i@m.fm

I just ordered a print of a panorama pictures from Future Photo (Future Shop‘s digital print service). Now this is the third time that I have ordered prints from them.

First I took advantage of the “5 free offer”, then I printed two
panorama pictures and now a third. Everything worked rather fine,
despite the delivery being rather slow (since my local store where I
pick up the prints does not print the pictures in house). Also so far
all of my prints where a little bent on the corners – especially the
panorama size ones.

During the order process you have on point where you can choose between ‘glossy‘ and ‘matte‘
for the print. I prefer ‘matte’. So on my last order I could have sworn
I selected ‘matte’. However I got ‘glossy’. Thinking that they might
have made a mistake, I wrote to their customers support. Here’s their
reply:

So basically this means (and this is an excerpt from my reply back):

Let’s see if this is how they see things as well.

Actually you even have to go
back to the initial order page in quite a few cases because they often
default to a standard print size and set the order amount to “1″ for
that size.

And I thought their in-store customer service had just improved, but I
guess that this is not the case for their picture printing service

If I wanted glossy prints, I would go to photolab,
since their prices are better in most cases. Which brings up the
question if Future Shop’s lowest price guarantee applies to their photo
prints

On Wednesday night, on my way back from an event from the Young Executives in Canada, (a sub organization of the Canadian German Chamber of Commerce) at the Ontario Club, I had an interesting experience on the Go Train. It resulted in a delay of the train, which by itself is not unusual, but these circumstances were.

So I was sitting on the train, eavesdropping to some other conversation
as usual. I got on the train at Toronto Union, and this incident
happened between the next two stops, between Exhibition and Mimico.

A girls runs through our car, screaming something like “he is hanging
outside the door”. Seconds later two security guards run back with her,
to the next wagon behind ours. Shortly after there’s a loud bang and
the train stops half ways between stations. We continued on about 5
minutes later and a passenger was escorted off the train the next stop.

Here’s what one of the security guys told us had happened: Apparently a
drunk person jumped onto the outside of the train at the previous stop
- basically “train surfing”. I guess he had just missed the train or
something. The girl saw him outside through the window and pressed the
emergency button – according to the security guy about 99,9% of these
are false alarms.

The security team opened the door and held the guy by his belt until
the train stopped. The then pulled him in and closed the door….

Not sure if I got all the details right, but this is how the story was
told to the surprised passengers when someone asked the security guy.
When we heard the ‘bang’ before you could see everyone being shocked,
since it could have been him falling off the train, but apparently it
was just the door being opened.

I am wondering where he was holding on, since there are no handles just
outside the door, but only further down at the end of the cars.

I would like to expand Ross‘ comments (Random Bytes :: Canadian Music Industry: Get a clue!)
to include the music industry of the rest of the world. Ross also
stated that we need a way to listen to an album before buying it. I
agree.

I am still convinced that had the industry realized where the trend was
going early enough, they could have created a better attitude where
people would voluntarily pay for what they listen to. Right now, they
are just pushing everyone in the opposite direction. And not to forget
that there have been several studies that have shown that the downloads
actually work as free advertising and boost sales to some extend.

Ross‘ post was based on this press release by the CRIA. The press releases shoes how surprisingly ignorant the artists and the industry are

The music industry will and has to change if it wants to survive. And
yes, this will also mean that some people will lose their jobs. It will
also create new jobs if done right. One could call it evolution.
Dear Music industry, just watch & learn from what is happening
around the world in other industries.

The music industry will have to start concentrating on using other
(cheaper) means of promoting their artists. The artists themselves
should be receiving more of the money we pay in the stores and online.
In a perfect world, the radio station’s could play anybody’s music,
even if you they have not signed on with any major label. Where is the
old mp3.com (RIP), when you need it?

And what about those songs that you cannot purchase anywhere, either
because the artists is not published by a major label, or because the
song is a remix by a DJ, or because the song is a bit older and is not
available any more. Even if you wanted to pay the artist for his work,
the music industry would not let you.

