Shawn Sorichetti

“The Samsung Instinct, which has many of the same features as the Apple iPhone, differs from the iPhone in one major way: Its monthly price plan, which will dramatically undercut the iPhone plan announced last week by Rogers Wireless.

A subscriber can buy the Instinct for as low as $149.95 and then pay less than $40 a month for a modest voice plan accompanied by an unlimited data plan on Bell’s high-speed data network.”

The Globe and Mail - Jack Kapica

This does make things rather interesting. I am an Apple fan, and I’ve lusted the iPhone ever since Steve stood on stage and unveiled the first generation (I was set to drive to Buffalo to get one), but this has made me stop and think.

Unlimited data at 3G speeds and a modest voice plan for $40/month.

I’m going to stew on this. I’m sorry Steve, but this could be my magic bullet. Time for you to smack Ted around and knock some sense in.

I’ve been following the status of the ongoing protest of the Rogers rate plan for the iPhone at http://ruinediphone.com, and checking Google News regularly for news updates. I found it interesting that while the other major news organizations in Canada have carried the story in one form or another, and yet CityTV has made no mention of it.

CityTV was quick with the “BREAKING NEWS!!!! Ted Rogers announces that Rogers will be carrying the iPhone in Canada this year!”. It’s nice to have an in in the Rogers organization to carry this story first, but where’s the story on the backlash? Are news providers in this country not supposed to be unbiased?

Here’s a copy of the feedback I provided to the station:

As a loyal Breakfast Television/Cable Pulse TV viewer, 
I have to ask myself, why is there no mention of the 
ongoing protest of Rogers iPhone rates not being 
covered by your station?

In case you haven't heard, Rogers announced the plan 
rates for the iPhone 3G last Friday. The response 
on the Internet has been less than favourable, with 
a large protest at http://ruinediphone.com as   well
as groups on facebook.com. The other news stations 
have covered it (those being CTV, Global, and CBC). 
Newspapers have covered it, most notably The Globe 
and Mail has multiple articles. Even    International 
Websites and Newspapers have been carrying it.

So why hasn't CityTV/Breakfast Television/Cable Pules 24?

I'm beginning to think that this ownership by Rogers 
is hampering these stations abilities to report unbiased
news. These stations certainly made a point to tout that 
Rogers was going to be carrying     the iPhone within this 
year. I saw Kevin Frankish speak of it numerous times. 
Your site archives, list multiple stories. Not one  on 
the backlash.

The lack of story coverage has lead me to question the 
trust I have    placed in your news organization.

Thank you

~Shawn

I really don’t expect to hear much from them, other than a fluff response of “all news is important to someone, but we can’t cover everything”, while they’re running stories that “Britney Spears is looking for a new house in a less trafficked area”.

I think it’s funny how a simple little thing like a rate plan has made me question the integrity of an entire organization.

Way to go Rogers!

Canada’s in an uproar, and once again Rogers is the cause.

It’s not very often that Canadians speak out about anything. But now the country is speaking, and the country is upset with the rate plans Rogers introduced for the iPhone.

There are only 2 other instances I can remember of Canada being this upset. One was in 1995 when Rogers (big surprise), introduced 7 new cable channels via negative option billing. The other when the CBC mentioned that they would not be renewing Don Cherry’s contract in 2004.

High mobile rates have always been on Canadians minds. We are the 3rd world of mobile technology, and to thank for that we have the Canadian Government, the CRTC, Rogers, Bell and Telus.

Rogers is a mobile carrier monopoly in Canada. They are the only GSM provider after the Canadian Government allowed their purchase of Fido, which provided the 3G network Rogers now touts.

We held a lot of hope that Apple would be able to strong arm Rogers into reasonable data rates (unlimited) with the iPhone, as they had done with AT&T. However this is not the case, and the usage cases that Rogers is providing for emails/web pages downloaded are unrealistic in today’s world.

While I’m not convinced that this protest will amount to anything, I’m still holding onto a hope that Rogers may finally see the light.

I’ve been meaning to write this post for over four months. It started in my head as separate posts, but they never were completed. So now there’s one big post.

There is plenty of change to talk about. Some minor, some life altering. The biggest change occurred at the end of October.

Employment

At that time I left IBM for a position with Scorecard Systems. I spent 11 years with IBM. I started as an OS/2 administrator and moved my way to Backup and Recovery Architect, Tivoli Systems Management Specialist, UNIX Administrator and Web Developer. With numerous and various stops in between.

I had a great time, learned a lot and made some great friends. But towards the end the environment and direction were no longer agreeable to me.

The move to Scorecard Systems has been a great one. I’m now doing SQL development and UNIX consulting. I’m really enjoying the change of attitude, business size and philosophy. I’m no longer a number lost in a sea.

