Category: Uncategorized

Today was the day I was supposed to get the Internet working again in my home. Around 10:30am this morning, a Telus technician phoned me to say he was five minutes out and ready to finish up some wiring in my home. He arrived promptly and the worked he needed to do lasted only about ten minutes or so. He was out the door very quickly after that.

I then ran quickly across the street to the post office, where my DSL modem was waiting for me. I brought it back home, unpacked it, and wired everything up. I plugged it in and turned it on. One particular light on the modem would have to go from off, blinking green, and then finally to solid green to indicate everything was working properly. After five minutes, that light never changed from blinking green. I called my new ISP to ask them what was going on. I was told that even though Telus completed all the physical wiring work today, they have until 1pm tomorrow to actually flip all the necessary “switches” on their end to enable Internet access in my home. Contractually, my new ISP can’t chase down Telus for this until the stupid 1pm deadline passes tomorrow. Of course, no one told me this, neither my new ISP nor Telus (even when the guy was in my home). I’m stuck with another day without proper Internet access.

I get the feeling when it’s 1pm tomorrow, that damn light will still be blinking green instead of solid. That’s just the luck I usually have for these type of things. I am running out of patience!

Like clockwork, I received my property assessment in the mail this week. Every year I have received the assessment, the assessed value has gone up, except for this year. For first time since being a homeowner, I have seen the value of my home go down. According to the province, my home is now worth six percent (6%) less compared to last year.

To go into more detail, the assessments are broken down into buildings and land categories. Each value is summed to give the total assessment value. Interestingly, the value of the building stayed exactly the same but the land was worth 10% less compared to last year. Does this mean land is cheaper to buy now? I’m no real estate expert but I’m guessing yes?

What is also interesting is that my municipality has stated that almost universally, all property assessments went up which makes me lucky or unlucky? Perhaps my property taxes will be lower this year.

I’m still under the weather, my sinuses are still congested and now I have a cough. It sucks really. Being sick while having limited Internet access just adds to that suckiness. Since I’m ill, I haven’t been outside much in the last few days. I might go out once a day to get some groceries where I also get some fresh air. I feel like I’m not sure what’s happening in the world currently.

Being a hermit used to mean you probably were very disconnected from the world and had very little knowledge of what was going on in the world. With the advent of the Internet though, living a hermit’s existence no longer meant these things had to be true. I tell ya, if you’re gonna be a shut-in for whatever reason, make sure the Internet is working for you.

I look forward to the end of the week where hopefully I will be able to get porn in HD again and more importantly, I hope my body will stop producing green-yellow mucus like I’m Slurpee machine.

I think I fell asleep around 3am last night and I woke up just after 8am this morning. While the rest of the world returned to work from the holidays, I found myself in bed and still under the weather. The good news was my nose was less congested compared to the weekend. I grabbed my phone and surfed the Internet for about an hour before I started feeling tired again. I closed my eyes and the next time I opened them, it seemed a lot later. I checked the time and I was startled to see it was almost 3pm. Whoa. I had not been getting a lot of sleep in the last few days and I supposed my body was comfortable enough to sleep about 11 hours in total.

I got up and the first thing I did was to phone my new ISP about the status of my new Internet connection. As many of you know, I switched ISPs and the original plan was for everything to be ready tomorrow. I’ve been without in-home Internet service since the early morning of December 31. From that date, I’ve been relying on just the Internet access I have through my cell phone. It’s not the fastest connection and also when I set my phone to be a mobile wi-fi hotspot, it becomes very flaky. This leaves my other computing devices at home with very limited connectivity. To say that I’m ready to have a real Internet connection again would be an understatement.

When I got my new ISP on the phone, I discovered that my connection date had been moved two days forward. So instead of having it ready on Tuesday, today, it would be connected on Thursday. Not only that, I would have to home for a Telus dude to come check some wiring in my hallway closet. Even though I’m no longer with Telus, a Telus dude has to do the wiring work. Here’s the real fun part, the window that I was given for this visit is 9am to 8pm. What kind of stupid work window is that? No wonder people hate the big cable and ISPs. They expect me to be home for nearly 12 hours on Thursday and be waiting the entire time so a Telus technician can grace me with their presence. I’m lucky that I’m not working right now but even so, the thought of having to wait half a day for a house-call seems stupid.

