Rogers / Fido Does Not Fail to Surprise

So Rogers/Fido finally decided to bulk a bit and offer a 6GB iPhone plan for the 3G iPhone on the big day. I sold my 1st Gen iPhone to jump right on the 3G iPhone bandwagon. Like many, if not all, I jumped on the 6GB data plan as it is currently the best option as it is to expire in 3 weeks for new signees. I locked myself up in a 3 year contract with Fido. No biggie I thought to myself. I 'needed' the 3G data (very subjective), and it's not like I'll be going without a phone anytime soon.

Well, we finally moved into our new office this week, but since our internet isn't due to arrive till friday I was using my iPhone for my office connection away from my home office. The problem with Rogers/Fido now is, they are having 3G Network outages across the country (of Canada). All we're getting are errors such as:

"Safari can't open the page. The error was: Operation could not be completed. (kCFErrorDomainCFNetwork error 302.)"

or

"Safari can't open the page because the network connection was reset, which sometimes occures when the server is busy"

The connection has been less than 30% reliable and I haven't been able to connect to my data for over 2 hours at a time in some cases. MobileMe had it's ups and downs, but losing data at huge chunks of time means not only no Push Email, but no Email no Internet, nothing at all for the past couple of days during the frequent hiccups.

I gave a call into their service center to speak to one of their CSRs. What I got from her was an annoyed, "Yes we our technicians are aware of the network outages and we are working as fast as we can resolve the issues. You are not the first to call." When I told her that we are paying $30 a month for just 6GB of data and this not even semi-functional service it isn't cutting it for me, she shrugged me off. When asked if I will be creditted for my lack of service provided from their end, I wasn't even given a straight forward answer.

We Canadians are bound by Rogers/Fido's 3 year contract, outrageous montly fees ($30 just for 6GB of Data aside from Voice), exorbitant $400 Early Cancellation/Termination Fees, and $100 Data Early Cancellation/Termination Fee, $0.50/month non-govermental 911 (??!?), $6.95/month non-mandated systems access fees, $15/month add on for a Caller-ID / 2500 Text Message package (yes our phone plans do not come with Caller ID). And now the 3G doesn't even work on our iPhones, what's the point anymore?!

Sounds like all we like to do is whine, but it truly sucks to be us..

4 Months

Wow, 4 months has come and gone. So what happened during the past 4 months?

Well, my birthday has come and gone, I quit my job in pursuit of something more 'grand',
and I've become an uncle. My sister had a boy on the 13th of June. Cute lovely little fella. I'm going to spoil the little man. He's blood, and I don't think my mother's going to have another child, so he's the closest thing to having a kid than to actually have one.

I've been really busy the past couple months. I just came back from Calgary and I feel lazier than usual. Feel like a slacker. Could be because of all that's going and the added stress that's draining me.

I gotta keep pushing forward though.

Friendships

I'm guessing true friends are hard to find. In my, 27.. wow 27!!, years of life I went through many friends, enemies and what not. But in the end, the ones that you trust most may end up messing you up the most. Trust takes days, months and sometimes years to build, but less than a second to break.

You may put all the trust in the world in someone, and you may find out in the end, they're just treating you as another dummy, exploiting your resources, your friendship, anything possible. So is it worth it to have friends? Yes it is, but true friends that you can go heart to heart with and not worrying when you have your back towards them are hard to define nowadays.

In the end, God is always there..

Productive Night

I generally do not enjoy being idle.  Idle hands are the devil's playground.  You end up wasting a day here a day there, in the end, your whole life ends up being a waste.   By no means should you work 24/7 and kill yourself.  If you can enjoy your life, all the better!

I contradict myself in that although I do not enjoy or believe in the concept of being idle, I like to procrastinate.  But I tend to find myself all this work to keep myself busy, then wait for just about the last minute to get started.  

Yesterday was different, hence a relatively productive night.  I've had time to finally work on my PSP and old Compaq laptop, and a friend's friend's PSP and iPod Touch.  

First was the iPod Touch, it was interesting to work on, so let me bore you with some details (mostly for my reference).  It was purchased with firmware version 1.1.2 out of the box and about 8 apps installed on there.  Apple charges some ridiculous $20 to add another 5 apps onto the iPod Touch which are included with the iPhone.  To bypass this $20 scam and enable 3rd party programs to be installed onto the iPod Touch, the Touch would have to be hacked.

