Our heater is on the fritz in our building, and we’ve been going back and forth with our landlord on the issue. Frustrated with a lack of response, we authored a letter to the landlord stating our intent to take matters to the next level, and wanted to include a detailed record of every time that we had contacted the building manager.

It seems that AT&T stopped keeping a list of local calls on our local phone bill, so we looked online. Nope. Only “Zone 2 & 3″ calls. We called AT&T to get a list of our local phone calls, and we were told that we needed a court order in order to have those records released. A court order. To get a list of phone calls we had made from our own phone, that we paid them to enable us to make. What’s up with that?

Shouldn’t I be allowed free and unfettered access to my own data? Or perhaps a better question is, do I own that data, or did i just generate it, and now it belongs to someone else? I imagine that if they charged me for each and every local call, they would be obligated to present that data in order to justify their billing (hence the list of Zone 2 and 3 calls). Is there something about the fact that we pay a flat rate for local calling that prevents us from commandeering a list of those calls?

Back when I was at Fluid, I was the lead engineer for The North Face In-Store Explorer, which involved .NET 3.0-based touchscreen kiosks and plasma displays. The kiosk was (perhaps) the first production application to launch on Microsoft Windows Vista, especially given that we launched before Vista was even released. This was easily the largest and most challenging product I have ever worked on, and I can’t even begin to mention how much I’ve learned about WPF, Vista and kiosk-based applications. (Well I guess I could mention them, sounds like some new blog fodder to me). In the meantime, though, I’ve gotten several requests to show what the kiosk actually looks like in action. Tommy, my right-hand man on this project, made a really clean video cap of the kiosk in action:

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Of course, this doesn’t do the 1280×1024 30fps experience justice; nothing beats seeing it in person.

Microsoft is also featuring a case study that talks about the project in more detail.