Blessed by the Potato

Why is it so hard to get a curling team together? I know it’s a challenging sport, involving strength, agility, balance, strategy, yelling, housework, and a creative way of keeping score. It’s also fairly expensive (only slightly cheaper than hockey, after you figure in the equipment). We’re pretty lucky at Western, since we can put a team on the ice for only $300 (plus a $90 “performance bond” to dissuade us from defaulting, which it looks like I’m going to lose this year), whereas at a private club it would run more like $300 each.

Yet even after I managed to get a team of 6 together, proven on the ice that they can handle the sport, and got them to agree to the cost (not that they’ve paid me yet), I can’t even get 3 people (just 2 others out of 5) to come to the games so we don’t forfeit.

Part of the problem, I think, is that I actually listened to people when they professed a genuine preference for the 5-7 timeslot instead of the late 9-11 pm one. Next year, I’m definitely going to sign up for the late league without consulting them: while they claim it’s rough since they all have to get up early in the morning and need their beauty sleep, or can’t stay up that late without falling down, and it’s also hard since the rink is on campus and many of them can just come straight from class/labs at 5, whereas at 9 they’d have gone home and then have to go back… the fact of the matter is that at 5, it’s too easy to let something else sneak into that timeslot and eat up curling time. “4 pm meeting? Sure, sounds good sir… oh crap, even if it’s only an hour long, I’ll still be late for curling! Sorry Tater, guess I’ll have to sit this match out.” “Oh, my class that usually ends at 4:30 leaving me with perfect timing to get to curling got out early, so I went home and now I don’t feel like coming back in. See you next week, I guess.”

It’s a shame, too, because curling is the only sport I’m actually half decent at… wait, does StarCraft count as a sport? What about in Korea?

It used to be that you would have a fairly long time to pay your bills after you got them, since companies had to give plenty of time for the snailmail system to do its thing, for cheques to clear, etc. It seems now that internet banking/bill paying and the more reliable Canada Post has taken away some of that leniency. It used to be that most bills would give me 30 days from their print date to pay them; London Hydro used to give me 60 days to pay. In another day and age, I might have waited until the last minute to pay so as to accrue interest on my money in the interim, but there’s pretty much no way to make more than a cent or two these days, so it’s just not worth the risk of procrastinating and forgetting. But on my latest London Hydro bill, the settlement date is only 15 days from the date they printed it (giving me 13 after it arrived). Still plenty of time to pay it off, but now it almost feels like they don’t trust me anymore… Odder yet is TD Waterhouse; after my last trade with them, I got the slip that noted the date settlement must be made by: the date the slip arrived in the mail, 3 days after printing. Yikes!

Different times, indeed.

Speaking of omens of the end times, it looks like Bell is finally upgrading the lines in my parents’ neighbourhood, so they may finally have an alternative to Rogers for internet access. I don’t know what’s taken them so long. We first ordered it in 1998, and at the time they said it was available, then after 2 weeks of nothing, they finally got back to us and told us it wouldn’t work, but within a year an upgrade would be done and then we could get it. So I’m a little skeptical about whether they’ll actually do it this time.

It’s weird, because my parents are fairly centrally located, and even have a large brown Bell switchbox on their front yard. I don’t know how far they are from the building that actually delivers the DSL connection, but it can’t be too far. The house was built in 1987, so it only slightly predates multiline/network wiring. I’m pretty sure that’s the cause of our problems: we got a second line for me and my modem way back in the day, and I’m positive it’s piggybacked on the same copper cable the main line is on (and often, there is a tiny bit of cross-over between the two). This, somehow, must degrade the signal enough that a DSL wouldn’t run properly (or that’s my theory anyway). Since I’ve moved out and my siblings use their cellphones for conversations they don’t want on the mainline, I’ve suggested my parents try to cancel the second line and then see if DSL will work. Unfortunately, they want to keep it for backup purposes (in case they want to make two landline calls at once) and as a fax line… So I’m not sure they’ll be able to get DSL even if the aforementioned neighbourhood upgrades are carried out by Bell.

I mention this because my Dad was complaining about Rogers again: it was really slow during the day on Monday, and he even got dropped a few times. I told him he won’t see any improvement unless he calls to complain during a problem period, but he wants me to do it, and of course it’s never that bad when I’m over (weekends & evenings). It’s not running anywhere near as fast as it should (usually less than 600 kbps), but it’s stable as a rock whenever I’m there, and the last time I complained about the speed being way below where it should be, they just told me they don’t guarantee speeds and then tried to sell me a new modem for the extreme service.

Anyway, I’ve got more to say (but not necessarily on these topics) but I have to run now for more mind-melting MRI training.

In a conversation, I don’t know how it got started, we were talking about how crappy Rogers has been treating its high speed customers. They have a monopoly on high speed internet in many areas (because Bell’s DSL is very picky on the acceptable distance to the telephone company and the quality of the line into the house), and let’s face it: even though the government may consider the presence of dial-up as a competitive option and thus don’t regulate Rogers like a monopoly… dial-up is not the same thing at all.

