Author: chuma

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.

This. Weekend. Sucked.

Well, to be fair, only Saturday sucked. Well, it sucked, and then for a brief, shining moment, it was good again, but then it sucked again. Let me explain.

On Friday evening I was installing my company’s VPN software on my home PC, so I can attach to the corporate network and use such wonderful software as Microsoft Outlook. Well, actually it was so I can work from home a day a week. So anyways, I run the installer with nary a hitch, it says to reboot, so I do. After said reboot, I try to run the software, at which point instead of the login screen, I get a message from Windows Bloody XP that says that there is a known compatability problem with this application, and I can’t run it. Please go away.

Oh joy. Once again, the vagrancies of changing APIs rear their ugly head. Pissed off, I go to uninstall the software, but right in the middle of uninstalling, my computer decides to reboot. Oops. Now thoroughly pissed off, I glance at my watch, realize the time, and just hit the power button with the intent of fixing the infernal device in the morning.

Morning rolls around. I hit the power switch on my PC, and nothing. Well, almost nothing: there’s power, the fans are spinning, but the board won’t self-test, and there’s no video signal. Normally I would panic, but this has happened with this machine before: it don’t like to wake up. So I try, and try, and try, and try to get it to boot. Same crap. Despair starts taking over. Even if I unplug everything except for the motherboard, video card, and a stick of RAM, the system still won’t POST. Bad. So I call Michael, Sandy’s brother, who built the machine for me in his computer store. Tell him what’s wrong, he suggests the power supply is toast. Out I go to grab another (higher rated) power supply to try. Still no go. I call him back, tell him it’s not the PS, and his immediate reply is “OK, I’ll come over”. He lives 2.5 hours away by car. Uhm, okay, he’s a really nice guy, so I guess it’s not that strange, he’s been here before. It’ll be just like another visit, but with a purpose.

A few hours later, he arrives with four friends. Hey, the guy hates driving alone apparently. Sandy is back home by this point. Him and his friends have brought me a new motherboard and CPU, and go to replacing my (most likely fried) one. To summarize:

Good things that happened:

• My computer got fixed, and I even got a faster CPU (but I did have to re-install Windows)
• We sold our old PS1 system
• We were having a good time

??? things that happened:

• Uhm, Mike told us that his girlfriend is most likely pregnant

Bad things that happened:

• One of Mike’s friends (accidentally) shattered a flourescent tube in our living room, resulting in an hour and a half of clean-up.
• We didn’t go see Bowling for Columbine like we had hoped.

Yeah, that’s about all. Yeah. I got to spend the rest of the weekend rebuilding my computer (with Win2000, thank you very much, WinXP can bite me) and generally not doing the things we had planned. Argh.

Damn, I’m too fast on the enter key. And I don’t have a real content management system, but instead a web form, a few lines of PHP, and some bash scripts. But using FTP and its insecure logins is just evil. Truly.

Anyways.

Why am I still at the office? I’m almost the only one left in my group, or on my floor actually. I’m waiting for my train, which doesn’t leave until 5:40pm. I suppose I could have jumped on the Greyhound and gotten home sooner, but the Greyhound sucks. I have developed an extreme dislike to it since I took it twice a day for two months over the summer. (Damn, the summer was so long ago!) Sometimes you get good driver, usually you get awful drivers. Occasionally the buses are nice, but usually the buses suck ass. All the buses are cramped (for me at least – I’m 6 foot 2, aka 188cm (tall!)). Some of them smell bad. Not all of them have air conditioning or heating. And let’s not forget that you still have to contend with bad traffic. It’s just shitty, period. The only good thing about it is that it runs about a billion times a day between Toronto and Guelph.

Now that I can afford it, I commute on the VIA train. It’s very nice, roomy, comfortable seats all the time, doesn’t feel like a sardine can, is always air conditioned or heated, and is very very seldom late. It only runs three or four times a day, though – and that’s why I’m still here, because train 87 doesn’t leave for another hour and a half.

In the meantime, I’ve been updating WikiWikiNewt. And generally just surfing the web. I’m now seriously considering just going to Union station and sitting on a bench for an hour playing Tengen Tetris via PocketNES on my GBA until the train comes in. Adios. Have a Happy New Thing.

Okay. It’s time for the post-Xmas report. Brace yourselves.

