View from 54North

Well it has been 3 years (give or take a week) since I got my Motorola Razr, and it has packed it in. What failed was what I thought would be the weak point when I first took it out of the box – the hinge mechanism.  Suffice to say, both my screens now display coloured confetti. Ironically, I had just decided that I could live without a fancy new phone.

So now that I need a new phone and can shop with a clear conscience the question is: what phone do I want?

First question: Smart phone or not?

Obviously I’m enough of a geek to want all the bells and whistles of a smartphone even if I don’t need them and may not use them. The factors arguing against a smart phone are the cost of the device itself, and more importantly the cost of data plans in Canada. The first factor is mitigated by locking myself into nice long contract. Yay!  The second is helped, somewhat, by the fact that new phones can connect via wifi.  So, I think I can rationalize getting a smartphone

I am generally happy with Rogers, and see no benefit to changing providers at this time… which leaves me with 4 phone choices:

1. iPhone
2. Blackberry Torch
3. Windows 7 phone by someone
4. Samsung galaxy S captivate

I could be wrong, but I just can’t imagine Windows anything being stuffed into something as small as a phone and working efficiently. And I just don’t care for “apple”.  I might like the phone but the corporation is reminding me more and more of the old “Evil” Microsoft, with the added irritation of the fan boys.

That leaves me with the Samsung, an Android phone and the Blackberry.

The Samsung, being an android phone will work well with a lot of the google programs, such as picasa and calendar, that I currently use. It has a nice screen, takes good pictures and video. It is also large and reportedly has poor battery life.

The Blackberry has a nice form factor and has a slide out keyboard. Rim is a Canadian company. (Hurrah!) And Blackberries have a solid reputation and come recommended. Reviews of the Torch however are mixed, and it is a more expensive device.

Looking at both, while the BB looks like it would physically be the most convenient, it is optimised for business/work. Many of the things the Torch is best at ( such as e-mail push ) are things I simply will not ever use… or if I do, my employer can provide it! For my phone, the Samsung better suits my uses and interests, which are liable to be taking photos and video and postig them online, web surfing – looking things up, and gps - maps ( better on a bigger screen.)

So it looks like after Christmas I’ll be getting a Galaxy S. In the meantime I’m using my old motorola V3 that I had before the V9 Razr.  The battery is not in great shape, and it’s outside screen doesn’t work anymore, but it is still built like a tank, and works fine as a phone. ( Using a cell phone as a phone … radical concept! ;)  )

On the 13th of February we left Puerto Princessa proper for the Daluyon Resort on the other side of the island. It’s about a 2 hour drive now that the road is paved and the resort provided a ride to pick us up at the Hibiscus Inn and return us in a couple of days. The driver was good enough to stop off at a bank and a Jolibee on the way.

About halfway to Daluyon you will stop at a veiwpoint, rest area, and craft stop. The Philippines is the source of many pearls and while the “best” are shipped off to be made into the jewellery you buy in you expensive boutique the less than perfect examples are made into into jewellery by the locals.  Do not miss the opportunity to buy some. Not only does it help the local people, you will pay 1/10 what you would for same earrings or necklaces as in Hong Kong, and 1/100th what you would pay in Canada. 

We were met at the resort with chilled towels and a welcome drink of coconut juice . The Daluyon is a small resort and all the accommodations are to all intents and purposes on the beach, which is blissfully empty.  Between November and April the prevailing winds are onshore from the South China Sea, meaning the surf is up and Sabang Beach is not a good spot for swimming or ocean kayaking. It’s still fine for playing in the waves though.

The room was a neat little octagonal affair on the second floor. Each villa is a separate building with one room on the lower floor and one on the upper so it is nice and quiet and private. Air conditioning is provided, but with cross ventilation and sea breezes it wasn’t needed.  The washroom was large and well equipped, but a word of caution: the hot water is provided by solar heating.  All very green, but if you get up before dawn, expect a cold shower

Breakfast was included, but the other meals we purchased in the resort restaurant. On the first night dinner was by candlelight on the beach ( it was valentines weekend, and Filipino’s like romance ) Food was good, and inexpensive.

As well as breakfast and the ride to and from across the island, our package included a trip to the underground river and the mangrove forest, as well as a kayak trip to a nearby waterfall ( as it happened it was to windy so we didn’t take that trip. )  With meals, drinks, taxes, tips and all for 3 nights the bill came to under 30,000 PHP … or $227 CAD a night.

The setting was incredibly beautiful, the staff wonderful, and I really can’t do enough to recommend the place. The only real negative was the “ugly white people” phenomenon, which I will touch on elsewhere. Sadly it is something I saw throughout Asia, so it in no real way takes away from the wonderful Daluyon experience. If it wasn’t so far away, I’d be back tomorrow.

