Rogers Wireless: A Direct Line to Your Pockets

Even after I move to Australia, Rogers manages to get my ire. Emailed below to their support, likelihood of a proper response…?

My most recent wireless invoice contains billing detail:

Oct 02 Early Cancellation Fee 500MB Data Option 100.00

I was under contract with Rogers wireless May 2008 to May 2011. I purchased an unlocked iPhone4 direct from apple.com and activated Mt. Sinai’s iPhone corporate plan in September 2010. At no point was another time-sensitive service agreement signed or even communicated to me by a CSR.

On top of this assumed contract, the most current billing cycle ends Oct 7 yet this ETF appears Oct 2 while I’m also being invoiced for another period into November due to Rogers’ draconian 30 day notice for cancellation policy. If the iPhone plan is for one year, the cancellation date would fall outside my service time.

When I called in to cancel, at no point did the retentions rep indicate an iPhone plan ETF of $100 would be applied. And I’m traveling in Australia now and won’t be calling again using international long distance to clear this up.

Recovering Faster Than Fevola

Swear I’ve been meaning to post more on this blog but every item is in a scattered draft form. It doesn’t help that last week my 1TB Seagate hard drive decided to stop powering up so I had to rebuild my computer while losing over a year’s worth of music along with 10 hours+ of Doom editing which was the tedious details-oriented sort. Otherwise, I tend to keep all my files online somewhere so the incident wasn’t as disastrous as it’s been in the past. But I’m going to try finding a circuit board to hopefully repair the hard drive because my meticulously organized music collection is a labour of love (and I cry myself to sleep at night.)

I’m still Tumblring and tweeting about.

Look At Me, Look At Me

Since I prefer to dilute my online brand, you can now also follow me on Tumblr. Longer items that are less microbloggy will still be appearing on this domain.

My expectations of this reunion were pretty low but wow, Cornell still has the vocal chops and this performance highlights how Kim Thayil has been sorely missed for more than a decade.

Internet Memes Across the Seas

A friend mailed me this saucy-packaged packet of gum and postcard from Switzerland because, “it reminded me of you.” Take that as you will.

A Straight Shooter

“Let’s take this offline for further discussion. We just don’t have the bandwidth to address that here. Besides, best practices dictate that we stay client-centric and focus on our core competencies on a going-forward basis using a holistic approach while still tending to our ROI and best-of-breed reputation. Once we get to the next level, we can touch base, move on from the low-hanging fruit and address issues such as sustainability, rightshoring, and management visibility.”

- Do_Or_Die

Putting Off Procastination

I had this video loaded for three nights until finally completing all 76 minutes. Such is my life. Lazy list view:

• If you work on a computer, always have a second monitor. Within a month, productivity increases pass the cost of a < $200 screen which is why I never understood my past employers forcing a single setup on me, even if it’s a 22″ widescreen.
• I can say many of my university essays back in the day fell into quadrant 3 under “due soon” and “not important”. Damned relative values always get in the way, but I maintained my honours average!
• The current reality of customer service: “Your call is extremely important to us. Watch while my actions are cognitively dissonant from my words.”
• “When you have a meeting, lock the door, unplug the phone, and take everyone’s Blackberries.” Highlights the reason projects using a SCRUM methodology has daily meetings less than 15 minutes while standing up.
• And WTF to the camera staying on the blond at ~1:06:15 for what felt like 30 seconds.

Wherein I Blog About Denim

I’ve come across many quickly deteriorating consumer products, such as headphone-jack-frayed iAudio 8805 Metallic Earphones (+two pairs of iPod earbuds but their low quality were a given) and the odd Old Navy wardrobe-filler purchase, but I really didn’t expect to spend almost $100 on a pair of denim jeans that wouldn’t even last me 6 months.

