cell phone

Dealing with the Boys in Blue

I remember when I came to Canada how my great uncle taught me to respect the police. I don’t know what he thought, because I was not a gang member, I was doing well in school, I wasn’t a problem in school, my parents didn’t let me run amok breaking laws, and even though I had immigrated to Canada from what was ostensibly a Third World country, the strata of society in which I lived was anything but Third World.

Somewhere along the way, I had my eyes opened though.

I didn’t join any gangs, I didn’t engage in the sexual assaults some of my elementary school friends allegedly perpetrated or partake of the kinds of substances they abused, I just carried on being a “good kid”. I joined Air Cadets, excelled there, and went on to become an officer in the Canadian Armed Forces. The Forces decided I wasn’t as good as the impression I had given them in the recruitment process, and so they kicked me to the kerb. C’est la vie. A blessing in disguise, and I think if their training was half as good as they thought it was, I’d have had the full career I signed up for, and may even be a senior officer there now. Or I may not be, and I’d be a veteran with a distinguished career behind me doing what veterans do with themselves after they serve.

Instead, I’m no longer on the books of the Forces, but the books of police services around the country, in the Lower Mainland specifically.

You see, I’m known as a speeder. Yes, apparently I drive very fast in all sorts of municipalities around Greater Vancouver and southwest BC.

So what do I do? Hundreds of kilometres an hour through school zones? Stunts on the road? Come to screeching stops at traffic lights? Not quite. I’ve had a clean driving record for 20-25 years. I don’t even remember what the number is, because I don’t remember a time when I blew through a stop sign or red light and smoked that minivan full of two families heading to the beach. If that happened, I’d remember the date and time and how long it has been since then, but it never did. But despite that, you’d think that was exactly the kind of record I had judging by what ICBC and the various police forces think about me.

Photo radar

Speed and red-light camera warning sign.

My first reminder of Big Brother was an inconspicuous envelope in the mail. Two of them, actually. I’ve recently taken up driving my mother around because she was negatively affected by damage to one of her eyes (and her other eye sucks anyway), and I’m the only son left because one of her sons decided sometime ago to estrange himself from the family, and the other is focussed on himself and can’t help out on week days between 9 and 5. (It’s called having a job, but he and other family weren’t so supportive when I was doing what I needed to do to earn income and wasn’t doing so well, and he’s a hypocrite, so I don’t feel the need to be supportive of him now.) Those two envelopes were photo radar tickets. Yes, contrary to popular belief, we still have that here. The BC Liberal government took a hint from the public a few years ago and got rid of the old photo radar where a van sits on the side of the road and takes pictures of speeders as they go by, but the NDP got the idea to combine red-light cameras with photo-radar cameras, and now you have photo radar at multiple random locations around BC.

And how fast was I going? 150 km/h? 250 km/h? For one ticket I was going 80 km/h and the other 81 km/h. About 3 hours apart. On the same afternoon and evening when the weather was dry and the light and visibility were perfectly fine. Pretty consistent! This is at the intersection of 50 km/h and 60 km/h main roads where there are multiple lanes in either direction (plus dedicated left- and right-turn lanes) and the average vehicle is going at about 80 km/h. Average! That means some are going faster! I’ve since gone through that intersection at 50 km/h, and I don’t feel safe doing so. But that’s OK, as long as I’m not going through it at the insane speed of 80 km/h, we’re all safer.

At this point, feel free to shake your head.

And how visible is that sign above? Definitely not very.

So what lessons have I learnt? It’s not to drive at exactly the speed limit, because I tried that years ago and, as with driving through this particular intersection at 50 km/h, I didn’t feel safe. No, what I do now is take routes in that area that avoid that intersection. Yup, I’m still driving as I always have, but just through different intersections. Somehow I don’t think that’s the goal of putting robots on the side of the road that see and measure everything, but that’s why I’m stupid and am not a police commissioner or the premier of the province.

I very strongly intended to fight the tickets in court, but eventually I decided, because the tickets were only monetary penalties to the owner of the car (my mother) and didn’t also come with the added sting of penalty points, I just paid them. Considering my business just failed and I have an income right now of $0.00, $342 was difficult, but that’s what credit cards are for. I’ll get back on my feet and pay back Visa eventually.

The intractability of ICBC

So what other excitement have I had with ICBC and the boys in blue? Well, as I said, I’ve been driving my mother around recently, and my 20/25-year (if not more) clean driving record was sullied. This was completely my fault (as some accidents are) when a driver in front of me suddenly hit the brakes for a surprise pedestrian and I rear-ended him. And how fast was I going? 250 km/h? No, I was barely moving, as even speeders are wont to do occasionally, because we were slowing down in a right-turn lane. I don’t know how fast we were going as it’s not my habit to glance at the speedometer as my vehicle is about to hit something, but I’d say we were barely moving. I did no damage to the other vehicle and all I have on my vehicle is an indentation on a bumper.

I reported the accident, as I’m required by law to do (I still follow most laws) to a call-taker at ICBC whose first language was obviously not English. If you want to hire foreign call-takers at your company and all you want to do is take orders for your widgets, that’s fine, but not if you’re taking statements in legal cases. So after my call I decided to log into ICBC and provide further information. This required that I re-activated my account with Service BC to integrate with my phone. I did that, and logged into my account and found that ICBC hadn’t connected my account to the “claim” (I’ll explain why that is in quotes in a moment) that I had opened. So here we are about a month after the accident, and I’ve had three (I think, Gmail is such a shit interface) messages from “CC63” at ICBC, who also seems to be challenged by English. I get between one- and four-sentence emails, but none of them make any attempt to resolve the situation in which ICBC has put me by denying me access to provide additional information about my accident. I can’t really think of anything else to say, but you can’t pretend to “resolve” an issue in one- to four-sentence emails, most of which are boilerplate. That’s just ridiculous.

