i@m.fm

I just realized that I have fallen way behind with regards to updates on our one year list that we sent to Mattamy a while ago.

Everything started out rather well, when one of the builder’s service
people showed up a few weeks after they received the list. We went
through the entire list, and he fixed most of the items, but said that
some of them will be addressed by the trade while others will be taken
care off.

Well, here’s how Mattamy “took care” of the remaining issues: They
stuffed a letter in our door from another few weeks later which says
that all of the issues are not valid and will not be fixed.

And here is
the letter in it’s full beauty with some comments and pictures. I took
the freedom to remove some typos, most likely while adding others


This letter is to inform you of our actions for the following issues listed on your Year End Warranty Service Request.



- Wood chips on columns, wood siding and frame to be repaired:

During our inspection we could find no fault in the above areas that requires repair. Mattamy Homes deems no action.

I wonder which inspection they are talking about, since John also saw the problems when I inspected the area with him.

So here are some pictures of the garage door frame:

- Cracks and nail pops in wood panel at the front of the house.

As our inspection normal weathering was found on the wood panel in front of the house. Mattamy Homes deems no further action.

Again, I am not quite sure which inspection they attended. Also it says
in the warranty description that nail pops are to be fixed in the year
end inspection. Take a look at the normal weathering and the
non-existant nail pops:

Here is the normal weathering (cracks), just so the other buyers know what to expect:

And the other side:

I guess this is normal too:

I had also included three walls that did not have any power plug on
them. As far as I know any wall over 4 foot is supposed to have a power
outlet in it according to my understanding of the building code. Are
certain walls excluded from this rule? Does anyone know?

The last item they deem not ‘actionable’ is the dented water heater,
which I did mention before, but they are not able to find the record.
Basically what happened is, that I mentioned it during the Pre Deliver
Inspection (PDI) and they forgot to note it down. Hence it was not on
their list, but I faxed them something with the missing items the same
night. I also mentioned it during the next inspection.

They will receive my reply shortly, I will also list the other items that they have missed.

We also got a note that our driveway is going to get  a second
coat soon in July. I wonder where we are going to park, since the
maximum permitted parking time on the street is 3 hours – we better
call the town of Oakville about
this. I also hope that the driveway is not going to cave in as much as
did before. Ours seems to be the only one on the street that ‘settled’
this much.

Greg Scott emailed me and told me about his website:

He is hoping to expand the site to cover other areas (including
Oakville) as well. The site is meant to help to build a community for
the new homeowners.

It’s a great site, and I don’t even want to know how many hours of work
went into it, especially going around and taking pictures of all of the
new homes.

Keep up the good work Greg!

We watched this a while back back – Kim came across it and we rented it on video. Here’s the short description from the IMDB:

Five young people apply to live in an isolated house together for six
months whilst their every move is filmed by numerous cameras. Each has
their reason for wanting to be there – fame, money, adventure. The
prize – $1 million. The rules – if one person leaves, everyone loses.
It becomes the ultimate morality test. When Danny’s beloved grandfather
dies, does his greed overcome his love? When the skittish Emma finds
blood on her pillow why does she still stay behind? And what dark
secret does the house harbour that leaves them feeling as though
they’re being watched by more than just a million pairs of eyes?

So basically this is about a reality show on the
internet. And since it’s in the horror genre, you can already imaging
that people get killed. Basically this could be considered the modern
version of “And then there were none” by Agatha Christie, also known as “Ten Little Indians“.

I don’t want to spoil the story, so I will not give too many details.
The filming style pretty much imitates the people being filmed by
webcams, the noises of the zoom and servos moving the camera add to the
eerie atmosphere. However I don’t think the movie is this great – it
sort of leads up to a predictable outcome and contains some technical
weirdness.

So now the website about the ‘relaunch’ of the Commodore Brand has got some content:

http://www.commodore.net/ or http://www.commodoreworld.com/

A part from the Mini Game Console
they seem to have bigger plans; however kind of confusing. And I am not
sure how this relates to the history of the commodore brand.

Here are the sections:

Hardware:
This section contains USB sticks. It was hard to find them, though. I also found an MP3 player after looking around some more.

Media & Merchandising:
This section is empty now, but will apparently contain clothing as well as optical and magnetic media. What a combination.


Music & Movies:
Looks like a co-branded DRM download site for music and movies. No c64
remixes – no real relation to Commodore at all, at least in my opinion.

Games:
Games as a paid for download.

If you look at the amount of companies involved, this looks like
a major undertaking, which in my eyes totally dillutes the brand:

	CommodoreWorld	Tulip Computers NV
	Commodore Hardware	Commodore International BV
	Commodore Music & Movies	Yeahronimo NV
	Commodore Games	Ironstone Partners Ltd.
	Commodore Media	Commodore Media
	Commodore Merchandising	Commodore International BV

For those of you who have taken the Go Train from Toronto Union
Station before, here is a unique Snapshot taken on June 10th in the
morning. Now I know that I missed the earlier Go Train for a reason -
just so I could bring you this picture.

So what’s so special about this you might ask? Well normally these signs always look like this:

And actually even this morning, only one of the signs on the entire
platform was operating. But this is the proof that the signs actually do work.
No idea why they are normally not working. And I do not even want to
start thinking how much Go Transit spent of our tax money a few years
ago to put these signs in place….

Just yesterday I posted some comments on Google Adsense. I would like to add another one today.

I just took another quick look at the stats, and it turns out that www.toern.org
- a website about trips on sailing boats also contributes to paying for
the hosting. Interestingly enough the amount of views on this site is
not that high compared to the other ones, but due to the very specific
(and related) ads, the clicks on the ads seem to yield a rather high
return.

As Ross is fooling around with Google Adsense (Random Bytes :: Google Adsense) I would like to share my experiences here.
I have been running Google Adsense on several pages for a while now. I will keep the following information generic, as to not to interfere with the agreements that I accepted when signing up online.
Funny enough the idea to add ads to my page came to me when looking at two sites that I operate:

• Padua
• The c64 Banner Exchange

Both sites cater to a very specific audience – Commodore 64 enthusiasts, and more specifically the demoscene. The Padua site has been around for quite a while and the same goes for the banner exchange.
When looking at the logfiles (using Webalizer) I noticed that a lot of visitors seemed to come to my home page and would then leave again right away. Further investigation showed that I a lot of those visitors were coming from search engines, where they had been searching for “Padua” or “banner exchange“. On top of that, I also often had quite a few people sign up at the banner exchange that were in no way related to the Commodore 64.
So I thought – let’s try putting ads on the sites (we’ve had a link to the Padua Tourist Office on www.padua.org now for the longest time now). After all this might direct people to the actual thing they are looking for with just one additional click. After running a few trials with Google Adsense, I was quite satisfied with the ads displayed, so soon afterwards the banners were added to the Padua splash page. On the c64 banner exchange I used the ads within the signup process to discourage webmasters of unrelated sites from signing up.
I am rather satisfied with the results. As a matter of fact the money coming in from those two sites almost covers the cost of my hosting (and I hardly have any commercial sites on my server). We have now added another website about sailing to the list and I also ran a little trial with a Contest Blog, However neither one of those sites is as successful as the initial two.
So don’t expect any big revenue from Google Adsense, but it can certainly help you subsidize your hosting. But this also shows that even if the content matching for the two sites mentioned above does not really provide matching ads, it might still be of help to the visitor and the webmaster of the site.