I was just doing some weekend cleaning and came across a pair of Lucky Brand vintage straight (style# 7M10130, cut# 101876 08 F) I purchased in late 2008. Even though they were the most comfortable fit I’ve tried, I had to retire them in spring of last year after they developed massive holes you see above. They’re pre-distressed to attain the design’s vintage look, so that does weaken the garment. However I didn’t exactly wear these every day while rotating on a slab of sandpaper. I’m the type of guy that is reluctant to wash denim, only throwing it in the laundry after a spill or particularly sweaty day out. So I definitely took good care of the jeans before a small hole appeared and decided to go viral.

It’s too bad I couldn’t follow @LuckyBrand tips on #denim_care:

#denim_care To prevent growth of a hole in your jeans, try painting the edge of the hole, (just after the fray), with clear nail polish

Many men would love to claim they have brass balls, but there’s no way their potential abrasion could explain the crotch’s rapid widening. My trust in the brand’s product and lack of manicure tools proved to be my downfall. Even when not purchasing from a store’s clearance section, sometimes the best solution is to try more brands and hope more durable items can stick in your rotation.

My (cheaper) Levis 511 skinny jeans are still going strong.

The Most Dangerous Game

You can read Richard Connell’s 1924 short story on the interweb or watch the 1932 film adaptation, but my preference is Orson Welles’ radio broadcast on CBS Suspense. Listen here:

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

K & P Variety, We Sell Rat Chips

I bought some salt+vinegar chips from at a corner store at College/Euclid last week to find a nibbled off corner at the bottom once I got home. They were on a top-shelf and had no remnants of packaging attached to the hole indicating an abrasion where a rip may have occurred in transport. No, this junk food was infiltration by vermin.

Not Just a Footnote

By coincidence, I (drunkenly) ordered David Foster Wallace’s Consider the Lobster from Amazon the very same night he hanged himself. My morning-after hangover was a bit more bittersweet than usual. After reading his blunt 2005 commencement speech and catching so many blurbs about the man’s brilliance, I felt a need to jump on that bandwagon and get in touch with the hype.

Why I Don’t Interact with Clients

An input test for a web site poll module I wrote:

Are you wearing pants?

1. Yes
2. No
3. Maybe. I feel a draft.
4. What are pants?
5. I don’t have any legs.

It’s the Pleats

Random link time:

• Isaac Asimov’s short story The Last Question
• Banned words from US school textbooks?
• How to not rid yourself of a bee problem
• How to not sell cigarettes
• Corporate rockets falling over rocket falls
• How to say nothing in 500 words
• “I’m going to give him my number.”
• Robot done right
• Preaching to the perverted

Why are victims of cancer always courageous? Black artists are soulful? White baseball players are gritty? Through the deceptive use of mirrors, do Tool t-shirts subliminally promote kleptomania? Radio rotations highlight my fear of The Other. Cold showers are a form of torture worse than waterboarding. You can always tell that you’re insane when you can’t find any pre-made bumper stickers for your cause. You should look both ways before crossing one-way streets.

Mobile Phone Service of the Stone Age

So, you can’t update your My5 with Rogers in Firefox. You get the oh-so descriptive error: AM002. That’s it. I was told by a rep in their eCare department to use Internet Explorer or Safari since they’re aware of the issue. How is a simple POST form submission a known issue that has been broken since I signed up two months ago? The Rogers Wireless web site is seriously the worst customer service portal I’ve ever come across. HTTP requests time out and information is so poorly laid out that it extends the user’s frustration in this timesink. Also, what’s the deal with being unable to check how many minutes/text messages/data you’ve used so far in the current billing cycle? Cingular/AT&T have been offering this in the US since, what? 2003 or earlier? Charging for incoming text messages? Refusing to offer unlimited data plans? Too bad Canada doesn’t have the population density to create enough competition that forces telecoms get off their fecking arse.

My Sarcasm is a Coping Mechanism

Note to self: don’t finish reading Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, watching The Orphanage, and looking at paintings by Zdzislaw Beksinski all within the same day if you wish to maintain a positive outlook on life. But read this article.

I cleansed the palette by watching Forgetting Sarah Marshall, probably the funniest movie of the year so far. But was the penis really necessary? That is the question.

