Category: Life

I switched cellphone carriers this past week from Rogers to Wind Mobile, finally putting an end to my relationship with the service provider.

I wasn’t a fan of Rogers. The problem was that there wasn’t any competition to switch to. The Canadian cell phone market was controlled by the big three: Rogers, Bell, and Telus. Together, they charged rates far beyond any of their international counterparts.

With investigations into their activities by the government, the big three decided to roll out discount service providers. Telus started up Koodo, Bell went into a joint venture and created Virgin Mobile, and Rogers acquired Fido.

The competition was purely illusory. The market was still controlled by the big three, and the prices were still high. Finally, there was a wind of change: through the actions of the CRTC and government intervention, outside competition was allowed in.

Three new, entirely independent, companies are now setting up shop in Canada. I switched to Wind Mobile, the first to be available in my area.

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Those were the words of a twentysomething on the bus today as he passed me to disembark. I had my hands wrapped around my boyfriend and the man apparently took offense. Never you mind that he was himself displaying affection for his Gucci-clad girlfriend.

We get these sorts of comments more frequently than I care for. No one has the balls to say it in our face (with the exception of one gentleman* last week), but these comments are always vocalized in our presence. Loudly. Unmistakably for our ears.

My boyfriend has been out since he was 13, and has a thicker skin to these things. I don’t. It bothers me that such adversity still exists in a country as progressive as ours.

The odd thing is the age group of those that make comments. Older folks don’t care. Neither do kids. It always seems to be those in the 25-35 range that spurt out these idiotic remarks.

* Some friends may know him as the crazy homeless black man from the Market.

Yesterday I went to go to the speech that Ann Coulter was giving here in Ottawa with my boyfriend. Unlike pretty much every single person I had talked to there, we had registered for the event. It was going to be awesome: we were going to witness extremist bigotry first hand. Unfortunately, the speech was canceled due to “security concerns.” Here’s how it all went down. (more…)

I had a neat referrer yesterday to the Rice Tea site. For those who don’t know, referrers are the address that a web browser was surfing on before they linked to your site. I keep track of these things for statistical purposes.

This was the referrer that stood out yesterday:

http://www.google.com.kw/search?num=100&hl=en&newwindow=1&safe=off&q=torrent+Rice+Tea+Julien+McArdle&meta=&aq=f&aqi=&aql=&oq=&gs_rfai=

In other words, someone tried to find a torrent of the book. Even though I distribute it for free on my site.

It could be that the visitor wanted to save me some bandwidth by getting the torrent instead. However, what’s much more likely is that the guy saw the book listed on the Wikipedia entry for Hacker, and wanted to grab a pirated copy – not realizing I’m already giving it away for free.

Pre-teen girls like Justin Bieber. I get that. Some music executive saw an opportunity for a new franchise and leapt on it. What’s rather unfortunate is that his fans also extend to the listeners of commercial radio.

I’m pretty tolerant when it comes to standing pop music. But even I have my limits. I had to walk out of a store today because they were playing his song “Baby.” How bad is it? Well, let’s do a bit of word frequency analysis.

The lyrics of the song consist of 280 words. Out of those:

• 56 (20%) are the word “baby“
• 21 (7.5%) are the word “yeah“

One out of every five words is “baby”. From a 15 year old kid. Being aired all throughout your shopping experience. Fun.