Blessed by the Potato

Just a quick note to the Rogers users out there: Rogers will begin charging for going over your monthly download cap (60 GB for Express, 100 GB for Extreme) soon. Of course, knowing Rogers, they’d never tell you that until you actually got a bill from them for it. The usage monitor tool (when it works) now shows the charge amount as well as your usage to date. At the moment the overage charge is $1.25/GB (which seems a little steep already), but that will be going up to $2/GB for Express (each tier is anticipated to have its own overage charge amount, Extreme at $1.50/GB, and Ultra-Lite at $2.75/GB), and the cap will be coming down (down?!) to 50 GB for Express. It is believed that the charges will go into effect in September, but will be waived until December (so if you just look at the bottom line of your bill, you might not notice until December, but if you look at the service breakdown, you may see a funny charge/refund set of lines starting this month… assuming you go over your cap). The maximum overage charge is anticipated to be $50 (though if you’re a 300 GB/mo downloader, Rogers may drop you).

Personally, this probably won’t affect me. When I had Extreme, the most I ever downloaded in a month was 62 GB, and that was when torrents worked and I was connected to a WoW server for half the day. My usage now is typically in the 20-40 GB range, but that’s just a little too close for comfort if the cap becomes 50 GB (especially if I get back into online gaming). It comes off as pretty scuzzy, especially with throttling being used as another measure to limit bandwidth use, and so many price increases seen in the past few years. If I thought the phone lines in this house could handle DSL, I’d probably switch to Teksavvy. (Unfortunately, half the phones in the house have a lot of audible static, which just can’t be good for DSL — and I still haven’t found the phone demark box in the basement).

Gifts for a couple at their wedding is a cute tradition: stock them up on all the things they’ll need for their new lives together… and to avoid ending up with 5 breadmakers and a baker’s dozen fondue kits, or to get a matching set of china or silverwear one piece at a time, gift registries evolved. These days, it gets harder as a lot of people getting married already have the stuff they need to start their lives together, because they’ve already been living on their own (and, since there are two of them, may in fact have two of everything they need to start their lives).

But that’s a rant for another time.

What I want to complain about today is the HBC (the Bay, Zellers, Home Outfitters) gift registry. A friend of ours is going to get married later this month and registered there, and I can’t believe the very basic features that are missing. First, the upside: my understanding is that they get to visit the stores (the Bay and Home Outfitters) and just go crazy-go-nuts in the store with a bar code reader as though they were on a shopping spree (which, essentially, they are), and it all gets added to the list. Guests can access the list online and buy things right off the website. However, there is no mechanism that I can find to cross gifts off the list except by actually buying them from the registry. If you get the same item at another store (for example, Caynes), you’d be hard pressed to get someone at the Bay to take it off their list. Heck, even if you got the item at the Bay and forget to tell the cashier that at the time, I don’t know if they would let you go back and cross it off the list unless you did a full return and rebuy (or at least that’s the vibe I’m getting, I haven’t tried it). That’s pretty stupid in my opinion. Yes, it helps force guests to buy at the store where the registry is kept, which gets more business for them, but I think the increased probability to shop there should be enough incentive for a company to host a registry, and as a courtesy should make it easy to scratch off items bought elsewhere (after all, if the couple gets two of a particular item, they may very well assume that the store didn’t properly maintain the list, and not recommend them…).

What’s even weirder is that even though Home Outfitters and the Bay are all part of HBC, they maintain separate lists for the couple. Even though (some) of the same items are available from both stores, if an item appears on the Home Outfitters list, we can’t buy it at the Bay. Furthermore, when Wayfare did buy an item in store, the saleslady seemed to have real trouble comprehending the concept of taking it with her and wrapping it. She was all keen on pushing the service where they can ship it to the store nearest them where they registered, and they can pick all the gifts up together (granted, it’s probably more convenient than trying to get one of the groomsmen to stay sober enough to be responsible for trucking the gifts after the reception, but it’s a lot less personal).

