Tech

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Internet Usage

I have a week left to my current internet billing cycle as well as 500mb of bandwidth remaining. It seems that a 2GB limit is my magic number. It’s enough so that I can do pretty much anything I need or want to do, but not so much that I can surf blindly. I think twice about downloading and streaming (I miss Youtube!), but otherwise bandwidth is not my foremost concern. 3GB would definitely be the number for me, but the next plan up is 5GB, which is way too much, so I’m sticking with 2GB for now. I am also considering moving to the ‘flex plan’, whereby I would be automatically moved up or down a plan based on my usage, but I don’t trust Telus enough to do that yet.

So far, I am very satisfied with both my internet connection and Telus customer service. Internet independence is awesome!

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A Good Day In Whitehorse

Today was awesome. I will share the awesome parts tomorrow when I’ll be able to upload pics. 🙂

Last night in the tent would have been okay if I didn’t have the noisy neighbours from hell. Every time I managed to doze off I’d be awaken by their loud voices, and, once, by their car alarm!

It was a surprisingly cold night, but I was dressed for it and have a good sleeping bag. It was time, however, to concede that I have passed the age for sleeping on the ground. 🙂 Since I plan to camp during my Inuvik adventure, I bought a self-inflating mattress at CDN Tire this morning.

I needed to be at Kal Tire at 7:30, so I headed straight there, then went for breakfast. The work was done by 10:30 and seeing the new front tires helped me accept the mechanic’s assertion that there is no reason to change the rear ones at this time since they have just about as much tread left on them. I was told to have all tires balanced periodically and eventually move the new front ones to the rear. The alignment made a huge difference to how the car drives. I can’t believe I didn’t recognize that there was a problem!

And, so, the tedious item knocked off my to-do list, it was time to see some tall mountains, touch prehistory, discover that I’m a natural at using an ancient weapon, and gaze upon some relics of Yukon transportation history. And all by 5PM! The pictures will be worth waiting for the story. 🙂

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Internet in Dawson City

The internet situation in Dawson City this summer is abysmal and I am spending a good chunk of my day apologizing for this and telling people to use our wi-fi for emails only. Guests are about as understanding as I was last summer, before I understood the internet situation in Yukon. It’s bad for business.

There is one internet provider in all of Yukon, Northwestel. There is also only one line linking Yukon to Outside. Finally, Northwestel is protected by Canada’s punitive-towards-the-customer competition laws. This means that Northwestel doesn’t have to upgrade the infrastructure, only has to provide as much bandwidth as it chooses, can throttle back users at will (even if the capacity for more is there), and can charge whatever it wants.

There was a big exposé in the Whitehorse paper exposing Northwestel’s ‘throttle back’ policy. People are up and arms about this, but what can we do? I experienced the exact same thing when I was living in the Gatineau Hills, a mere 50km from the capital of Canada. The only internet accessible to me was a 28kbs dial up connection for which I paid the same as DSL and efforts made to improve service was blocked by the government. I really think that the only thing that could fix the telecommunications industry in Canada would be for folks to band together and provide their own service. That’s what happened in the Gatineau Hills, with a few people who had access to a DSL connection linking up via repeaters to provide a high speed wireless connection to as many people as possible.

All that to say, the internet situation is really affecting tourism this year. We can only have about 20 people on our wi-fi at one time before it crashes and we can only run a couple of hard-wired computers. There’s just not enough bandwidth to go around. Some long termers have run their own private lines, but they are also experiencing slow speeds and throttling.

In the midst of all this chaos are folks like me who are connecting to the internet via the cellular network and who have experienced a grand total of five hours without service this summer, decent speeds, and few drops. I’m starting to be embarrassed. 🙂

Telus and Bell internet sticks work here, and some Americans have had good luck with their Verizon aircards. I don’t know what it is about Verizon in that it seems to provide service for some and not others; perhaps it has something to do with their package. AT&T definitely does not work up here.

Since satellite has the same issues as DSL or cable internet, it seems that cellular is the way to go to get online in Dawson City. I’m a little worried that getting the word out will break the system!

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New Pentax Optio W90

It’s taken about a year of hemming and hawing, but today I finally placed an order for a brand new camera.

One of the things that made shopping so difficult is that I’m not a photographer and have no desire to learn anything about photography. My brain’s full enough as it is!

