In case you're wondering why I haven't posted anything lately, it's because I've been more of less off the grid in the Yucatan Peninsula of Mexico for the past month or so, learning Spanish and escaping the cold Canadian winter. Before arriving here I was super busy planning and packing and tieing up loose ends. In short, sold the condo, quit my job, and high-tailed it down to paradise. Life is good, and I am enjoying this opportunity to get closer to nature, and live a simpler life. I am currently living on the island of Cozumel, taking Spanish classes with my wife. When we're not studying we are hanging out on beautiful beaches and snorkeling. "¡Qué vida!" as they say. If you're interested in keeping track of my travels, please follow me on Twitter. Postings here will continue to be sporadic, especially once we make our next move to the jungle, on Laguna Bacalar, where we will be completely off the grid, living without electricity. Hopefully all those years of watching Gilligan's Island and Swiss Family Robinson will pay off. :)

Last week I found myself signing petitions and making donations to several campaigns that are trying to save the most feared of all sea creatures. It all started when I finally got to watch Sharkwater, the incredible documentary by Toronto native Rob Stewart. What I learned while watching this film, and in my follow-up research, frightened me far more than any Jaws movie ever had.

Most people have an unfounded fear of sharks. Ask 1,000 people if they are afraid of sharks and most of them will say yes, even though the odds are such that less than 1 in 1,000 will ever have an encounter with a shark that ends badly. The truth is sharks are not interested in humans any more than lions or tigers. While each of them is a feared predator in its own domain, the main difference between them is that sharks are not protected by any international protection laws, and only sharks are slaughtered by the millions every year. This is problematic on so many levels. Watch the film and you'll understand why.

After watching Sharkwater I had to do something. Anything. So I donated money to the Sharkwater fund, then I made a pledge to save sharks along with the 65,000+ others who have been similarly inspired to do something after watching this film. Eventually I was led to the Saving Sharks website, where I learned about a couple other initiatives to pressure both government and big-business to stop supporting the shark slaughter. There are several online petitions currently. The first, organised by the producers of Sharks: Stewards of the Reef, aims to Stop Distribution of Shark Fins on the Chinese web portal Alibaba.com. The next petition I signed, this time at the Shark Savers website, opposes the Autstralian government's plan to allow new shark fishing on the Great Barrier Reef. Another one seeks to pressure Canadian mega-chain Shoppers Drug Mart to stop selling Hollista brand shark cartilege supplements. And there are other initiatives popping up everywhere as people around the world wake up to the impending ecological disaster.

Please do your part. Get educated. Add your voice to the conversation. Save the sharks!

Today I submitted my data to the annual survey conducted by the Web Standards gurus over at A List Apart. If you make websites, and want to contribute to the only online survey that tracks trends in working conditions for web builders around the world, head on over and do your part by clicking on the badge (at right) that says "I TOOK IT". You might even win a prize.

We recently noticed that both the Tagroll and Linkroll that power the Bookmarks page have not been working since July 26, when the good folks at Delicious.com (aka Del.icio.us) rolled out a major update. Until the bug is fixed on their end, and the data feed's service restored, bookmarks and tags will not be visible. We apologize for any inconvenience.

This week the iPhone goes on sale in Canada, officially, for the first time. Too bad most of the people who should be excited about it, myself among them, are pissed. Apparently, so is Apple. The fan-sites are abuzz with a rumor that Rogers is getting "significantly" less iPhones than originally planned for the launch as punishment for pissing off so many potential customers.

Instead Apple is rumored to be diverting units to Europe where the rate plans and data packages are actually decent and affordable. They also don't have massive online petititions and almost-daily negative media coverage over there. As of this morning, there were nearly 43,000 names on the RuinediPhone.com petition. On July 11, the date of the launch, every name and comment on the petition will be printed out and delivered to Rogers' head office. The fact that this initiative has garnered over 40 thousand names in a single week is both amazing and somewhat disconcerting.

As an aside: the RuinediPhone site became so popular in just one week that it has already sold out to been acquired by a web marketing company with a very slimey slick name called Oilchange.com, who are no doubt thrilled to get access to all those email addresses.

So now the real countdown begins. It's only 5 days till the iPhone 3G goes on sale, and my name is number 15 on the "reserved" list at the local Rogers store. I still don't know if I'll actually buy one on launch day though... I totally want the device, and it's even related to my job, but it's overpriced and politically-charged. What should I do?!? 