I’m sure somewhere out there (and I haven’t looked, not even a quick Google search) there’s a decent web service that will let you register for an arbitrary number of items at as many competing stores as you like, and guests can knock items off the list at their leisure (perhaps even before leaving to pick them up)… or at the very least a PHP/SQL script… Actually, something like that might come in handy come next Potatomas…

The 12-volt outlet (cigarette lighter) in my car has been broken ever since my brother had the stereo system installed, possibly since before it came into our family. It’s never really bothered me. While I am a little anal about monitoring the air pressure in my tires, and always carry an air compressor in the trunk, I’ve managed to keep my tires inflated through the use of other people’s 12-volt power or the free air pumps at service stations.

I don’t know how long this has been going on, but I stopped at two different Esso stations in the past week, and both had started charging 50 cents to use their air compressors. Outrageous! For now, Petro-Canada, Shell, Sunoco, and Loblaws/Supercentre gas stations still have free air compressors (though the new Shell at Hwy 7 and Woodbine hides theirs around back halfway along the car wash lane). Considering how relatively cheap an air compressor is, how long they last, and how important properly inflated tires can be for safety, I’m really surprised at that move. Providing free air is just a cost of doing business for a gas station, and not a very big one, either. While I don’t run a gas station myself, an educated guess would suggest keeping the windshield cleaning stations topped up with cleanser, paper towels, and squeegees would cost more over time than the air compressor. I find this especially disturbing and surprising since they jumped straight to a 50 cent charge, instead of starting at just a quarter, and since they jumped into the mess all on their own.

Well, looks like I won’t be buying gas from Esso any more… which is a good point that Wayfare made: how much can they possibly be making, 50 cents at a time, from the few people who actually check their tire pressures regularly? Does that at all compare to the amount of goodwill they stand to lose from cheapskates like me?

So with the trip to Ottawa and the cottage coming up, we thought it was best to secure some online access with a dial-up account. It was a surprisingly difficult ordeal. Many websites for ISPs would forward us around due to acquisitions and mergers before we found what the new ISP name was, and then many of them made it difficult to find the access numbers needed for all the cities we would (or might) visit. Oddly enough, many also made it difficult to actually order an account.

Take Bell Sympatico for instance. We tried calling them first because we knew that they had access all across the country. We even have most of the access numbers already since my dad uses Sympatico at the cottage (I was tempted to just use my dad’s account and hope that they wouldn’t notice the simultaneous connection). But it took a lot of navigating around their website before we finally found which number to call. Wayfare called to order, and after 20 minutes was pulling her hair out and swearing never to use Bell again for anything.

First, she tried the online chat feature (which sounds like a good idea — the internet support people should know about the internet services). That… didn’t go so well, and she was directed to call the number (310-SURF). She had to go through the frustrating automated menu, then was transferred around 3 times until she finally got a representative who told her that the line was only for high-speed DSL subscriptions and would have to transfer her for dial-up [I may get some of the details wrong here, she’s got them all somewhere and may correct me in the comments]. That transfer lead to her being on hold for something like 5 minutes [after something like 20 minutes had already elapsed], then she was told to call a different number (310-SURF) where she could find someone who could help her. Now, that’s just criminal: a customer should never have to call back to a company to get help, especially when all they’re trying to do is something completely ordinary: order a service and give the company money. And a customer should never, ever have to call the same number back. She pointed this out, and the rep told her that she would have to call back, and then told her which specific menu options to pick to get someone. He turned out to be completely, flabbergastingly wrong. So, going through another chain of reps and hold periods, including being transferred to India (possibly Pakistan, definitely a weak international connection either way), she got someone who was going to try to sell her some dial-up internet access. She was asked for the number she would connect from. She explained that she wanted roaming access while we were on vacation, that we’d be connecting from all over Ontario (and possibly Quebec)… and the rep told her that wasn’t possible. Now, that’s just plain wrong. I know it’s wrong, since the whole purpose of my dad having a Sympatico account is because we can use it while roaming, with access numbers everywhere. So all in all, an hour of Wayfare’s time wasted (more in fact, since the service was so bad she’s going to have to write them a letter to complain).

