played out. The tone of the post likely has really fueled the war but the topic itself seems to truly polarize some in the web standards community. Why is that? The devil is likely in the definition and I see it as the less formal art world colliding with the engineering world (something that has been slowly happening for a while with web development I believe).

Jeff Croft posted some follow ups: A follow up on CSS frameworks and The final word on frameworks, from someone way smarter than me. Andy Clarke interjected a comical What’s not to love about instant cake mixes in between that offered some satirical insight. The comments on the posts are shocking in some ways but once the definitions were clarified I think it comes down to artistic approaches meeting formal engineering process.

If you agree a framework is just a collection of reusable code that offers enough abstraction that you could apply it to whatever project you are working on then you have probably some engineering exposure ;) Reusing things is common practice, if you have a problem with that then you are just plain dumb with your time. This reuse of code features is part of what makes Dreamweaver CS3 such a good tool for rapid development. The CSS templates that come with it offer a powerful ‘framework’ to start with. Would you consider that a framework? I dunno. The ‘CSS Framework’ proper that is implied (blueprintCSS ) is in fact a more extensive framework that tries to solve more problems.

I think frameworks are great. I am building one now along with my GUI team of co-op students for a new system here. We are using a more formal engineering process to approach it but what we are essentially doing is creating a framework of GUI elements along with their HTML and JavaScript. Love them or hate them frameworks are just another thing the web dev world ‘re-invented’ from the software engineering world.

Is there a template out there for evaluating web page content in order to identify content patterns that would stand the test of academics? Surely there must be. So far I haven’t been able to find one as most of the research on semantics focuses on application based on a given content type you are creating or using. What I am trying to do is research a site, identify patterns, apply Microformats to the patterns, then figure out if there is a need for a new format based on the content.

What would need to identify a pattern in web content? Two years ago in WebPatterns and WebSemantics John Allsopp (the guy who wrote the Microformats book ) posted a great summary of what are patterns and how can you identify them. John mentions the area of web patterns is under-researched and references a great collection of patterns in web sites (that is missing the higher education pattern) but unfortunately for me I don’t think I can use that as key reference.

Interestingly enough, identifying web application patterns is exactly what my team and I have been doing with the new JobMine system. What I need to find out is where this has been before and in what capacity. Documenting UI elements is nothing knew but I think the criteria for the documentation is pretty loose and perhaps there is a need for one.

When I have my research criteria defined I will post it, any thoughts on the matter would be appreciated ;)

In what is probably the silliest post I have seen on 37Signals blog, they ask Is formal education important? The response?

“We’re more interested in someone’s experience, real work, and point of view than we are with their diploma, degree, or GPA. Formal education is probably last on our list of qualities we feel make someone qualified to work at 37signals.”

They aren’t saying a formal education doesn’t count but they do under state the value of higher education. I think it’s a common misunderstanding that higher education is about specific skills training. But I suppose higher education means different things to different people.

To me it’s about thinking outside of your comfort zone, meeting different people with radically different beliefs/values/etc, and gaining strategies/techniques that enable effective life long learning. Is it for everyone? No. You can certainly gain a similar value through work experience. But that takes some luck.

Update: What I do want to point out is that if you are up for a job against some one with the similar personality, same experience, skill, and passion and they have a degree and you don’t… guess who will likely get the job?

Last night (but dated today) an article on how the iPhone comes with a cost for Rogers appeared on the Globe and Mail web site. The article points out how Apple was able to simplify the silly billing practices of mobile carriers in the US and the EU (the iPhone launching in the EU November 9th). They compare the equivalent bill in Canada for the unlimited data/voice at $70 a month (leaving out the AT&T monthly charge with the exchange rate is actually lower in the US). Sadly in Canada if you try to use the data people have been seeing on their iPhone you could go well over $1000 a month. In theory, that is why Apple has not released the iPhone in Canada yet.

I know of a few people with an iPhone in Canada. Some not using their data, others lucky (or silly for paying that premium for so long) enough to have kept the old Fido (a GSM carrier that didn’t have long term contracts then either) unlimited data plan that was around in 2000 before the phones that would use said data were really in use.

Personally I think the iPhone is cool but the lack of iPhone in Canada doesn’t mean the carriers suck. It is the fact they refuse to have phones that are less than a year on the market in the US (never mind Europe), have wifi, with a two year plan still costs hundreds of dollars, and don’t in reality cost close to $150 a month if you actually use them for talking, texting, etc. Their inability to change this practice when the profits of AT&T, likely in part thanks to the iPhone, are stated is what makes them suck. Then of course there is the possibility that Canadians think both Bell and Rogers (CDMA and GSM carriers and our only real choice) are terrible companies in terms of customer service and technology adoption/reliability and that alone means they suck. They could be happy with the money they are making and fear change but that should mean the CRTC needs to stop protecting them and open up the market, now!

I have seen it stated before but I will say it here too… Apple’s big coup with the iPhone is not the technology, it is taking the position to tell the carriers to stuff it and change or loose out on the coolest technology out there (according to Apple’s marketing machine). One lesser mentioned observation I have had is that Nokia (and Motorola) is also sending a message to carriers but in a more subtle way, they are selling their phones unlocked for a decent price in North America (at least). With the US/CDN exchange rate just drop into a Nokia store in any trendy US mall ;) You will still be screwed on the data plans but you can always just use wifi where you can, maybe a little VoIP.