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  • Rogers, you and I need to talk.

    written by

    james

    It’s great that you’re coming out with a new, in-house and online equivalent to your on demand option available through your cable services. It’s even greater that you’re extending the option of using it to customers of any Rogers service. But you might want to, maybe, give not screwing over your customers a try if you’re actually planning to do that.

    We’re already Rogers customers. We’re already paying, a lot of times way too freaking much, for Rogers services–up until October or so, for me, that included cable. If you’re going to grant us free access to your on demand service online, don’t then go back and decide that it still counts against our bandwidth caps (*). It’s *your* service, on *your* network. For which you’re still getting a *lot* of our money. More so if they’re also paying for TV from you. That’s enough. You’ve just guaranteed I won’t be playing with the new Rogers on Demand online anytime soon. And if I were a Rogers customer still for anything beyond my cell phone–you guys *are* the only ones right now that offer accessible phones that won’t absolutely kill my bank account–you’d be guaranteeing, since it would count against my bandwidth cap anyway, that I would continue my current means of obtaining my television viewing. No love, your local former customer tech geek.

    PS: Thank you for not automatically assuming your wireless customers want to pay a monthly charge for *this* service, as well.

    (*) Rogers is apparently not going to lift the bandwidth limitations on your internet service if you’re with them and accessing their on demand feature. I don’t get it either, but that’s Rogers. That’s also why I’m with TekSavvy.

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  • This is college. This was me in college.

    written by

    james

    Anyone curious why it is I didn’t decide to take my parents up on their strong recommendation that I become an English major need only read this. Sure, it’s intended somewhat to be humourous, but sitting in some of the classes I actually managed to go to while I was in college, sometimes I couldn’t help but wonder if they didn’t vaguely resemble this.

    ENGLISH: This involves writing papers about long books you have read
    little snippets of just before class. Here is a tip on how to get good
    grades on your English papers: Never say anything about a book that
    anybody with any common sense would say. For example, suppose you are
    studying Moby Dick. Anybody with any common sense would say Moby Dick is
    a big white whale, since the characters in the book refer to it as a big
    white whale roughly 11,000 times. So in your paper, you say Moby Dick is
    actually the Republic of Ireland. Your professor, who is sick to death of
    reading papers and never liked Moby Dick anyway, will think you are
    enormously creative. If you can regularly come up with lunatic
    interpretations of simple stories, you should major in English.

    Nope, sorry. That’d be above my pay grade. I prefer to be locked in a room with only a server or two to fight with. They, at least, don’t tell me I’m wrong.

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  • So this is what happens when I’m bored.

    written by

    james

    I know this isn’t a techy type blog, but well, I’m a techy type geek, and it’s my blog. I’ll get back to writings of a more personal nature just as soon as I have something to write about. In the meantime, have a read. You might yet find something relatively interesting.

    I challenged myself yesterday to find something that would equal or better the stats package I’ve been running locally since the opening of the blog. And, in fact, challenged myself to even give Google Analytics a try for the sole purpose of letting it take its best shot at proving it can do a better job of it. In so doing, I fear I may have come across something of an accidental discovery. I’ve been suspecting my current stats package of missing things every so often, but wasn’t entirely sure exactly how accurate my suspicion was. So I installed another plugin to run a comparison. Already, just in a brief test run of the two side-by-side–really, I don’t do that very often, but I was curious–the newly installed one’s picked up on things the current doesn’t. For the curious, the plugin that’s currently being challenged is StatPress Reloaded. The challenger is the more recently updated and, at least on initial outlook anyway, more flexible Wassup plugin. So far, on initial testing, the latter seems to come out slightly more on top. Not sure yet how well it’ll work with a fully implemented WP Supercache, but that’ll be my next step after putting it through its paces like this. In the meantime, I shall now sit back, and watch the thing periodically refresh, thus giving me a few more stats to enjoy. While StatPress likely misses a few.

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  • Maple Leafs 3, Canadians 0.

    written by

    james

    Wow. Just… wow. The contrasts between last night and the night before is absolutely surprising. We did the one thing we hadn’t yet managed to do this season on Monday–get shut out completely, and last night, on the backs of some pretty awesome goals (breakaway to open the scoring, anyone?), we turned around and did the same thing to Montreal. And stuffed that damned na na na na from the last meeting right down their fans’ throats. Oh yeah, and in the last 3 games we’re officially above .500. Hey, that’s as close as we’ve been to doing well all season. Work with me here. We’re in Columbus on Thursday. Here’s hoping we don’t suck.

  • Taking the analysis challenge.

    written by

    james

    Since I started this blog, I’ve been running a local tracking tool for the purposes of generating stats of mostly general interest to me–how people got here, what people read when they got here, did they come back, where did they go when they left, all that interesting to me but completely useless to anyone else stuff. It’s also how I generated yesterday’s breakdown of what got the most attention in November. And, while it does give me a lot of information, I can’t help but wonder if I’m still missing a thing of interest or two.