I recently received an email from Suzanne M. about her experience with when buying a home from Mattamy and how some of the information in some blogs (including mine) helped her in the buying process.

I am glad to hear that this is the case, since this is the main reason
why I added this section to the site. In addition to sharing the
information with my friends, I wanted to share the information with
other home buyers that might be researching builders. I was rather
disappointed when I hardly found any information on Mattamy other than
their own site. Luckily enough, this is different today.

Now back to Suzanne’s email – she was so kind to permit me to quote it here – with my comments inserted into the text:

Thanks!

Congratulations – I wish you all the best. Actually Mattamy is re-doing
part of our sodding this week, so they do seem to try their best to get
things in shape. My one year visit is on Monday, so I will probably
have more information to post in my blog soon.
                                                                             

I don’t think that she showed the site plan to us, we only saw the
floor plans, which did not show the opening windows as far as I
remember.
                                                                               

Also I noticed that even some of the other same model town houses have
slight differences in how they were built – despite being the same
elevation. It always depends on the people working on your home.

                                                                               

I think everybody is trying really hard to do their best, but the
resources are just not enough. Plus they seem to have a high staff turn
over rate – especially in customer service.

[...]
                                                                             

Thanks for your email, and good luck with your new home – I am sure that everything is going to work out fine in the end.

These days everybody is complaining about the high gas price, and I am starting to get sick of hearing the complaints.

Here’s what I think needs to be done: We need to significantly increase
the gas tax, and put all of that money into public transit. While the
higher gas tax should be a disincentive to drive your car, enhancing
public transit should motivate you to taking more public transit.

Especially in the GTA the TTC needs to be forced to offer combined tickets with other public transit systems, such as Go Transit. As a matter of fact, transit prices should be subsidized by the money that is taken in from higher gas tax.

Of course this also means that the provincial government really needs
to make sure that this is what the money ends up being used for. I am
still not quite sure why Go Transit
is currently starting to re-model the Bronte stop, where I normally got
on the train. It looks completely fine to me. Adding weekend service on
this part of the Lakeshore line should be a higher priority than
redecorating the interior of a station that has increased passenger
traffic due to the new housing in Oakville North.

When you are buying your new home from a builder, like we did, you have
to make sure to ask the right questions. One of these things that we
wished we had asked about in advance, would have been which/how many
windows in the house can be opened.

This is something that I have been planning to write about for a while
now. When we bought our house, we never thought about how many windows
could actually be opened. Apparently the Mattamy policy is that one
window per room will open. At least this is how it was for our
townhouse.

So this actually also means that if you have a combined living and
dining room, there should be two windows in there that can be opened.
And of course do not expect them to use high quality windows – it seems
to be considered normal to feel a draft around some of the windows in
the winter time.

I am now wondering if you could actually pick in advance which windows
would be the ones that open, or at least find out about the builder’s
plans. But then again, it is kind of hard to pick before the house is
built, because it would be hard to picture the entire situation with
regards to light and wind.

Our windows were all put in fine with one exception – in the master
bedroom the contractors had originally put in two windows that opened.
We first noticed that the window in the ensuite did not open, so we
reported this to the builder. Unfortunately this was early enough in
the process for them to just take out the window from the master
bedroom and put it in the ensuite. Sometimes I wonder if we would have
had an extra window that opened had we waited a bit longer, because it
would have been too much work to move the extra one from the master
bedroom to the ensuite.

Last night after coming home from the YEC board meeting, I took the Go Train (which was not late, this time) back to Oakville.

Normally, I would have been stuck at the station now waiting for my
wife to pick me up, because there’s no normal bus in the night any more
going to where I live – those only run during rush hour.

But then there is:

A great idea by Oakville transit, which takes care of getting around Oakville on Public Transit at night.

