Blessed by the Potato

I finally have an exam date set. May 5th it is! The email was pretty funny:

Because [Examiner #3] was not available to participate as an examiner on Potato’s defense on Friday, May 5th, I contacted [New Examiner #3] yesterday to see if he was available to replace [Examiner #3]. He contacted me a few minutes ago to say yes – he is available.

So I want to proceed with a defense date for Friday, May 5th.
(This e-mail supercedes all previous conversations – by phone or e-mail – about prospective dates that I have had with all parties involved with the defense.)

The Public Lecture will be at 9 a.m. and the oral defense at 10 a.m. Room locations to be announced.

An afternoon defense is possible as well but I plan to go with the a.m. if there are no objections.

All of you ([Examiner #1, 2, and 3], and [Admin person] as Chair) have indicated that May 5th is doable. [Supervisor] and Potato are available too.

That sort of afterthought quality to the italicized part (emphasis mine, naturally) is what’s so funny. What’s funnier is that while I find it humourous, Wayfare and her mom are sitting there busting a gut at the wording choice…

It’s nice to have a date finally set. I would have preferred a Thursday, since I want to go away the weekend after and I know I’m not getting any sleep the night before. At least it’s in the morning so I can conceivably take a nap before hitting the road. The upside is that the extra day gives me more time to procrastinate on polish my public lecture!

A quick disclaimer: I wrote this in early March (so when it says “today” or “last week”, that’s when I’m referring to), but didn’t post it at the time because I had been focusing on Rogers bashing a little too much at the time, and also because this is not one of my more readable rants (a particularly long one at that). However, Netbug recently praised Rogers Home Phone and I figured that as long as the rant was already written…

Netbug pointed out one thing that I didn’t consider in the original rant below, that you can lower the price with Rogers’ “bundles”: I could save 5% ($4.65) by bundling the phone and my internet service (analog cable doesn’t count for a bundle, but with TV it would be 10%, and 15% if I had a cell phone with them too) with a 2-year commitment. Still not worth it for me, living in rental housing with basic cable, but it might make the whole exercise less futile for someone with permanent lodging and a big screen TV. (Fun fact: for the first year and a half I lived here, I only had a 12″ TV, and watched DVDs on my computer)

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I got a flier delivered in my mail today advertising Rogers home phone service. They send me the same stupid flier almost once a week, it’s getting to be an obscene waste of paper, and I’m thinking of mailing them soon to let them know…

The biggest problem I find with the whole thing is that their pricing is completely out of whack with what it costs to get a phone (hey Rogers: you don’t have a monopoly on phones like you do with cable TV, you can’t just pull prices out of your butt!). Before we get into the details, here’s my a priori assumptions and ideas on the matter: Bell is the old school monopoly, and the incumbent phone service provider. As far as landlines go, they are “the” company to go with. As a result, one might expect that they would have the highest prices, both due to residual monopoly thinking, and due to the value of their name brand.

Telus has offerings, and is a fairly well-known telephone company. Rogers, while well-known for cable and cell phone service, is a complete newcomer to the landline (I think it’s technically VOIP) industry [update: I’m pretty sure it’s only VOIP to the CTMS — that is, the cable head-end for your neighbourhood. After that, it’s on the phone system, not the internet — another source says that it’s simply reselling of Bell’s normal phone lines]. Thus, I would expect Rogers to offer the best prices in order to get people to switch to their service. After all, as a consumer I’m fundamentally lazy, so I will only switch services if there is a savings involved, or if I believe the quality of the product or service will be better. For example, I generally avoid shopping at Futureshop unless there is a significant cost savings, as the staff there are generally smacktards, whereas the staff at the Business Depot located in the same mall here are much better behaved. For me, the smacktard cost is about 5-10%. About a year ago I bought a laptop at Business Depot even though it was $50 more because the staff were more helpful, and relented after the first rejection of the extended service ripoff–err… contract. For my parents’ wireless router, however, I ended up getting it at Futureshop, since it was $30 cheaper.

Anyhow, for the matter at hand. The ubiquitous Rogers flier arrives in my mail again last week, and being a day where I’m already 3 hours late for work, I decide to read it (I can be a real retard at times). Here’s the offer: Local phone service + 1 calling feature, $29.95/mo (plus system access fee of $4.25). Add on unlimited long distance for $19.95/mo, or 1200 evenings & weekends minutes for $18/mo (less if you call less than 225 minutes). Fine print: Actually not too bad. Oddly enough, you’re prohibited from using your long distance access to send faxes (though I doubt that’s enforced).

