Category: my ramblings

I’m still playing around with the design, of course. I’ve gone back to my yellow, green, and light grey colour scheme for now – I liked it on the old site, so I decided to keep it. Oh, BTW, if you’d like to see what my old page looked like for comparison, it’s still here. I’m not sure if I like the menu-on-left look, but I do want to keep the calendar on there, and if there was no menu on the left then I don’t know where I’d put it. Ideas, anyone?

I took a photo yesterday that I was going to use for the top of the page. I work on the 17th floor, so I took a shot out the window of a nearby empty meeting room, looking west. Unfortunately, my new camera is so good that it caught the dirt on the outside of the windowpane, making the photo look brown and ugly 🙁

I’ve still got to write a Perl script to process all of my old entries so that I can put them into the archives in MT. If I don’t have too much work today, I should be able to bang that out pretty quickly.

On Thursday night we went and saw our friends, the Erin Smith Band play in Guelph. It’s cool to have a band as friends, especially when the band is as good as ESB. They played two sets, and while both Sandy and I thought that they took a few songs to get warmed up (hey, it was -15 C outside 🙂 they kicked ass, ESPECIALLY THE SECOND SET which we swear was almost two hours long. They were hypnotising the crowd with some of the solos. The crowd got so into it that they were totally silent during some of the songs, especially Drama in the Desert. I think I would kill anyone for a copy of that song, which will likely be on their next album, which I also can’t wait for. We didn’t get home until 2am, but it was amazing. I felt great afterwards.

Yesterday I had to drive from Guelph to Stouffville to go to the dentist and pick up my nightguard. This is a molded soft plastic thing that you wear at night to prevent you from grinding your teeth together. I didn’t even know that I did this until I met Sandy – sometimes my grinding would wake her up and she’d have to elbow me until I stopped. So I’m glad to get this finally – wearing down your teeth sucks. Then I had to go to the Co-op to set up a server for them, which of course didn’t work. Grrrrrrr. I spent way too much time there. Sandy was mad at me when I came home. I just don’t have the time to spend on them anymore. I’ve gotta realize that. In the evening I had to run a bunch of errands, and then we had a nice night at home.

Today Sandy’s working this afternoon, and I have an HP LaserJet 1100 to clean and try and fix – I hate these bloody printers. HP should have just taken them all back, the bastards – they have a stupid fucking paper path that always causes problems.

Listening to: G Love and Special Sauce – I-76

The winner of the “Website that I envy most” award goes to… Adam Tow for tow.com!!! A close runner-up to Grant Hutchinson for splorp.

tow.com borrows lots of ideas from Philip Greenspun and for good reason. I own a copy of Philip and Alex’s Guide to Web Publishing and while it might feel out of date to read it now, the key concepts are still very important and too often ignored on the web. Namely, content is king, and so is allowing people at large to contribute to this content easily. My friend Jon has set up his own little corner at jonandnic.com that’s really neat. Problem is that 1) he programs in VBScript/ASP and 2) I don’t seem to have that much time to write custom code for my website. I just want to publish

I’m itching to get this cruft gone. Stan said he’d work on getting MovableType installed for me… Stan, you there still? No rush or anything, but if you’re working that hard, maybe you should take a break and do me a favour 🙂

Note: no name brand shrimp flavour oriental noodle cups don’t taste anything like shrimp, unless you close your eyes and concentrate really hard.

I can’t believe I’ve never seen this before: WhoWouldBuyThat? is a collection of bizzare auctions.

On Saturday morning I checked the EFNet #newton IRC channel like I always do and heard some shocking news: a long-time channel member, bunch, had died. It was kind of surreal, as I’ve never known anyone online who had died before. I moped around most of the morning, with kind of a dull feeling in my head. I’ll miss him.

Condolences to everyone who knew him, including bill, dpr, zarby, and especially all of the aussies (carneous, niteshado, yeled, fudj, and the rest) who knew him best.