And here is how it works:
You normally need to call them about an hour in advance before you want
to go anywhere. The bus will then pick you up at a scheduled time at
one of the regular bus stops – however the bus is serving an entire
zone, not just a specific route. So if you want to transfer between
zones, you need to go to one of the connection points first to switch
busses. This service only costs you the normal fee of $2.00 and is
available on weekends and after hours.

As for the connections to the Go Train, you don’t even need to call in
- the busses are waiting when the train arrives from downtown Toronto.
You just pick the bus for your zone and tell the driver where to letyou off.

After having taking advantage of this service twice now, I am really
pleased with it. Both times I got home in under an hour (I always end
up being dropped off second to last) and paid just 50 cents because I
am connecting from the Go Train. A great solution!

In the rush in the Mattamy sales office many people were lining up to
‘bid’ on the same house (it was first come, first serve, basically -
actually one of our now-neighbours even slept in the parking lot,
hoping that the lot she wanted would be up for grabs, but the home she
wanted was only released a week later), you feel forced to rush your
decision. In any case, as a first time buyer there are a few things you
miss, so for the purpose of documentation, here are some things that we
wish we had thought about in advance.

One thing that I did not pay a lot of attention to is the elevation. We
ended up getting something with wood siding in the front. After the
first year, I see some of the nail pops we expected, but also the
wood/paint seems to be broken on the surface in some spots. This
definitely seems higher maintenance versus full brick (which we knew we
preferred, but didn’t care about enough to change our mind).

We have a pie shaped lot – our house is an end unit on a row of
townhouses in an inside corner of the street. I don’t have a sketch
handy, but basically means that the front corner of the two houses are
close together while the back is rather far apart. We thought that this
was a nice layout because it gives us a bigger backyard.

This also means we have about five neighbours to talk to if we want to
work on the fencing together. In our case another result of this
location also is that our driveway is not quite straight, it curves a
little. This is something we got used to by now, but visitors tend to
have some difficulty with it.

One thing to keep in mind with regards to the garden is the grading. If
you are buying a home, you might want to try to get grading information
from the builder. We never received any of this, and so far don’t see a
big problem with the grading either. However I am pretty sure the
people in the back don’t really like that their already small backyards
are missing even more space, because the lowest point of the area is in
their backyard. Which means that all the water will collect there when
it rains a little harder.

Our house has the entrance on the side. Two factors are annoying about
this: There’s more walkway to shovel in the winter and there is a wind
tunnel between the two homes. This is mostly bothersome in the winter,
but since there is no fencing up yet, there’s also some recycling
garbage flying all over the place. Quite a bit of it ends up in our
garden, but this should change when we put up fencing.

All of this being said we are still relatively happy with our house,
and of course there is no perfect situation without any problems. This
topic will probably be continued later

According to several sources the Sasser Author is under arrest in Germany: Slashdot | Sasser Author Under Arrest, Say German Police. Apparently the ‘phatbot’ author has been arrested as well, also in Germany.

So this most likely means that soon we will be hearing reports on how
much damage thes viruses caused, we should think a little about who
shares part of the guilt:
How about Microsoft, who was aware of the security hole for several
months and did not do anything to patch it. How about the generally
insecure design of the Windows operating system? How about the vendors
and advertising that tells the consumer nothing about the danger of
using Windows and the importance of updates?

The virus is NOT the source of the problem, it is just a symptom.

Apparently Microsoft also has people that help track down virus
authors, which are mostly teens. How about spending those resources
instead on making their operating system more secure and explaining to
their users how to secure their systems.

Of course I do not endorse the work of any virus author, but is he
really the one who is guilty? If you leave your door unlocked, is your
insurance going to pay if you are robbed?

Here’s how to secure your Win 2k/XP computer.

I found this on the German Heise Newsticker Website:

Apparently the people at McGill in Montreal have developed some
computer games that help to increase self-esteem. Some of the games and
additonal information are online on their site. I did not go into in too much detail, but it seemed to make sense, and their games, while simple seemed to be fun, too

The tested several groups of people, and they even had a ‘placebo’ game.