I’ve been so busy lately that I totally forgot to announce on logloglog that my iPhone application is no longer a secret. Apple finally approved it and it’s now for sale at an iTunes Store near you. If you are fast you can still get it for free, because I decided to give it away for the first couple of days. Afterwards it will be $0.99 or the equivalent in your local currency.

The star of the application is of course Poupoune. She works under a stage name, as do the other cleaners. That way we can make things up on their weblogs, because these are modern times and all cleaners have weblogs and Twitter accounts.

Here is the website, so you can check it out for yourself. Even if you don’t have an iPhone or iPod touch you can still watch the demo video, also presented by my favourite dog.

A lot of blood, sweat and tears went into the making of this and I hope you, and a lot of other people, like it. I really hope this is going to be a success since I need to pay a few of people who helped me with this, and it would be nice if I could pay myself a little too for all the hours (many hundreds!) I worked on this.

Oh, and you could really help me if you write a review in iTunes for me. You don’t even need an iPhone or iPod for that.

During the opening of the exhibition at Galerie de l’UQAM the machine was fed a copious amount of food and subsequently it had a satisfactory bowel movement.

The artist, Wim Delvoye, was there and seemed content with the reception by the rather large crowd.

This is a machine that makes poop. They’re installing it now in Montreal and it will be on public display from Friday onwards. (You can go to https://cloaca.be to find out more). My friend Wim, another Wim than the artist that made this machine, is photographer and he’s here in Montréal (for the second time already) to document the setting up of the machine. There are also stereoscopic pictures on display that he made over the past few years.

The opening of the exhibition will be this Thursday 16 January and there will be plenty of food, for both human and mechanical lifeforms. Yes, this machine eats the same as we do, and it gets digested into the same excrements. You’re all invited.

Here is more info about the exhibition.

Made it to Yulblog on my skis. Here they are signing up blogs to be included on the register of Montreal blogs. I had already signed up from home, so this post might show up on their meta-montreal-feed.

Finally I made time to move loglog over to a new content management system, so I can use some new and nifty features. I spent many hours fine-tuning style sheets and modifying impenatrable PHP-code, and photoshopping images and this is the result. I hope you like it.

You can re-arrange the boxes to the right by dragging them, and you can collapse the ones you don’t want.

I categorized a good many of the old posts, but I haven’t finished that gargantuan task. Still 500 posts to do… I’ll continue doing that later.

I also use Gravatars on this site. These are small icons that you can use to represent yourself when you leave a comment. Set one up for yourself (it’s free and there aren’t even ads on their site) at the Gravatar website.

If there are any problems, please don’t hesitate to let me know, either by leaving a comment or by sending me an e-mail.

Yup, today I signed my life away.

After my lamenting about the outrageous cost of the iPhone in Canada I thought I would never buy one. Maybe an iPod touch (which is basically an iPhone that can’t make calls) but no iPhone.

But today my eye fell on a leaflet that announced a special deal: a voice plan for only $17.50 per month. It includes 200 minutes per month which is plenty for someone who almost never calls. I asked if I could use that as my iPhone plan, and just add a $30 data plan to it? The sales rep had to ask his superior, but then told me that that was indeed a possibility.

One of the reasons I didn’t use my previous ‘Pay-as-you-Go’ phone is that every call was outrageous expensive. That will change now, because I’ve already paid for those minutes. (I don’t know what will happen when I don’t use all those 200 minutes per month; will they roll over to the next month or are they just gone? I have to look that up.)

Of course Rogers adds some ridiculous fees to it but in total my monthly bill will be less than $65 including all taxes and fees. Over the course of the 3-year contract that will still be more than $2300 but it is substantially less than the $5700 I had calculated previously.

I had some problems setting things up (they sent me an email with a temporary voice mail password that was not correct), and my data connection stopped working after a few hours, so I spent some time on hold with Rogers’ Tech Support, but it works pretty well now. Of course I can spent hours and hours tweaking settings and installing applications (like a Twitter and Facebook client, so I can stay totally in the loop) but I’ll try to spread that out over a couple of days.

[From the photo it’s obvious the camera doesn’t like our yellow walls in low-light.]