It’s not a terrible deal, I’ll admit, but here’s how my Bell bill breaks down:
Local access: $19.13/mo, plus $5.95 access fee. I don’t get a “calling feature”, but it’s still $9.12 cheaper. The long distance is slightly different: right now I pay $18.95/mo for 1200 minutes (essentially unlimited for me), but they’re only good evenings and weekends. For the most part, I don’t find that to be a burden, the few calls I do have to make during the day rarely run up more than $1-2/mo. Looking at my Bell bill, I noticed that the system access fee is going to go up in April by $1.50. So I called to complain, and the agent was actually really helpful, which is a huge, refreshing change for phone support in companies (there was also no waiting on hold period, so I suspect it was a slow day and he was bored). Nothing to be done about the system access fee, of course, but I found out that my $19 plan had been upgraded to 1200 anytime minutes, and the 1200 evening & weekends plan had gone down to $12/mo. So, I had him switch me down to that cheaper plan (like I said, I hardly ever use the phone during the day). They also threw in a $7 credit towards the daytime long distance I had used in the last few months after the plan changed since they didn’t automatically upgrade me to the same-price “anytime” plan.

That makes the final bill about $13.50 cheaper for Bell (with my new long distance package), but assuming I pick up a calling feature at $6 to make the packages the same, Bell is still $7.50 cheaper.

Granted, if you absolutely, positively need call waiting, call display, visual call waiting, call answer, and call forwarding, then you’ll come out ahead with Rogers, since they charge about half what Bell does for the add-ons. For me, that doesn’t work: I’m very old school with my calling features, since those per month charges really add up. A year or two with call answer, and you’ve paid for your answering machine (though you do miss out on the ability to take messages while on the phone). I dislike call waiting (email me or call my cell if I’m on the phone and you need to get through), particularly since when you choose to ignore it since you’re on an important call, the person on the other end can never tell if you’re not home or what — a busy signal actually says something :). And with a cell phone, it just becomes a matter of “manual call forwarding” — getting people to try you on your cell themselves (without eating up airtime for forwarded telemarketers). Finally, for call display, I figure: why bother? I almost always answer it even when I can plainly tell it’s a telemarketer, and when I don’t feel like answering the phone, I let whoever it is leave a message (even if I can tell that it’s my mom and she hates when I do that).

This is simply not a very good deal, certainly not enough of a savings to make me switch. Bell has its issues at times (there are some billing horror stories out there), but their home phone service seems to be the best branch (most of the nightmares are for expressvu, sympatico, and wireless, in roughly that order too). The reliability is very impressive — I’m not sure Rogers’ phones would still work if we had another multi-day blackout like we did two summers ago, and that’s not factoring in the usual late-night outages that used to plague Rogers and still happen occasionally.

It reminds me of a discussion raging recently about the Rogers digital cable service. My parents got it, and have not seen the benefit. There’s been talk about discontinuing analog service in the next few years, since it eats up a lot more of the spectrum on the cable than digital TV does. The sooner Rogers can get everyone switched over, the better. However, the benefits just don’t seem to be there for regular people like me and my parents. There are many advertised benefits, and some quiet downsides.

First, the real benefits we’ve seen are pretty much limited to the time-shifting channels and Rogers On Demand. However, there’s very little free stuff on ROD, and what you have to pay for looks pretty over priced: I’m better off walking to the video store most of the time. The picture is clearer on some channels, but most have no difference (for HD, you’ll need a HDTV and a more expensive HD tuner box from Rogers; and this is a household where everyone wears corrective lenses, so buying a new HD TV isn’t a very high priority).

The downsides are numerous, starting with the cost (about 25% more than analog, at least for the basic package). The program guide is a joke (and is down or wrong a lot, especially in the middle of the night). Channel hopping is painful, as the digital tuner is significantly slower than the analog tuner built into most TVs. The seperate tuner adds a seperate remote; while the remote can learn to turn your TV on and off, it only controls the volume from the cable box, which doesn’t give you the kind of range you get when controlling the TV directly. Note that someone has refuted this point, and told me that if I “read the manual” I’ll find that there’s a way to program the remote to change the volume on the TV instead. Unfortunately, I never found this, and my parents’ system didn’t come with much of a manual, just a 16-page installation guide. Wayfare’s dad, who’s very knowledgable about technology, couldn’t get it working on his system either, and if he can’t do it what hope is there for the rest of us? Since the cable comes into the tuner box first, and then out to your TV or VCR (or DVR if you’re more hip to the times), if you want to record something you’ll need to program both devices to work together. My parents just barely got the hang of setting up the VCR to tape shows, so they’ve given up all hope of recording off the digital cable.

There are benefits to be had, but they largely seem to benefit Rogers: if everyone goes to digital cable, they can discontinue analog, freeing up spectrum on the cable for other things. And digital terminals don’t require a technician to come by to change the filters every time you choose a new channel lineup.

Well, I still don’t have a firm date for my thesis defense, which means that my thesis isn’t technically due yet, but I handed it in today anyway. It brought me a brief moment of joy. Not the sort of joy that you might expect from sexual ecstacy, nor even that brought about from a passionate kiss… more like the kind of joy you experience when you fold the laundry and realize you have exactly the right number of socks.

Of course, if it turns out that I have a May defense and thus have another week before it’s due, I might just run over and take it back to fiddle and worry until the last minute…

Well, my trustly little webserver has been locking up with increasing frequency. I still get nearly a week before I have to reset it, but it’s no longer a guaranteed seven days like before, which puts me in the embarrassing position of having other people tell me that my website has gone down. So as a bit of a thesis gift to myself — and since the website looks to be fairly stable and extremely productive at the moment — I’m going to buy some professional webspace. I tried to find a Canadian host since Americans scare me a little at the moment, even though I know I don’t exactly have schemata for Rube Goldberg devices of terror hosted here. Unfortunately, the pickings are slim.

