Blessed by the Potato

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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I think the last time I watched TVO was when Today’s Special was on the air (right after Polka Dot Door), but I just noticed that they have some interesting videos on their site that you can go watch, including a recent interview* with David Suzuki. I like David Suzuki, and I hate to speak against him, because he might burst through my wall and throw a basketball at my head, but he says some downright silly things about hydrogen cars. It’s just a throwaway line though, so I’ll leave that comment at that. I also disagree a bit with his comments on nuclear: I still think it’s the only medium-term solution open to us. Demand management and renewables are going to be a vital component of managing our electrical grid, but we’re still in the hole from the shutdown of 2 reactors at Pickering and Bruce, and if we want to shut down the coal plants as well then some kind of massive capacity must be built soon. There are tricky issues with nuclear, since when it goes wrong it goes wrong in a big way — whether that’s leaks, waste management, cost overruns, or whatever. You have to make sure to have massive amounts of money and trained personnel at all times for up to a century into the future, and to keep reckless people like Stephen Harper far away. The crumbling of a country and its economy/infrastructure is no reason to let your nuclear reactors go unattended, and those costs (take out an annuity?) can be massive; higher perhaps than a straightforward massive renewables buildout in the final accounting.

On the topic of demand reduction, an article about the real-world efficiency gains of CFLs is making the rounds, brought to my attention by Michael James. Because CFLs are more efficient, they produce less waste heat… but this leads to a secondary effect: when heat in your house is desirable (such as a Canadian winter) you have to replace that heat somehow, which reduces the real-world benefit of CFLs. Professor Peter Blunden at the University of Manitoba is credited with working out the math, but no news article cites a primary source other than that, so I haven’t had a chance to see how he figures it (and I’ve looked around for a primary source and can’t find one; I’m tempted to email the guy directly). After all, you will have to replace some of the lost waste heat with more efficient bulbs in the winter, but our houses are not perfectly insulated boxes at equilibrium, so heat generated (and trapped) near your ceiling is not as effective at making your house comfortable as systems designed for heat (baseboard heaters, forced air systems, etc). Plus making heat is generally quite efficient (since inefficiencies in most devices are represented as heat production!), but making cool air in the summer is nowhere near as efficient… The various news reports of this study (back of the envelope calculation?) are reporting different numbers too, with the CBC saying that “real energy saving for Winnipeggers using CFL bulbs is probably closer to 17 per cent” but the Winnipeg Free Press giving “Winnipeggers would end up with energy and cash savings of 17 per cent, similar to Manitoba Hydro’s findings. Those who use air conditioners would see savings of around 24 per cent, he said, while cash savings will be a little higher for people who heat with gas instead of electricity.” So what does that mean for someone in Toronto with less heating requirements in the winter and the A/C cranked to full for four and a half months out of the year? Seeing his work would go a long way to figuring out the real answer.

* – This interview with Allan Gregg was less of an interview than an opportunity for David Suzuki to speak. In fact, I’ve watched a number of these interviews and they were quite enjoyable because Allan Gregg is just there to help facilitate the interesting, articulate guest speaker in ranting for a half hour, it’s a great way to do an interview (since except for David Letterman or Conan O’Brien, who really cares what the interviewer has to say?). It’s a neat series to go back through the archives and watch over at TVO.

A final note: the forwarding and dynamic IP behind the scenes here look to be getting troublesome. I don’t have time in the next month or two to get around to moving hosts (and probably upgrading wordpress as well) and all that nonsense, so for now I’m just going to add a permalink to this post whenever I remember.

Last weekend when the wind was blowing and it was -20 in the sunshine I had the unfortunate luck to not be able to start my car on the first try. There was no second — the key turned but the engine didn’t. Luckily, in a slow, painful-sounding third attempt the engine did turn over and I was on my way.

By Wednesday night though, that was it, the battery was dead. Luckily I had an eliminator emergency jump kit in the trunk so with just a minor delay I was off and made my curling game. It’s pretty clear that the battery has been run down by all the short trips I’ve been making — I haven’t gone further than the grocery store or curling in 2 months, and it’s been cold and miserable. I drove around for a half hour to charge it up again and things seem to be working ok for now, but I know that I’m going to have to replace it pretty soon, it was coming due next fall anyway. Fortunately having that eliminator in my trunk will buy me some time to get around to it at my convenience, though I’ve lost the confidence to do things like shut the car down at long lights or railway crossings to save gas.

More bad news with the car though: when I had the hood up to jump the car, I noticed that my coolant was nearly empty. My radiator has been “weak” according to my mechanic, and obviously has some rust issues, and is another thing that’s on the list to get fixed at some point in the future. However, at the time the leak was first noticed I was losing less than a litre of fluid per year. Now I’m down nearly a litre in three months. I’m tempted to just keep topping it up — as long as the leak stays small like this a tub of coolant a year is a lot cheaper than fixing a radiator on a car that’s probably only got 2-3 years of life left in it anyway — but sadly coolant is both necessary for the car’s operation (whereas a weak battery I can skimp by on as long as I’ve got the backup jumper) and if a slow, minor leak turned into a big leak I could get stuck. Plus it might be a bit of an environmental hazard (though I’m not sure if losing a litre of coolant is any worse than the four of windshield washer fluid I might go through in that time).

Update: While the battery did run fine for a few days after taking it out on a drive and charging it up, it didn’t last. It’s completely dead now (6 days later), it won’t even run the lights after I turn the car off, let alone try to start it. The eliminator looks to be good for 3-4 boosts per charge on it, which has been fantastic. I bought a new battery at Canadian Tire and installed it myself; I have to go back tomorrow to trade in my old one. Unfortunately the battery there wasn’t as cheap as I thought from looking online: the price says “from $89.99” but I suppose that’s for like a motorcycle or something. My car has a pretty “normal” battery (mid-sized 4-cylinder car), and it was $120.