Ideally, the dude would arrive around noon, so I don’t have to get up too early and that also means I didn’t have to wait for him until after dinner. The worst-case scenario is he arrives around 7pm, meaning I would have wasted the entire day waiting around for him.

Well, this new year is off to a great start for me. The minor sinus infection I thought I had last week managed to linger all through the last several days of 2014. It bothered me just enough to knock me out of my ordinary routine but wasn’t debilitating to the point where I was bedridden all the time. On Friday, it seemed it was clearing up for good as my right sinus (the infected one) was producing less of that greenish-yellow mucous and I was breathing without difficulty. I even went outside and got some exercise which felt great. Things changed drastically on Saturday afternoon. I felt really tired all of a sudden and both of my nasal passages were very clogged up.

I felt awful for most of Saturday evening, like perhaps I had a real cold rather than just a sinus infection. I decided to go to bed early, which was 1am for me. I was probably asleep for about two hours when I woke up with this feeling like I couldn’t breathe very well. Once fully awake, I discovered the source of my troubles were my congested nasal passages. I had to sit up to somewhat breathe normally. I went to the bathroom and rifled through the cabinet drawers to look for some cold or flu medications, anything that drugs for relieving nasal or sinus congestion. Then I realized I threw out all my cold/flu meds a few months ago when I discovered they were all past their expiry date. So I had nothing to use and I wasn’t about to go to a 24 hour pharmacy at 3am to get something.

I went back to bed and sat upright again. I began reading an e-book on my tablet, Darrell Hammond’s account of his early life and his time on Saturday Night Live. I’m a fan of his work, so the book was a fascinating and at times, tragic view of his whole life. I kept waiting for fatigue to take me back to sleep, hopefully sitting up so I could breathe easier. Well, the hours went by quick and I finished the book. I then turned to randomly surfing the Internet when sometime around 8am, I finally felt tired enough to fall asleep. I’m not sure how long I was out for but it didn’t seem long because of my awkward body position caused the circulation to be cut off in one of my arms. That jolted me out of my sleep. This happened a few more times before sometime after 12pm, I decided I wasn’t really going to get much more rest with my sinuses still congested like this.

Still feeling kinda crappy, I got up, blew my nose, made some breakfast, and decided I needed to go to the drug store downstairs. It took some effort but I dragged my ass outside to some meds, specifically something to clear my congestion. I consumed one pill right away after I got home and it seemed to work almost immediately. I was able to breathe easy all evening. I’ll take one more before going to bed and hopefully I’ll be able to sleep normally tonight. I have no more e-books on my tablet for tonight.

As I write this, some parts of the world are less than two hours away from 2015 but in my part of the world, we still have about twenty-one hours left.

As with previous years, I am planning on having a very quiet New Year’s Eve. It wasn’t supposed to be like this as I was going to host a friend from out-of-town for the end of the year. My grad school friend, who hails from Alberta, was going to spend the holidays in Victoria with the rest of family. While they were going to back home after Christmas, he was going to hop over to Vancouver so we could celebrate New Year’s Eve. Unfortunately, his family got ill and the trip to Victoria got cancelled which meant he wasn’t coming to Vancouver at all.

Perhaps that was for the best anyways because at the end of the last weekend, I developed a bit of a sinus cold. My right sinus has been bothering me, producing some interesting substances. I also seem to have a bit of a sore throat in the mornings. There appears to be some minor fatigue and lethargy that hangs over me. I’ve definitely had worse colds but I’d have to say I’m not 100% either.

Anyways, I’m looking forward to staying warm and having a fun evening at home for the last night of 2014. I hope whatever you do for your New Year’s Eve, it is enjoyable, safe, and memorable.

As I type this, the current air temperature is -3 degrees Celsius, which is very cold for the greater Vancouver area. Despite putting on some warmer clothes. I wimped out and turned on the heat in my bedroom for a portion of the evening. The heat will be off again when I go to bed because I don’t want to use any more electricity while I’m sleeping.