I just came back from watching the Legend of the Guardians, the …oh the heck with it, just call it the “owl movie” in 3d.  I enjoyed quite a bit.

The story is fairly basic, as one would expect from a movie taken from a children’s book. A  young owl is kidnapped, finds evil goings on, falls in with a band of misfits, finds the heroes of legend, and in the end saves the day and becomes a hero himself.  That said, while there is nothing new in the formula, it is a formula that works and the owl movie sticks to it well: we aren’t talking Lord of the Rings here, but the characters are likable and the plot well done in a workmanlike fashion.  A lot of movies with great effects and spectacle die because of a crappy story and editing, this isn’t one of them.

Now, while a lot of movies die use they have poor stories, you still need something more than a workable story to lift a movie above the mundane. In this case that would be the artistry of the CGI people.  Simply put the graphics in this movie are brilliant, a true work of art.  I mean that not only are the technical skills superb, but they are put to use in aid of the movie and the story and the characters in a way that makes the whole much much greater than the parts.  In the Legend of the Guardians the owls manage to not only come across as real believable personalities, but also as real owls.  That’s something I have3 never seen before to this degree.  In past you could have “realism” or you could have “personality” ( usually by using cartoonish characters,) but not both.  For me, this  movie finally managed to bridge that gap.  And many of the scenes are simply beautiful in and of themselves, as if a Bateman painting had suddenly come to life.

Finally the 3D.  I saw avatar in 3d and was underwhelmed. It seemed clever, but gimmicky. It actually intruded on the movie experience by reminding me I was watching a movie… anytime the 3d effect hit the edge of the screen it made me aware of the screen. The people in the avatar were looking at 2d displays that were transparent and would have been hard to read, for  no other reason that so we could see through the displays and go “Oooo 3D!”

But the owl movie is different. 3D is used to capture the element of flight and works wonderfully. And I don’t mean as one of those 3d roller coaster make you sick sort of 3d experiences either.  But Owls are birds… creatures of the air, and the distances and movements are much better presented in 3d.  When they are soaring high up in the air, the ground doesn’t just look small, but far. And they have avoided the pitfalls of having 3d scenes where foreground elements hit the edge of the screen and get cut off.

If you don’t like fantasy films, like gore, or need “gritty” depressing realism … you won’t like this film. Otherwise go see it and see it in 3d.  It’s a good way to spend an hour and forty minutes.

In previous posts I recounted my trials and tribulations getting new Telus Optik bundled TV/Internet/Phone installed. That didn’t go so well.  But now that it is installed, what do I think of it and how is it working?

Pretty good actually.

Firstly, lets deal with phone and internet which haven’t changed that much. Phone service is the standard telco land line, rock solid reliable and it stays up even when the internet and TV go down or the power goes out. The internet is much the same, but rated at 15 Mbps and generally provides over 10 Mbps. I’ve always been very happy with Telus internet, and found it more reliable than people I know using Shaw… however that’s a purely subjective assessment. Still, if you are  satisfied with Telus internet now you will be happy with it as part of Optik.

Now, about the TV.

I’m very happy with the actual Telus Optik product.  By and large the way the channels are bundled makes sense so that you don’t end up with a lot of stuff you have no interest in just to get the channels you do want. News channels are bundled together, as are “education” channels like discovery and national geographic. (The big exception to this seems to be OLN which is bundled with re-run sports channels.) You get any HD channels included if you have the standard definition channel as well – with shaw we were paying extra to get HD even if we had the standard def channel.

The menu system has a few quirks, but I find it much faster than Shaw, especially for Video On Demand. It is clearer, updates quicker and allows  you to see trailers easily. The guide has numerous options for search and display and is very flexible.  You can , for example, search for all shows that have Johnny Depp in them. Once you find the show you can search for all the times that show is coming on … and this is where it gets interesting … press a button to record it. The key to the Optik system is the PVR and he way all the set top boxes communicate with each other as computers on the local network. In effect all TV, on demand rentals, and recordings reside in the master PVR, which works as a server for all the other boxes.

There is a limitation to this system though, and that is that you can only have 3 simultaneous live feeds, watching or recording. For most people this will probably never be an issue, but as we have 4 TV’s with potential of 4 different people watching 4 different programs it is something our household needs to take into account. What we have done is to record programs where possible, and to do that recording outside of the 6pm to 10pm “prime time” period.  This has meant we watch primarily recorded tv allowing us to skip commercials. For myself in means I watch more TV,  but better TV; I never watch something just because it is ‘on’.   It also gives us complete freedom to stop or start watching, or share VOD rentals at any time and on any TV in the house.  This is not something that we could do with the Shaw system even at higher cost, as it is, as we share the cost we actually save a considerable amount of money.

