Bell Sympatico

I don't even understand why a company would want to buy out BCE as was finally approved last week. I myself have had a number of problems with them on a service level, with unannounced changes of e-mail servers, and unexplained loss of connection for days at a time (though that hasn't happened in a while now). That's not even getting into the fact that Bell has deemed it appropriate to throttle internet connections, whether legitimate or otherwise, all while actually increasing the cost of the high speed service since the time we initially signed on.

In what other market do you see a diminished quality of service for an increase in price? I sure can't think of any.

Then late last week out of the blue, Carolyn's family Sympatico connection went down for no good reason. With no apparent changes being made to the modem-router combo (that you are forced to rent from Bell as opposed to buying your own and saving money in the long run), all three of their computers were unable to connect. After hours on the phone with their tech 'support' spread out over much of the weekend, her dad was driven to screaming at the useless tits at the other end of the phone line.

It seems to be Sympatico policy to always pass the blame to the customer. In this case they had Carolyn disable her wireless card, and in whatever else they had her do, remove the drivers for said card, causing more headaches later. Along with that, they tried to insist that Internet Explorer HAD to be used, and that there was some error, apparently present instantaneously on all of their computers at once that was causing the problem. This despite the fact that 2 of those 3 computers were reformatted and configured recently and were clean of any kind of spyware, adware or viruses. I've managed to reconfigure everything for them now and it seems to be up and running fine again, but that's not to say that Sympatico should be let off the hook for their useless 'help'.

After the first 2 hours on the phone, they should have been willing to send a technician out to the house, maybe not same day or anything, but nonetheless within a day or two. Instead, they shipped out a new modem, without the wireless capability of the previous one, and strung them all along for a ride blaming the customer's computer instead of their own shortcomings, something I've run into with my own dealings with them.

Then to top all this off, I read this morning that Bell is restructuring their cell phone billing to charge their clients for incoming text messages. While thankfully not a Bell mobile customer, you can guarantee I wouldn't be one for a second longer once they started pulling that kind of bullshit, effectively making double the profit on messages exchanged between Bell customers. Of course it makes sense to charge fees for outgoing messages, but incoming messages? The client can do nothing to control what messages they receive. On an incoming call you at least have the option not to answer the call, but a text message doesn't have the same feature. But its these kind of backhanded business practices I guess that make a company worth billions. Watch out, in the months ahead I foresee Bell adding a rental surcharge for the copper communications lines running into your home that have been there for decades.

Blisters the Size of....Well, They're Big

Three days helping my buddy Steve and his wife move from a third story apartment with no elevator to what is essentially a three storey house. By the end of the first day I had the cliched muscles I didn't know I had aching. After three, I'm pretty sure I had worn them away to nothing anyways.

I followed that up with two days of building a poorly designed and supplied shed from Home Hardware (let this be a warning). Holding a bottle of ketchup at dinner was a challenge with fatigued arms shaking. At least its been good to be productive, and I have been paid well with food and beer.

But somehow between yesterday and today, my cellphone decided to take a shit, and now won't start up, despite being on a fully charged battery. Infact, the charger itself won't even work, and I'm left trying to find a replacement battery or a replacement phone for at least less than the amount of airtime I have left on the plan. I guess its back to being incommunicado for me.

WiFight It?

I came across an interesting article this morning on the BBC, wherein a man in London, England became the third person arrested for 'stealing' wireless signals, inspiring some debate as to whether it really should be illegal to do so.

It is, as the article states, easy enough for a person to set up simple encryption on their wireless access point to keep people from easily using their signal, and in most cases it would seem this would be a strong enough hint that that particular signal is not intended for public use. When my connection has gone down for a length of time in the past, or when I've been travelling, I've felt no shame for finding the strongest available unsecure network to troubleshoot any problems with my ISP, or to check my e-mail and such while away. As new neighbours have come in over the past few years, more of the networks around me have become secured, but still leaving one or two viable options.

Surely enough, there are ways to work around those safeguards, but not taking the hint that the network is secured, and then attempting to circumvent it then starts to become an issue of hacking versus 'stealing' wireless signals, and should be treated as such.

