loglog

Finally I made time to move loglog over to a new content management system, so I can use some new and nifty features. I spent many hours fine-tuning style sheets and modifying impenatrable PHP-code, and photoshopping images and this is the result. I hope you like it.

You can re-arrange the boxes to the right by dragging them, and you can collapse the ones you don’t want.

I categorized a good many of the old posts, but I haven’t finished that gargantuan task. Still 500 posts to do… I’ll continue doing that later.

I also use Gravatars on this site. These are small icons that you can use to represent yourself when you leave a comment. Set one up for yourself (it’s free and there aren’t even ads on their site) at the Gravatar website.

If there are any problems, please don’t hesitate to let me know, either by leaving a comment or by sending me an e-mail.

Yup, today I signed my life away.

After my lamenting about the outrageous cost of the iPhone in Canada I thought I would never buy one. Maybe an iPod touch (which is basically an iPhone that can’t make calls) but no iPhone.

But today my eye fell on a leaflet that announced a special deal: a voice plan for only $17.50 per month. It includes 200 minutes per month which is plenty for someone who almost never calls. I asked if I could use that as my iPhone plan, and just add a $30 data plan to it? The sales rep had to ask his superior, but then told me that that was indeed a possibility.

One of the reasons I didn’t use my previous ‘Pay-as-you-Go’ phone is that every call was outrageous expensive. That will change now, because I’ve already paid for those minutes. (I don’t know what will happen when I don’t use all those 200 minutes per month; will they roll over to the next month or are they just gone? I have to look that up.)

Of course Rogers adds some ridiculous fees to it but in total my monthly bill will be less than $65 including all taxes and fees. Over the course of the 3-year contract that will still be more than $2300 but it is substantially less than the $5700 I had calculated previously.

I had some problems setting things up (they sent me an email with a temporary voice mail password that was not correct), and my data connection stopped working after a few hours, so I spent some time on hold with Rogers’ Tech Support, but it works pretty well now. Of course I can spent hours and hours tweaking settings and installing applications (like a Twitter and Facebook client, so I can stay totally in the loop) but I’ll try to spread that out over a couple of days.

[From the photo it's obvious the camera doesn't like our yellow walls in low-light.]

Update: All minutes you didn’t use in a month are gone. Use it or lose it. So the 9 cents per minute I pay now, might become 35¢/min when I don’t call a lot. How is that in other countries? How you are supposed to keep track of your minutes is unclear. My iPhone has a usage counter, but it also counts all the long calls to Rogers’ support help line. Four of those calls today, totalling more than one hour. Most of it spent on hold, (yay for speakerphone!) but my call was dropped twice. That seems to be an iPhone problem, hopefully fixable with software. My calls to tech support were about the unused minutes (no mention at all about this on the website), and about visual voicemail (they had sold me the wrong add-on plan; the first month is free, after that I’m going to cancel it anyway but I want to see how it works.)

I installed a lot of apps and deleted some of them after I tried them. The only application I bought was an iPhone version of my ToDo-list application. They talk to eachother to keep things synchronised.

Being downtown and being an Apple “fanboi” I decided to attend the grand opening of the first Canadian Apple Flagship Store. Well, it involved just standing in line and chatting with people for an hour, so survival didn’t prove that hard.

The store looks clean, empty-ish and boring, just like the other Apple stores i visited. There was an abundance of staff present who cheered and hi-fived us when we entered the store. Kind of cheesy and very loud.

It’s nice I don’t have to go to Laval anymore if I want something. But I have all the Apple gear I want (read: can afford) so I won’t be visiting that often. But I scored a nice T-shirt and that was well worth the wait. I actually like it and I’m not going to sell it on eBay.

I saved a lot of money today.

For over a year I’ve been eying an iPhone, Apple’s hot touchscreen gadget. Recently it was announced that the iPhone would come to Canada and also that developers would be able to write applications for it. I have some ideas for a couple of cool iPhone games so that would be a reason to justify the purchase.

But today Rogers, the only carrier that has a GSM network in Canada, announced their subscription rates. But their 3-year contract and exuberant high monthly fees would mean that an iPhone would cost me 5700 dollars and that without unlimited use of the Internet, my main reason for getting it. There’s no way I’m going to pay that. No iPhone for me.

