Alec Saunders SquawkBox

It’s hard to describe the amount of mud on the interior of my car at the moment. Mud? Inside? And did I mention the smell?

We’re sitting in the parking lot of Beryl Gaffney Park, Janice, myself, and Toby and Ginger, our two shelties. The engine is running, and we’re toasty warm, but we’re not going anywhere. The front end of the car is deep in mud and ice, which collapsed as we drove into the lot, imprisoning car and occupants.

It all started this morning. The kids didn’t want to go skiing, so we decided to take the dogs for a walk instead. It’s been pretty warm here, so we put on running shoes, and headed down the road to the Chapman Mills boardwalk, which is a pretty riverside walk in the south of Ottawa. The boardwalk was only partly open, so we thought we’d chance Beryl Gaffney Park. “Yeah, the trail might be muddy, but it’s probably alright”, we reasoned.

You know that feeling you get when something’s about to go horribly wrong? I could tell as we drove in that we were in trouble. The car bounced through some slushy ruts and then came to a halt in the middle of the parking lot.I gave it some gas, and the tires spun… Uh oh.

Well, time to try rocking the car. Reverse, forward, reverse, forward. Nope. Just a deeper rut.

I got out, and got behind car (deep puddle, wet, cold feet) and put shoulder to the hatch as Janice gunned the engine. A wave of mud rose up, coating the front half of car in muck, and cascaded in through the open driver’s side window. But the car didn’t move. Around the front, I tried pushing as she threw it into reverse. Nothing. I had a few old copies of the Ottawa Business Journal in the back, which we sacrificed to the traction gods. The car move a scant foot before the OBJ became papier mache.

A small coupe (with snow tires, as opposed to my “all-season” radials) pulled in, and all the way out. A young guy named Tony got out. At his suggestion, we piled branches under the tires. We got behind the car, and gave it a shove while Janice gunned the engine. The smell of burning rubber, and newly macerated juniper filled the air. But, the car didn’t move.

Tony pushed, while I gunned the car in little shots. The car rocked back and forth. Gun the engine, rock forward, let go of the gas, slide back, repeat. Rock forward, slide back, rock forward, slide back. And then it happened… The dogs threw up in the back seat. Apparently the rocking motion was too much for them.

We got out and surveyed the situation. Besides, it smelled better outside. I called Sonny’s Garage in Manotick.

“I understand you have a tow truck”, I started.

“No, not right now. Sonny’s on vacation until Thursday. You need Ed’s towing.”

A call to Ed’s towing, and Ed agreed to send the truck out, with the proviso that if the ground was too soft, he’d have to go back and get his bobcat. Half an hour later the truck showed up.

“Nope. Can’t go in there. Hafta get the bobcat.”

And so we sit. We scraped the dog spew off the back seat, so it doesn’t smell quite so bad. We have Ottawa’s pathetic assortment of 1980’s era “classic rock” radio for entertainment. Wet feet, mud coated, and toasty warm. Occasionally I get out and warn away someone else pulling into the parking lot before they come in too far. At least we haven’t run out of gas (yet).

Lesson learned: we should have gone south for spring break.

This is a test post from Bleezer, which Rick Segal mentions on The Post Money Value. I’ve been looking for a decent offline blogging tool for WordPress for a while. Perhaps this is it.

Recently I’ve been playing with several new VoIM systems: TelTel, Sightspeed, and Skype with Video.  The Sightspeed folks were good enough to send me a Sightspeed Starter Kit, which includes a Logitech web cam, and that’s what I’ve been using. Ken Camp and I had a video call last Friday with both Sightspeed and Skype, and then I spoke with Eugene Eckard at Skype and Brenda Gili of TelTel using the  TelTel client.  I did it from our corporate network at iotum, which is due for an upgrade. We’re connected to the outside world on a commercial grade DSL line, and periodically we saturate our outbound pipe.

Caveat: As you may know I am not a huge fan of video telephony.  My experiences to date have all been uniformly poor. Most of the time I’ve ended up looking at the person’s forehead, and the video quality has been extremely variable.  I’m happy to say that the state of the art in camera design has advanced since the last time I used one of these — Logitech’s face tracking technology keeps a tight focus on the speaker, and the video quality problems I’ve seen previously have largely been addressed.  There is still the overall experience issue that the view you have of the other person is that person looking at their screen, which gives you the constant impression that they are not actually listening.  One of these days, someone will mount a 1 pixel pinhole camera in the center of my screen and solve that problem.

Impressions?

Sightspeed is targeted squarely at consumers, and all types of video usage.  They help you with family video, video mail, and video blogs.  They have a nice address book, and the product is dead simple to use.  High marks! They also use a proprietary codec which allows larger, clearer video over lower bandwidth.  In use, what I found was that they had better sound quality than Skype, but video suffered (presumably from packet loss when our outbound link saturated), with periodic macro blocking or colour shifts.  It recovered nicely, but the flaws still existed.

For Skype, video is just an added media type.  You can’t do anything special with the media, as you can with Sightspeed.  It’s very simple to use, though.  Just add a camera.  Skype will recognize it and let you start to use it for your calls.  Video quality is high.  I noticed no artifacts, although the frame rate was a little slow.  However, sound quality, when compared to Sightspeed, was lower. 

TelTel doesn’t support video, but does provide a glimpse of what could be a very compelling experience for the business user.  At first, it appears to be just like Skype.  Sound quality is higher, which is surprising because they use the same GIPS codec.  Perhaps it has to do with the fact that they’re not using peer relays, which Skype does.  More interestingly, though, TelTel has a small business offering, which allows you to do things like call operator@teltel.com and enter an extension to reach someone.  In the TelTel world, you can hang a PBX off the network, without messing around with a proprietary gateway a la Skype.  That’s very cool!

What’s interesting to me in all of this is watching this second generation of clients start to focus on specific market segments. Of the three, TelTel is the best solution for business and Sightspeed best for consumer.  And Skype?  Well, when you’re the big kahuna, you try to be all things to everyone. It’s a great position if you can hang on to it.