    So, I’m finally deciding to take advice long ago given to me by Mike among others, and installing Google Analytics to go along with it. I very very briefly played around with it some time ago, but never actually ended up really getting anywhere with it beyond mildly confused, but that’s mostly due to the fact I haven’t had the time to mess with it in detail. Since I do, and since I’m curious what these two packages combined will do to possibly complement each other, I figured what the hell. Worst case, I decide to pick one and ditch the other. Best case, I keep both. In any event, the comparison over time should be mildly distracting. I’ll be quite interested to see which one misses more and by how much. As for right now, though, I’m almost missing a hockey game.

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  • Sabres 3, Maple Leafs 0.

    written by

    james

    Okay, i’ll admit it. I watched it. Well, most of it. Up until about the 18-minute mark. Then I just had to turn the damn thing off to avoid crying. You can have me shot for this attempt, however accidental, at proving that aspect of my running theory. Ah well, ’twas fun while it lasted. Glass half full time: at least we played well this time. Right? … Work with me, dammit.

  • Still in the website revival process, apparently.

    written by

    james

    When I opened up this site again for actual regular use for reasons beyond just collecting dust and as a place to test whatever cool new toy I happen to be considering implementing, I noticed that even though I hadn’t actually *used* the site for its originally intended purposes in about 2 and a half years, people and things were still being referred to files and other such niftyness that no longer existed here. For example, entries that I’d written during the early days of the original blog. I saw the occasional referrer pointing someone to a file I’d uploaded 3 years ago, and later moved to the old blog’s new, retirement location. That got me thinking, just how long do search engines actually keep this stuff around? If you look hard enough, could you potentially find something resembling a website still in the search results that hadn’t been updated since the early part of the decade? Even if that website doesn’t exist? Of course, if search engines wanted to, they need only crawl the Wayback machine–it’s full of sites that existed 10 years ago and don’t now. You perform the right search, you could pull up a very different Yahoo! homepage than what you’d see were you to go there now. Here’s the way the blog looked close to its retirement date. This is the most recent update where content actually existed pre-wordpress. Just… ignore the frame with the 404 error showing itself off there. I was including something in a frame that I’m no longer running here, mostly just as an excuse to play with stuff. My, how times change.

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  • Popular posts (November, 2009).

    written by

    james

    On average of about once a month, I like to try and capture a snapshot of things of general interest people have been pointing to here. Mostly for my own curiosity, but also because sometimes if they find it interesting, they might not be the only ones. Since the thing’s only been online for a little less than a month, the interest level’s probably gonna be through the floor, but oh well, I’m doing it anyway.

    Since the blog came back from the dead in the first week of November, 275 unique visitors ran across these posts, and probably pointed a friend or two to reading them.

    There you have it. Bits and pieces of my life, documented and found interesting by folks. Hopefully it’s as interesting a read as it was entertaining when I was doing it.

    Disclaimer: statistics may not be accurate, as this doesn’t count those of you reading this on Livejournal, which for the moment I’m unable to track. Hey, LJ, if you’re reading this, fix that. Also. MY ability to spell, and my ability to actually remember to link to the posts in question, seem to have taken a vacation. Here’s hoping next month’s is better.

  • Winter drops in at home, while I’m out of the country.

    written by

    james

    Shortly after I revived this blog in its third reincarnation, we were teased with just a small sampling of wintery weather, which ended up not actually sticking around. We were well on our way to the first snow-free November I can remember having in the Ottawa valley area. Temperatures were still well above freezing, the most threatening of weather we ever had to hear about was the odd patch of fog at 6:30 in the morning, and layers were most asuredly not required. Flash forward to this morning. It’s dipped below freezing, and at last report, was still snowing north of the border. And, also at last report, it’s supposed to dip just a little farther into the below freezing end of the spectrum, at somewhere around -4 C (31 F for those of you reading from the comfort of your US locations). Winter’s definitely moving in. And, like the relative you don’t want showing up but who’ll show up anyway, it waited until I wasn’t home to do so.

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  • The return of the pot-smelling basement.

    written by

    james

    My apartment in Ottawa had its moments of sheer and utter amusement. Not the least of which is the lower floor that, after about midnight or so, took on a decidedly potlike quality. Usually I only happened to notice because I was, as always, up at that hour–only doing laundry instead of my usual routine of, well, doing nothing. Of course there was the lazy and plenty of it, but it wasn’t *all* lazy.

    I’d actually gotten used to not being able to giggle amusedly at the fact some poor fool was pretty much baking his brain on a day when most folks would be considering maybe existing just enough to think about going to work. Then I decided to come down to Rochester.

    Jess and I were in the midst of getting done with the week’s laundry, and were distracted with talking so much that I didn’t immediately notice, but when we did, I had to keep myself from bursting out laughing in the middle of the hallway. Right there, in my girlfriend’s apartment building’s basement, the potlike quality made its reappearance. My regular source of amusement didn’t abandon me, it just moved in with Jessica. The mocking shall resume.

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