Category: Products
-
Rogers: If We Can’t Have You, No-One Can
A provocative and arguably unfair title, I know, but after the evening I had it makes me wonder what it takes to leave one provider for another. I arrived home tonight to both a voicemail and an e-mail from TekSavvy. The e-mail is titled “Rejected Cable Order: Attention Required”. I shook my head. I paid…
-
Goodbye Rogers, Hello TekSavvy
About a week ago I decided I was finally tired of paying for bandwidth penalties from Rogers that were as expensive as buying a second monthly subscription. I called their customer service, and later, their retention department. They wouldn’t match the bandwidth (300 GB/month) of even Teksavvy’s cheapest cable Internet plan, nor would they match…
-
KDE help: Kubuntu Oneiric Won’t Shut Down Anymore?
I’m really loving Kubuntu 11.10. As usual, I upgraded during the beta phase to avoid the slow downloads after the official release. It was a flawless upgrade: the best I can remember. I even did it using the wireless connection, with no significant hiccups… except this one I hardly noticed. I rarely need to reboot…
-
Kubuntu Natty Update Weirdness
I just updated to Kubuntu 11.04 (Natty Beta 2) last night. All went reasonably well except for a few hitches: Inexplicably, several apps were uninstalled including GIMP and Wine. Easily remedied. This weird error message proved more difficult to fix: dpkg: warning: parsing file ‘/var/lib/dpkg/available’ near line 20544 package ‘handbrake-gtk’: error in Version string ‘svn3834ppa1~maverick1’:…
-
Facebook is Concerned about My Protection
I closed my Facebook account about a year ago. While it had ceased to have any meaningful use or interest to me for a long time before then, it was ultimately Facebook’s recurring problems with privacy that prompted me to blank all of my profile information and request deletion. However… I’ve been a privacy analyst for…
-
Lubuntu lost your Windows install?
Recently, I installed Lubuntu 10.10 as a dual boot to Windows 7 on my laptop as a replacement to Linux Mint. Everything seemed to go well until I rebooted and noticed that Windows 7 was no longer listed in the menu options of the GRUB boot manager. Windows wasn’t gone, but GRUB had failed to detect…
-
The Truth About Placebos
“It is a reality of our time that the same companies promoting health care products are also largely responsible for underwriting their research.” An excerpt from The Industry of Illness in US Health Care: Why Privatization Is Inefficient – Part 3 The following ad didn’t really fit the tone of my “scholarly” discussion quoted above,…
-
A Vending Machine that Sells… Live Crabs?
Here’s a video worth viewing. Watch it, then consider: Are you impressed by the innovation and convenience-mindedness of humankind, or the limitless of our cruelty?
-
Classic Commercial: Man vs. Bear
With the exception of the occasional Super Bowl gems, most North American commercials are dull and hollow. Here’s an example of a great commercial, because you deserve a laugh today.