(Why do I put “claim” in quotation marks? According to my education, one only makes a claim against an insurance policy if one claims a payment for something that that is covered by the insurance policy. The cars of both parties in the accident were not damaged and neither was either party injured [and there was no third-party damage], so there is no claim. But the non-English-speaking call-taker pointed out to me that by reporting the accident I had opened a “claim”, even though she heard me state that there was no claim under the English definition of the word. So either her English wasn’t very good, or she has been brainwashed by ICBC jargon to just believe everything they tell her.)

And I haven’t even got to the point where I can complain about the fact that the non-English-speaking call-taker actually said that ICBC will find out about anything to do with my driving, even if I try to hide it. First of all, WTF?! Second of all, I’m not trying to hide anything, and for someone to suggest I am — and it’s only a matter of time before Big Brother finds out — is beyond the pale unless you have evidence that I have tried to mislead someone.

I have an expletive ready to go here, and it’s one of George Carlin’s famous “seven dirty words”, but I receive complaints occasionally.

The hypocrisy of the police

We’ve all seen the police do things they’re not supposed to do, whether it’s right in front of you or on the news. It’s the stuff of legend. We write it off because there’s nothing we can do about it, because most of it is inconsequential anyway. But try telling a cop that the 80 km/h you were doing in a 60 zone was “inconsequential”, and he (or she) will laugh at you and write you a ticket anyway, because the government is expecting that revenue. I remember obeying the law recently and I was pulled over and “talked to” (I didn’t get a ticket, because I didn’t break any laws) because the cop made the assumption that I had no idea what I was doing, or that another driver would assume I had no idea what I was doing and would then act that way and hit me. It was the other driver that should have been pulled over and talked to (or even ticketed for failing to yield), because I didn’t break any laws of even rules. But I’ve had interactions with cops in unmarked vehicles where they were obviously breaking the law, but because they had red and blue flashing lights, they just flashed them at me and I quietly went about my business. I mention this now because this just happened to me on Monday.

I was driving along Steveston Highway in Richmond and I passed an unmarked (as I found out later) police vehicle, a black pick-up truck. And no, I wasn’t doing 250 km/h; I was probably doing what everyone else was doing, about 70 km/h … yes, in a 50 km/h zone, in the same lane as others doing the same speed. I have no idea if it was a Richmond RCMP officer because I never saw him or her in the flesh and got some reasonable identification. Before he (or she) revealed himself/herself to be a cop, I noticed that one of his/her headlights was out. Then he (or she) flashed his/her red-and-blues for no apparent reason (other than to intimidate me, I assume, as other off-duty Richmond RCMP officers have done in non-driving situations) and I got ready to pull over, but he/she carried on and didn’t do anything, and I continued driving as I was. However, if that cop had pulled me over, I was going to ask him/her to write themselves a ticket as well for having one headlight out. I have no idea how that would have gone, but it was worth a shot.

Back when I was doing my darnedest to be a law-abiding citizen and drive at or slower than the speed limit (referred to above), I was passed all the time by cops … in marked cars even! That’s one of the reasons I felt unsafe obeying the speed limit, because nobody else (including the cops!) was doing the same! Why should I drive at 50 km/h when I’m being passed by a cop doing 70?! Why should I do 50 km/h when I’ve got people rushing up my ass and pressuring me to go faster? Why should I do 50 when it’s obvious I’m the slowest person on the road and holding up traffic? So many rhetorical questions, so many hypocritical cops.

Driving mentality

I don’t have any deep analysis of the psychology of driving, but one thing I have noticed, as I avoid being hit by people doing their make-up, eating hamburgers, applying mascara, brushing their hair, talking on the phone, etc., is that driving is not the priority of many people. I mean, sure, they’re in the car because they want to get from A to B, but they’ve done it so much they don’t care, and if the kids in the back seat need a swat, they need a swat! You can’t put that off until later. (That would be sarcasm.) I’m not holding myself up as the model for good drivers to emulate but, besides cars, I have learned to pilot aeroplanes, and you don’t just jump in a plane in your driveway with a couple of screaming kids and your hairbrush, and away you go. Sure, it’s much simpler to “pilot” a car (and also easier to come into contact with other cars), but if people paid as much attention to driving as is required to pilot aeroplanes, our roads would be in much better shape.

When I drive, whether I’m going 8 km/h (5 mph) in a parking lot, 30 km/h in a school zone or 120 km/h along the Coquihalla Highway, I’m driving. I’m piloting a vehicle of a tonne or two, which would hurt if it ran into someone … to put it mildly. I’m not doing one of the activities I mentioned above, I’m focussed on driving. Preferably as smoothly as possible, whether I have passengers or not, because it’s just more pleasant that way. Sometimes I’m fiddling with climate controls or radios (which is one of the reasons touch screens in cars should be banned!) but only when it’s safe to do so, such as when I’m stopped or moving in predictable traffic, such as when I’m on the freeway. I don’t know, but controlling those things is never my priority.

