I got a letter from Bell today saying that the price of an text message was increasing to $0.15 due to “increasing costs”. Oh really? First of all we already know that SMS messages are a huge ripoff. So, I’d really like to know what increasing costs have been incurred that are even remotely related to text messaging. It’s times like these that I take a tiny amount of comfort in knowing that I have a fairly reasonable cell phone plan—thanks to a smart girl in a mobility kiosk that found a way to sign me up for a corporate plan even though I was working for a small design studio at the time.

And as I read this letter from Cameron McCuaig, the Vice President of Client Care at Bell, I marvel at the line “thank you for choosing Bell”. As if I selected them from number of worthy opponents. Actually, Cameron, I “chose” Bell 4 years ago because I couldn’t stomach being with Telus anymore after having worked for them for a  year and a half, and I didn’t like any of Rogers’ phones at that time. So congratulations on being the slightly less foul smelling pile of garbage back in December of 2004.

Speaking of greedy cell phone carriers acting like you’re getting a deal, have you seen the new iPhone plans from Rogers? Their cheapest plan rings in at $60. For that you get:

• 150 weekday minutes, unlimited evenings and weekends (note: evenings start at 9pm, when those of us who work for a living to keep paying those cellphone bills are starting to think about heading to bed)
• 400MB data (which may sound like a lot but you’d be amazed at how quickly emailing and web browsing will eat through that 400MB—oh, and better stay off Google Maps, that’ll leave a dent)
• Visual voicemail
• 75 sent text messages

Whoopdie friggin’ shit. Oh, do you like having call display? Well then you can pay $15 more for the “Value Pack” of “Wireless Essentials”. The first part assumes you’re a complete moron and need to look up “value” in the dictionary. The second part just points out the fact that these were features that should come standard with your plan anyway, hence “Essentials”. Let’s be honest, right now you wish you were a stakeholder in Rogers. It’s brilliant! After all we really don’t have much of a choice, do we? It’s not as if we can take our iPhone elsewhere and get a better deal. We’re all held at the mercy of our greedy cellphone carriers.

There is a petition you can sign, and while I’m sure it won’t make a difference it might feel better to get some things off your chest, knowing that once they reach 10,000 messages they’re going to print them out and send them to Rogers (sadly a huge waste of paper since Rogers execs will be too busy rolling around in money to notice a few extra white bits of paper in the pile).

While I’ve only ever been a lukewarm fan of the music of Nine Inch Nails, I have a tremendous amount of respect for Trent Reznor and his business model. Today he announced the release of his new album with the following note attached:

“thank you for your continued and loyal support over the years - this one’s on me.”

Not only is the album completely free, but it is being released in a variety of formats (including lossless torrent downloads) under the Creative Commons “attribution non-commercial share-alike” license. From the site: “we encourage you to remix it, share it with your friends, post it on your blog, play it on your podcast, give it to strangers, etc.”

And for people like me who devour the NIN album art, a printable PDF of the cover art, the track listings and the individual track artwork is available for download.

On an interesting and related note, Metallica (who previously sued people for copyright infringement and embarked on a crusade to shut down Napster) is considering following NIN and Radiohead in releasing their tracks for free over the internet. Also of note, I think Lars Ulrich is King Douchebag of the Universe.

It’s true, I do. Lately I haven’t really posted at all, and I just haven’t wanted to. Admittedly I spend very little time on the computer of late when I’m not at work. But I’ve also been very busy at work and just have very little desire to be on a computer when I don’t have to be. I’m also very behind on my internets and I’m sure you’re more up-to-date than I am, so I can’t possibly enlighten you on anything new. Google Reader only tells me when I have 1000+ unread feeds, so I have no idea what the actual number is.

Seriously though, no one even reads this thing. So it’s not like I’m letting anyone down!

This is why cartoons should stay cartoons.

Here's a well-explained article on ilovetypography.com about the difference between all caps and small caps. It's unfortunate that many browsers ignore the small caps font variant…

The other day I made the terrible terrible mistake of trying to upgrade my iPod touch to a cracked version of 1.1.3, up from my jailbroken 1.1.1. I was unable to get it cracked using Zibri's app (kept getting the same thing a lot of people are getting, hangs at "BSD root: md0, major 2, minor 0"), so I decided to try a vanilla version of 1.1.3 out, just for kicks. After restoring my iPod I got this screen:

 Okay… so how do I manage my music and sync settings and stuff? There are no tabs appearing to do that, and clearly the iPod is highlighted right now… I'll click off the ipod to something else, then click it again and see what happens…

Back when I was working a contract stint at Karo in the summer of 2006, I was asked to come up with a logo for UBC's Beaty Biodiversity Centre. It might have just been make-busy work because I don't even think we knew for sure if we were giving them a rebranding, and looking at their website it's still their old logo so I guess it never did go anywhere.

Anyhow, the idea here was to create a sort of yin-yang feel while representing a large land mammal, a fish, a plant and an insect all inside one circle. It was definitely a fun little exercise in illustrating for me, and I just stumbled upon it in some old files.

Alright so I finally got around to going through my Maui photos from last summer and uploaded them to my Flickr. I had only owned my camera for a week when these were taken so it was a fun exercise in learning how to use it. View the Flickr set here.

In case you've somehow missed it, the posters that Shepard Farey created for Barack Obama are fantastic, and bound to pull in a whole new audience that probably haven't previously had any interest in the presidential race. From obeygiant.com:

"I believe with great conviction that Barack Obama should be the next President. I have been paying close attention to him since the Democratic convention in 2004. I feel that he is more a statesman than a politician. He was against the war when it was an unpopular position (and Hillary was for the war at that time), Obama is for energy and environmental conservation. He is for healthcare reform. Check him out for yourself  www.barackobama.com. Proceeds from this print go to produce prints for a large statewide poster campaign.
Thanks.
-Shepard"

Some related reading: Analyzing campaign typography, The Hardest Working Presidential Candidate Logo

Happy Birthday Lego! You don't look a day over 48.