But I saved even more money. I planned to go to an outdoor concert of one of my favourite bands, Sigur Rós from Iceland. So this morning I called Admission, the Québec Ticketmaster monopolist, to buy some tickets. My ears fell almost off my head when they told me there was a surcharge of 8 dollars per ticket for their services. Eight dollar for picking up the phone! And 5 dollar on top of that as a fee to pick your tickets up at the box office. So I told them that was ridiculous and hung up. No Sigur Rós for me.

If I’ve the time and inclination I might check tomorrow if I can still buy tickets in a brick-and-mortar music store in town. Support your local businesses.

And I might look into buying a hacked phone when/if they come available but for now the deal is off.

I feel so frugal now.

We’re a couple of days in New York City, visiting friends and visiting the city. We saw an installation by former Talking Heads singer David Byrne, in which he attached a organ to a building. Playing the organ causes all kinds of whistles, clicks, bangs and rumbles.

Just being in that building, an old ferry terminal, was already nice. All these sounds added to the experience and made it even better.

My camera, after almost 7 years, gave up the ghost. It fails intermittently, sometimes with beautiful results but this wasn’t exactly the photo I wanted to make.

We were at the yearly Nuit Blanche, an all-night event during which a lot of places like museums, cinemas and other venues are opened for free until 05h00. There are also many special events like almost free wine tasting (one glass Chianti for me, water for Alison) and this dance show by students of the UQAM.

It was very busy and for almost all events there were big lines of people waiting. We are not so big on waiting so we just left the lines as they were and went only to a small number of events but walked a lot through the snow. Unfortunately I had made a terrible shoe choice, having spent mostly indoors for a week working on a computer application. So my low sneakers were soaked quite fast by the puddles of melting snow.

The spectators for the dance performance were located in a courtyard and most of the dancing took place behind the windows of the university building surrounded the courtyard. Very nice, even though I was standing in deep snow with soaked shoes.

The dance show appeared to both of us as a homage to the dancing lady that was on display a couple of blocks away from the dance show venue. It was a perpetually projection of the silhouette of a naked dancing woman, as an advertisement for a strip club. That building is recently razed, and the seedy projection will be missed by many.

We didn’t stay that long, after 23h00 Alison was tired and wanted to go home. I begrudgingly complied.

A new camera is ordered, my birthday present. Alison bought it at Amazon in the US where it was almost half the price of a very discounted model at Future Shop. Plus free shipping and no taxes. I’ll pick it up at a forwarding service just over the US-Canadian border.

No, I didn’t go for the DP1, but for a Panasonic Lumix with a 10x Leica zoom lens. It will be a huge improvement compared to my current Canon camera with 3 seconds shutter lag and 1 inch screen. You’ll see the results here soon, I hope you will notice the improvement.

Just got a call from Bell. Not an actual person but one of those automated calling machines. The voice tells me it has a message about my phone number, and to please call this toll-free number to talk to us. Bell wants to sell us something? We’re not spending enough time on the phone? We’re using Jajah too much?

So I called said number. Turns out that someone stole our phone number. And since it is an unlisted number they were giving us the option to get a new unlisted number, free of charge. Of course they wouldn’t pay for new stationary, messages to notice all our friends, relatives and other contacts and all the time it would cost.

So I declined.

After I hung up I did a search on Google for this story and found out that we weren’t the only “victim”, but that someone got hold of 3.4 million telephone numbers, 5% of which are unlisted. That’s a lot of new phone numbers to give away, more numbers than are currently “free” in our area code. So the likelihood we get an unlisted number that was recently used by someone else is very high. And then you get all these people calling and asking for Jean-Marie, Claude or Sophie. No thanks. I previously had that with my cell phone which is of course far worse because it costs me 40 cents each time I pick up the phone.

I’m not too worried about the fact that our number is now in the wild. We mainly have an unlisted (strangely enough it cost money to have an unlisted phone number; you’d think that it would cost less because they don’t have to list it) phone number because we don’t get as much unsolicited direct marketing calls around supper time. If they will increase now, I can finally play out this anti-telemarketing script.

For all readers who wants to read loglog in their RSS reader I’ve now enabled full feeds. You now not only get the photos but also the words, so you don’t have to click through anymore. If there are any problems please let me know.