Making suggestions

Isn’t this the point at which I, in all my wisdom, make recommendations? Look, we can’t all be experts on every facet of life, but it’s clear to me that “the powers that be” couldn’t give a shit about us becoming better drivers. They’re just after the money that citizens apparently have stashed … who knows where? … just waiting to pay fines. As our society evolves, we’ll find more and more ways to control the population by, as I say above, installing robots at the side of the road to record and measure our every move. Some people probably want that, and will work to get it; I don’t want that. But, as I watch the news tonight, I’m reminded of the fact that I can assault an innocent person with a baseball bat and be back on the streets tomorrow, but god help me if I do 80 km/h in a 60 zone, because there’s probably a camera somewhere recording that, and hooked up to a system that will automatically churn out a speeding ticket and mail it to me.

That doesn’t improve society.

Teksavvy, update 2

Dec 24th, 2025

by Craig.

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I was busy yesterday (Tuesday), so I’m late.

I woke up in the morning (again, Tuesday) to find the downstream light on my modem still flashing, which meant my Internet access was still not working. I rebooted the machine, no change.

Then I left because I had stuff to do.

I came back after 13:00, no change in the modem status. I again rebooted it, just to see if that would help. No go.

So, using my lightning fast (that’s a joke) Troublesome Mobile connection, I entered chat with a Tek-non-Savvy person. I have to admit the wait is not too long, but it ironically starts with, “We hate that you are having service issues”, and provides a link to basic troubleshooting. Nice, if it helps, which it doesn’t, because my problem isn’t basic.

The customer service person says my service has been activated, so I need to try another cable outlet. I ask her, “What if it works, but it’s not in the room where our TV will be?” I had attached it to the cable outlet (they’re using Rogers, sadly) in the living room near where the previous owners had a TV mounted on the wall. When I attached it to another outlet and I rebooted the modem, it eventually connected. Great! So I do finally have Internet access!

Oh, but wait.

Me: “OK, now it is [online]. But a wifi connection to the TV is not as good as an RJ-45 connection. Why do we not have connectivity on the one outlet where we want it?”

Her: “We have no control over which outlet the vendor activates for the modem, unfortunately.” (I’m starting to see a scam here.)

Her: “I can make some changes in the modem to improve the wifi. What would you like your network name and password to be?” Huh?

After being disconnected and reconnecting: “Why can we not get service at the cable outlet by our future TV?”

Her: “We have no control over which cable outlet the vendor activates for the modem. If you want to relocate the active jack, there is a fee to dispatch a technician. I can make a change in the modem that will help improve your wifi. What would you like your wifi network name and password to be?”

Me: “That hilarious. So you cripple a new modem? I will consult with the person bringing us our new TV on the 28th, but this might be a very short subscription. Would you rather charge us the fee, or have our subscription?”

Her: “It’s not crippling the modem. Band steering is enabled in the modem by default. Disabling it separates the two wifi networks so you can better manage your devices.”

(I looked up “band steering” on Wikipedia: “Some enterprise-grade APs [access points, I believe] use band steering to send 802.11n clients to the 5 GHz band, leaving the 2.4 GHz band for legacy clients. Band steering works by responding only to 5 GHz association requests and not the 2.4 GHz requests from dual-band clients.” Duck.ai says, “The main difference between 5 GHz and 2.4 GHz WiFi is that 5 GHz offers faster speeds but has a shorter range, while 2.4 GHz provides a longer range but slower speeds. Additionally, 2.4 GHz is more prone to interference from other devices, making 5 GHz a better choice for high-bandwidth activities in less crowded environments.” So despite the conventional wisdom that a “hard” connection (network cable) is better than a “soft” connection like wifi, she’s suggesting that I put my modem in another room (rather then right next to the TV) and connect to the modem over wifi. I don’t think so. The building is wood, but there is obviously a wall between the room with the modem and the room with the TV. By connecting the TV to the modem over wifi we’re jeopardising the quality of what the TV plays back. I have almost no experience in this area (TVs), so I have no idea what the degradation will look like; will it look like snow on a 1950’s TV, or what?)

More importantly, the “scam” I’m seeing here is that when we’ve set up Shaw (and then Rogers) cable TV and Internet in new abodes in the past, all cable outlets have been activated; we had a “main” TV in the lounge and a small TV in the bedroom. So if only one of the three outlets we have now was activated, why? Why this one instead of the one by the TV? Why this one instead of the one in the bedroom? And why hold us hostage if their random pick of outlet was wrong and we want to activate a different outlet? Why do they have to send a well-paid technician out? They can do most (if not all) things remotely, so their “claim” that they need to send someone in person sounds bogus to me, especially as what’s probably really happening is that a switch is being flipped back in the central office and the person they send just has to look busy on our premises for a few minutes.

This sounds like it’s worth bringing to the attention of the CRTC, quite frankly. This is either a scam on the part of the established players, or a reseller (TekSavvy) is rolling over. Either way, I don’t think this is playing within the spirit of the rules.

I’ll finish the conversation with Tek-non-Savvy:

Her: “The vendor charges us a fee to dispatch their techs, we have to pass this fee onto the customer.”

Me: “But why are you only activating *one* *random* outlet?”

Her: “That’s the way the vendor does it. Rogers. They own the lines”.

Her: “They complete the activation”.

Me: “I understand how the system works, but when we used to be with Rogers they activated all outlets in the suite.”

Me: “That’s how we believe it was with the previous owners.”

Her: “We have no control over this, unfortunately”.

