Swampy’s Weblog Real life is just another window

WordPress 2.7 Upgrade

I spent yesterday upgrading the version of WordPress that runs this blog from 2.0 to 2.7.

There have been a lot of horror stories around about how hard it is to do this upgrade, especially when jumping several versions at the same time. All I can say is that, for me, the whole thing was pretty simple and there were no problems at all.

The bigest reason why I wanted to do this was so that I could publish a photo gallery of pictures from our trip. There's a plugin called wppa that allows this, but it wouldn't work on my blogs and I suspected it was because of the WordPress version I was running. This turned out to be true and the plugin now works perfectly.

There are now two albums available on the Life Around 60 blog. The first is a general album showing what the winter scenery is like in northern British Columbia. The second is an album of great chainsaw carvings from Chetwynd, a small town on the way to Dawson Creek.

Cellular Carriers are Laughing Now

The launch of the new iphone has drawn world-wide attention to how much we are all paying for cell bandwidth.

I don't have one of the new phones myself and have no intention of getting one, but I have been following the blogs on this topic. There seems to be a sort of feeding-frenzy going on amongst the service providers. Here in Canada, we are getting hosed. Apparently, Telstra in Australia is doing the same thing.

So, here's this whiz-bang, brand new, gotta have techie gadget, whose main claim to fame is the way it accesses the net. Only problem is that the fees will kill you. For example, you can connect the iphone for as little as $60/month, but you will use up your bandwidth allowance just by downloading the phones software updates. After that, it's cost-plus.

I don't know enough about the tech involved to say whether data transfers over the cellular network have to be expensive. For sure, costs don't have to be as high they are. This is one reason I shied away from cell-phones for so long. Just plain too expensive for a lot of what I do.

In Canada, we pay particularly high rates for all forms of cell traffic and the release of the new phone is drawing attention to this. Parliament is considering a bill to force the providers to stop collecting access fees. These fees were imposed as a short term tax and remitted to the government. Government no longer collects this money, but the carriers are still charging the fees. If you are a Canadian and want a fairer deal on your cell bill, you should sign the online petition supporting Bill C555. The bill is sponsored by David McQuinty. It calls for the abolition of access fees and an end to the locking of phones so they only work on one network. Here is a link to a video interview Mr McQuinty gave recently on this topic.

Let's have a revolution and demand better cheaper cell service!

(Late note: Rogers just announced a special data rate for iphone users. Six gigs of traffic/month for thirty bucks if you sign a 3 year contract. Offer is limited time until the end of August.)