While this move was going on, my wife was also changing jobs. After 4.5 years as a server at Montana’s, she’s now serving at a new Baton Rouge that opened near us.

These are two big, life altering changes that just happened to occur at the same time, making them even bigger.

Source code management

After some “encouragement” from rjbs, I have switched my chosen SCM from subversion to git. I had been using a combination of subversion and SVK for home and work, but experienced a number of issues with SVK and merging at work that I moved to straight subversion.

After talking with rjbs, I converted my home repositories to git and my work repository to a combination of subversion server and git client. Something I’ve carried over into my new position. It works remarkably well, and amazingly fast. Much better than SVK.

Editor

With the change in jobs came a change in platforms. I can now do my work entirely from a Mac. This has allowed me to change my default editor from Vim to TextMate.

I have been a long time vi/Vim user. Keybindings on all my systems are set -o vi and they still are. With all my editing being done locally and with large amounts of files, the flexibilty, tools and environment of TextMate are a great help to my productivity. Although I still find myself dropping to a terminal and opening a file with vim for quick edits.

OS X Utilities

I have been a strong proponent and user of Quicksilver for years. So much so that I am constantly teased by my friends with the answer for everything being “Quicksilver will do that”. Recently my view has changed.

About a year and a half ago CromeDome started complaining about copy/paste and drag/drop issues. After a couple reinstalls and much problem determination he discerned that Quicksilver was the cause. I dismissed this as an Intel versus PowerPC issue as I’d never experienced this problem. That is until a couple of weeks ago.

I lost the ability to reorganize tracks in iTunes, drag files between finder windows, and copy and paste between some applications. After searching the forums I discovered that this is a long known, recurring problem that has yet to be addressed. Such a major problem, that usually results in a wipe reinstalls, without a migration as this would cause a reoccurence, still remaining unfixed, this was unacceptable to me. I immediately uninstalled it.

Quicksilver has been replaced by LaunchBar and PTHPasteboard. After using this combination for a couple of months now, I have to say I’m not missing Quicksilver.

With the change to daylight savings time, a sign that spring is on the way, upon us, it’s quite a surprise to be getting record setting snowfall.

I’m so tired of shoveling.

update: Just came in from the third shovel of the day. Another 8 inches on the driveway, and the wind has really picked up. The banks on the side of the driveway are now 2 feet over my head, as there is no where else to put the snow.

I’ve recently started watching video on my iPod Touch while exercising on our elliptical machine. I place the iPod on the book holder, plug in headphones, and off I go.

I had been watching TV or movies on the TV near the elliptical, but the whole view is blocked by a post, and I had to turn the volume way up to be able to hear it over the movement, and distance. There’s also the problem of either stopping or calling someone to change DVDs for me as the TV shows would sometimes span DVDs during my workout.

My workouts are 45 minutes in length, normally I can fit in an hour long episode (wonderful without the commercials), 2 half hour episodes, or an episode of diggnation.

Recently I’ve been converting Futurama episodes for the iPod, and loading them into iTunes. I’ve run into a couple of speed bumps.

First, iTunes doesn’t like adding 22 episodes of video at a time. While my system and network are no where near taxed, iTunes slows to a crawl. 5 to 6 episodes at a time it handles no problem.

Second, while iTunes 7 has added features for video specifics, it still expects the audio track name and number filled out for display. This means updating information in 2 different tabs in iTunes. I had started entering this information manually, but today I grew tired of copying and pasting and started looking for an easier method.

As always, looking for an easier method with iTunes starts with Doug’s AppleScripts where I found this script, that’ll allow me to update multiple video tracks at one time, something iTunes doesn’t do.

Now this only gets me part way there, but my job is much easier. I still need to edit the Episode ID with the name. There’s no way around doing this manual, so I just did it.

This still didn’t put the name of the episode into the iTunes TV Shows list though. For that, the information needed to be copied from the Video tab to the Info tab. I wrote this quick and dirty AppleScript to help with that:

tell application "iTunes"
    set sel to selection
    repeat with i from 1 to (count sel)
        set t to item i of sel
        tell t
            set album to show as string
            set disc number to season number as number
            set track number to episode number as number
            set name to episode ID as string
            set genre to video kind as string
        end tell
    end repeat
end tell

The time to process new shows in iTunes has now dramatically decreased.

Third, smart playlists and the Video Kind setting don’t allow me to exclude any video from a smart playlist. I keep a smart playlist of all recently added tracks, this allows me to easily see what has been recently added, but also because my music is stored on a NAS, I can use some simple AppleScript to automatically add recent tracks to other Macs throughout the house. To get around this, I ended up using the genre to specify the video kind and filter based on it. The script above handles setting the genre to video kind for me.

