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Always after HPTC in Idaho, coaches and staff have a recovery day, this year at the famed Coeur d’Alene Resort.

more photos

What do you pay a month compared with the average Canadian in 2010 …

Are you happy with your service?

Do you feel you get good value?

…Overall, the number of wireless subscriptions in Canada grew by 8.5 per cent to 25.8 million, just slightly higher than the eight per cent growth the year before.

At the same time, the number of households with broadband internet subscriptions grew by 9.2 per cent to nine million — significantly higher than the six per cent growth in 2009. …

CBC – Average cellphone bill $1 cheaper in 2010

One Report from 2010 found Canada to have the highest costs of any nation in the world, overall – An International Comparison of Cell Phone Plans and Prices

More competition doesn’t seem to be helping much.

… I still don’t own a phone.

Warren sent me a link to this terrific new service.

… flight search service Hipmunk just updated its iPhone and iPad apps to show you which of the flights you’ve searched for have Wi-Fi on-board….

LifeHacker – Hipmunk Flight Search App Shows Which Flights Have Wi-Fi

Hipmunk has by far the best interface for seeing what flights are available. Sadly, however, I’m finding the actual results worse and worse over the past few months. The best deals are not showing up.

Bryson is one of my favourite authors. His latest book – At Home: A Short History of Private Life (2010) – just might be his best, yet.

From one review:

… At Home has a fairly simple structure. Bryson will wander around the Norfolk rectory where he lives and discover how each of the rooms came to have the purpose and contents that it does. He’ll also concentrate largely “on the events of the last 150 years” and be “painfully selective”.

But as it turns out, this manifesto goes by the board even quicker than most. Two chapters later we’ve had spectacular set pieces on the construction of the Crystal Palace and the Great Exhibition. We’ve been told how assorted 18th and 19th-century clergymen invented the submarine, bred the first Jack Russell, wrote a history of dirty jokes and published the first scientific work on dinosaurs.

We’ve learnt that almost all of our food is Stone Age in origin and that the end of nomadism “happened all over the Earth, among people who could have no idea that others in distant places were doing precisely the same thing”. (“Dogs, for instance”, runs the typically striking paragraph-punchline, “were domesticated at much the same time in places as far apart as England, Siberia and North America.”)

… read more by James Walton on The Telegraph

Crystal Palace

Amazon – At Home: A short history of private life

Everyone will love this book.

Only a couple of hours free in Munich, I went straight to the Deutches, my first visit since 1976.

The Deutsches Museum (German Museum) in Munich, Germany, is the world’s largest museum of technology and science, with approximately 1.5 million visitors per year and about 28,000 exhibited objects from 50 fields of science and technology. …

It always listed one of the most interesting museums in the world.

Astronomy, mapping, weights & measures, musical instruments. I loved the full size wooden tower – 50m high – an amazing technological advance in prehistory.

Certainly the evolution of technology: phone, typewriters, computers … is fascinating. (They had neither an Apple 1 nor Apple 2 in the collection, an unforgivable oversight.)

The history of photography included pictures from 1850 of excellent quality. Digital photography was introduced in 1982, but was not affordable until 1996.

The history of agriculture fascinates me too. How did early man figure out how to turn grass into maize?

A full size replica of the Cave of Altamira in Spain surprised me. It’s one of the two best sites ever discovered for drawings and polychrome rock paintings of wild mammals.

I don’t begrudge giving Steve Jobs a big chunk of my limited income. But why can’t Apple design decent wireless headphones?

Yeesh.

I may be driven to try these – Outdoor Technology Bluetooth Tags
($70 – $80)

Making Bluetooth headsets “cool” is the mission of Outdoor Technology, a southern California-based active sports and lifestyle accessories maker. To this end, they have unveiled OT Tags, their stereo Bluetooth headsets which function like conventional one-ear “business” headsets but look like and are music headphones in the earbud style — mating the style of wired headphones to the convenience of wireless. …

electronista

Click PLAY or watch a review on YouTube.

Looks like my iPod touch is compatible. But it not, I can make it so with a $30 Bluetooth Transmitter.

… Colin Firth plays King George VI who, to overcome his stammer, sees Lionel Logue, an Australian speech therapist played by Geoffrey Rush.

The two men become friends as they work together, and after his brother Edward VIII abdicates, the new King relies on Logue to help him make a radio broadcast on the day that Britain declared war on Germany, beginning of World War II. …

I finally saw the slightly controversial film.

Click PLAY or watch a trailer on YouTube.

… a major box office and critical success. On a budget of £8 million, it earned over $400 million internationally. …

… The film was also nominated for 12 Academy Awards, the most of any film that year, and won four: Best Picture, Best Director (Hooper), Best Actor (Firth), and Best Original Screenplay (Seidler). …

Kudos to Colin Firth. He was excellent. An actor I’ve always criticized in the past as being a one trick pony, type cast as the opposite of Hugh Grant.

I’m sure you’ll agree that Geoffrey Rush was even better. Shame he didn’t win Best Supporting Actor.

I’m happy this film won for Best Picture as my bias is to see it go to an EPIC film. For example, The English Patient. By the same logic I’m still mortified that Shakespeare in Love won Best Picture. (Not EPIC)

It’s new.

It’s somewhat similar to Facebook.

It’s by invitation only, so far. (I could send you an invite if you are interested.)

Click PLAY or watch a brief intro on YouTube.

It’s getting heaps of praise from experts.

Facebook is worried.

The little Google +1 symbol is similar to the Facebook LIKE button, but it’s more powerful. When you click that +1 it tells Google to recommend that page in Google search.

I’m just experimenting with the new social network now. So far I like it better than Facebook. In any case, it’s nice to have some real competition for Facebook for the first time.

read more on how it works – Google, takes on Facebook

There are at least 3 fake Apple store in remote Kunming, China.

The fake Apple store in China so convincing that even its staff are fooled

(via a blogger in China – BirdAbroad)

UPDATE: This story has hit the fan in China – Customers angry, staff defiant at China’s fake Apple

Let’s say you’re a hiker in Lausanne, Switzerland in July. Those mountains look very appealing from Lake Geneva.

Would you go … HIKING? … Or pop in to the nearest Travel Agent to buy an expensive flight home. (Double the cost of the same plane flying the other direction.)

If you have the MacBook Blues …