The Life of PhotoJim

It's the solstice! (No, it's not the equinox, like a certain radio station is alleging... the equinoxes have equal day and night... i.e. spring and fall, boys and girls...)

In case you were kept in a box under your parents' bed for your entire childhood, today is the day when the night is at its longest in the northern hemisphere (and at its shortest in the southern hemisphere). For people on the equator, it's just another 12 hours of daylight, just like every other day in history, although at noon the sun is as far south as it ever goes there and it will start moving north tomorrow.

There, don't you feel educated?

We're planning a vacation for next year and I've been thinking (among other things) about phone access. The last time I went out of the country, to Florida in 2003, I spent about $50 in roaming charges for a pretty small number of minutes of airtime. It was almost $2 a minute to receive a call and well over a dollar to place a local call... pretty obnixious. (I'm on Rogers, which is a GSM network, but Telus, SaskTel, Bell, etc. all have obnoxious roaming rates.

So I've done some digging... and some ordering. I've gotten some SIM cards for GSM prepaid providers in the UK (O2) and the US (T-Mobile). Both are cheap to run and cheap to keep up. O2's time is good for up to a year and you can top up your account to keep your prepaid time going. T-Mobile requires you to top up regularly but if you buy a $100 card first, you only have to add $10 every year to keep it going. O2's rates will be about 25 pence a minute for the first three minutes a day, and 5p after that, which is very reasonable; incoming calls are free (they cost the caller about 20 cents a minute, even from North America). T-Mobile costs about 10 cents a minute including long distance.

I also discovered that PagePlus is a very cheap American CDMA-based prepaid plan that works in Canada. It's about 10-20 cents a minute on Verizon towers, and 99 cents a minute on other providers' towers. The service works on SaskTel. I tried it. ($5 US and half a day... check out eBay for some reliable sellers.) Kind of expensive to use here in Saskatchewan, but great for an emergency phone, especially if your main phone is on Rogers or Fido and you want the big SaskTel coverage footprint... and it works very cheaply in the States. Just buy an old Verizon phone. :)

Regina has a new telephone exchange... 306-908... owned by Globility. Undoubtedly for VoIP services. 306-205 is already assigned for Allstream.

I don't know if this means we have another VoIP provider setting up shop... but I'll keep my ears open.

Sorry for not blogging in so long.

I had the flu this past weekend. No, not the flu that is really a cold... and not the flu that is really a form of gastroenteritis. The actual influenza.

By my recollection, the last time I had the flu was in 1986. I missed the graduation of my broadcasting school class, just after I got back from Kelowna, where I did my broadcast internship. That was a very long time ago. Those Commodores I have in the basement were seriously cool then.

In any event, I'm much better today (well enough that, even though I don't feel nearly at 100% of capacity, I really *feel* well, if that makes any sense - probably because relative to Sunday and Monday, where I slept about 31 1/2 hours in a 36 1/2-hour span, I am as right as rain).

Christmas is but two weeks away. Tick, tick, tick.