Those are the issues I’ve found with iTunes, so far, and how I managed to work around them.

Last week we placed 2 orders with the online AppleStore. Due to availability Apple broke the orders into 3 separate shipments.

On Monday we ordered a new 24″ iMac to replace my aging 1.25Ghz G4 PowerBook. The shipping lead time was 1 - 3 days, with a 2 - 3 day ship time if we paid extra. Which we did so my wife wouldn’t have to listen to me complain about FedEx and Memphis.

Wednesday afternoon I placed an order for a second power supply for my MacBook Pro, and a Griffin Elevator. The lead time on the power supply was 1 - 2 days, with a 3 to 8 day shipping time, the Elevator had a lead time of 2 to 3 weeks with the same 3 to 8 day shipping time.

Friday afternoon, the doorbell rings and it’s Purolator delivering the Griffin Elevator.

Today at lunch FedEx dropped off the MacBook Pro power supply, all the while the iMac is sitting in Memphis waiting for it to be the day that Apple committed for it to be delivered on.

Time for my annual list of Christmas presents received.

Clothing

• Scarf
• Leather coat
• Long sleeve shirt
• Maple Leafs workout wear
• Roots sweatshirt and pants
• Pajamas
• Slippers

Games

• Halo 3
• The Orange Box
• Bioshock
• Guitar Hero 3

Movies

• The Bourne Identity
• The Bourne Ultimatum
• Futurama: Bender’s Big score
• Pirates of the Caribbean: World’s End
• Mallrats
• Night out in a bag: Fargo (movie, coolers, chocolate, popcorn, and bowl)

Toys

• Stuffed lion

Books

• The Sandman: Preludes and Nocturnes

Hotspot Wireless Internet Access allows users to connect to the Internet from various public locations. It is a collaboration by Canada’s 4 (really 3, Rogers bought Fido) mobile providers. Accessing the system requires a mobile phone with one of the carriers for billing purposes.

Bell, Telus and Fido (Rogers) offer an hourly rate, Bell $7.50, Telus $10, and Fido at $8. Rogers offers $0.15/minute which works out to $9 for an hour. For greater usage, Bell, Telus and Fido offer daily/24 hour rates of $13, $15 and $15 respectively. Rogers continues at $0.15/minute, for $216.

Now in their defense Rogers does offer a $4/month subscription, for 90 minutes, and $0.10/minute after. But, this is a very weak defense, it doesn’t take long for Rogers to become more expensive than Bell, Telus and themselves (Fido).

Rogers also offers monthly subscription for $24/month which nets the user 600 minutes and a per minute rate of $0.10. However both Bell and Telus offer an unlimited month for $25 subscription.

Telus and Fido both go a step further and offer a pay per use week of $25, and a month for $40. Neither of these requiring a monthly subscription.

One key point to remember here, other than the billing system, the 3 (4) providers are using the same infrastructure, with the same costs.

Hotspot Rates:

• Rogers
• Fido
• Bell
• Telus

My wife took our van over to the dealer to get a lube, oil & filter. About 2 hours later the phone rings “The intake gasket is shot and it’s leaking coolant into the oil, and needs to be replaced”. This is the 4th GM vehicle we’ve owned that has required this work. The repair bill would have been $1100, GM offered to pay all but $200 of the bill. However….

Couple years back CTV did a story on GM vehicles that had were experiencing intake gasket problems. It included pretty much all cars/vans built between 1995 and 2003. There were several internal memos where this problem was acknowledged but GM would do nothing about it (there are several class action suits in progress). At the time my car was experiencing the problem and noting the van was also on the list, I called GM to complain.

They logged my complaint about the car, plus my concern that a couple months after the warranty on the van was up, the intake gasket would blow and I’d have to foot the bill yet again. They said they couldn’t repair something that isn’t broken, but they’d keep a record of my concern and should the time come, something would be done.

So I called and sure enough it was logged just as I said it would be, and the woman who took my call said she’d look into it and get back to me.

She later called me back and said they were doing everything they could and no further action would be taken. I informed her of the fact that I’d already expressed concern over this issue 3 years ago, and that I’ve paid for the same issue 3 times previously. That them not handling their quality assurance problems is not the customers fault and I should not be paying for it. She didn’t agree.

At this point I made sure she documented the fact that I would never be buying another GM built vehicle. That in fact my last vehicle purchase had been a VW to avoid the shoddy workmanship and general lack of quality in GM vehicles.

The part that kills me, is GM is wondering why more people are buying imports. Willing to pay more than what a GM vehicle sells for.