B. Mann Consulting

I'm currently sitting at the Vancouver airport, waiting for a flight to Toronto and then on to the Dulles airport. I'll be spending the week there in meetings with clients in Sterling, VA. The days will be full, but I'm hoping to connect with some Drupal folks like Development Seed and the fabulous Earnest Berry, aka souvent22. Actually, I seem to recall that Thomas Vander Wal is over in Bethesda, which is pretty close as well. Perhaps a personal info cloud meetup on Wednesday night.

Now a mini rant on airport power. Djun and I were recalling the horror that is Heathrow (of which Tim Bray recently wrote). Here at YVR power is usually good, but we're at this weird Gate 50 - 52 area that has no outlets other than at the gate agent station. So we're plugged into the printer outlet :P I wanted to document this, and there is apparently the AirPower Wiki hosted as part of Jeff Sandquist's stuff. I'm sticky about things like that -- it needs to be at airportpower.org or some other top level domain, not hidden in someone's personal namespace. But I got up at 3:45am today, so please excuse any grumpiness. (and yes, I just registered http://airportpower.org and URL forwarded it to Jeff's wiki for now...)

termie and factoryjoe are doing another one. On the night I think I had the couch booked (it's Kate's 30th birthday, so we're in San Fran until the 28th, then I have meetings which keep my in town until Sept. 4th -- call me!)

You can start planning for the next event:

Burning Geek BBQ happening at The Langpad (where Chris and I live) this Sunday (the 28th), 3pm+.

You bring the food, the booze and the skillz, we provide the venue. Emergent party, baby.
reoriginalize: Someday They’ll Let Me Sleep

My contribution will be tequila peanut dipping sauce.

Well, Kris is mad at me because we're even farther behind in various projects, but I really wanted to fit this trip to Seattle in before going to OSCON in Portland next week.

Thanks to Chris for spending your Gnomie points on us at Chinoise, and happy birthday! I still don't get the term "pan asian"...

I keep thinking we should do more cross-border trips specifically to Seattle. Maybe Web 2.0 meetups every month, alternating between Seattle and Vancouver (and Bainbridge?).

After the jump, I'm just going to quote all of Scott Laird's post, since he nicely covered all the necessary links.

Kris and I are heading down to Seattle to hang with the 'gnomes today (Monday, July 25th).

I think we'll probably stay the whole day and likely have time for a Web 2.0 dinner. Any takers? Like...Lee, Robots, Scoble, Scott? I'm sure I've forgotten people, but it's "today" already and I need to go to sleep/get up early (and Kris will likely fill in some more for me...).

Update: we're heading to Chinoise on Madison at 6:30pm. Chris says it's "pan asian", which apparently means it has sushi plus more (i.e. non-sushi stuff).

And yes, as you can see by my comments, I did forget a bunch of people. I need to start filtering by city or something, although that wouldn't have helped with Bainbridge Island. Here are some more pings: Matt May, Nick?

That was fast. SkypeIn, Skype's connection of "real" phone numbers to your Skype account, is live.

They are offering numbers from Hong Kong, the UK (well, sold out, apparently), France, and the US. I've seen people say they want to wait for Canadian numbers -- I'll probably just try a US number and get a Canadian one later.

So, looking at the list of US area codes, I was trying to figure out what area I would want a number from. I copied out all the area codes and looked them up here. Below is the list of SkypeIn area codes and what area of the US they are connected with:

PalmSource's numbers come from US market watcher NPD, which tracks retail sales. During March, 47 per cent of the smart phones sold in the US through retail were based on the Palm OS, 20 per cent were based on the Symbian OS and the Series 60 UI (ie. Nokia and Sony Ericsson) and another 20 per cent used either of Microsoft's two smart phone-oriented Windows Mobile variants.

PalmOne pledges to boost Treo shipments | The Register

I've predicted the demise of Palm-based smartphones multiple times now, but that is likely because I keep thinking about European uses.

While some DSL providers are now offering 6.0Mbps service to those with short line lengths and cable ISPs have been offering 3.0Mbps for some time, the 20Mbps residential speeds seen in other countries have been out of reach for American consumers. In a speech given on Monday in London, Nortel Network's Chief Technical Officer Greg Mumford outlined a vision for broadband where everyone would have a nice, fat DSL pipe.
ArsTechnica: Fast DSL: when will it hit the US market?

I'd prefer FTTH.

I just learned that AT&T's CallVantage is not using SIP, and are using MGCP, but that SIP is on the edge is on their roadmap, and all of their core elements use SIP in their network.

Also, AT&T's CallVantage offers no QoS (today) but their enterprise grade offerings have various Service Level Agreements (SLA's). As far as applications go, everything has been developed in house, no third party applications server, which is smart. No royalties, no licensing. I hear Webley has taken a similar approach.

VoIP Watch

Build your own application server? This sounds crazy to me, but it also means that AT&T has been planning this for a long time. Will have to have a peek to see if I can find out what companies like VocalData are charging: maybe AT&T went this route because they are paying per-subscriber licensing fees?

Just like cable broadband is slowly overtaking DSL broadband, it seems like they're taking a major chunk of telephony revenues as well.

Comcast Communications and Cox Communications have quietly climbed to the top rungs of telephone providers, helping the cable industry capture about $900 million in telephone revenue in the United States in 2003, or about 2.5 million residential customers, according to MRG, a digital media research firm. It projects cable operators could capture $8.1 billion in U.S. revenue, or 22 million subscribers, by 2007 -- or roughly 10 percent of the U.S. residential telephone market.

Wired News: Cable Guy Whupping Phone Guy

Note: this isn't VoIP -- yet. These numbers are for "phones hooked up to cable lines". I'm now starting to think that equal access requirements really should apply to cable operators as well.

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From What is the Message?, a pointer to a NY Times article on how fast food restaurants should be reclassified as part of the manufacturing sector.

I readily admit to not understanding large parts of American politics, but I do find it funny at times: