Month: March 2012

In my previous post, I mentioned the special general meeting that was scheduled this evening at my apartment building. A faction of owners who are represented by the developers of the building were trying dissolve the current council. It took over two hours of discussion before the vote was even held. It got a bit heated at times, as I had expected. To make a long story short, the developers’ voting block was able to use their numbers to push through the motion to remove the current council members. I somewhat expected this as they seemed to have the numbers  (but perhaps not the moral high ground) on their side.

Since the building cannot proceed without a strata council, new members had to be voted in immediately. I believe there were eight people who nominated themselves to be on council, five of which were previously council members. There was nothing to stop the just removed members from being on council again. In the end, four of five previous members who wanted to be back on council were successful in their re-election bid. The remaining three members were new. One of the new guys seems like a good and fair dude and I feel like he has no connection with the developers. Another new member, I am not so sure about. First, I am uncertain about his affiliations with the developer. Second, he seems to think working with the developer on issues is an easy task and I’m believe he will be in for a surprise when he goes to work on council. The third new council member is someone I don’t trust at all. She appears to have clear ties to the developer and by law, she can’t even be present during strata council meetings where developer issues are being discussed. She’ll be absolutely useless in those matters and I also believe she’ll be using her powers on strata to advance the agendas of the developers and not the owners.

It was disappointing to see the whole council wiped out but the good news is the developer was not able to vote in their puppet strata council as I had feared would happen. With four of seven spots still being retained by previous members, the council appears to be still in good shape at keeping the developers at arms length. The drama is still far from over though. I expect some fallout from tonight’s meeting. Also, none of this mess had changed the fact that the building’s deficiencies, which are supposed to be fixed under the warranty, have not been addressed. It’s times like this I kinda wish I owned a house instead.

In a previous post, I detailed the dastardly efforts to remove the current strata council in my building. The effort is being led by a representative of the builders who constructed this apartment complex. They’re not even being sneaky about it and it’s clear to everyone what their agenda is. They want to elect a puppet strata council so that they can control what goes on in this building, most importantly what does and doesn’t get fixed. It’s a huge conflict of interest. In fact, a lawyer who has been advising some of the residents has said such an action would lead the developer open to a huge risk of legal action. By law, you can’t have a developer/builder influencing a strata council like this.

The vote is going down tonight. I suspect it’s not going to be civil based on what I’ve seen from both sides in the last few days. A lot of money is at stake here and money gets people’s attention more than most things. Depending on how the vote turns out, this may wind up costing me thousands of dollars. I’ll report back with the results.

While Oprah decided everyone in her audience should get bees, I’ve decided everyone should get comment icons! That’s right! No more commenting and getting a stupid little default icon. I’ve given myself a specific icon. You can get one too if you go over and sign up over at Gravatar. If you do sign up, it’s really important to remember that whatever e-mail address you sign up with is the same e-mail you’ll use to comment on this blog, that’s how the association is made. So just use an unimportant e-mail address account that you have.

Welcome to another edition of “Did You Know?”!. Did you know that YouTube has a section for viewing commercial films online? We all know YT for allowing regular folks like us to upload our videos but they also have an online video streaming service. They have new releases just like a video rental store. Movies will run you between $3.99 and $4.00 CDN. The unfortunate thing is that the films are shown in 480p as their highest resolution. The saving grace is that they have a pretty good selection of free movies. The titles that you can watch for free aren’t bad either. Some of the newer free flicks are less than three years old. There are also some classics in the free list, such as the timeless Ishtar. Seriously though, you should check it out, there maybe some interesting flicks there that you haven’t seen before. As a final note, I believe the selection is dependent on the region of the world you live in, so you actually might have more to choose from than I do!

Photo courtesy of Gentlemen’s Quarterly

Do you know who Jason Sudeikis is? He’s a cast member of NBC’s Saturday Night Live. Sudeikis has been on the show for several years and he’s one of my favourites. He’s a great all-around utility player who can be useful in almost any skit. His most famous re-occurring characters are probably Vance, the wickedly talented backup dancer, in What’s Up With That and the Officer in SNL’s version of Scared Straight (Sudeikis has an odd talent for jumping on desks). Up until approximately 2010, Sudeikis was known basically for his rich comedic talents. It was at this time, after which he divorced his wife of four years, that I began noticing Sudeikis’ other talent.

Shortly after his divorce was finalized, there were rumours that he was dating Jennifer Aniston. If he was indeed was with Aniston, it didn’t last very long because he soon became involved with January Jones of Mad Men fame. Jones figured prominently in last year’s X-Men: First Class. The pair were together for several months before splitting about a year ago. It’s also interesting that Jones had a baby after they parted ways but he isn’t the only dude who is rumoured to be the father. Then early this year, Sudeikis went public with his newest gal pal, the stunningly beautiful Olivia Wilde.

Now before I continue, I have to make it clear, I like the dude. He’s funny and he seems like a down to earth and genuinely nice guy. Having said that, I believe he’s been dating way out of his league since his divorce. It really is astounding how he’s been able to do all that. In a hockey analogy, it’s like the eighth seed defeating the President’s Trophy winner in the first round, three years in a row. I would have never thought any of those women would have dated Sudeikis. Aniston was once married to Brad Pitt. Wilde was formerly married to a prince. Those are some high standards to compete against, yet he seems to have not had a problem with that.