Anyhow, we were whining about the torrent throttling, the increased and spikey ping times from the crappy packet inspection hardware, cancelling newsgroup service, as well as older things like the switch to geocities wbpages and the junky front page, and then having the nerve to follow it all up with a price hike coming in the next few months (as well as the reintroduction of the modem rental fees).

So, one person determined that Rogers is sacrificing the internet quality (with the throttling, etc.) in order to have the upload capabilities for their new home phone service. Basically, Rogers is trying to become the largest telecommunications company there is, and is directly competing with Bell for the phone market now. They did this buy buying up AT&T, Sprint, and Fido, and introducing the digital phones that partially run on their own cable internet network. After spending that much on the phone sector, they don’t have the money or will to upgrade their internet systems, and probably won’t until they absolutely have to (whether it’s because they become even more non-functional as more people with high speed try to do more than just check their email, or because Bell finally gets DSL working at more than 4 km from the telco office and actually offers up some competition in most markets).

Here’s my response to that:

Rogers is exploiting/leveraging their de facto monopoly on high speed/cable internet in order to move into the telephone playground.

Personally, I think it’s really short-sighted of them to be neglecting the cable internet customers and infrastructure as much as they are, and I think it’ll bite them in the rear as soon as a real high-bandwidth alternative comes around, which may be around the corner if a miraculous discovery extending the range of DSL or the quality of phone line it requires happens soon. (if I win a billion dollars in the lottery, I’d totally invest it in building my own fibre optic infrastructure through Ontario to wipe the floor with Rogers just on principle… too bad the odds are low and the payouts only go up to a few million rather than billion)

The home phone sector just doesn’t seem like a big enough prize to sacrifice what was a reasonably decent internet empire for. Sure, everybody has a phone, so the market’s bigger… but in a home phone service, once you have met the not terribly stringent level of voice quality most people expect, and those few add-on packages people want (call display, voicemail, etc.), you’re only competing on price and brand name/corporate trust & service. Things that Rogers is not particularly well known for.

Whereas with high speed internet, you have your peak speeds to go on (or the reliability of those speeds no matter the time of day or neighbourhood), your bitcaps (if any), your ping times/routing, your email servers, your webhosting, newshosting, “premium content”, your network up-time, as well as price, brand name, and level of service (do you have techs just to solve problems, or also ones to help you set up your computer’s software when you get started?).

It just seems to me like a better sector to stay in and dominate properly, than to gut for a stab at an admittedly larger sector that you’re not really suited for.

I have to wonder if Rogers is getting into it just simply to spite Bell for getting into TV with their ExpressVu service.

It’s been a pretty decent winter for us this year, though my curling team hasn’t done all that great (how we can barely get enough people to keep from defaulting each week when we have 6 on the roster…). We’ve also got a departmental minispiel coming up, and being one of the few people who actually curls on a regular basis in the department, I wrote a guide for everyone else. The departmental secretary converted it into an acrobat file, and I’ve put it here so everyone else can read it as well: So You Want To Be A Curler.

It’s a short introduction that I wrote in about an hour or two, and I’ve noticed a few typos and the like after reading it again, but since it’s already in PDF I won’t bother trying to correct them; it’s still readable. While it is a decent introduction (IMHO), it was written specifically for our department, so some things may not apply. For example, if you’re going to take up curling in a proper league, you may need to provide your own broom & slider, and there may be a more stringent dress code. One-off curling nights (many clubs, departments, and even businesses seem to have them) will still provide you with brooms, but may use tape on your shoe instead of a slip-on slider (which works better).

Also, I noticed this story on the Canadian Red Cross thanks to Boing Boing. It’s a little nuts, especially for an organisation that shouldn’t be frivolously spending money. Basically, they’re “requesting” game companies stop using the Red Cross as a marker for health powerups and the like. While I can see not wanting to be in violent games at all, I think that it actually helps them a bit, since it gets into everyone’s minds that the red cross emblem is equated to healing and medicine. Furthermore, I’m not sure that the red cross deserves trademark protection in the first place — it’s a pretty basic, common symbol.

I got to watch two new episodes of Scrubs today, a feat made possible by the odd decision to film a full season and then only air them in the second half of the TV year. I really hope that stunt won’t cost them viewers (those with Neilson boxes seem to be a fickle bunch, not remembering fantastic TV shows if they don’t debut in September and stay in the same timeslot).

Today I watched them rock out in an air band and build a deck on an empty lot. It’s such a brilliant and witty show, I want to just sit here and gush about it and perform dark rituals to ensure it gets to run at least another 4 seasons… and maybe a movie trilogy after that. I wish I could write that well.

Anyway, I don’t have much else of substance to say, so I’d like to fill this space with a quick message to Baum: update your blog, I want to see pics of Dancouver!