Thanks to a team of developers and enthusiasts out there, it wasn't too hard.  The process goes as such:

1. Download the iPod Touch's 1.1.1 firmware

2. Download the iPod Touch's 1.1.2 firmware

3. Restore the 1.1.2 iPod Touch to version 1.1.1

4. Jailbreak the iPod Touch (to enable third-party apps) by going to http://www.jailbreakme.com

5. Install OktoPrep in preparation for the upgrade to 1.1.2

6. Upgrade the 1.1.1 iPod Touch to version 1.1.2

7. Run the Jailbreak app for jailbreaking OktoPrep'ed 1.1.2

Then voila!   Now I have a jail broken 1.1.2 which would let me install applications at will.  Once this was completed I went through and installed the 'missing' Mail.app, Stock.app, Map.app, Notes.app and the Weather.app.  On top of that I installed a whole slew of productive applications, games, and system tools and organized them as such.  

Next up, the PSP's, this was easy as I've already modified both PSPs and installed custom firmwares onto them.  All that was needed was an upgrade to the latest custom firmware which entitled downloading the latest firmware and the latest custom firmware patch then uploading them onto the Sony PSP's memory stick for upgrade.   Now we're up to custom firmware 3.80 which gives us all the latest quirks from Sony and the ability to run backed up games and homebrew applications. In addition, this custom firmware disables Sony's Network Update server by pointing to Dark Alex's custom firmware server.  Meaning, all future custom firmware can be downloaded and upgraded onto the PSP by just strictly checking for updates on the PSP itself.  No more manual updates, harrahs!

Towards the end of the day, I started up my Compaq V2305CA that was collecting dust on my floor and formatted it to install a fresh copy of windows onto it.  After installing Windows XP Media Center Edition onto the lappy, the installer asked me for the Service Pack 2 CD which was no where to be seen.   This messed up XP royally and forced me to start from the beginning. At which point, I decided to go with Vista.  I'm sure Vista would run sluggishly on the machine, so I'll have to do some performance tweaking when I have the time, but not last night.

I ended off the night with a dine-out at Parkside Restaurant in downtown Vancouver with Vivi.  The mood and setting was better than the last place (C-Restaurant) I went to, but I'm still not too use to this classy dining.   Earls, The Keg and such is good enough for me.  The food was delightful, desert was interesting.  I had some blood orange desert. Go ahead, Wikipedia it... and yes.. the orange was blood red.   All in all, I had a great night dining out, enjoying the drive through the city.  I need to do that more often.   Being crammed with work can get tiring at times.

U.S. Border Woes

I don't work there, nor do I want to.   I've always enjoyed challenges, but about 2 years ago, I had my first run-in with the United States Custom and Border Protection guys/gals.  The parent company, Gatekeeper Systems Inc., of where I work, Deep Development Corp., sent me down to service some school bus systems. 

I've travelled quite a bit with DDC, going to trade shows, demo's, fishing for bodies, etc.. etc..  but none of those have prepared me for what was to come.  For I didn't know I needed a Service Agreement or Warranty Paper stating that I am in fact going down to repair systems that are under warranty.  A huge slap on the wrist, 4 hours and 20 fingerprints (each finger and thumb once, four fingers for the left, four for the right then thumbs again) later, I was denied entry and sent back to Canada.  I went back to the office at 2 in the morning to grab the paper work and successfully crossed the border.  It was a long night, as I planned on crossing the border at 10pm to rent a hotel in Seattle for the night to catch a flight in the morning, but in the end, I didn't get any sleep, almost passed out drive down to Seattle, learned my lesson, and caught my flight on time.  

A New Year A New Blog

I'm not really into blogging, but I guess I need an area to vent, to keep track of my life as I get older.  The last blog I setup was probably 3, 4, 5 years ago. 

Stories - I'm not much of a story teller, not even remotely interesting at that!  But my life is full of little surprises here and there, and this place is where I'd like to share a bit about my past, present and future!  Like I said, just a little place for me to keep track of what went on, what's going on and what's going to go on in my life.  I'm never a big fan of grammar and spelling, so just give me a break! 

One thing you might have noticed,  I like to make up my own words, 'iFie' everything.  During the next few days, I'll run through what I've been through the past year, my thoughts, some interesting times, some fun times and, no doubt, some disappointing times as well.  

PS.  I don't know why I'm writing as if I have an audience, weird eh?  Well, that's just me! Enjoy!