Snow Crash

…condensing fact from the vapor of nuance.

Fact: the last book I read took me more than a year. After completing Neil Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon last June, I decided to backtrack in his catalogue to read his cyberpunk classic, Snow Crash. Problem is, if it’sn’t on a moving screen, I tend to lack the ability to focus. By sheer will and determination, I was able to overcome this obstacle. I’m going places!

Like Cryptonomicon, seemingly every character is a quick-lipped bad-ass to the n^th degree. You can tell it was written by a massive nerd for all the godlike abilities they possess, although it does poke fun at genre; mainly by calling the main character Hiro Protagonist. For being printed in 1992, its depiction of virtual reality (sorry, “Metaverse”) has a fair amount of accuracy when compared to modern MMORPG interactions. Of course, the holograms and private corporation Big Brother technology haven’t come to fruition yet in mass production, but it’s an interesting intellectual exercise to think about how this would affect how information flows in the future.

Somehow, he attempts to parallel ancient mythologies to the shift in modern man’s consciousness during the information age, which became a bit more fun (and confusing) when mixed together with a viewing of Francis Ford Coppola’s latest film, Youth Without Youth. The book does get complex when the names of mythological deities are thrown about as if they were common English verbs. A Mesopotamian mythology cue card cheat sheet might be handy when it comes to interpreting just exactly what analogy the characters are attempting to express.

Beyond all the silly high thought process nonsense, I must say that Neil Stephenson sure loves his sexual innuendo metaphors. One of the main characters is a fifteen year old girl that acts as a courier making quick deliveries by attaching a magnetic harpoon to cars to street surf in a process called “pooning”. Then there are gems such as:

“…shopping carts performing their clashy anal copulations.”

“…a vast U-shaped valley that was ground out of the rock, a long time ago, by a big tongue of ice in an epochal period of geological cunnilingus.”

Nerd.

My favourite idea in the book is likely the ruthless kayaking supervillian that has a H-bomb always to the immediate side, connected to his brain activity with a mechanism that’s set to trigger a ginormous explosion at the immediate absence of a signal. How’s that for a God complex? Think last season’s Lost’s finale gone extreme. Via kayak.

Now I’m a third of the way through Cormac McCarthy’s The Road.

The Blogosphere Hates Unordered Lists

Rantable items:

• Grocery store clerks that put cold items (fruit, frozen foods, etc.) in the same bag as bananas. This bruises them, you cocks!
• Microwaves that fucking beep. Then beep again when you don’t take the food out within thirty seconds. I can tell time, asshole.
• Facial razors where when you nick yourself shaving, it’s not just one cut, but 4 parallel ones.
• The size of one’s ego is directly proportional to the number of images uploaded to their Facebook profile picture gallery.
• Facebook application requests, kind of like the old relative that always has to forward those fucking “God works in mysterious ways” e-mail.
• Playing World of Warcraft is the equivalent of being suspended in a sensory deprivation tank. You may even regress to your Cro-Magnon man ancestor’s form and go wild on the city zoo.
• Software developers that wear a tie everyday.
• Reading YouTube comments is the contemporary online abstraction of car crash rubbernecking. ∀x(YouTubePoster(x)⇒BorderlineRetarded(x))
• The inevitable fact IMDB will have at least one discussion on each entry exclaiming, “WORST MOVIE EVER!”
• To conclude the two previous items: “Always be yourself… unless you suck.” – Joss Whedon
• Who thinks leopard-print anything is a good idea?

A local shopping mall here has erected a billboard containing the slogan, “keep your eyes on the road”. Driving down the street reading this sign is like steering into a brick wall of irony.

Now on to the good:

• Stuff White People Like, best web site ever?
• The Enigma of Amigara Fault, bizarre Asian short story/comic that you must read right to left.
• Outside Online: David Shaw, a diver that attempts to make an unprecedented deep water body recovery.
• Toward a Unified Theory of Black America, a young American economist that went from crime to high academia. Oh, and he’s black. They’re so cute!
• The Big Lebowski themes, it’s about the misunderstandings held between generations, man! This connects pretty well with The Culture War.