Me: “Wow, not impressed. I will have to reconsider this whole palaver.”

Me: “I guess that’s it then.”

Her: “Have a good evening”.

Yup, TekSavvy: “We’re different. In a good way.” Depends; do you consider it good to subject your new customers to more fees rather than just providing the service and taking your fee every month? It certainly seems that this technician doesn’t give a shit and wants their mark-up on the Rogers technician’s time rather than my monthly revenue. That’s the most egregious short-term thinking I’ve ever come across.

I will have to consider my options when the Geek Squad guys show up with the new TV. But as I said above, it looks like this whole TekSavvy palaver has been a waste of time and money, so it’s fake competition.

Sales calls from Telus and Rogers

Feb 5th, 2025

by Craig.

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Telus logo

A couple of days ago I received sales calls from Telus Communications Inc. (on my business line) and a few minutes later from Rogers Communications Inc. (on my personal line). A coincidence, I assume, that two of my arch enemies would call on the same day within literally a few minutes.

I haven’t done business with Telus in over twenty years, and I never will in the next thousand years! Among other reasons is that Telus ripped off (or stole) money from an older relative of mine for years, and then refused to return the stolen money. When I realised what had been going on after looking at bank statements, I cancelled one of the automated debits (which I almost never use myself) and they refused to return more than 90 days worth of debits in line with Interac rules. This was despite the fact that they were charging for a dial-up Internet account for years that had been cancelled years previously when it was replaced with broadband from another company!

Shortly after that I replaced the Telus phone line with VoIP from another provider, whom I will not name because I wouldn’t recommend them at this time. (That said, I’ve been using them [VoIP.ms] for sixteen years, so their service is at least acceptable, even if their support department seems to be hell bent on getting rid of their clients as fast as possible!) And not a cent has been paid to Telus since. Telus returned the favour by reporting me to the credit bureau.

I gave the Telus representative the concise rundown after they asked for details and gave the disingenuous impression that “maybe they could help”, and then I told them there was no way I’d ever again do business with Telus when he demurred.

Rogers logo.

In the case of Rogers, after their negative option billing fiasco in 1995 that affected my father, I swore I’d never do business with them. And then the government of Canada completely gave up on fostering competition in the cable television market, and allowed Rogers to buy Shaw, which I was using for TV and Internet. So when that happened and I had no other option, I was doing business with the reviled Rogers. That happened four years ago now, so I’m ashamed to admit that I still haven’t executed a departure from Rogers, but it will happen the next time I move.

Anyway, in that phone call I told the Rogers representative that I would not be buying anything else from them and would be cancelling my account with them at my earliest opportunity.

Just another day in the life of someone who likes to complicate his life by boycotting companies (and now countries!) with no scruples. I’ve had an article in the works since about October 2024 that explains why I’ve been boycotting Cadbury, Nestlé and Mars Inc. (and probably a few others) since I realised that they support Russia’s war effort against Ukraine and the killing of their civilians.

One weird trick to avoid scams and spam

Jan 26th, 2024

by Craig.

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Forgive my clickbait title, but everyone and their dog has this one rule you must follow to avoid scams and spam … or some variation of it. Maybe it’s a top-ten list or something. They’re all valuable, to some extent, and yet every day people are duped. And now that scams are being written by AI, you can’t even count on spotting scams with broken English (or whatever your language is) and poor grammar.

But every time I read about the latest data breach I think to myself, “Thank god they don’t have my email address or phone number.” Wait, what?! How do I open accounts without giving that information?! Oh, I do, but it’s not the one email address and phone number that 99.99999% of the world give out. For that reason as well no connection can be made between accounts because each account has a different email address!

For many years I’ve operated a system of what I call “supplier addresses”. If I’m dealing with Twitter, for example — not that I use their name because they were mentioned in recent news about a data leak — I create the email address “twitter@mydomain.com”, and I only give that address to Twitter, nobody else. (I can do this, of course, because I own my own domain and use it to its potential. Here’s a clue: Stop using Gmail for everything and register your own domain!) Yes, I have the email address craig@mydomain.com (umm, that’s not the real email address, in case you’re stupid), but the only people who get that email address are my family (the ones I talk to, anyway) and friends. Nobody else on the planet gets that address, and I certainly don’t enter it into a form field on a web page and I don’t post it on the Web! This is why it drove me nuts, back in the 20th century, when people sent jokes out to everyone they knew and exposed all the email addresses in the “to” and “cc” fields! Some people still do that!

So if Twitter (in this example) sells my email address or is hacked, I know exactly who let my email address into the wild. To be frank, that hasn’t happened to me many times, but I quickly realised that it does happen, so the email addresses I create now all include a number (e.g., twitter123@mydomain.com). If the email address is compromised I just change the number and inform Twitter by changing it in my account with them and kill the old address. My numbering follows a system, but you can make your own rules.

I also use a system of rotating email addresses that change every month. I use those addresses for short-term relationships, like when you have to provide an email address to download some white paper or connect to free wifi or something like that. No problem, bud, have this address. If it does get spammed, it will only be for a few weeks, but the reality is that I almost never receive any spam that I don’t expect on those addresses because they don’t last long enough for spammers to sell, circulate and use.

