Contemplating North America

I was pleased to have the opportunity to take this photo from the rear observation car of VIA Rail Canada's westbound train #1, The Canadian, in early April, a trip I've hoped to make for a number of years. There's another dome car (one of three) further up the train, Rocky Mountains ahead, as well as passing freight headlight reflections dancing on the stainless steel car roof ahead.  (Some lens flare as well, but I'll take that for some further effect.)  Altogether, representative of the end of Mountain Day, the route's third full day of travel between Toronto and Vancouver.  Mountain Day (my unofficial nickname) follows Prairie Day and Forests Day, perhaps less dramatic but both engaging in their own ways.  If the idea of several days out of time (and often away from cellular signals), while viewing most of a continent, seems appealing, I'd strongly recommend the trip.

It's the little things that (stop the) count

I drive a rather old car, which continues to serve well after nine years.  When I take it for routine maintenance, there's some of the same kind of anticipation that medical tests bring. Will mechanical inspection suggest a need for some significant intervention?  Happily, that wasn't the case today. There wasn't any reported indication that the car's complex systems of moving parts weren't prepared to continue ticking smoothly as they had for over 100,000 miles.  When I sat down in the car to drive off, however, I found that the seat had slid back to accommodate longer legs than mine and wouldn't slide back forward.  Back into the service bay briefly, where a piece of rubber was extracted from the seat mounting, and off into the day.  It seemed ironic that the vehicle's internal mechanisms kept running smoothly, only to have something far simpler render them briefly unusable for my own purposes.

Desktop wallpaper (blotter paper?)

I'm clearly not the only person who spends a lot of time looking at computer screens and takes the trouble to personalize them with some sort of image from outside the computer domain.  I usually find myself selecting some natural scene, like this one that's current as of today. Based on an unsystematic over-shoulder survey at offices and conferences, it seems that family members are also popular.  Though a small gesture, the result seems more comforting than one might expect, perhaps as a reminder of being anchored into the physical world.  Even when most of the image is obscured by an email client.

On computers and cameras as containers

In a traditional cold-season home activity, I've spent a while recently setting up a "new" server system on my home network. I'm quoting "new" because it's a repurposed desktop PC that's about a decade old, retrofitted with Linux and more disk capacity than its designers probably ever envisioned as being connected to its SATA ports.  It's working well for now, though. It's entirely possible that its aging power supply may die or that its motherboard may fail. Power supplies aren't hard to replace, but finding appropriately sized and cabled motherboards might be harder.  The important thing, though, is my data; if the surrounding hardware fails, I can remove the new disks, read them elsewhere, or build them into a new system.  The computer isn't a destination in itself; rather, its purpose in my IT life is to act as a means to get data on and off of disks.  The "peripheral" disk device is the central component, and the "central" CPU is present and running in order to support it.  Similarly, the purpose of a digital camera is to translate views into bits that can be stored on a memory card and processed, and that become independent of the camera that collected them. A closed camera whose images couldn't be exported or viewed except through its own screen wouldn't be nearly as interesting or useful. The cheap and ever-more-capacious storage modules can be read and written elsewhere; their information is what matters, not the surrounding systems that load the information into them.

Winter has teeth!

The season hasn't been especially cold so far except for one night's visit to the negative Fahrenheit numbers, but I thought that this ice pattern in a stream looked rather jaw-like, and that the sun's backlight made it somewhat jack-o'lantern-ish.

Over three orders of magnitude!

I don't think it's common for the price of a given good to vary by more than three orders of magnitude depending on its location and circumstances, but that seems to be the remarkable situation with cellular data, so I'll remark on it. In the US, I'm using a plan which seems to be fairly typical, and that offers 2GB of data per month for $25.  That's $0.0125 (1.25 cents) per megabyte, and is an allowance that I've never used as much as half of; if I track usage, it's more a matter of curiosity than of financial concern.

My US carrier, not atypically, posts pay-per-use rates for international roaming that range up to $19.97/MB, which is almost 1600 times higher than my domestic cost.  It's practical to communicate in this price bracket with occasional access to text-only email (which may have been the primary use of mobile data when the rate was set, but I don't know the tariff history), but is much harder to manage economically in an era of rich graphics and autonomous mobile apps "phoning home" to their servers.  There have been numerous horror stories from unwary travelers who have returned from overseas trips with smartphones to find that their data services worked smoothly but the the resulting charges dwarfed their air fares.

It's now possible to get international packages with terms that have improved significantly over recent years, allowing cheaper roaming to many countries (e.g., 120 MB for $30, or $0.25/MB, 20 times my domestic plan rate and about 80 times cheaper than the pay-per-use rate), but these don't operate everywhere.  (Tip: if visiting an excluded country, find Wi-Fi, use SMS, or make the most of a rare opportunity to disconnect.) If one of these plans is active, it moves the criteria for mobile data usage from something like "only in case of emergency" or "only if price is no object" to "apply thoughtfully and carefully, where and when useful", but not as far as the domestic "use freely and don't worry much about measurement" category.  I'm able and willing to measure usage and act accordingly, so this works for me, but it can seem awkward and unfamiliar if you're accustomed to data usage being effectively free within an existing plan.

On travel, packing, and writing

Looking back over posts here, I see that a lot concern travel in some form, which makes me think to inaugurate a tag on this theme.  I'm a fairly occasional traveler, and each trip has its own drumbeat of anticipatory preparation, generally culminating in early arrival at a departure terminal, waiting there to leave.  On the preparation side, it seems that the notable voyagers of years past assembled rolling libraries of attire, their capacious trunks sufficient for any formal occasion.  On my side today, clothing choices are usually simple, casual footnotes relative to the technology items (and, be sure not to forget, their chargers) that share the cubic inches available in carry-on bags.  Oh, and maybe a snack or two, since it's usually unclear whether or when food might be available.  It's always a compromise to compress one's personal environment into portable form, and departure or absence from the familiar promotes introspection. You bring yourself on any trip you take, after all, and your mind stays powered without plug adaptors.  I don't think the volume of travel essays is coincidental.