i@m.fm

A short affair with Vonage leads me to cancel my account before my telephone number is even transferred to them. I guess I should have done some research in advance (but this info is hard to find on their site):

You cannot use a Softphone with a regular Vonage account. It turns out that you need to add a seperate softphone number to your account, at an additional $12.99 per month. There go all the savings. I have not found an option that allows you to make your main line a softphone.

One of my main points in transferring one of my numbers to Vonage would have been the ability to access it from my laptop from anywhere. Something that I consider standard for a Voip-Service, not an additional feature.

[update]: I’ve decided to keep this line with Vonage (for now), mainly because it seemed I might be running a risk of losing my number if I canceled so close to the end of the trial period. I do think that the quality of the line is very good. I have also been looking at Inter.Net’s voip service, which actually does allow you to use a softphone. However it took them too long to answer my email asking about the features and about transferability of my number. I’ll keep them in mind though, as it appears that their offer is a little cheaper too.

I just got back from the Targeted Traffic Conference in Hollywood Florida last night. Peter has got some coverage at ClickToHit and my other blog DomainEditorial.com features some posts as well. What a great conference and great networking. Wow!

Please also take a look at my blog about and for the Domain-Industry:
http://DomainEditorial.com/

We received a letter from the MP for Halton, Garth Turner, P.C. Thank you, but you could have saved the paper and the postage. In any case, this gave me the inspiration to post about something I’ve been meaning to comment on before, so here’s a quote from the letter:

(I am not even going to mention the amazing Universal Childcare Benefit and the huuuuuge GST cut he mentions in the beginning of the letter.)

Ok, first of all, the math seems a little off to me. It’s a tax rebate, so you have to wait until the next year to get it, plus it only came into existence in mid-2006. But OK, let’s keep that aside. Let’s do the math:

I pay $214 dollars a month for my GO train pass. That’s $2568 Dollars per year. WOW, that is expensive. The tax rebate appears to be 15.25% (please correct me if I got that wrong). So that would $391.62 as a rebate. Two months cost $428, so I am $36.38 short from “riding free for two months a year”.

Interestingly enough, the tax rebate only applies to monthly passes. And while I did not find any statistics, from my personal experience I always see many riders using 10-ride passes on the GO train. Some of them work part time, some of them drive in from time to time, in some months (vacation etc) the monthly pass is more expensive and some cannot afford the huge upfront expense of a monthly pass. Now the tax rebate should of course especially help the latter, but they are not eligible.

And yes, all of this just to save our “irreplaceable environment”. I know that the conservatives are very concerned about our environment. After all they quietly canceled some of the retro-fitting rebates for making houses more energy efficient before putting their “new and improved” programs in place.

While we are talking about the environment and Kyoto comes to mind: How the Liberals thought TV ads could convince everyone to save enough energy to fulfill the commitments in the international agreement we signed. Right, because we just need to watch an ad on TV in order to be convinced to cut our energy consumption. How about asking the big cooperations to curb their pollution a little as well?

Talking about pollution, politics and energy, I cannot afford to forget the mind-boggling ads of the Canadian Nuclear Association. Yes, Nuclear Energy is an “important part of Canada’s Energy Mix“. An important part that IMHO we should phase out ASAP. But hey, while we had plans all along to get rid of the dirty coal (which could have been a lot cleaner with the proper filters), the politicians just forgot(?) to make arrangements on how to replace the missing energy let alone considering any increased energy needs.

So Nuclear Energy is “clean – reliable – affordable“. Actually the TV ad was without the word “clean” for a while, so I assumed someone had ordered them to stop this message. But no, it’s back in the ad. So please explain to me how something that leaves waste that radiates it’s surroundings for centuries to come, could possibly considered “clean“? I don’t get it.

Now here’s a tool that I have been waiting for a long time: Ponyfish.com. Since the name is anything but self-explanatory, here’s a quick review.