For the last couple of years I’ve been doing the same with phone numbers. Well, almost the same, as I can’t create ad hoc telephone numbers on my domain. (I’m aware of ENUM, but I’m not nearly as knowledgeable about it as I’d like to be and society isn’t ready yet for phone numbers that look like 12345@mydomain.com.) I first started using VoIP (long term) in 2011 (if I remember correctly), but only in 2022 did I switch to a company where I have full control over setting up new phone numbers in multiple geographic locations as and when I please. Now I don’t give out my personal phone number to anyone except the aforementioned family and friends, I give out one of my junk phone numbers. (Actually, I make one other exception, for medical contacts.)

Do I still receive spam and attempts to scam me? OMG, of course I do! But my email and phone are not beeping every five seconds with a new one, and none of my thousands of grandchildren have called me to ask for bail money. In fact, because of my system I hardly ever have to deal with either. I know that if the email address I first used to register a domain in 1996 (now owned by AOL) was active I’d be inundated! But it doesn’t so I’m not. 🙂

There you go, my “one weird trick” that everyone can and should use to avoid spam email and scam phone calls. Maybe one of these days I’ll write a more comprehensive document on all the actions I’ve taken over the years and the nuances to protect myself. Here’s a hint though: It’s work, but it’s simple, and it’s way less work and aggro than deleting all the spam from your email and voice-mail accounts.

Motorola for the win

Jan 8th, 2024

by Craig.

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As you’re aware if you follow this blog — all two of you — I recently broke my cell/mobile phone and needed to replace it. I know, this is stunning news that you just never hear and likely haven’t experienced yourself, but bear with me. 🙂 Although I had a cell/mobile phone long before many people did, I essentially gave up on them and stopped owning one for many years due to the way that the Canadian cell phone oligopoly rapes their customers.

In 2017 I decided to buy a phone from an American supplier — Ting, who operated based on paying only for the services you wanted and used — even though I was in Canada. Ting was a mobile virtual network operator owned by Tucows (before they sold it), a Canadian company who also own OpenSRS, a domain registrar who operate based on the reseller model. One of these days I will write more about them and why I left them after almost twenty years, but it should suffice to say that they didn’t (and don’t) live up to their own hype. Tucows never opened Ting in Canada because of how fucked-up the Canadian cell phone market is, and they essentially said that to their Canadian clients … without using the four-letter word I used. 🙂

However, Ting was awesome for the approximately two years I used them. (They actually did live up to their hype!) They’re not any more, sadly, because they now operate based on the plan system like just about everyone else, rather than actually charging you for what you need and use. (Tucows sold Ting Mobile.)

Through Ting I bought a phone that was adequate for my needs, a US$60 smartphone. Why didn’t I spend a thousand dollars on an Iphone? Because I don’t give a fuck about fads like owning the latest and greatest tracking device. Simply put, I just needed a portable computer in my hands that would tell me when I had email that may or may not need my immediate attention. I roamed in Canada, of course, but that was still cheaper in the long run than owning a Canadian cell phone. Bizarre, but true! I also wasn’t scrolling through Facebook endlessly and watching videos on it; all it did, essentially, was check my email. (In January 2024, after Rogers and Bell coincidentally raised their rates at the same time by about the same amount — after Rogers bought Shaw and promised that being allowed to do that would cause rates to be lowered! — I’m again hearing other Canadians talking about getting a non-Canadian phone and roaming! With VoIP and Internet-based messengers like Signal, why not?! Welcome to the 21st century!)

I still have that $60 cell phone! I occasionally use it on wifi, but I suspect it wouldn’t be welcome on any cell networks in 2024, or be able to download the latest apps.

In 2019 I was enticed to join Freedom Mobile, to whom I refer as Troublesome Mobile. I am not generally someone who looks for the cheapest, nastiest deals around — quality is not cheap, but quality isn’t to be found in this industry at any price! — but considering the extent to which the Canadian cell industry, as I say, rapes the Canadian population, the deal was good for what I needed, a portable computer that let’s me check my business email when I’m out. I don’t know anyone who pays $15 a month (before taxes) to be connected wherever they go.

Troublesome Mobile offered a Motorola phone at a reasonable price, so I went for it. I had bought a Samsung tablet a few years before but, as I said at the time, “In a nutshell, I am mightily disappointed in my Samsung/Android tablet.” So there was no way I was gong to acquire a Samsung phone, and I never will seeing as they have become the Apple of the Android world. When looking for a new phone late last year, I decided on another cheap, unlocked phone from an electronics retailer. I mean, smartphones have been around for years now, right? Apple is up to the Iphone 132 now or something, I believe, and each iteration is a vast improvement over the one before, right?! Well, apparently not. I was well aware that my old Motorola had Motorola apps on it that imparted more functionality on the phone than what comes with Android the operating system, but I naïvely figured that by 2024 those things would be standard in the OS. Ha! They aren’t, but I knew I’d adapt … until my new Cat Phone wouldn’t play nicely with my network of (limited) choice.

So I returned it and, as I said, walked into the trap of the Canadian cell phone oligopoly and crawled back to Troublesome Mobile on my hands and knees and handed over a couple of hundred dollars for another, low-end Motorola. Now, with my new phone, I can again karate chop my torch on. Yippee. Sadly, I learned that the feature of my old phone whereby I could do a double wrist twist to turn on the camera doesn’t work any more. As I said, new versions of software don’t imply improvement.

I readily admit that my vast experience will all of three brands of smartphones doesn’t hold a candle to the experience of selfie queen Kim Kardashian, who can afford to buy (or is probably given) a new phone every week, but Motorola is one company that I’m reasonably content with … except for the fact that it’s owned by Lenovo, who are based in the hostage-taking PRC. Now all I need is a Motorola sponsorship so that I can get paid for my effusive words of high praise! 🙂

Excellent service (not!) at Visions Electronics, Vancouver

Dec 29th, 2023

by Craig.