SONUG was great. We met on Sunday, had some pints, had a LOT of great discussion and showing-off, and generally a good time was had by all. John Charlton came all the way from Royal Oak, Michigan, and I think we showed him a good time. Curiously absent were Peter Cameron and Stephanie Maks – where are you guys? We miss you!

As a result of my big mouth at the meeting, Ao Loo lent me a Palm Portable keyboard after I promised I would try to see if I could interface it with a Newton. Grant Hutchinson has been collection information on this for quite some time, except that he’s been looking at the Handspring version, not the Palm version. The Palm version should actually be much easier to deal with since it already has RS232-level signals, whereas the Handspring version would require a line driver in order to interface with the Newt. So the process is going to go something like this:

1. Find appropriate connector that will slide into the connector on the keyboard (a simple piece of circuit board might do, that’s basically what the connection on the Palm side is anyways)
2. Solder a Newton interconnect port onto the little breakout board that Ao also gave me (this will be a PITA!!)
3. Connect the appropriate wires between the interconnect thingy and the keyboard
4. Write a piece of software that wakes up the keyboard and reads its keystrokes, sending them somehow to the NewtonOS

I’m wagering that the hardware part of this is going to be MUCH harder than anything else.

Yes, I got Sandy’s C332 unlocked yesterday. It was a joyous moment to see it boot up into the menu, and to call her on it to let her know that it works 🙂 Last night we programmed it with some ringtones, but it seems that its ringtone composer is different from other Motorola’s – it doesn’t support setting the tempo!! I might have to compose it on my V101 and then SMS her the song.

Today the odyssey ended. I visited Bongo Wireless and had the C332 unlocked. It works. Finally. Fuck you Rogers.

Anyone want to buy a slightly used V101?

More in this space tomorrow. SONUG was good.

Despite my scathing attacks below, I’m really feeling alright. Here to prove it is a non-threatening blog entry. (Is this a blog or a diary? Kind of both. Whatever.)

Nintendo releases new Game Boy Advance SP. Ooooh, nice new design. Apparently it’s more comfortable than the original, which is good because my huge hands do not like the shoulder buttons on the GBA. But what’s this about the headphone adapter being a separate item? That just blows.

How Hotmail users get so much damn spam. I always wondered how this was possible… silly Microsoft. Anyone remember a time before MS bought Hotmail?

What else is going on… oh. Scripting MS Office applications is damn fun to do with Win32::OLE and Perl. Damn, I wish I had known about this sooner.

The C332 is locked. Rogers will not unlock it, of course, because they want it on a new contract to make back their discount on it. However, because I got someone to program that number with the C332’s IMEI, once I get it unlocked it should just work. They shouldn’t have done that, but it only took two attempted calls to get someone at Rogers to do it. I’d like to point out that all of this bullshit is still way cheaper than buying a new handset outright. Buying a C333 outright directly from Rogers (as a replacement phone or hardware upgrade) is $170 CAD. This is the bulk discount price because Rogers buys thousands of phones at a time. But I can’t do that, I’d have to buy one through a reseller, who is going to make a chunk of change off of it – RadioShack told us $279 for a C333 (basicially the same phone) without a contract. I got this phone cheap off of eBay and it’ll cost me $50 to unlock it, but then it will be MINE and it will STILL be cheaper by at least $100. Are you listening, Rogers? You bastards! Hardware locking should be illegal.

Let’s not hide the costs here. I know why the phones are locked, because they’re sold well below cost. But they must be locked into a contract for 2 years on a contract. Let’s do the math:

