Flickr

Well this idea had struck me some time ago, and an e-mail thread with my colleague - Richard Smith - prodded me to do something about it.   The problem is that it's a real shame I even had to do it.  You see it all came down to price plans for wireless networks.

In particular, Richard sent me a note where he parenthetically bemoaned the price of data on the Fido network.  Specifically, in one instance he had consumed about 500K bytes of data - for which he was charged the whopping sum of $17.25 (pre or post tax - I'm not sure).  In another instance, he had consumed about 270k bytes of data - for which he was charged $8.01.  Now when you consider he's using an N80 device that has a reasonable 3M pixel camera, his average photo is just south of 1M.  So uploading a single photo at these rates would cost on the neighbourhood of $30 each!

Well, after an extended sabatical, I have finally returned.  There really aren't a ton of excuses for my prolonged absence from imparting my words of wisdom.  However, let me offer some tepid explanations.

My original hiatus began because of just shear workload.  As you may recall, I am implementing the platform technology to support the Mobile MUSE projects.  The platform provides various services that are ostensibly valuable for content developers in delivering their applications to mobile users in the cellular environment.  Well, as is the case with most technical projects, the task became bigger than I had hoped for.  I continued to experience problem after problem after problem.  Some were attributable to my own inexperience in some areas.  Some were attributable to changing requirements from the MUSE projects.  Some were attributable to hardware failures.  And some were attributable to arcanery in the mobile networks.  Whatever the reason, I was spending WAY more time on this project than I had planned.  I decided to bail on least pressing of the issues - namely my blog postings.