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I did something for the first time in my life on Boxing Day, and that was go shopping looking for a Boxing Day deal, days after I had smashed my cell phone by dropping it. I’d done a bit of online research in advance, of course, so I already knew roughly what I wanted. My old phone was running Android 9 (“Pie”, to you weirdos that like to use silly words instead of version numbers) and the new one runs Android 12. (I’ll have more to say about how crappy Android 12 is in a future post. How Google gets away with selling a software product [as Microsoft does], even though it’s open source, without providing any kind of support except through their fanbois is beyond my understanding.) I’d also decided to shop at Visions Electronics, who had been open on South East Marine Drive at the north end of the Knight Street Bridge for a few years. I’d never been in there, so I thought it was time I had a look after driving past about a million times.

Although I wasn’t there at opening time, I was still surprised at how “un-busy” they were. It’s not as if the place was deserted, but I suppose they just didn’t have the deals people wanted. Apparently Boxing Day sales are a thing of the past, with Black Friday and Cyber Monday taking their place.

I first went over to the big “CELLULAR” sign, where I found … no cell phones. I eventually found a small cell-phone display (nowhere near the big “CELLULAR” sign!), but they were just selling phone packages from the Canadian cell-phone oligopoly (including my current provider, Troublesome Mobile, aka Freedom Mobile), which was definitely not why I was there. I just wanted an unlocked phone. The salesperson there was uninterested in helping me if I was looking for an unlocked phone — he was busy doing something else on a computer anyway, and I was unhelpfully interrupting him — and pointed to a desk where customers were apparently checking out and paying for goods.

Unlike the old A&B Sound, which used to be located further west on South West Marine Drive, the place wasn’t roaming with salespeople looking for marks, even though the interior decor is similar with boxes piled everywhere. Instead I made my way to the head of a short queue where I stated that I was interested in a Cat S42 smartphone, and that I had questions. Instead of a helpful salesperson being very interested in selling me a phone, all I received in response — besides a look at the phone in question — was aggression towards and disinterest in my questions, one of which was based on the visions.ca website reporting different specifications for the phone than the Cat Phones website. Just as I didn’t really want to have a phone with a smashed screen, I also didn’t want to drag out the process any longer than was necessary by going somewhere else or going back home empty-handed to restart my research for what has become a standard consumer good, but for which cell-phone companies charge sometimes four figures for their products!

Anyway, to make a long story short I handed over my money to the ungrateful salesperson and walked out with the new phone. Admittedly, I got it for $210 less than the price on the Cat Phones website, but considering how I felt I was not really welcome or wanted in their store, I don’t plan to go back for anything else. Just not gonna happen!

Updated, 2 January 2024: After wasting several hours of my life on the Cat Phone (not the Bat Phone!), both on the phone itself and on the line with Troublesome Mobile (aka Freedom Mobile) for the better part of two hours, I returned the phone today to Visions Electronics because, despite the fact that one would assume that the phone was manufactured according to “standards” by Bullitt Mobile Ltd. in the UK, Troublesome Mobile declared that it was an “off-brand” phone and it was incompatible with their MMS system! It so happened that I returned it to the same salesperson (Thomas Lai-Mana) who sold it to me and who was completely uninterested in answering my questions when I bought it. Surprisingly (or maybe not!), he wasn’t one bit interested in why I returned it!

I also returned it because, despite the fact that the Visions website states that the phone is compatible with “All known Canadian carriers” (which seems an odd way to put it) … it wasn’t! Frankly, I don’t know whether to blame Bullitt Mobile Ltd. or Troublesome Mobile, but I already have a very low opinion of Troublesome/Freedom Mobile, so let’s go with them.

I then unwillingly (but knowingly) walked into the trap laid by Canadian mobile operators and went to a Troublesome Mobile retail location and bought a Motorola Moto G Pure … for fifty bucks less. (I bought it outright, not on some stupid payment plan.) I’ll have more to say about this ongoing scam in due course, but I’ve got so much to complain about at the moment that I need to take a break for the sake of my sanity! 🙂

Updated, 8 January 2024: I mentioned my experience at Visions to a friend, and she told me she and her husband had had a similar negative experience with a TV purchase from them. If only I had known I could have avoided my experience!

411 directory assistance is questionable at best, a scam at worst

Oct 4th, 2021

by Craig.

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Phone scams.

A couple of months ago I was temporarily in a bit of a desperate situation. I had just been dropped off at a ferry terminal by friends, and I had left something important in their car. I was sure they had a cell phone, but I didn’t know their number. But if anyone had their cell number it would be their son, so I dialled 411 to get his home number. I do realise these days that the phone book isn’t what it once was, and my own number isn’t even in it, but it was worth a shot to save my friends from driving all the way home and then having to turn around and do the drive again. So I gave directory assistance the name and town I required. Efficient as ever, they immediately came back (within seconds) with a number for, I guess, the right name but in a different town. This was no use to me, so I called back. I explained what had happened, and restated the name and town.

This time I got the opposite result: a different person in the right town. So I gave up and left a message on my friends’ land line. In retrospect, I don’t even think what I was given was anything even close to what I asked for; if I want the number for Bob Smith in Town A, why give me the number for a random Bob Smith in Town B? That’s not what I asked for! And in the second case, what’s the point in giving me the number for Barb Smith in Town A?!