I suppose he has some sort of magical combination of qualities that makes him quite attractive to women. He isn’t ugly and compared to an average dude, I guess he could be considered handsome but at the same time, in the world of celebrities, even he would probably admit he ain’t no male model. Again, I believe the fact that he’s funny and mostly likely a super nice guy more than makes up for any deficiencies in that area. In the end, I think he’s done a great job with his post-divorce dating success. I just wish he could tell us what his secret is.

Welcome to another edition of “Did You Know?”! Did you know the European Chess Union has instituted a dress code for women at their chess tournaments? The dress code specifically addresses issues regarding the amount of cleavage to be shown and how short skirts can be. The General Secretary of the ECU explains the dress code in an interview here. I never knew chess was this sexy!

On Tuesday evening I attended my first Vancouver Canucks game in almost two years, thanks to my lovely sister and her husband who gifted me with two tickets. The Canucks were facing the Dallas Stars. Unfortunately, the Canucks played very poorly and lost 5-2. One of the very few highlights of the game occurred during a TV timeout when an in-house camera captured a little boy named Jack who was dancing up a storm in one of the mid-level suites. Jack had some pretty awesome moves which really got the crowd going. For better or worse, it was probably the best piece of entertainment during the evening.

Because of his performance, Jack won the honour of getting an autographed game-worn jersey from Dan Hamhuis. Jack actually got to meet Hammer himself after the game. Upon hearing that Jack was going get that jersey, some random dude next to me remarked that no kid in a suite should get more free stuff.

Witness the dancing styles of Jack in the video above.

To update you on my last post, I did indeed call Telus to find out why I was still being charged for the TV service when I had already cancelled it. The call centre dude looked up my account and quickly discovered that Telus had screwed up another thing with my service. He apologized and instantly credited my account with bogus charges. I thanked him for that but I told him the whole process of cancelling my TV service was a horrendous experience. Having to call tech support twice and then finding out I was being overcharged was unacceptable. He agreed and offered me a free month worth of service. I probably could have squeezed more out of him but I took his offer.

I would have preferred that Telus just done everything right in the first place but at least I received some manner of compensation for my trouble.

It seems like that no matter where you live, people will have countless stories about being unhappy with their Internet service provider. Sadly, I am here with a tale of that sort. In a recent post, I detailed my successful attempt at getting free HDTV over the air with a cheap antenna. In doing so, I decided to cancel my TV subscription with Telus, the company that provided both my TV and Internet services. I contacted them and got them to cancel the TV but keep the Internet. You’d think this kind of thing would be something that they’ve handled before. Based on my experience, Telus appears to have no idea what they’re doing.

As a consequence of canceling the TV service, I had to step down to another level of Internet service. I understood this and I was ok with it. While the speed I had before was crazy fast, I didn’t really use up the maximum bandwidth very often so decreasing my speed was fine. I’d still be at least one level up from the most basic and slow service. I agreed to make the changes happen at the end of February just so was neat and tidy with billing. The 1st of March rolled around and everything was fine and dandy. I’d removed the TV set top box and my Internet was still working. I just assumed everything had switch over with no problems. I was wrong. Little did I know that Telus’ billing cycle for the month of March started today and not last week on the 1st.

I woke up this morning, grabbed my phone and tried to check my e-mail via wifi. I was connected to the router but I couldn’t get a connection to the Internet itself. I grabbed my laptop and tried connecting that way. No dice. I then booted up my desktop to see if it was just the wifi. That did not work either. I rebooted my router three times and it still didn’t work. It was then I called technical support at Telus. I had to get escalated to a Tier 2 person but I finally got an answer. Telus had completely screwed up the change in Internet service levels. The network settings on their end had not been changed correctly. The person I was talking to on the phone told me it would probably be a five minute change but they would call me when it was all fixed. I hung up and went about my day. The five minute fix wound up being closer to an hour. I was at lunch with a friend when they finally called back. Apparently, they had screwed up more than they had initially thought. I don’t know a lot about networking services but it appears a full re-build of the network path for a customer is not a five minute fix.

I didn’t get back home until the evening because I had to run some errands. That meant that I couldn’t observe Telus’ “fix” in detail until after dinner. When I got back in front of my computer, I noticed the porn scientific papers I was downloading was coming in really slow. At first I thought it was just that single site but I then noticed everything was coming in at a crawl. I then ran several download speed tests over and over again, from several different sources. They all capped out consistently at the same very low speed. That meant the slowness had nothing to do with varying network conditions. I called Telus technical support a second time. I again had to be escalated to a Tier 2 person. That dude made me wait for about 15 minutes on hold while I listened to some soft rock favourites that seem to always be a staple of all “holding” music. When he finally returned he explained that whoever tried to fix my problem earlier only partially fixed it and left something else completely broken. I was told he couldn’t fix it right away as the work order had to go to some other network group to be processed. He also warned me that the fix could take as long as 48 hours to be completed. Wonderful.

To add insult to injury, I then checked my Telus account online after I got off the phone. Telus billed my credit card today the same amount that I was billed last month. Going over the items charged to me, I saw that I was billed for the TV service which I had indicated I wanted cancelled after the end of February. So not only did Telus deprive me of Internet service for several hours, then left it slow as molasses, they also charged me money for a service I no longer had.

It’s this type of terrible customer service that leaves people with a huge distrust of large corporations. They seem to have no trouble charging you money, as Telus did in my case, they never get that part wrong. Whenever they have to do something for you though, they always seem to find a way to screw it up completely. When the billing and customer service departments open up tomorrow, I am going to give them whatever ineffective rage one wronged customer can possibly give out against a faceless, cold corporate entity.