Blessed by the Potato

By now I’m sure everyone has heard about the Ontario government’s plans to harmonize the PST with the federal GST. I don’t particularly care for this move, for two very simple reasons. The first is that this is going to take away the provincial government’s ability to have incentives for specific areas through PST changes. For example, the Ontario government doesn’t charge tax on the bare necessities such as electricity, natural gas, diapers, or most food items. While most food and diapers will remain free of the new HST, it looks like home energy is going to be taxed, and the MERs of mutual funds might get hit too. An even better example would be the green transportation initiatives: the Ontario government rebates $2000 of the PST paid for a hybrid car (new or used) — will they still have that ability when it’s HST? At the same time, they also cancelled PST for bicycles last year, to encourage Ontarians to take up cycling — will they have that ability with a federally-managed HST?

The other reason is that Wayfare is currently a private contractor at her job, and so she has to remit GST to the government; this is basically a charge she eats out of her “salary”. We don’t know what’s going to happen when the HST comes around, but at the very least she’s going to have to renegotiate her contract with her employer/client.

Wayfare’s old Toshiba laptop is having some issues lately. It’s a “regular” 15.4″ laptop weighing in at roughly 6 pounds. While I take my 8-pound monster nearly everywhere, for her 6 pounds is too much and she often doesn’t bother to take it on the train with her. Combined with the other issues (such as an upcoming trip), she’s looking at getting a new netbook now, something under 3 lbs and 12″.

I have a computer under my desk running the Apache/SQL server behind this website. It’s 10 years old, a Pentium-III. Despite its age it has plenty of power to surf the net and do word processing (maybe not with Windows XP and Office 2009, but that’s beside the point). So when my brother spilled water on his laptop and fried it (for the second time), my purchasing advice for him was to just go to the store and get the one he liked the most. Any of them would have plenty of power for what he needed.

So likewise when Wayfare wanted to buy a netbook, my advice was to just try it out in store to make sure she liked the usability, they should all do what she wants (and in fact, they all seem to be running the same Intel Atom processor and chipset). She had done her own research and decided on an Acer Aspire One. It’s a cute little 10″ thing, comes in an attractive shiny case… and within seconds of trying it, she realized she hated it. Why? Because they made the moronic decision of changing the keyboard layout. There are of course always unique keyboard layouts on any laptop under 17″ because there just isn’t enough space for a standard full-sized keyboard, but usually the compromises are made at the periphery: half-sized function keys, weird insert-home-delete-page keys with dual or triple functions depending on concomitant key presses. The parts for touch-typing are often left alone. However, we found the weirdest thing (and I wish I took a picture): they put a half-sized backslash key where the enter key should be, and then made a tall enter key that was further from the home row.

They sacrificed the usability of the enter key in favour of backslash.

Wayfare walked into Best Buy, credit card in hand, ready to buy that Acer tonight, and didn’t because she knew that changing how she typed (on a computer that would only be used for web surfing and word processing) would cause her more frustration than the computer was worth. Bizzarely enough, that same keyboard layout was used on a few “regular” (14-15″) laptops from Acer, Gateway, and HP. Thankfully, HP’s 10-inch laptop didn’t succumb to the same insanity. I’ve complained before about how prominently the backslash key is featured on keyboards, and it makes even less sense in its new position.

She’s out in the living room right now researching alternatives (the Dell Inspiron Minis and the HP 10″s are still in the running) and muttering “stupid Acer” to herself all the while. So obviously that keyboard layout lost them a customer, and I can’t fathom any that it would bring in, unless *nix uses a lot more backslashes than I thought (I really thought they were forward slashes, which is how we have forward slashes in URLs). Even then, ewww. Backslash should be above enter, and that’s all there is to it.

Right now the HP 1035 10″ netbook and the Dell Inspiron Mini 12″ are neck-and-neck in the running. My favourite of the two is the Dell: it’s a more comfortable size, you get a bigger, higher-resolution screen (12″ you could use for quite a long time for work, whereas I wouldn’t want to use a 10″ screen for much more than I’d use an iPhone for) and a better keyboard/trackpad combo (thanks to the marginally larger size) for only a small increase in weight (about 2.5 vs 2.7 lbs). Because of the larger screen the Dell is reported to have a bit less battery life (about 2.9 hrs vs 2.5 hrs), but has an option to go over 3 pounds (up to about 3.1 lbs — this figure is harder to come by exactly) for a 6-cell battery (5-6 hrs of battery life, $50 more). It just seemed to have to make fewer sacrifices: a half a pound for more usability. If she’s carrying it in her backpack then the extra width shouldn’t matter, and it’s actually a bit thinner than the HP (though the smaller HP or Acer might just fit in her purse, whereas the Dell looked a little too big for that). The Dell has 3 USB ports to the HP’s 2, and the Dell also has a standard VGA-out port in the event that she wants to connect an external monitor or run a presentation; the HP has a proprietary port that requires a dongle.

Update: Ah, this weird vertical enter key is apparently a european feature, allowing more space for accented characters (rather than the useless backslash it is here). Still, eewww. Why not bring the enter key closer to the home row, make it a single row, and deal with the accents somewhere else?

So there I was, back around September-ish, skimming tv.com to figure out when my favourite shows were coming back on the air for 2008/2009. Some had not been cancelled outright, but wouldn’t appear again until January (e.g.: Scrubs), so I checked again around New Years. Despite the fact that I definitely remember hearing somewhere that Battlestar Galactica was coming back for another season after the depressing (and bewildering) end to season 4, there wasn’t even an entry for season 5, so who knew when or if it would have more episodes?