I eventually got a hold of my friends and got my stuff back. I felt bad for making them drive back to the ferry terminal, but all ended well, and I was only one ferry behind schedule.

Fast forward a few weeks and, of course, I’m billed for the two pointless directory assistance calls by Troublesome Mobile (aka Freedom Mobile). I expected this, of course, and as planned I phoned them and asked for those charges to be cancelled. (If my second 411 attempt had been successful I’d have eaten the first charge, but both times directory assistance just shovelled a random number in my direction and washed their hands of me.) I was told flat out by Troublesome Mobile that, as they were billed to Troublesome by a third party, they could not refund the charges for the calls. Supposedly I would have to phone the third party to get a refund. What?! I obviously don’t even have an account with this third party, so how the fuck would I or they even do that?! They couldn’t give me a phone number to call, so said I should just phone 411.

I explained to Troublesome Mobile — I have a long list of alternative names for them, but “Troublesome Mobile” is probably the only polite one and the closest to “Freedom Mobile” — that they provided the opportunity for me to use the service and they billed me for the service, so they were the only party it made sense for me to call! To make a long story short, after much hemming and hawing and obfuscation and making sure that I understood the obvious, that the service wasn’t free, they finally agreed — “just this one time” — to refund my $3.50 ($1.75 per call).

In the “old days” 411 was a useful service. But, like all mass services these days, the people in the call centres are being timed like rats in a maze, and there’s no time allowed to actually confirm with the caller exactly what they want and that the information the call taker has is what the caller wants (I remember they used to do that) and there’s no opportunity to tell the system that the number you’ve been given is of no use to you or wasn’t even what you asked for in the first place. Nope, it’s just hit a couple of buttons and get the caller off the line as quickly as possible so that you can move onto the next call.

For this reason I will go out of my way to try anything except calling 411 in the future. A dollar fifty isn’t a life-changing amount of money, but as usual — especially with Troublesome Mobile (aka Freedom Mobile) and Canadian cell phone companies in general — it’s the principle of the matter. I will not allow them to take my money without at least providing the service for which I’m supposedly paying — and which they are advertising on the outside of the box; either they give me the number I’m actually looking for, or they be honest and tell me that they don’t have it and therefore are not going to charge me for their inability to provide it. Anything else is theft, and failing to provide the service you’re advertising and still charging for it is a scam. If more consumers actually acted on being scammed out of a dollar fifty once in a while the phone companies might actually go back to providing the service they’re claiming to offer.

Rogers buys Shaw. How bad can the news get?

Apr 6th, 2021

by Craig.

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Three weeks ago it was announced that Rogers Communications Inc. is planning to buy Shaw Communications Inc. This is yet another example of the big communications and media companies in Canada giving the middle finger to the public, and doing what they want to maintain the oligopoly they hold over the aforementioned marketplaces. Study after study, year after year finds that Canadians pay the highest prices for cell phone usage in the world, and yet the federal government, who are supposed to regulate these companies, pays lip service to lower prices but never actually follow that up with action.

Shaw owns Freedom Mobile (to whom I refer as “Troublesome Mobile” given the absolute gong show I had transferring a number to them from Virgin, a number I actually had to abandon), and they are the only reason I only quite recently got a cell phone in Canada. Before 2019 I found it more convenient and cheaper to have a phone with an American provider and “roam” in Canada. I combined that with Sugar Mobile to have a Canadian phone number. It wasn’t exactly a great system, but having lived in Third World countries in the past I am used to “making a plan” to work around the inefficiencies of Third World governments and thinking. Welcome to Canada.

Ironically, Air Canada just cancelled their planned purchase of Air Transat. The reason? The European Commission wanted concessions from the newly enlarged airline, while the Canadian government had given the green light to the merger. Thank the gods for the EC, saving Canadians from ourselves.

There has been talk that the federal government could insist that Freedom Mobile and perhaps Shaw’s fledgling cell phone service, Shaw Mobile, be excluded from the deal, to do something to encourage the nascent development of competition in our mobile industry, but such a suggestion assumes that the Canadian federal government has the cojones to do so. (But speaking of Shaw Mobile, it looks to me a lot like Sugar Mobile, the company against which Rogers successfully waged a legal challenge to shut them down in 2017! That hypocrisy is a story for another day though.) While I would support the federal government doing something like that, it won’t be enough for other opponents of the deal, such as OpenMedia.

I can assure Brad Shaw and Edward Rogers though that, regardless of the action or lack thereof from the Canadian government, if the purchase and merger go ahead, the new company will lose a long-time customer of Internet connectivity, cable TV, and now cell/mobile service. The cell service will go back to the United States; Internet will probably go to one of the resellers (possibly even of Rogers, but we don’t have much choice), and if I can get my shit together we’ll “cut the cable” completely.

Updated, 2021-04-07: Add link to Troublesome Mobile.

Samsung and Android: Out-of-box failure

Mar 28th, 2014

by Craig.

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I learnt a new term recently while doing research related to configuring my Samsung/Android tablet: Out-of-box failure. The current definition (as of this writing) on Wikipedia that applies in this case is as follows: “Out of box failure … is a negative experience a user has when installing and/or performing initial configuration on a piece of hardware ….”

In a nutshell, I am mightily disappointed in my Samsung/Android tablet.

