Category Archives: Tech

Bell Network Charges are Way too High

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Permit me to rant for just a moment, if you will.

Got the girls’ cell phone bill last week, opened it and was unpleasantly surprised to see it was about double what it normally is.  Further analysis revealed that the extra charges were from mobile browsing, almost $50 for each phone.  Wow, that’s a lot of mobile browsing, you might say.  You would be wrong.  The amount of data for each phone was less than a megabyte, in fact.  Let’s put that into perspective here: that much data would fit onto a floppy disk, if you remember what those are.    The rate for this charge was there in black and white:  $51.20/MB

I can’t be the only one thinking that’s a little excessive, when (as I found out) you can get an all-you-can browse plan for $3/month?  Even at 3G speeds (and these phones aren’t 3G), my iPhone plan with Rogers is $30 for 6GB/month.  That’s a half a cent/MB folks, or approximately 5000 times cheaper.  I understand they want to drive people to use their data plans, and pay for capacity they aren’t using, but this smacks of robbery to me.

Needless to say I called to complain about the charges and to Bell’s credit they reversed the charges for me, but only because I don’t complain often.

What gives?

Messing with a new look

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Hey folks.  Goofing around with a new blog template today, it may stay, it may not.  I was tired of the old look, and found it rather restrictive when reading long posts since it had a narrow main column.  Any feedback on this one?

Mailbag Time

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Like any incredibly popular website, we get literally BYTES (for the non-technical crowd, that’s not very much) of email from you folks, screaming for this or that.  I do my best to satisfy every request, but there’s only so many minutes in a day (that I can spend working on a blog at work that doesn’t pay anything at all, all the while taking time away from my day job).

Having said that, it’s finally time to read just a very small fraction (both) of the messages I have received recently from you crazy folks.

First off, strangely devoted reader Stacey sent a message a while back about what the Ottawa Citizen is calling a “Miracle at the Experimental Farm“, but to me is just ever so slightly horrifying.  It’s an article about a cow at the farm with a strange set of markings that make it look like the cow is basically attempting to crap out a small child.  See for yourself (stole the picture without permission so this post will make sense when the Citizen erases history like it seems to do on a regular basis).

Cow Face

Now, that does not look like the face of a happy kid, it looks like the kid has been smushed under a cow’s rear end, and would much rather be miraculously appearing somewhere, anywhere else. Still I admit that I have never seen that before, and that’s what learning is all about folks, now you can cross off “see cow poop out a kid” from your lifetime bucket list.  Thanks Stace!

Next we move onto a slightly more technical topic, this one sent in from GibsonTechCorp‘s chief smarty pants, Wanda.  It’s from a newsletter for the technically challenged (it seems to me that Ask Leo would almost be the competition, wouldn’t it Wanda?  And he’s giving it away for free!  No link for Leo…) with this gem:

How do I move my Windows Live Hotmail account from one computer to another?

I am selling a computer and I need to delete our Hotmail accounts from it. We have a laptop we need to activate them on. How do we do this?

This surprisingly common question is an example of a misunderstanding of exactly just how services like Hotmail work.

In short: it’s not on your computer.

If that’s not funny to you, well then perhaps you could use some assistance from Gibson Technology Corporation, because they will smarten you up, dumbass, but good.  Actually, the slogan is catchier and clearer than that, “We tech-smart you”.  Also, it seems to me that GibsonTechCorp.com is sporting a nifty new website, and I have somehow never noticed the blog there before (Is it because I’m a self centered egotistical bastard?  Yeah.)  Thanks Wanda!

Ok, well there’s the mailbag for today.  As I said, there’s BYTES of this stuff, it’s hard to blog it all (I actually was waiting for another message to come in after Stacey’s so I could have, you know, a MAILBAG post).

Twitter Gets Even Weirder

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Well, it seems that the world of Twitter just got slightly stranger as Geordie LaForge (also known as LeVar Burton, his real name) from Star Trek decided to use Twitter to plan an impromptu meetup with some of his Twitter followers in Toronto.  He tweeted that he was looking for a pub in Toronto to go to for a beer after an interview on CBC’s The Hour.  He got some suggestions, and then he said, ok I will be at this one in 45 minutes, meet me there for a beer.  And some people actually did.  By all accounts it was a rather awkward meeting, since no-one knew anyone else, and the folks that could actually get there were only mostly casual fans, not his typical hard-core Trek fans.  Still, this shows that Twitter allows a previously impossible level of immediacy to this sort of thing.  It really would be a dream for a marketer to say to the followers of a strong brand “Be in the market at the corner of George in 20 minutes for some free ice cream”.  Some folks would probably show, if they were interested, and if the story was compelling enough.

It’s a strange, twittery world out there people.  You should get involved, it’s still new enough to be fun, and it’s definitely new enough to be changing things as it goes along.