2006.12.26
Posted in House and Home, Travel at 8:38 pm by Jeremiah Wittevrongel
The stockings were hung, and Santa delivered. I got a number of great gifts this year (thanks, everyone), but I have to say, the coolest gift I got this year caught me a little off guard.
No, I didn’t get a Wii (though I probably will at some point), and I already have an iPod, so that’s not it either. But the iPod guess isn’t all that far off, as it turns out.
I got a Solio.
I vaguely remember hearing about this thing a while back, but it didn’t register. And it certainly wasn’t on my radar at all. But now that I have one, I’m amazed at how infinitely freakin’ cool it is.
Solio is a travelling eco-nerd’s dream come true. You stick it in the sun and it charges. Then you can plug it into your mobile phone, iPod, Nintendo DS, or whatever you’ve got, and Solio will charge that.
This is a great thing for a couple of reasons.
- When I travel, I can take one charger instead of a whole bunch. It will charge everything I currently have and also will charge things I’m considering picking up.
- I hang it in a sunny window while I’m at work (or sitting on a beach sipping margaritas), and it’s fully charged in about a day.
- Cloudy day? Solio’s parade won’t get rained out – it comes with a wall adapter with plug adapters for pretty much everywhere in the world.
This means that when I decide to head overseas I can continue on with my digital lifestyle without hunting down a bunch of plug adapters and things for the countries I’m visiting. I can just bring the solio, the appropriate dongles for my devices, and the plug adapters I need for the countries I’m visiting.
Solio also gets bonus points for being able to charge my razr, which won’t charge over a standard USB connection to a computer without a bit of voodoo. Yes, I’m glaring at you Motorola. I realize you want to milk the overpriced accessory market, but honestly…
After trying it out with my razr and my iPod, I’m thrilled with it. It fully charged my iPod from darn near empty in a few hours while sitting in the sun, and still had plenty of charge left. Very cool. It also solves a problem I was having – I don’t have an iPod dock or other wall adapter to charge my iPod – I have a car charger and I also charge it via USB all the time, but when I’m visiting the relatives, sometimes neither car nor USB is handy. Solio’s great in that situation.
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2006.11.24
Posted in House and Home, The Web at 8:02 pm by Jeremiah Wittevrongel
A recent experience with a brick-and-mortar store has got me thinking about buying things on the internet, and what sorts of products make sense to buy online.
In this particular case, I’m going to name names. The retailer is Pier 1 Imports, and they have a fairly decent web site (as web sites go for their sort of products). It gets bonus points for the following:
- It has a reasonably complete listing of available products.
- It allows you to check stock at their stores.
- There don’t seem to be a lot of products that are exclusive to the US stores – all of the products I checked were available at their Canadian stores as well.
So far, I’ve come up empty-handed in my quest for two items of furniture: a bench for my front entry hallway, and a laundry hamper for my bedroom. I thought I should check out what Pier 1 had, so I surfed over to their web site.
My laundry hamper requirements are pretty stringent – the physical dimensions have to be such that the hamper is no more than 14″ deep, and it has to fit in with the other bedroom furniture. With the bench I’m more forgiving. I’m looking for something roughly 48″ in length and 18″ deep, although style is more important than size.
While browsing Pier 1′s web site, I found two benches that looked promising, and a laundry hamper that fit the depth requirement and that I sort of liked the looks of. So I checked the local stock, called up the nearest store to make sure they had display models of the three items on the floor, and set off to check them out in person.
It turns out that none of the three are what I’m looking for. The benches looked a lot like the web site, but the upholstery color was different than I was expecting on one of them, and the other had a much higher “lip” than was apparent from the photos on the web site. The laundry hamper was much duller and plainer looking than it appeared on the web site. I was quite disappointed in it in person.
If Pier 1 is guilty of anything, it might by that they wanted their products to look good on the web site so they made sure that they were clean, well-polished, and professionally photographed. No harm, no foul, really. Of course they want to show off the product, but this has a few downsides:
- Color reproduction on web sites in general is not going to be true, less so when the furniture is professionally photographed using non-natural lighting.
- The furniture can be “dressed up” by either choosing the “best” of a given run, high-quality polishing and cleaning, or (very likely) both.
Without going so far to say that these practices are deliberately deceptive, they do lend themselves to a let down when I’ve driven to the store and viewed the pieces in person.
Looking back on this experience, I realize that I would never have bought them online for the above reasons. Something like furniture doesn’t lend itself well to purely online shopping, but online research can be a good tool for narrowing the choices.
The products I do buy online tend to be books, CDs, DVDs, commodity electronics, and the odd mail-order-only thing where I’ve seen one in the real world first. All of these items are mass-produced, and aesthetics aren’t as important as content. I don’t really care what the book’s cover looks like, I’m buying it because I want to read it. And barring a major screwup at the printer, every copy of the latest Harry Potter novel is going to have identical contents.
For almost anything else, I will probably never order it online unless I can somehow manage to find one in the real world and convince myself that the one I’m ordering online will be almost exactly the same as the one I was looking at. Most mass-produced products fit this criteria – I can write down the SKU of the hot new digital camera I’ve been salivating over and find the exact same SKU on Amazon.com to be sure I’m buying what I expect. I can’t necessarily do this with items like furniture since, in many cases, no two pieces are entirely alike.
It also further underscores the importance of trust in any sort of mail order transaction. Sites like eBay try to give an indication of trust, and eBay is quite successful, so it must be doing something right, but when you get right down to it, eBay wouldn’t work if there weren’t an awful lot of trusting (and honest) people out there. I seldom buy things on eBay, and maybe this is part of my problem – I’m too wary perhaps.
The bottom line is that I’ll certainly use the Internet to do a lot of research into a lot of my more major purchases, but I don’t feel I can rely on it 100% as a shopping medium. I’m sure the book Why We Buy: The Science of Shopping would have something to say about that if a second edition were published today.
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2006.11.06
Posted in House and Home at 8:05 pm by Jeremiah Wittevrongel
On Saturday, the remainder of my new furniture was delivered. Or rather, was supposed to be. The headboard and footboard for my bed showed up at long last, as did my sofa and chair for the living room. The new ottoman was conspicuously absent.
It turns out that the ottoman is still at the warehouse, because they discovered some damage as it was being loaded onto the truck to be delivered. The ottoman will be delivered after the damage is repaired, which shouldn’t take very long as it’s fairly minor from the sounds of things.
Despite being not quite done with furniture deliveries, I’m quite happy with the way the place has shaped up. I need to buy a few smaller touches, but that’s about all.
And yes, I’ll post some more pictures soon.
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2006.09.29
Posted in House and Home, Parties at 9:04 pm by Jeremiah Wittevrongel
I keep getting asked when I’m going to post more pictures of my condo. After all, I’ve been moved in for a few months now. So where the heck are all the pictures?
Ask and ye shall receive.
And now before you ask, “But where are the rest of them?” rest assured they’re coming. Sometime after the rest of the new furniture. So probably sometime in November. Sigh.
As for the housewarming, I keep waffling on that one. At this point I’m thinking I may do a combination birthday / housewarming party, a sort of Happy Birthday Warming if you will. This means I would have to stay in Calgary for my birthday, breaking with the norm, and I’m not sure just yet. I have time to figure it out, thankfully, since my birthday isn’t for a few months yet.
All shall be revealed in time. Once I figure it out myself, that is.
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2006.09.13
Posted in House and Home at 6:14 pm by Jeremiah Wittevrongel
It has been remarked on a number of occasions that Calgary is becoming more like Toronto every day. Ssshhh, don’t tell the natives, or we’ll have to find a new city to love to hate.
I’ve also recently observed that Calgary is also becoming more like Los Angeles as well. Or maybe it’s already a lot like a smaller version of L.A., and striving towards Toronto. Now there’s a scary thought.
Allow me to explain.
I’m not about to argue that Calgary isn’t becoming more like Toronto. The city is a lot more multi-cultural than it was a decade ago, and a stroll down 17th Ave SW or 4th Street SW should be enough to convince people that Calgary feels a lot like Toronto at times, albeit with a slightly different flavour.
OK, so what’s this business about Los Angeles all about?
Consider the following conversation from Neil Gaiman’s “The Goldfish Pool and Other Stories”:
“Is it far?”