Other nice features:

• Movies are cheaper than on Shaw.
• The Telus Music Room – this gives you all of the Galaxy digital music channels, but it also gives you radio stations from all across Canada
• You can buy individual channels at about $2.00 each
• You can program your PVR from any computer with web access, even across the world.

Overall, I’m very pleased with the service, if not the install, and would recommend it to anyone looking to have 3 or more TV’s. In my opinion the Shaw product cannot compete in this area.  For 1 or 2 tv’s your choice of phone or internet bundle might factor in, but certainly Telus is now comparable to Shaw in terms of picture quality and channels provided. 

The best way to get around Puerto Princessa or ( I expect ) many other small towns in the Philippines is by Trike. Trikes are small motorcycles with a side car type of structure built on or over them.  They are small, bumpy, very noisy and a lot of fun.  They are also cheap, and surprisingly efficient at moving people around over short to medium distances.

To get around the few miles of Puerto Princessa costs 15 to 50 peso a trip, 15 is for locals, foreigners are going to get charged more. But 50 peso’s is about a buck so don’t complain.

Normally a trike will take 3-5 locals … or one of me and Billie. I climb in and take up the entire back seat.  There are no doors or seat belts, but you seldom get above above 20kph. As there are seemingly, millions, of them, you can always flag one down.

Just got back from a short trip last weekend (4 nights ) to the mountains. We went to Revelstoke, which is a bit of a drive but is less expensive than Jasper or Banff, and somewhere a little less travelled. In fact I haven’t spent any time in the Revelstoke area for around 25 years or so. (Time flies as you rush towards death by old age )The last time I was in the area Revelstoke was a rail and logging town, plain and simple, and most of the roads off HWY 1 were unpaved and full of logging trucks.  It was definitely a “Hard working, hard drinking” sort of place if you catch my meaning.

Things change over a 1/4 century. The railroads are increasingly automated and need fewer engines and less maintenance stops to make it over the passes. Cars can travel farther on a tank of gas and seldom break down. And most of the easy trees have all been reduced to 2×4’s.  Revelstoke has discovered tourism and is trying to remake itself as a resort town. Whether in the grand scheme of things this is good or bad is hard to say, but it does make it a much nicer place to visit for a short stay.

The oldest part of downtown has been made into a pedestrian plaza, with sidewalk eateries, a bandstand ( live music every evening in August,) and flowers. There are gift shops, bike rentals and various tours and activities. As well moat all the roads to the south all the way to Nelson and Castlegar are now paved, making it an excellent area for short tours and camping loops.

We stayed at the Hillcrest Hotel, which is a Coast “resort” property. It was not bad, but a little remote and hardly a ‘resort’.  I think next time I would stay at the Gateway, ( a motel freshened up and sporting ‘boutique’ status ) or the Regent Inn, which is located inn the centre of town and looks like it was at one time the hotel that every small town has that gradually fades until it is nothing other than a rough bar and cheap dive. It has been completely redone and looked quite nice.

Just south of town is the Revelstoke Mountain Resort ski area. It has some very nice accommodations at the Nelsen Lodge, but the resort just opened last year and at the moment is still a construction site in summer.

We saw a fair bit of wildlife, though most of it dodged the cameras: a mother bear and 2 cubs in town, another black bear by the Galena Bay ferry, elk, mountain sheep, and deer. The Halcyon hotsprings were quite pleasant and when we went not overly crowded, and for both of us the highlight I think was walking through the Alpine meadows on top of Mount Revelstoke (which you can drive  up to,) seeing the view and the flowers in bloom.

The clicking on the pictures below will take you to galleries of pictures from the trip:

Technorati Tags: Revelstoke,Travelogue,rail,roads,trees,tourism,resort,plaza,music,August,flowers,bike,activities,Hillcrest,Hotel,Coast,Gateway,Regent,Mountain,Nelsen,Lodge,wildlife,Galena,Halcyon,Alpine,Mount,pictures,mountains,accommodations,galleries

Windows Live Tags: Revelstoke,Travelogue,rail,roads,trees,tourism,resort,plaza,music,August,flowers,bike,activities,Hillcrest,Hotel,Coast,Gateway,Regent,Mountain,Nelsen,Lodge,wildlife,Galena,Halcyon,Alpine,Mount,pictures,mountains,accommodations,galleries

WordPress Tags: Revelstoke,Travelogue,rail,roads,trees,tourism,resort,plaza,music,August,flowers,bike,activities,Hillcrest,Hotel,Coast,Gateway,Regent,Mountain,Nelsen,Lodge,wildlife,Galena,Halcyon,Alpine,Mount,pictures,mountains,accommodations,galleries