Ponyfish is an RSS generator for sites that do not offer RSS-Feeds. But instead of writing complex regular expressions, Ponyfish uses Ajax in order to select what to place in a feed. I already tried it for one website where I miss a feed, and it worked fine with one small manual edit. Great idea, even better execution.The only downside is that it currently only works of the title/headline of the post actually is a link, but it’s a great start.

Dear Charitable Organization:

When I donated some money last year on your website, I did so because I wanted to help your cause, I could identify with some of your ideas. You disappointed me. You took my address information and added it to your mailing list, in order to solicit repeat donations from me. You are driving me away instead.

You ignored my letter to remove me off your mailing list. Who knows, maybe you even sold my address information to other charitable organizations.

Please leave me alone. I decide when I donate and to whom. I visit your website, subscribe to your newsletter if I want to. Do not try to decide for me.

Thank you,
/Frank

Since I once more received unsolicited addressed advertising from my “friends” at Blinds to Go (despite their reassurance that I had been removed from their mailing list), I was reminded of a reader comment that I had not yet posted.

Not really a big surprise (actually they still advertise this guarantee today). Why it is going to be very hard to find an exact match? Because they apparently have their own factory. They do not sell any other manufacturers.

PS: I actually wonder why they are called Blinds To Go when you have to order the blinds in most cases and cannot take them home with you right away.

Our car insurance is up for renewal next month, so I figured it’s time
to get some quotes to compare. TD already gave me a quote (over the phone), which was
far more expensive than our current insurance from Aviva Traders. Let’s see what the other players in this market can offer me.

OK, let’s go. I go to belairdirect.ca. I saw some advertising from them
and figure that this might be their domain. Got it right. Click on huge
“Get a Quote” button.

Guess they didn’t set things up properly. Well, let’s klick on “OK”. What’s next:

OK, let’s try “belairdirect.com” – same problem. It only works when you
use “www.belairdirect.com”. Note for the webmaster of the Belairdirect
sites: It is very nice that you made sure that you can also access the
websites under different domains, and even without using the “www.”
prefix. To prevent people from encountering this error, you might want
to set up a redirect on the other domains that points to the working main site. If you need any help doing this, I am available for consulting

Anyways, let’s get a quote, now that we know which website they want us
to go to. Filling out page after page. Side note: Canadian Auto
Insurance will generally not acknowledge any experience driving in
countries other than possibly the US. Even when the driver’s license
now just gets changed these days, without any additional test for many
countries. Anyways, still on my way throught he forms… Finally there,
the last button “Obtain a Quote”. Click.

Exciting… Insert Elevator music here… and then (60 seconds later or so):

(Please note, when you try again later (and go through all the (now pre-filled) forms again), you receive the same error).

Since I had advertising from them I figured let’s try RBC insurance. However, here too after filling out a loooooong form:
 

Our
online quote service is designed to handle most situations. However,
based on details you entered, we require additional information in
order to provide you with an accurate quote for your insurance needs.

I guess I will end up staying with Aviva, for now.

Should Bloggers Know XHTML & CSS? ask Nick of Performancing.com? The answer is: They should not have to.

However
I did notice that cutting and pasting from articles or posts on the web
into a rich text editor can be quite challenging and can possibly
produce a lot of garbage HTML. My current solution: I try to remember
to paste the text into a pure text editor and re-copy it from there
before actually pasting it into the rich text editor of the blog.

By
no means a perfect solution, but it seems to work fine in most cases
for now. In the future the Blogging System/CMS should take care of
these formatting issues.

James is going on a Feed Diet (WarpJam). A great idea. He started out by reducing the amount of feeds he subscribes to to 15 and then added a couple of new blogs that he had not been reading before in order to broaden his mind.

I recently started using Google Reader, and I do notice that I barely make it through the new articles in a day. So a Feed Diet might indeed be what the Doctor ordered, after all I also see quite a bit of redundant information in my feeds.

By the way I just meet with James the other night, and you should keep an eye on his company Names@Work. They are up to no good many good things.