Month: February 2015

When I was a child, typical things got me excited: french fries, sci-fi movies, and video games. I guess those things still excite me as an adult but I’ve discovered the most mundane things can be a cause to celebrate. Case in point happened about a week ago. I went to get my home insurance renewed. The insurance company had sent me a renewal package but I had shopped around for quotes. Ultimately though, it appeared my current insurance provider was still the cheapest. I was about to pay it online but I wanted to make sure all the terms of my coverage still made sense. I decided to drop by the office to speak with an agent.

Once I got there, an agent went through my current policy and we decided to change a few things. For one, I think I had listed my personal property at $50K. I’m not sure if I’ve ever owned $50K of stuff over the course of my lifetime, let alone currently in my apartment. So we changed that amount to something a lot more reasonable. The agent also found a few discounts that I was now eligible for. Some of these were significant. In the end, my original quoted renewal was $260 and that went down to $173. When the agent told me that I was like, hell yeah, let’s get that done right now. He’d reduced the amount I had to pay by over $85. That was the cheapest my insurance has ever been, eclipsing the $220 mark from several years ago.

Getting my insurance this year for that cheap made my day and I was super excited I was able to save that much money. I’m sure as a child the concept of buying insurance would have been a boring concept to me but this has been a highlight of the month so far!

As many of you know, an American company recently announced they would be retreating from Canada due to a failed expansion into this country. Of course, that company would be Target, whose demise in Canada has been well-documented.

Unfortunately, another American company has decided to call it quits in Canada as well. Just like Target, Redbox is leaving after a period of less than three years. Redbox operates thousands of automated kiosks that rents movies to the public. Achieving success in the US, the company decided to expand into Canada in early 2012. They intended to tap into a consumer market that no longer had any video stores to go to. You can read their announcement here but the gist of it is, there wasn’t enough demand for them to continue.

I was and continue to be a huge fan of Redbox. They chose to put a kiosk downstairs in the Safeway. I could go online and check the inventory of that kiosk without leaving my home. It was so convenient. Sometimes I’d rent from a Redbox somewhere else but I could return to any other Redbox. It was also cheap too. I always rented Blu-rays and they were just over $2 a rental after tax. Over the course of two years, I’d say I rented from my local Redbox about two or three times a month on average.

A lot of people question why someone would use Redbox when streaming services like Netflix exist. Let’s address Netflix first. Netflix doesn’t offer movies as recent as the ones you’d find in a Redbox. Sometimes you’ll have to wait a year or even longer for a movie to appear on there. In many cases, some movies will never arrive on Netflix. Because I live in Canada, the selection on Netflix sucks compared to other countries. In the last year, I don’t think any of my Redbox rentals have shown up on Netflix.

As for other streaming services, they are much more current than Netflix. Unfortunately, they’re more than double the price for a movie rental in standard definition. Yes, that’s right. Why would I rent something at twice the price with inferior image quality? High definition streaming rentals do exist but they’re $6, triple what a Redbox rental costs. Also keep in mind that if you go with a streaming rental, you also incur the cost of eating up any bandwidth caps you might have.

Lastly, there’s also the murky option of downloading movies using torrents. As someone who derives their living from making consumable digital entertainment, I just can’t justify getting a movie for free and then complaining that people are pirating the games I make. If I want to keep myself positioned on the moral high ground here, I can’t go the torrent route.

So, where does this leave me? No other kiosk rental services exist in Canada. Best Buy used to have a competing service but they wrapped that up nearly a year and a half ago. Some companies still operate the movie rentals by mail business. The problem is these services force you to pay a set fee every month, even if you decide not to get any movies for that month. With Redbox, I only paid whenever I rented.

I had no feelings either way when I read that Target was leaving Canada. With Redbox though, I’m genuinely sad. I was looking forward to seeing Interstellar on Blu-ray and getting it from my local Redbox at the end of March. That won’t happen now.

It’s a long weekend here in British Columbia, so the staff at et.com are at home for Family Day. This is the only third Family Day holiday in the history of the province so it’s still quite new to us residents. I imagine this is how people felt when they first started to celebrate Christmas and barely had any of the traditions established. Like on the third Christmas, it was just Santa and egg nog. Mistletoe wouldn’t arrive until the fifth Christmas and the tree didn’t make an appearance until Christmas XXV. Or, I could be wrong about that.

Several months ago, when I was still working, I bought a back massager for my chair at work. I detailed this purchase in a previous post. Because I was feeling a bit generous, I left the massager at work so my co-workers could use it while they toiled away. I would need no massaging since I’d be a carefree bum. The intention was to pick it back up after everyone was finished work on Halo.

Well, the beginning of January rolled around and I went to pick up the massager from UFG. I discovered they had thrown out the box that it got shipped in, which concerned me because it would be slightly awkward to bring on the train with me. Luckily, the good people at UFG found be a large enough tote bag to hold the whole thing. I got it back home with relative ease.

I’ve been enjoying the benefits of a massaged back ever since. It’s quite nice to have this small luxury at home.

It used to be that if you saw a penny on the street you’d pick it up because it was inherently worth the effort to get that penny. I think those days are long gone now (especially since the government decided to get rid of the penny). A single cent doesn’t buy you very much of anything anymore. I don’t even bother if I see a penny. For the coins coloured silver, things are a bit more complicated. It’s gotten to the point where I sometimes won’t even pick up a random nickel I see on the ground. It all depends on my mood I suppose. I still pick up dimes but I’m starting to question that. I was on the bus last week and when I went to sit down, I saw a dime on the seat next to me. As an experiment, I decided to leave it, just to see if I would regret it later. I didn’t. Is this a new trend for me?

On the flip side, there’s no way I’d turn down a random quarter, loonie, or twoonie. Those are definitely worth my time and effort to pick up. I’m poor enough to need those coins. Just this evening, I was walking through the retail parkade in my building. I noticed something blue and silvery on the ground in a puddle. When I got closer I saw it was five-dollar bill! It was right in parking spot so someone might have lost it when they were fishing out their car keys from a pocket or purse. Luckily, it was one of the newer polymer bills, so the huge puddle it was sitting in didn’t make it all soggy. I picked it up and shook off as much of the water as I could. Finding five dollars was pretty much the highlight of my day.

I wonder if super rich people won’t even bother to pick up a $20 bill on the street. I get the feeling Kanye West wouldn’t waste his time on anything other than a $100 or higher. Man, being that rich must be great.

I’ve heard of people getting insulting ads appearing on their Facebook page and I’ve finally joined that list. The ad you see above is showing up frequently when I’m on Facebook. Apparently, Zuckerberg’s social network thinks I’m senior citizen looking to date other senior citizens. Look at the woman they featured in that ad. No offense to her but she’s old, like she possibly could have grandchildren. I’m no spring chicken but I’m not looking to date grandmothers. Thanks Facebook, I get it, you believe I’m old.

Thankfully, if you click on the corner of the ad, you can tell Facebook to hide the ad forever. I’ll go do that right now.

I love this bit every single time Jimmy Kimmel makes a new one. With our advanced technology, even the most humblest of citizens can reach out to their favourite stars!

I don’t consider myself a football fan even in the loosest sense of the word. I don’t really follow the NFL and I don’t follow the CFL (which might make me a bad Canadian). As many of you know, the Super Bowl was on today. I didn’t watch any of the commercials and didn’t watch any of the half-time show. I was playing video games instead. What I did do was turn on my TV for the last minute of the game.

What I did see when my TV had finished warming up was that Seattle was basically about to grasp its fingers around its second consecutive Super Bowl Championship. They were five yards from the goal line and all they had to do was run the ball into the end zone. Yes, technically had they done that Tom Brady would have still had maybe one or two plays to tie it up but the odds would have been totally against him. So me, not even a football fan, knew that a running play would have almost guaranteed Seattle another championship. Why do I know that? Because they have a pretty good running back and he’s pretty good at Mortal Kombat too.

Instead of giving the ball to that dude, Seattle coach Pete Carroll decided to go for a passing play, which of course was intercepted and sealed the Super Bowl victory for New England. I haven’t seen such a bone-headed move since perhaps the Canucks started Roberto Luongo three times in Boston in the 2011 Stanley Cup Finals despite him being completely useless in Beantown.

For not being a football fan and not living in Seattle, even I felt bad for Seahawks fans. I can’t imagine the anguish the actual fans went through this evening. This is why following sports kinda sucks sometimes.