Right now I’m trying to decide between Monster Hosting, a Canadian host with a fairly cheap plan at $7/mo, and LunarPages, an American host at $8/mo (Canadian). BlackSun came highly recommended and was in the running for a while, but I’m trying to do this on the cheap, so their $10/month rate and $25 setup fee pretty much killed that. (I know, it’s lunacy to be agonizing over like $20 per year, but there you have it.)

LunarPages is offering a ton more bandwidth as well as a free domain name. I also know of one person using LunarPages, so that’s another plus to them (both for the more relevant referral, and also because I can help out a friend through their referral kickback program). MonsterHosting seems a lot smaller, and I don’t really know how much I can trust the few positive reviews of it I’ve seen. But I don’t really see their lower bandwidth offerings as a huge drawback since it’s still well above what I’m using now, and it might indicate that they’re a little more honest with being able to deliver what they sell. While the domain won’t be free, I can register holypotato.ca through them, which appeals to me a bit more than holypotato.net (or going with some other .com for my free LunarPages address).

So if anyone has any final advice before I end up flipping a coin and taking the plunge, let me know (especially if you can get a referral out of me :)

My defense date still hasn’t been finalized, and it’s killing me here. I’ve been making changes and corrections to my thesis like crazy here — sometimes going back and undoing changes the more I look at it. It’s a difficult process, as one person who reads it will suggest a change for a certain part, and the next person who reads it will think that part is great as it is and shouldn’t change. This is a particularly difficult process for the parts that are shall we say a little more “poetic” — the flowery wording confuses some, whereas others are grateful that it doesn’t read like a phone book for that one little part. There are also different grammatical interpretations for some parts. For example, in one place in my results, I start a sentence with “25…” and one of my supervisors keeps circling that through every revision saying I can’t start a sentence with an arabic numeral. But it would be a little awkward to change it up to start another way, and we also have a rule of thumb of not spelling out most numbers (particularly not above twelve). Of all the perversions to the “standard” rules of writing scientists willfully propagate, I would think the arabic numeral one would be right at the top. I think I could keep doing revisions eternally, but at some point I do have to hand it in. Since my date hasn’t been nailed down, there’s a chance it could be as early as April 25th — which means the thesis has to go in tomorrow.

I suppose it’s true when writers say that a story is never finished, merely abandoned.

I’m trying to put a brave face on the whole thing, saying things like “oh yeah, it’s all over tomorrow: I’m gonna be hot shit now. Lasers will shoot out of a wide variety of orifices!” But truthfully I’m terrified that there are major problems that I’ve missed (and I know of a bunch of minor ones that just aren’t going to be fixed for one reason or another). I don’t know whether I’d prefer to find out tomorrow that I have a later date so I can fix it up more, or to just have to give it in once and for all so I can stop worrying about it.

I hit the Costco here shortly after Potatomas, when I got a membership as a gift. Most of the candy I got disappeared within a few weeks, despite the big boxes. However, I still can’t even see the bottom of my box of Lotsa Fizz candy, so I think after I drop off my thesis tomorrow morning, I’ll head out to Costco and get more of that. Of course, that’s partly because each mediocre hard candy piece is secretly smuggling an explosive cargo of fizzy sugar waiting to terrorize my teeth and intestines alike, and the reason they’re still around is not due to great value, but rather to a very real fear of death in the case of overconsumption. So maybe I shouldn’t get any more…

Speaking of abusing your body, I heard of a “fun” new drinking game today. I don’t drink, but do have some appreciation for some of the drinking games out there. There are the geeky ones, such as when you (“you” being loosely applied in this case, and only applies to engineers) sit in a circle and go around counting up from person to person, but you must remember to not say any multiple of seven, clapping instead. Anyone who screws up the pattern has to take a drink. Or the cool TV-related ones, such as taking a sip every time Picard adjusts his uniform on ST:TNG, and taking a shot every time a commercial comes on promising us that next episode, yes the very next episode, they will finally kill Janeway off Voyager. On second thought, that’s pretty geeky, too. Anyhow, the point is that they can be kind of fun even when you’re sober and they can also teach you things, such as your seven times tables, or to watch TV closely, looking for subtle events. As I was saying, I heard of a new drinking game today: what you do is you eat a few handfuls of Captain Crunch cereal so that you cut up the roof of your mouth a bit lot, and then just go shot-for-shot until someone starts to tear up from the pain.

Baum had this to say when I pitched the idea to him “but why?” True, it’s not as educational as some of the other drinking games out there. It may not be as much fun, either. But man would it make for a great story later. I mean, if you’re gonna get smashed and do stupid things, you might as well go in with a plan for your nonsense, right? Most importantly, this would be hilarious for the sober person in the room to watch, and would conveniently provide plenty of Captain Crunch to go around for everyone.