Now as it happens I was screwing around with Tversity and Hulu (which still doesn’t work in Canada) and saw a link for the latest BSG episode. The summary was not familiar to me, and since I couldn’t watch it right then and there, I went back to tv.com to see if maybe season 5 was just starting up now. Sure enough, still no season 5, but, reading through the season 4 summaries I came to the point where the season “ended” last year, and lo and behold, there are another 10 episodes or so tacked on to the end of season 4. What douchebaggery is that? I know I only skimmed the page and missed the fact that there were new episodes coming this year, but why on earth would they bother trying to classify them as part of an extended season 4 rather than a short season 5? Especially since the DVDs will probably come in two boxsets anyway (season 4.0 and 4.5 most likely). Ah well, at least now I know why I couldn’t find anything about season 5.

I’m not sure I’ll enjoy them anyway since I haven’t liked the path the series was following with this final 5 nonsense.

For those who missed it, Futurama had a few direct-to-video releases to extend the life of that show; all four were pretty good, IMHO, and well worth watching if you’re a Futurama fan.

Terminator: the Sarah Connor Chronicles is one show that I should like much more than I actually do. It’s about terminators, and stopping SkyNet, and all that good stuff, but parts of it I just find annoying. In particular, they’ve had 3 episodes (almost) in a row now full of flashbacks and altered points of view so that we just can’t tell exactly what’s real, and I think it’s just silly. This show doesn’t need that crap; one episode now and then is ok, but the content of the show is straightforward and cool enough that they don’t need to screw around with the narrative structure to try to make it interesting. Leave that nonsense to Lost (who do it far better besides).

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As reported by the Star, Toronto’s vehicle registration tax has fallen short of expectations. “…the equivalent of 167,000 fewer vehicles being registered than expected.” Of course, I’m one of the many people that had a car registered to a Toronto address that was promptly moved when the tax was announced. Like perhaps half of Western’s student population, I came from the Toronto area, and left all my mailing addresses (including my car registration) set to my parents’ address to make life simpler: no updating every few years as I moved around, and someone at home all the time to let me know if something important arrived. But for $60/year, yeah, I’ll update my address.

Oddly enough, when it was first being mulled over I was in favour of a vehicle registration tax, but that was back when I thought they were talking something modest, like a 5-10% surtax. When the Toronto surtax ended up being almost as much as the original provincial fee, I balked.

I blogged earlier about Rogers’ 5% increase in fees this year, and how ridiculous that was especially in these economic times. I wrote them a letter about it (and in the meantime started playing around with an antenna to see if we could pull enough over-the-air stations to justify cancelling cable; unfortunately we couldn’t).

Here’s the text of the letter I sent:

Rogers Cable
855 York Mills Rd
Don Mills, Ontario, M3B 1Z1

To Whom It May Concern:

Today I received in the mail another letter from Rogers. I assumed it would be yet another piece of admail – what would have been the third this week – but opened it anyway. Instead, I found the attached notice that the price of my Rogers’ services would be going up again this year. $1.50/mo for basic cable, and $2.04/mo for internet; a 5.3% and 4.5% increase, respectively. That’s double the rate of inflation over the last few years, and five times the rate of inflation projected for this year. This is not a unique increase from Rogers: indeed, I have seen the cost of my services go up at this rate every year since I first signed up.

I am on a fixed income and I simply can’t afford to watch my services get more expensive every year like this. The change does not take place until March, which gives us a little over a month to find a solution. I sincerely hope to hear back from Rogers that this notice was sent in error and there will be no increase for 2009; if not, I’ll have to pick one of my services to downgrade or cancel outright.

A straightforward suggestion: Rogers currently sends me an enormous amount of admail (addressed and otherwise). I get, on average, 3 pieces just from Rogers every week; up to 15 ads every month. Even if the bulk admail rate with Canada Post is only 25 cents per item, Rogers could find the savings to more than make up for the proposed rate increase just by cutting out these mailings, and that’s not even including the marketing cost of designing or printing them! Believe me, Rogers is not an unknown name in this city; saturating homes with ads (especially homes that are all ready Rogers customers) will not bring the kind of subscriptions that stopping the ever-increasing price spiral will.

I look forward to hearing from you soon;

–Potato

PS: Most of those aforementioned ads are for Rogers Home Phone. My regular rate with Bell is $18.48/mo for home phone, and while they’ve fiddled with their long distance rates several times in the last decade, that base price has not increased once. Your $19.99/mo promotional offer does not impress me, no matter how many times a week it comes in the mail.

Surprisingly, they actually called me today. They’ve put a credit on my account to counter-act the price increase, but only for 3 months. Still, that’s better than nothing. They’ve also stopped the addressed admail. I tried to tell the guy that my point about the admail was not that it was annoying me specifically, but that it looked like Rogers had a problem somewhere along the chain of their marketing department and they were basically wasting money (and wasting money on one hand while demanding more from me didn’t make me a happy customer). I had to leave to get to work and the guy had a bit of an attitude like he was doing me a huge favour, so I just thanked him for the discount and let it rest at that. But for the most part I’m just astounded I got a call back: this is not the first complaint letter I’ve sent Rogers (and not the first one about price hikes), but this is the first response I’ve ever gotten (though I did get a more substantial discount when I called to cancel my Extreme service back when that went from a $2 premium over express to $10). I’m sure they’ll go away in May when my bill goes up $3.54+tx, but for now Rogers has actually managed to inspire the warm n’ fuzzies by having the courtesy to acknowledge my complaint (ok, maybe not “warm n’ fuzzies”, but definitely the this-is-not-a-faceless-corporation-out-to-swallow-my-soulzies).

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