Who You Calling A Jesse?

Not that long ago Rogers/Fido announced their iPhone data packages. They started at 400MB and went up to 2GB for $60-$115. The really stupid part is the SMS packages with 75-300 in the range of packages… but the data is where the consumers focused their rage. In response a $30 for 6GB promotional rate was offered to tack on your current plan so I got one.

What I did this past week was try and use 3G as much as I could but not over the top. Really I just avoided the campus wifi and only used wifi at home, 3G everywhere else. I used Google maps a lot, email, downloaded apps (not many though), and used the web browser to constantly check stuff. In one week I used:

• 1.8MB sent
• 34.7MB recieved

That means if my first week is close to an average week I will probably just top 150MB in the month. Certainly I will try and use more ;) However, I think the original pricing Rogers offered was based on research and purely designed to discourage tethering. But I don’t get why they just didn’t offer unlimited plans. What a missed opportunity to be loved. It’s not like anyone but a few people will try and tether their iPhone to their laptop for a connection.

For the next few weeks I will try and use video more… but the other side of this is that heavy data usage kills your battery (as it does with your laptop). If I leave the iPhone as a ‘phone with benefits’ the battery could probably last days. If I use it as an online entertainment device the battery lasts 8-10 hours.

Almost a year ago now I started exploring the idea of a research paper on Microformats with regards to Higher Education. After doing some research I settled on assessing ten Higher Education web sites, their mark-up and their content, identify some common patterns and explore the viability of Microformats for the typical Higher Education home page.

• You can grab a version of my paper in acrobat.com but if you want a PDF version please leave a comment.

In my paper you will find a literature review, the method I used, all the data, and my results. I did write this over the winter so things might have changed a bit and it certainly isn’t a perfectly written paper… but I think it offers a way to approach semantic mark-up that I hope some people find useful.

From my research, I developed a process to identify a design pattern for Higher Education web sites in both the mark-up code and the content. It may not be the most efficient but it seemed to do the trick.

I used those design patterns to come up with a mock-up of what the University of Waterloo home page could be (not graphically, just semantically) and tried out how that could be useful. My mock-up has:

• hAtom for news
• hCal for event listings
• hCard for the University address with geo information

There is also some other semantic richness in there. I thought that maybe someone would find it useful as there really isn’t a lot of research with regards to applying Microformats and why.

On Thursday (July 10th) I was writing a nice email as to why I wasn’t getting an iPhone. Then I started looking into my plan and the $30 data plan Fido started offering as a result of the public backlash (likely). I decided to wait it out a bit… but then an act of stupidity happened and I found myself making sure I was at the Fido store on time to pick up a 8GB iPhone 3G. Here is the original post and then what the heck I am thinking…

The original post

I have been waiting until today (July 10th) to make my decision on whether or not to get the CDN iPhone from Rogers or Fido. If you haven’t noticed, there has been a lot of discussion about the cost of the plans in Canada vs those in the US as well as the 3-year contract. Rogers/Fido have tried to meet the storm halfway by offering a 6GB for $30 a month added to your existing plan. However, that doesn’t remove the need for a 3-year contract which is my main concern.

I have been with Fido for 8 years now, I have two accounts with them, and I went there initially because they were the only provider in Canada that didn’t require a contract. I have managed a new phone for a low cost ($200 or less) every 12-18 months and haven’t had much to complain about. Not having a contract gives me a little negotiating power with them, I don’t want to loose that. Having any influence over the telecommunications service providers in this country is rare and I just can’t give up my position.

What I am doing out of protest is reducing both my non-contract accounts to the lowest plan Fido offers and making an effort to use my phone even less. Oh, and not getting an iPhone for the moment. Maybe I will go buy an iTouch for now.

Besides, I am guessing that after Christmas (at the latest) they will drop to a two year or even one year contract. Maybe even a no contract option. My nokia 6300 makes me happy as it is and I know a new iPhone is likely already designed and in prototype phase. I can wait ;)

Why did I end up getting one?

Forget that I destroyed by Nokia 6300 the night before (just after I wrote that original post), the primary reason why I got the iPhone is that Fido changed the package and gave people a $30 data option on top of their current plans. I constantly run up $10-$30 data charges monthly (with their stupid pricing) so $30 wasn’t a real big increase. But this is my package:

• $45 gets me 350 daytime minutes, unlimited evenings and weekends, unlimited North American long distance
• $8 FidoPro – an old package that gives me voice mail, call display, etc plus unlimited text messages
• $30 for 6GB of data (heavy use of iphone today saw a crushing 4MB of data transfer, 6GB might as well be unlimited I think)

That puts me at $83 a month for what is essentially an unlimited plan for everything but daytime minutes. I can live with that. Its not cheap, $53 a month was better but I could really use the phone for other stuff… I was going to buy an ipod anyway (own one pre-ipod photo). For now, at least, I think the device is pretty amazing.

Now why did I commit to a three contract if I was so against it? I haven’t even been married three years, how can I commit to a phone that long? Bell and Telus aren’t really impressive for starters. Talk about blowing an opportunity by coming off as the greater evil. I have been with Fido a long time, am I going to leave them? Not likely. So what the heck. It’s not an iphone plan, its a ‘3G phone’ plan. I can live with that.

Oh and it would have been stupid to reduce my plan… I would have had to pay two times as much for something similar in the future if I did. Lesson learned.

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?