How I narrowed down my choices was by listing my ‘must haves’ and then eliminating cameras one by one until only one remained. My list will make photographers laugh. The new camera must:

-Have easy to access buttons. I have big fingers with little dexterity. My current Exilim is excellent–it has a few, very well defined, well spaced out, buttons;

-Be easy to hold. My Exilim isn’t. I like how the Canons have a curvature in the front that makes them easy to grip;

-Not use regular-type batteries. I’ve taken thousands of photos with my Exilim over three years and am still on the original Casio lithium battery that lasts me a week taking hundreds of pictures a day;

-Make it easy to transfer the pictures. My Exilim has a dock that plugs into my Powerbook and iMac via USB. I just put the camera on the dock, click a button on it, and iPhoto opens;

-Be small. I can tuck my Exilim into a coat pocket;

-Have enough memory to hold several hundred pictures at a time;

-Be able to take many pictures in rapid succession, which is where my Exilim fails miserably. It’s a camera that only takes pictures when it’s good and ready rather than at my convenience;

-Have a big view screen. The Exilim’s screen is almost as big as my iPod Touch screen;

-Have enough megapixels to take pictures that will look nice when reduced to 500×500 or so on a blog;

-Be robust; I didn’t like having to worry about my camera last year on the Chilkoot;

-Have pleasing aesthetics;

-Price isn’t the foremost consideration, but less than $250CAD would be great.

And the winner, coming in at a reasonable amount over $250CAD is…

Pentax Optio W90 in Pistachio Green!

I debated waiting till August to get the camera since it will be coming out in orange, but decided that the green will do. 😀

I was going to order it off of amazon.ca for 299.99USD+shipping, the best price I’d seen, but further Googling revealed Abes of Maine, which had it on sale for 241.99USD+shipping. At that price, it was worth my adding a 4GB memory card (my current camera has just 1GB). The invoice just landing in my inbox and the total is 306.89USD. Even with the memory card, I’m at less than what amazon.ca would have charged me! Joe at Abes and I have been emailing back and forth all morning tweaking the order and I am thus far very impressed with the service.

The camera won’t be here for my trip next week (days off, yay!!!), but I will have it for my journey to Inuvik in August. I’m rather looking forward to seeing if the Pentax’s pictures of Tombstone will be any different from the Casio’s.

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Food, Food, Food, Food, and More Food

Today started off slooooooowly. I needed to go in at noon, rather than my usual eleven, so, of course, I woke up quite early by my standards: quarter past nine. I then made up for that by spending more than an hour in bed with the cats reading, checking my email and getting work done on my iPod Touch (I wish I was kidding. Or maybe not!).

Our fishmonger left today and I thanked him once again for a gift he gave me yesterday: a big bag of frozen shrimp!!!  I’m going to have them on the grill soon as I take the time  to get it set up.

The morning was pretty sedate, but active, since I needed to do some work on the property, including sweeping which really feels like a futile endeavour. The best way I can describe what the property looks like is to imagine the set of the show M*A*S*H, only with RVs instead of tents. There are a lot of similarities in the layout (including mountains in the background) and that ever present coating of dust that turns to mud soon as it’s wet out. Whenever I’m put to beautification detail, I think of the episode where the colonel had the camped spruced up for a general’s visit, which culminated in a fountain being made with bed pans. I suggested we make a fountain with gold pans, but that didn’t go over so well. Hmph! 😀

Just before I went on my afternoon break, I was treated to a slice of watermelon. It was a tad pasty, but by Dawson standards it was excellent and I savoured every morsel. I’m almost at the time of year when my junk food cravings are going to give way to an insatiable appetite for fruit and salad and the watermelon was a nice way to inaugurate the season.

Unfortunately, we’re also at that time of year when the sun is really bad during my time off (3 to 5), so running to the post office and back was quite a chore. I was glad to return to Miranda’s cool interior and get some work done on my contract. As a side note, I received an email a couple of days ago that the contract had been canceled. I was understandably devastated! But some inconsistencies in the correspondence I got made me ask a few questions and I was able to learn that only part of the contract has been terminated. So, I can still count on some hours a week, just not as many. This served to show me that I really can’t rely on that contract for any sort of income this winter which led me down another alley for the winter. It’s much too soon to start on that subject, however.

When I came back to work, late afternoon, I snagged an apple (Golden Delicious!) from the manager and then attempted to show her how to transfer ebooks to her iPod. I believe I may have added ‘ebook transferer’ to my job description. 😀 We were interrupted when a caravan rolled in and I had fun watching the RV ballet. Once everyone was squared away, the organizer came in with treats for everyone–a huge container of cashews and a cinnamon bun the size of my head! It came from the Braeburn Lodge… known for their huge cinnamon buns. A couple of us tore into the bun right away, but we left more than half for the morning folks (ain’t we nice?). I had thought of making shrimp for dinner, but between the cashews and cinnamon bun slice, I think I’m done for the night. 😀

So, needless to say I was thinking breakfast, not dessert, when one of my colleagues (who was a neighbour in Oliver!) handed me two beautiful carrot cake muffins with cream cheese icing when I handed her the night phone. They are going to be soooo yummy with my coffee in the morning!

Been a good day; slightly crazy, which is what passes for normal around here. 🙂