Once a wireless signal is broadcast however, it is out there, in its limited range, traveling at the speed of light, so I'm not sure how it itself can be stolen. Of course this in most cases would be a question of semantics, where the general idea is that connecting to a wireless access point in turn gives you access to the internet. And this is likely where the whole issue became a sticking point in the first place, with the large provider companies having the money to attempt to force action against the practice. At this point one could get into the whole debate over how internet service charges, at least around here, seem to generally increase, with no increase, or infact some decreases in the quality of service, but that can be saved for another rant.

The fact is most people either pay for a set bandwidth, which in most cases I've ever seen goes 90% unused, or pay for an unlimited bandwidth service. Now, if the 'offending' wireless 'thief' is legitimate in just using the wireless access occasionally to check e-mail, troubleshoot their own connection problem, or even browse the news, the actual data transfer is a tiny fraction of even a 10 gigabyte per month service. On the other hand, if people go ahead and attempt to use a neighbour's connection for file sharing and the like, easily transferring large amounts of data, then concern may be warranted. Nonetheless, if you and your neighbour were to come to an agreement to do so, without defaulting on payments either for the initial service, or any charges for going over bandwidth, then there should be no way for that to be an illegal practice. In either the low or high bandwidth case, the service is paid for, and the user has willingly left their access point open to anyone with the capability to see it.

From the service perspective, it is somewhat similar to the debate of whether it should be chargeable to split your cable TV signal once it is in your home, and suffering the associated loss in signal strength, and so quality, if you so choose. Like the article states, it is no different than using the light from someone's window to read by, nor is it disparate from benefitting from the heat or cold of surrounding units in an apartment building.

Simply if you don't want people using your wireless connection, encrypt it. If ISP's don't want shared service, then they should give step by step instructions as to how to configure their router so as not to provide access to the service (though it should still allow for unsecure access to that wireless network for local networking should the user wish).

Tape Select B - Side A

In cleaning out my room to do renovation work I came across a case full of cassette tapes, as well as some 8-tracks I swiped from my parents' collections when I was a kid. Some of the cassettes, I can honestly say, I didn't know I had, including gems from Rob Van Winkle, MC Hammer, and the king of pop himitself. On the other hand, I see nothing wrong with owning 8-track copies of Bat Out of Hell, or Supertramp's Crime of the Century.

Along with the legit (2 legit 2 quit?) tapes though, I also came across my collections of mix tapes, some of them with the tracks written out in neat handwriting as I had nothing better to do at 12 years old, others printed off from some of the earliest versions of MS Publisher. These were the tapes that were nearly worn out listening to All Apologies or Black Hole Sun or One. If you're picturing me now as one of those kids walking around in a plaid shirt and ripped jeans, a few years behind the actual 'grunge' peak, you'd be absolutely right. Don't forget the quasi Kurt undercut.

Anyways, I found my mix tapes, and having just put the stock radio and tape deck back into my old van before its as yet unspecified date with the junkyard, I decided to throw one in the other day. Its remarkable how many of the songs I actually still enjoy, even with the tone not fading in and out from heating and cooling of the tape sitting in the sweltering car or being constantly fast-forwarded or rewound.

It was almost enough to make me want to bust out a tape deck and make a new one for this era. Which brings us to the new Matt Good single, and how I'd consider registering on iTunes and buying it, if it weren't for all the digital rights management crap. I like to be able to move my music around, between my PC and my laptop, or occasionally a memory stick to listen at school, and on to mp3 mix discs which have taken over for me from tapes. See I buy mp3 capable DVD and CD players for my car and home entertainment system for a reason, and to have to worry about whether the song will actually play because of the DRM is just a big pain in the ass. I ran into a similar problem with the Foo Fighters two years ago with the copy protection on the actual physical CD.

Its no fault of the artists either in most cases, but the money grubbing execs, who I guess aren't making enough off the $100's concert tickets and $billions in music sales still, despite file sharing. Nonetheless, I will be grabbing a copy of the CD the day it comes out anyways, as I'm still a sucker for the tangible, and for album art, and so feel no guilt about acquiring a copy of the track in other ways, perhaps to make myself a mix tape circa 2007.