First off, I’ve decided to stop saying Christmas and start saying Xmas (as in EKS-mas). For one, I’m not Christian, so Christ doesn’t enter into it for me, so I should stop pretending. Two, there is lots of evidence that Christmas was really a pagan holiday co-opted by the Christians in order to make it more acceptable to people. So I shouldn’t have to accept Christ in order to have celebrations around this time of year. Instead, it’s just a nice time to spend with friends and family, to reflect on the year past, marking the passage of time (I’m not a big New Years party person) and making people (and me) happy by doing nice things for them, or buying nice things for them. (And yes, Wes, I do feel happy.) Sure, X really just stands for Christ, but I don’t care. Pthhhhhh.

Next up: I always end up buying more things for myself than people get for me. But on the other hand, other people always buy me things that I would never go out and get for myself, stuff I need. Like sweaters. I got three sweaters for Xmas this year, which was great because my winter wardrobe was in dire need of some variety. But I never go clothes shopping, ever. So that was great.

The buying-stuff-for-myself-department: well, probably went overboard here. Way overboard. But I did get some things that I had been pining over for a while: a new DVD player that supports SVCDs (and I gave our old one to my parents, thankyew). Ever since getting my GBA I’ve been looking at getting a backup system for it. This is composed of a GBA cartridge that has flash RAM on it, and a PC interface to write to the cartridge. I bit the bullet and got my Flash Advance Xtreme 128M on the 27th. My primary use for this is basicially going to be playing ROMs from the Internet, yes – I don’t intend to buy another GBA game again. But you can also do other awesome things with it: right now, for example, not only do I have three GBA games loaded onto it but also an NES emulator to play my old 8-bit classics! This kicks ass: I played Tengen Tetris on the train this morning, right on my GBA. And I’m just a menu away from Super Mario Bros. 3, or flick the power off and on and I can play F-Zero Advance, or Super Monkey Ball Jr.

Oh, and I picked up a Canon PowerShot S230 the other day as well. Heh heh heh. I won’t be buying ANYTHING for a few months, but that’s just fine. We went to Future Shop on Saturday and they just happened to have gotten some more stock. They didn’t have the S200 doorcrasher ($449) anymore, but for not too much more, the S230 has a 3.2 megapixel CCD, better digital zoom (hey, it’s useful occasionally!), and a new image processor for better full-auto shots. After standing there for a while Sandy convinced me to stop waiting to get it and just get it. So I got it, I’ve been using it, and I’m not disappointed in the least. It’s a hella nice camera. And I even got lucky and got a 128MB Lexar CF card for the $49 special price! Schweet.

This article has left me totally shellshocked. Completely. Utterly. Fully. I don’t know what else to say.

I think I’m only going to travel by rail from now on. And certainly not domestically in the States – I don’t need some idiot security person having me remove my clothes in public, thanks.

I’m feeling a tiny bit better. My head is still pounding though.

I totally forgot to write about a bunch of stuff. On Wednesday we saw LOTR:TTT on the IMAX screen at Famous Players Paramount in Toronto. It kicked ass. I think I can say without spoiling it too much that I was happy to see some of the humour introduced in the extended version of the Fellowship continue on in TTT.

I got Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past for my GBA. It’s my first, and probably going to be my only GBA game. Link to the Past has gotta be my #2 classic game – surprassed only by Chrono Trigger. I’ve almost finished it, of course – I can remember just about everything about it, except for how to go through the friggin’ Ice Palace (grr!) and where the Magic Cape and Quake medallions are. It’s such a good game though, and quite a faithful port. I was thoroughly disappointed to see that the additional game, The Four Swords, required at least two people for play. Once you finish The Four Swords, you can play an extra dungeon that has been added to Link to the Past! Fie on you Nintendo. I guess I’ll just have to use my Flash2Advance backup system, which shipped today! Damn that makes me happy. Damn damn damn. Straight outta Hong Kong, no less. Oh yeah.

We’re going to see my parents at the cottage for a pre-Xmas dinner tomorrow. We’ll be seeing Sandy’s kin over Xmas itself. Sandy and I exchanged our gifts yesterday ’cause we’re still 8 year old kids like that 🙂 I think we were both happy and suprised at what we got each other. I’ve gotten a lot better at this “shopping for your significant other” thing since last year, that’s for sure… I was flippin’ out last year. No more of that tomfoolery.