Update 29 September, 2008:

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I went with a client on a hunt today for a bathtub. He’s quite tall and wants me to make a new, larger bathroom for him, but he has a hard time finding a bathtub that fits his frame, one that is actually big enough for him to lie in.

After visiting a number of stores we both have to pee. But asking “Do you have a bathroom?” in a bathroom store is kind of awkward, and pissing in the showroom toilets is generally frowned upon (apparently it does happen though, at least that’s what I heard). So we head to a Tim Hortons nearby and have a muffin and an orange juice. Coincidentally we order exactly the same muffin and the same kind of juice.

Afterwards we drive the long way home and even though a lot of people are on vacation, there is still a lot of traffic and it takes quite a while. I drop of my client, and when I arrive at home I can’t find my bag. I search the car, but it’s a big red bag and not easily overlooked.

The dogs are barking around me while I try to concentrate and think where I remember I had my bag the last time. I think it was at the Tim Hortons. I get the Yellow Pages, but can’t find them. Wait, the internet! But on the Tim Hortons website there is no restaurant finder. Canada411.ca. No Tim Hortons in Montréal on that street. O wait, Pierrefonds is de-merged and is a separate municipality now. Yes, there it is, in the long list of telephone numbers. I call the number and start talking to the woman who picks up in English. They all speak English in the West-Island so I’m surprised when she asks “French, please?”. I repeat my question (”Have you found my bag?”) in French, she goes to look in the place I tell her I was seating and then she comes back: “Non monsieur, votre sac n’est pas là…”

Fuck.

It now really dawns to me. I lost my bag. My really nice red bag. With my camera in it, and my cigars. And my brand new MacBook Pro laptop.
I thank the woman for watching and give her my phone number just in case. Just before I hang up I ask if there are any other Tim Hortons in Pierrefonds? She answers me that she’s not in Pierrefonds but in Côte de Lièsse. OMG. I called the wrong restaurant! Yes, it is the telephone number just below the one we visited. I get new hope. It’s not even an hour ago since we left. I call again, making sure to call the right number this time.

Unfortunately my hope proved futile. My bag hadn’t been found. I call all the bathroom stores we went to, one at the time. No luck.

Shit.

I call Alison and she has no idea what to say to cheer me up.

I hang up, and I don’t know what to do. I haven’t even paid off my credit card bill of the new laptop and I already lost it. Visa will be happy. Then I remember that my bank just recently upgraded me to a new credit card that included an extended warranty or something. I frantically try to find the leaflet that came with it. Yeah, there it says: “The Purchase Security Plan protects most purchases made with the card for ninety (90) days from purchase.” I quickly try to find the line that says what is meant with that word most. I’m sure I will find a line saying that “computers are excluded”. But there is no such line. I call the toll-free number, and someone takes my card number, address and the value of the item I lost. Thanks to Apple’s online invoices I can still find that information. She’ll send me a form that I’ll have to complete. Wow.

For the first time in an hour I can sit and calm down a bit. There is a possibility I didn’t lose a huge pile of money, but just some.

I eat a cracker with cheese and try to recall what I’ve lost, what haven’t I backed up yet.
Some photos, obviously. But for the rest I just lost the changes I made today and last night to the drawings of my client’s bathroom. Just a couple of hours to re-create those, so that’s not too bad. A good thing I worked on woodworking projects the past week and that I make regular backups. But not daily, even though I bought a new hard drive just for that purpose. But I haven’t had time to set it up yet.

I even manage to look at it from the bright side: I now have an excuse to replace my 6 year old camera.

What do you do when you are in the U.S. and Apple just introduced a new gadget?

You head to the Apple store and let your inner geek out. This photo was taken with an iPhone by myself so it’s a bit wide-anglish. I then mailed it to myself because that is the only way to get stuff of the phone.

iPhone itself is quite impressive. If I was into cell phones, had money to burn and lived in God’s own country, I might have been seriously tempted to buy one. But neither of these pre-requisites are met so I’m safe. But still it was nice to play with the thing for half an hour.

In the store there was a big table with 15 iPhones all logged in to the Wifi network so the connections were fast. The internet browser is absolutely fantastic and I can see you can actually read whole web pages. You can easily zoom in and out and scroll over any webpage just with your finger tip.