• Rogers’ bulk cost for a Mot C333 =~ $170. (The C33x series are so similar, I doubt there’s any major difference in price between the 332 and 333.)
• Rogers sells C332 “ready4u” phone for: $99.99, right off their website.. This includes six months of no fees whatsoever (they say) when you activate on a two year contract. Note that this page LIES – it states below that all ready4u phones are TDMA, when actually the C332s Rogers sells are GSM – see Motorola’s page. Also the fact that the C332 I’m looking at right now has “C 332 (g 8/1.9)” printed on its back (the “g” for GSM, “8/1.9” for 850Mhz/1900MHz dual band), and it uses a SIM card.
• All wireless providers charge a “system access fee” – a monthly fee for every phone connection (for GSM, it’s usually per SIM – so you can have a data card and a phone on one plan) you have, except for Pay-As-You-Go. For Rogers, this is currently $6.95 per month. Assuming the above ready4u 2-year contract, minus the six free months, you would have to pay a total of $6.95 * 18 = $125 by the end of your contract. Most providers will give you a different story when asked what this fee is for – Rogers says this, I couldn’t find what Fido says about it online. Many people will say that it is a licence fee paid to the government, but that is FALSE.
• Hrm. Bulk phone cost ($170) minus Retail Cost ($100) = $70 that Rogers has to make back on this phone. But 18 months of system access fee is $125, which more than covers what Rogers has to make back to break even. So that’s $55 that Rogers will make on this phone, not even taking into account your airtime fees.

I’m seriously considering starting a site to petition the CRTC in order to stop providers from hiding these costs and fees under meaningless names. Why not tell it like it is: “Phone discount recovery fee”. This market is so shady and underhanded, and grew way, way too fast because of tactics like these. Once Fido goes bankrupt, there’s going to be a serious lack of competition in the market in Canada.

Live MacWorld keynote blog updates by Adam Tow.

Some cool Everything2 links:

• Why strapping buttered toast to a cat’s back will not produce infinite power
• My brother made $700 in 3 hours by sitting in front of a grocery store

Adam Tow, you are a GOLDEN GOD. I bow down to your l33t n3w+0n skillz. In case you have no idea what the heck I’m talking about, Adam is working on an XML-RPC library and Blogger API client for the Newton. It’s mad. It’s actually alpha and released right now. And it’s probably going to make me move this blog onto a MovableType system just so I can use it. Schweet.

Last night I had a minor nervous breakdown while calling the Canadian evil empire. See, Sandy had really started to hate the Mot V101 “VBox” she got when we signed up in September. I got one too, and I like it. She didn’t. The voice volume, quite frankly, sucks. It’s great for SMS and the integrated ICQ gateway, however, and I use both of those features on a daily basis. She was more interested in voice however, and so it wasn’t her cup of tea. What she decided to replace it with was a Mot C332, a nice entry level phone which has gotten pretty good reviews. Problem is, Rogers AT&T only sells this phone as part of their ready4u promotion. And also, since Sandy had had her V101 for over 30 days, they wouldn’t take it back: we would have to buy a new handset for full price and then pay for it to be activated. This costs at LEAST $200 for the phone. Which sucks.

After placing some inquiring phone calls at Rogers, we were told that if we had a ready4u phone and an existing contract, we could replace one of the existing phones with the ready4u one (the C332). On to eBay I went, and got a brand-new ready4u C332 for $45.99 USD. Schweet. It arrived last night, and of course I called immediately to get it set up as I’ve outlined. I talked to someone, explained what I wanted to do, and he transferred me to the “activation centre.” The activation centre turns out to be the most inflexible department at Rogers, as the man who I dealt with told me that what I was proposing was not possible, and that I would have to activate the C332 on either the ready4u terms (4 months free, but still a contract) or add it to my family plan as a third phone. Needless to say, I was pissed, as I had called just a scant few days before to make sure that my switch plan could be done. I hung up and let out a groan of agony, thinking that now I was stuck with this handset that Rogers, really, really wanted to charge me up the ass for.

I don’t think men should be allowed to staff or call support lines. Period. The man at the activation centre I talked too wasn’t very pleasant in his tone, and I could tell this through his Quebecois accent. Sandy, seeing that I had been converted into a ball of useless meat, picked up the phone, called Rogers back, didn’t get transferred to activations but instead just gave the nice servicewoman the IMEI of the C332. That was it. It was done. Charge the phone, power-cycle it tomorrow, and it should work. God. Rogers is kind of like a seven-headed blind deaf Hydra. Of course, we’ll see today if this actually worked, but I’m fairly sure that it will.