If you haven't heard, Rogers finally released their long-awaited, and much-dreaded, rate plans and data packages for the upcoming iPhone 3G launch in Canada. Across the country, and very quickly around the globe, people were aghast to learn that Rogers decided to defy all common sense with a 3-tier pricing system with NO UNLIMITED DATA option, a mandatory 3-year contract, and prices that are way higher (with less minutes and less text message) than anywhere else in the world.

Not content to sit idly by, some enterprising Canadians picked up their keyboards and sprung into action. Within hours after the announcement the blgosphere was buzzing and online petitions went up. Initially conceived as FuckYouRogers.com, a more family-oriented version called RuinediPhone.com has been gathering names and comments that will be delivered to Rogers on July 11, the date the new iPhone comes out. You can click on the graphic above to add your name (and vitriol) to the growing list. As of this morning there are over 30,000 names on the list. The question is, will Rogers change their pricing and plans to appease the masses and ultimately maximise potential sales of the revolutionary new device, or will they be stick to their guns and continue sapping the lifeblood out of the Canadian mobile market by taxing the people for as much as they can? Hmmm... I wonder.

In mobile news today, Nokia announced that they were buying up the remaining shares of Symbian, and would be donating the whole shebang to the Symbian Foundation to manage as an Open Source mobile operating system. So what does this mean?

First of all, it means that Nokia is worried that the Symbian platform's dominance of the smart-phone market is threatened by Google's upcoming Android platform and Apple's iPhone platform (and to a lesser extent Linux for mobile). Until a year ago, Symbian was sitting pretty as the number one mobile platform with anywhere between two thirds and three quarters of the global smart-phone market share, while Windows Mobile was a distant 2nd (as of Dec 07 Microsoft only had 12% market share). Since then, a lot has changed (i.e.: Apple released the iPhone, and Google announced Android). Google decided to take the open source route when they first announced Android late last year. That model has done well for them in terms of getting a lot of developers (and bloggers) excited, but they have had some challenges getting it out the door. Apple has been getting nothing but adoration from the development community ever since it announced their SDK, and more recently, an integrated storefront (the iTunes App store) that developers can sell applications through. If Nokia wants to go head-to-head against Apple and Google, it needs its own platform and ecosystem of developers.

Secondly, it means that Nokia is betting that by going open source, Symbian might eventually become the mobile-platform-of-choice for developers. Without a strong development community cranking out exciting applications (and now presumably making improvements to the core code), the platform will whither on the vine. Even with Nokia's popularity as a handset manufacturer, they've got a real selling job ahead of them, because as the hardware components becomes more commoditised, and more manufacturers spring up to leverage Android and Linux, the future of mobile technology will be software-centric. This much Apple has proven with the iPhone, and Google has confirmed with Android. Whether or not going open source will actually help remains to be seen. From what I've read, the Symbian platform is a pain in the ass to develop for.

Om Malik has a great analysis of the game so far over at GigaOM. Make sure to read the comments.

Image source: CNET

Exciting news if you're a web-geek like myself: Mozilla has just announced the official launch date for the 3rd generation of the Open Source Firefox browser. Mark it on your calendar folks: Tuesday June 17th, 2008. In addition to their attempt to set a Guinness World Record, they are also hosting and encouraging launch parties around the world. The official party in Toronto will be held at the Mozilla Toronto office, starting at 6pm.

UPDATE: the official download site is DOWN, but these links will allow you to download Firefox3 directly:

Mac OS X

Linux

Windows

Thanks for the direct links go to MG Siegler (aka parislemon) at Venture Beat.

Well it turns out the rumours were true, and Apple will soon begin shipping its 2nd generation iPhone, dubbed the iPhone 3G, to Canadians (and residents of 21 other lucky countries) on July 11. You can almost sense the clouds gathering now so that when they part on launch day and the sun shines down upon the blessed mortals lined up around the block, rainbows and doves will fly forth and life will be good again. Uhh... right.   read more »

Those crazy grassroots marketing folks over at the Mozilla Foundation have come up with another great initiative to help make Firefox the world's most popular browser. They plan to host a worldwide Download Day (click on the image for more info) following the upcoming official release of Firefox 3 (currently in beta). The total number of unique installer downloads will be submitted to the Guinness World Records organization for evaluation and potential inclusion in the Guinness World Records.

For the real keeners like myself, you can show your support (and get a reminder by email) by signing the pledge at the Spread Firefox web site.