So we tried really hard to go with Bell, to give them our money and stick with the familiar, but they wanted no part of it. Back to surfing the internet for recommendations for other ISPs. We found a few really cheap ones local to Ottawa and the cottage area, and considered getting one account for each place if we couldn’t find an ISP with access to both. Eventually, I found out that Teksavvy has a dial-up plan (in addition to their DSL service) at a pretty reasonable rate, with access in Barrie, Ottawa, and pretty much anywhere in Quebec we might care to go. Whether or not Barrie was a local call to the cottage was still up in the air, but Teksavvy has such an excellent reputation that I figured we’d go with them for Ottawa/Quebec access at least, and possibly figure out the cottage later [though it turns out Barrie is local]. The toll free number to call was in pretty small print, so I wasn’t hugely impressed by that (what happened to the giant “order now! Call:” banners that used to plague ISP websites?), but the guy who answered the phone was great. He:

Of course, these shouldn’t necessarily be shining examples of outstanding customer service, but simply par for the course. The fact that it’s not is just simply a shame upon the other call centres. Anyhow, now I think Teksavvy will be our ISP for every summer where we need roaming dial-up access.

One thing I’m surprised I haven’t seen is advertisements for short-term contract dial-up access for vacationers. I believe I saw one once, nearly 10 years ago, for one of the PEI ISPs…

Other than dial-up, we did briefly look into the possibility of the high-speed wireless modems from Rogers and Bell. However, we weren’t sure of how well they’d perform (cell coverage at the cottage can be spotty), and how cost effective they’d be (Rogers only mentions a purchase option for the modem, as well as setup fees, and they can be a real pain to negotiate with for short periods of time, e.g.: charging for two months if you just want to use it for the last week of July and the first week of August; Bell’s service was excessively expensive and they only listed their “pricing with 2 year contract” — no idea how much it would cost to only use for a month).

This security light has caused us nothing but trouble. First, it was old and cycling a lot (they’re supposed to be changed every 3 years from the listed manufacturer’s lifetime rating — but they don’t burn out like incandescents, they just start cycling more, drawing more and more power, while providing less and less light), and alone was consuming about a third of our household’s electricity use. Then we had to wait months for a dry day to try to get on the roof (it was just one of those winters/springs where the roof was constantly covered in snow or rain) to change it out. When we finally borrowed a ladder (and a brave soul) to get up there, we found that the model of sodium lamp used had been discontinued. Fortunately, our landlord managed to find one for us, and we had intense orange light scaring away car thieves for about 3 days.

Now it’s dead, and I have no idea why.

The landlord took the old bulb, and I suspect she threw it out, so replacing it to see if it’s the bulb or the fixture probably isn’t going to be an option. Likewise, those high pressure sodium lamps cost over $30 (and I have no idea where she found one), so just picking up a second to test out isn’t on the table. I feel bad bugging the landlord, especially since if it’s not fixed in a week I’m going to be off in Ottawa… Ugh.

There was a big power outage last night, lasted for almost exactly an hour. I’m glad the webserver came back up — my main desktop computer was on the UPS, so I had lots of time to give it a graceful shutdown (and secretly wondered how long my old CRT would have lasted on battery power, chalking up another point for the LCD flatscreen), but the webserver was only plugged into the surge protector and went off instantly. I was afraid it would get mad at me and not automagically start Apache, but it looks like everything went off without a hitch. I didn’t even have to adjust the DNS forwarding :)

I had a dream last night that my car was stolen, again. It was exceptionally vivid and realistic. So realistic that I actually woke up believing it was true; the first thing I did when I woke up was start going through rental company listings to make sure I could get back to Toronto this weekend with my cat… then saw that my car was actually safe and sound in the parking lot. It’s a strange experience getting lost in a dreamworld like that, especially after polishing off another issue of the Sandman that week.