While I have damn nearly two decades of experience being the go-to guy for computer problems among some of my friends (not to mention providing technical support to paying clients for almost that long), managing a tablet (or smart phone) is a new experience for me. I expected to run into challenges, but I didn’t expect to be let down so severely.

I remember learning about Android years ago — long before it was even released — and at the time I was excited. (Well, as excited as I get anyway.) Here was a new operating system (albeit based on an old [and good] OS, UNIX, with which I have almost as much experience as I do with Windows) that was going to allow people to turn their “dumb phones” (akin to the one-trick pony sitting on your kitchen counter: the toaster) into handheld, portable computers, just like their bigger cousins sitting on laps or desks. Not only that, it was going to create competition for the monopoly at that time — Apple and iOS — giving its users the freedom to manage their devices as they saw fit rather than as the dictatorial manufacturer saw fit. Besides the fact that I am a fan of competition, I have no love for Apple or their products. I specifically dislike the control they exert over the consumers of their products, the people who put ridiculous amounts of money into Apple’s coffers. Either you do it Steve Jobs’ way, or you can suck wind:

And yet, here I am — definitely not an “early adopter”! — with a new Samsung Galaxy Tab 3, running Android of course, and I find that I’m being railroaded into having to do things according to the Gospel of Google:

First, if you want to do anything useful with your tablet (other than read reams and reams of dire legal agreements as you run each app for the first time), you have to sign up for a Google/NSA account. If you don’t want to do that, you might as well return your tablet or use it for a paperweight, frisbee, coaster, or for skipping on a lake like you would with a stone.
Then, if you want to dump crap like Dropbox … well, you can’t! It’s a “system app”, so you can’t uninstall it. You can disable it, but only after you roll back the updates that were installed after you finally broke down and gave your name and email address to Google and the NSA.
The other thing I have found my Samsung/Android tablet is useful for is spam. Not sending spam or stopping it, but reading it. The fucking thing is always whistling at me or interrupting what I’m doing to ask me if I want to sign up for one Google service or another, or to remind me that I haven’t yet set up yet another “system app” (Peel Smart Remote in this case) that I also have no intention of ever using. Plus I’m now getting spammed by YouTube (“Happy dances around the world” for fuck’s sake), even though I keep clicking the “unsubscribe” link and even though the link takes me to a YouTube page that tells me that my “current setting” is “off”. Let me give you arseholes a tip: If you want me to use your software or service, hijacking my email account and the device for which I paid a couple of hundred dollars and generally pissing me off is a guaranteed losing strategy. This kind of shit is why, in the desktop world, the first thing I do with a new computer is “format c:” and install a fresh and unadulterated copy of the operating system to get rid of all the “crapware” cluttering the desktop and hard drive that companies have paid to have added to the system, but which is generally of little or no use to any thinking user. I suspect that once I get the hang of this, I will similarly root any future new Android device I buy (or work on) immediately.

OK, so as I think I understand it (I’m just guessing at this point in my learning experience, actually), it’s the decision of the device manufacturer to decide what apps are “system apps”, so I need to blame Samsung for that … and they (and Google) are starting to look more and more like Apple to me. This isn’t even a cell phone attached to one of the evil members of the cell phone cartel, who speciously claim that they must control what software runs on my phone — it’s just a tablet, which to me should be no different than a desktop computer when it comes to installing what I want on it — so I fail to understand why I am forced to keep apps that I have no intention of ever using, such as Dropbox and Peel Smart Remote. (Hasn’t Google learnt from Microsoft’s experience about bad behaviour like this in the latter’s various anti-trust lawsuits launched by the American and European governments?) To me this is like being forced to live with a slovenly neighbour from down the street, because the Communist Party Housing Authority said so. No thanks.

Although I have had this tablet for almost three months now, it has taken me this long to get over my feelings of loathing and dread (for all of the above reasons) and find the time to get this far in the experience, where I have finally installed my choice of web browser (Firefox, which crashes daily for no apparent reason) and anti-virus (Avast), and a crashing (because it wants to use the now disabled Dropbox) KeePassDroid so that I can actually access useful services that I use for which I need to log in. (Two out of three apps crashing; not what I would call “out-of-box happiness”.) I don’t have all the time in the world to screw around with this crap, as educating as it is, so time will tell whether or not this tablet turns out to be a productive and useful tool, or another listing on Craigslist.

It will also determine what new cell phone I buy shortly, ending my one-man, seven-year boycott of the anti-competitive cell phone industry, and a “dumb phone” (also known as a “feature phone”, although I can’t figure out why when it has only one feature!) or continuing with no phone is starting to look like a mighty attractive option right now.

Stay tuned!

Cell phone carriers coincidentally raise prices at the same time

Mar 21st, 2014

by Craig.

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Within the last few days, two of the “big three” cell phone companies in the uncompetitive Canadian cartel/oligopoly (Bell and Rogers) “coincidentally” raised their prices at exactly the same time by exactly the same amount! Telus jumped the gun by doing the same in January, apparently. Wow, what are the chances?! What an incredible coincidence — and I mean “incredible” 100% literally. Should Canadian consumers rush out and buy lottery tickets, or (more likely) look skyward and prepare to dodge lightning bolts?

Probably neither, actually. The proper response is to adopt the position — i.e., bend over. As Michael Geist writes, Why Are Canadian Wireless Carriers Increasing Prices? Because They Can. And because they have nothing but contempt for their customers.

Can anybody say “collusion”? I knew you could.

Thieving bastards.

cell phone