In a related matter, if you were curious about how much extra electricity I’m using now since I’m all the time, I know this now. A few weeks ago, I received my electricity bill for the months of October and November. Usually when I’m working, I’m not home for a good portion of the day, meaning that many of appliances like my computer, lights, hot water dispenser, and stove are off. Now that I’m not working, many of these are running a lot more during the day since I’m not out as much. Normally, the bill comes to just over $20 a month for electricity. Since I’ve stopped working, that’s increased to about $30 a month. That’s not going to bankrupt me but that’s definitely a cost of being home all the time.

In a previous post, I mentioned how I was changing Internet service providers in an effort to cut those costs by about 50%. It turns out there might be a few complications to my plan. First, it may actually be impossible for the independent ISP to get service to me. The reason for that is because the indie ISP has to rely on Telus to run the proper copper wires used for DSL to my building. I’m almost 100% sure that Telus chose to actually run fiber optic lines to my building for Internet instead of copper because fiber is way faster. Apparently, Telus can apparently refuse to do any more wiring to my building because the fiber is already in place. Without having any copper wires for DSL in my building, the indie ISP won’t be able to provide service to me since Telus won’t let them touch the fiber lines. If this is the case, I’m stuck with Telus if I want to use DSL. If I’m ok with changing over to cable, then I could go that route but I’d have to choose another indie ISP that offers cable Internet.

Now assuming everything goes through fine (which is very uncertain at this point), I unfortunately will have to go through about a six-day period from the new year on where I won’t have in-home Internet access. The new ISP is supposed to hook everything up on or about the sixth of January. I could have made my Telus cancellation date on the same day but I would have been forced to pay an entire month’s worth of access for just those six days. Because I’m cheap, my cancellation date is now on the last day of this month. For those six days, I’ll be forced to use my smartphone’s mobile data and set up a mobile wi-fi hotspot so my tablet and laptop can have Internet access. My main computer, a desktop, will have to go without during that time.

So, things are a bit murky right now. I was told the indie ISP will tell me this week if the changeover can proceed but there’s a good chance I’ll be stuck with Telus again.

From everyone here at et.com, we wish you the happiest of holidays and best wishes for the coming new year!

Recently I looked at my bill for Internet access and realized Telus was charging me $58 a month for the lowest tier of service. I decided that was way too expensive for what I was getting. Around 1999, I acquired DSL high-speed Internet access for my home. I was charged $19.99 a month from Telus and that price was more than worth it. Over the years, Telus has increased the amount I have to pay, without a proportionate increase in download speed or value. Telus always trumpets the increasing cost of doing business and maintenance of their networks for the need to raise rates but I personally think there’s some hand-waving there. I don’t doubt inflation has something to do with it but when the company keeps boasting about profits all the time, it’s hard not to think there’s some money-grabbing going on.

I’ve had enough so I am canceling my Internet service with Telus. I am going with an independent Internet access provider. Such companies basically rent access to equipment and networks from the major Internet service providers, like Telus or Shaw, and sell that Internet access to consumers. In nearly all cases, for the same download and upload speeds, such independents charge less than the big boys.

In my case, for the same download and upload speed, I will now be charged $30 a month, instead of the $58, a savings of almost 50%. Of course, sometimes it’s not so black and white. I took advantage of a promotion where lots of fees, some one-time and others monthly were waived. I avoided a one time $75 general activation fee and another $37 dry copper fee. I also was waived on a $5 network access fee and another weird $10 fee, all monthly. Had I been forced to pay for all those, I might have thought twice about it.

In the end, I didn’t get away scot-free. I still have to pay about $40 for a DSL modem (which I get to keep) and a $100 fee for some wiring work that needs to be done in my building. By my count, after five months, the switch to the new ISP will begin to pay for itself, which is fine by me.

In Canada, we have a dearth of real competition amongst Internet service providers and cell phone companies. This leads to situations where I was paying 3x the amount I originally paid for the same level of Internet access. I encourage you to look for alternatives out there because the big companies rely on consumers to be static and just go with the increasingly expensive flow. Someone recently posted on social media a list of alternative companies for Internet access. There are some BC specific companies out there but if you live in Canada, have a look and maybe you can some money!