Me, I’m Not

In Praise of Vanity

A 1992 Yale University study found that attractive people are perceived to be “more sociable, dominant, sexually warm, mentally healthy, intelligent, and socially skilled than unattractive people.” And that is before you even open your mouth to verify everything her eyes assume.

You think? While this article loves to put the ego on a pedestal, there is a point where self-absorption reaches diminishing returns. I think more people require an existentialist crisis to open their mind to the varying levels of their being’s authenticity when considering suntans from strip malls, digital cameras on city transit, and hipster specialized hair stylists.

It’s this deceptive mindset as parodied in Bret Easton Ellis’ yuppie satire, American Psycho, where every executive is so concerned about his own state in the world to a point where he’s so similar to colleagues that he doesn’t notice co-workers disappearing due to a murderous madman. Dating back to the time period where the book and film were set, we had the Bo Knows advertising campaign.

That even Bo Jackson has often referred to himself as “Bo Jackson,” in the third person, as if his body were inhabited by some otherworldly force that took over when he donned a uniform, has led many to assume that both Bo Jackson and “Bo Jackson” were raving egomaniacs.

“That’s what the marketing world [wanted] you to believe,” Bo says.

Deception is the name of the game when it comes heightening the smugness. The Coen Brothers’ No Country for Old Men, based on Cormac McCarthy’s novel, nearing its end has a minor character state to the main protagonist:

What you got ain’t new. Can’t stop what’s coming. Ain’t all waiting on you. That’s vanity.

Coming to realize you are not in complete control of your domain and accepting that humility define the genuineness of your personality; not going to the gym and flexing for women while searching for a form of social acceptance. Cue my favourite comedian whose main focus was on personal authenticity: Bill Hicks. While ignoring that Denis Leary is a fucking thief (and a Red Sox fan), recall Hicks’ Relentless entry “Smokers” recounting health guru Jim Fix’s death occurring while jogging:

“I’m Jim Fix and I’m dead now… and I don’t know what the fuck happened. I jogged every day, ate nothing but tofu, swam 500 laps every morning, I’m dead. Yule Brenner drank, smoked, and got laid every night of his life. He’s dead. Shit.

I have a reoccurring dream a couple times of year where my adult teeth fall out, reminding me of the permanence of aging, but this mortality and vitality bullshit is not worth a second thought at my age. In modern parlance, the name “Adonis” is frequently used as an allusion to an extremely attractive, youthful male, often with a connotation of deserved vanity. See mewse, the office Adonis. Now a trophy wife, in the parlance of our times, has a certain entitlement, much like a typical Red Sox Nation member, that must be squashed. Service guarantees citizenship. Would you like to know more?

I Am So Clever

Non-sequitur time. Quoting Freaks and Geeks:

Harold Weir: By the way, that drummer you’re listening to…
Nick Andopolis: Yeah?
Harold Weir: He’s terrible!
Nick Andopolis: What? That’s Neal Peart, he’s the greatest drummer alive!
Harold Weir: Neal Peart couldn’t drum his way out of a paper bag!
*proceeds to play a Buddy Rich record to teach a kid the ropes*

Well holy shit, Buddy Rich. I was kind of waiting for one of his tendons to snap at any moment.

In true Knocked Up fleshofthestars.com fashion, I would like to declare that 1981′s Whose Life Is It Anyway? contains interpretative dance bush at exactly 32 minutes in.

Events witnessed on Guelph Transit on 2007, the 26th of November included a teenage girl in pink plaid, rubber boots almost to her knees, worn without any sort of ironic pretense and a university-aged man, skin white in colour, wearing a black bandanna on his head and aviator sunglasses on his mobile phone saying, “I gotta swing downtown, bro!” These disconcerting events led me to ensure my MP3 player’s batteries were fully charged for the return trip.

Sometimes the smallest decision can have the biggest effect, like when Jaleel White decided to audition for the part of Urkel.