Update: All minutes you didn’t use in a month are gone. Use it or lose it. So the 9 cents per minute I pay now, might become 35¢/min when I don’t call a lot. How is that in other countries? How you are supposed to keep track of your minutes is unclear. My iPhone has a usage counter, but it also counts all the long calls to Rogers’ support help line. Four of those calls today, totalling more than one hour. Most of it spent on hold, (yay for speakerphone!) but my call was dropped twice. That seems to be an iPhone problem, hopefully fixable with software. My calls to tech support were about the unused minutes (no mention at all about this on the website), and about visual voicemail (they had sold me the wrong add-on plan; the first month is free, after that I’m going to cancel it anyway but I want to see how it works.)

I installed a lot of apps and deleted some of them after I tried them. The only application I bought was an iPhone version of my ToDo-list application. They talk to eachother to keep things synchronised.

Being downtown and being an Apple “fanboi” I decided to attend the grand opening of the first Canadian Apple Flagship Store. Well, it involved just standing in line and chatting with people for an hour, so survival didn’t prove that hard.

The store looks clean, empty-ish and boring, just like the other Apple stores i visited. There was an abundance of staff present who cheered and hi-fived us when we entered the store. Kind of cheesy and very loud.

It’s nice I don’t have to go to Laval anymore if I want something. But I have all the Apple gear I want (read: can afford) so I won’t be visiting that often. But I scored a nice T-shirt and that was well worth the wait. I actually like it and I’m not going to sell it on eBay.

I saved a lot of money today.

For over a year I’ve been eying an iPhone, Apple’s hot touchscreen gadget. Recently it was announced that the iPhone would come to Canada and also that developers would be able to write applications for it. I have some ideas for a couple of cool iPhone games so that would be a reason to justify the purchase.

But today Rogers, the only carrier that has a GSM network in Canada, announced their subscription rates. But their 3-year contract and exuberant high monthly fees would mean that an iPhone would cost me 5700 dollars and that without unlimited use of the Internet, my main reason for getting it. There’s no way I’m going to pay that. No iPhone for me.

But I saved even more money. I planned to go to an outdoor concert of one of my favourite bands, Sigur Rós from Iceland. So this morning I called Admission, the Québec Ticketmaster monopolist, to buy some tickets. My ears fell almost off my head when they told me there was a surcharge of 8 dollars per ticket for their services. Eight dollar for picking up the phone! And 5 dollar on top of that as a fee to pick your tickets up at the box office. So I told them that was ridiculous and hung up. No Sigur Rós for me.

If I’ve the time and inclination I might check tomorrow if I can still buy tickets in a brick-and-mortar music store in town. Support your local businesses.

And I might look into buying a hacked phone when/if they come available but for now the deal is off.

I feel so frugal now.

We’re a couple of days in New York City, visiting friends and visiting the city. We saw an installation by former Talking Heads singer David Byrne, in which he attached a organ to a building. Playing the organ causes all kinds of whistles, clicks, bangs and rumbles.

Just being in that building, an old ferry terminal, was already nice. All these sounds added to the experience and made it even better.

My camera, after almost 7 years, gave up the ghost. It fails intermittently, sometimes with beautiful results but this wasn’t exactly the photo I wanted to make.

We were at the yearly Nuit Blanche, an all-night event during which a lot of places like museums, cinemas and other venues are opened for free until 05h00. There are also many special events like almost free wine tasting (one glass Chianti for me, water for Alison) and this dance show by students of the UQAM.

It was very busy and for almost all events there were big lines of people waiting. We are not so big on waiting so we just left the lines as they were and went only to a small number of events but walked a lot through the snow. Unfortunately I had made a terrible shoe choice, having spent mostly indoors for a week working on a computer application. So my low sneakers were soaked quite fast by the puddles of melting snow.

The spectators for the dance performance were located in a courtyard and most of the dancing took place behind the windows of the university building surrounded the courtyard. Very nice, even though I was standing in deep snow with soaked shoes.

The dance show appeared to both of us as a homage to the dancing lady that was on display a couple of blocks away from the dance show venue. It was a perpetually projection of the silhouette of a naked dancing woman, as an advertisement for a strip club. That building is recently razed, and the seedy projection will be missed by many.

We didn’t stay that long, after 23h00 Alison was tired and wanted to go home. I begrudgingly complied.

A new camera is ordered, my birthday present. Alison bought it at Amazon in the US where it was almost half the price of a very discounted model at Future Shop. Plus free shipping and no taxes. I’ll pick it up at a forwarding service just over the US-Canadian border.

No, I didn’t go for the DP1, but for a Panasonic Lumix with a 10x Leica zoom lens. It will be a huge improvement compared to my current Canon camera with 3 seconds shutter lag and 1 inch screen. You’ll see the results here soon, I hope you will notice the improvement.