He shook his head. “Maybe twenty-five, thirty minutes. You ever been to L.A. before?”
“No.”
“Well, what I always say, L.A. is a thirty-minute town. Wherever you want to go, it’s thirty minutes away. No more.”
By this definition, Calgary isn’t quite a thirty-minute town, but it’s close. From my downtown condo, it’s about a thirty-minute drive to, well, almost everywhere in the city. Whether I’m headed to my next Ultimate Frisbee match or to visit a friend out in the suburbs, it seems like the drive always takes about thirty minutes.
The downside is, even if something seems relatively nearby, it still often takes something approaching thirty minutes to get there, once parking and whatnot get factored in.
This magic thirty minute number is confounded by two phenomena:
- Traffic, especially during rush hour. Also, bear in mind that the worst rush hour traffic of all can be found within a five km radius of Chinook Centre on a Saturday afternoon. No word of a lie, there are more shoppers per km of roadway on Saturday afternoon than there are people commuting to downtown on a Monday morning.
- Construction, which seems to be increasingly common of late.
Of course, the construction is supposed to improve the traffic situation in the long run. My personal suspicion is that the real motive is to make it so an even larger area of suburban sprawl can be built which will be, you guessed it, a half-hour away from everywhere else.
This is a large part of the reason that I live downtown and actively try to avoid driving anywhere. Walking and cycling are my dominant forms of transport. Oh well. If Calgary ever does complete its metamorphosis into a city which resembles an unholy union of Los Angeles and Toronto, I’ll still live downtown and avoid spending a half-hour on the myriad freeways as often as I possibly can.
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2006.09.13
Posted in House and Home at 6:07 pm by Jeremiah Wittevrongel
To make a very long story short, I’m so dissatisfied with my current internet service provider that I’ve decided I can grin and bear it no longer. It takes a lot to push me to switch, and they’ve managed to do so.
I’m not going to name names or whine about it on my weblog, because that doesn’t do anybody any good, but it does leave me in a bit of an interesting situation: My ISP is also my VOIP provider, and when I signed up with them, I had them port my land line number from the telco.
Thus I’ve managed to preserve the land line number I’ve had for the past 5 years, and avoid the need to force everyone to update their address books and records with yet another change of phone number. Since I’m changing ISPs, though, I can’t keep my VOIP line where it is.
My choices should be fourfold:
- Port the number to the ISP I’m moving to, on their VOIP service.
- Port the number to a third-party VOIP provider like Vonage or someone.
- Port the number back to a POTS line with the incumbent Telco.
- Port the number to a mobile phone.
Unfortunately, I live in Canada, where the CRTC has given telcos until 2007 to implement #4 (and they may well push for extensions – this has yet to be seen), so really only the first three are currently viable. Each of these three options has problems:
- The ISP I’m moving to charges $55 / mo. just for their VOIP service, on top of the regular charge for internet access. Mind you, that does include all the calling features I would want, voicemail, and unlimited free long distance in Canada and the USA. And from everything I’ve heard, the quality of service is great, but $55 still seems a bit steep to me.
- I haven’t heard much good about third-party VOIP providers from all the friends I have who have tried them. I haven’t heard tons of bad things either, but the general consensus so far has been “not quite there yet”, at least when used with the local major ISPs services.
- Oh, local incumbent telco. How do I love thee…. let me count the ways. Umm… I’m stuck already. Plus, when I called you to inquire about porting my number back, whoever I spoke to clearly had no idea what the process was and gave me misinformation (I have a rough idea of what the process is, having been through it once, and what I was told didn’t jive at all). Plus, the cost is prohibitive – basic phone service plus a somewhat usable long distance plan is approaching the $55 /mo. number I don’t like with a VOIP line.
So, I have to ask the question: What’s stopping me from doing as many of my friends and colleagues have done and ditching my home phone altogether, in favour of only having a mobile?
- The cost of long distance. At $0.03 / min., I can still rack up $20 / month in long distance, believe it or not. Most of my relatives and a number of good friends live elsewhere in Canada and the USA, so mobile long distance at $0.25 / min. is way too expensive.
- My phone number. 5 years of the same number is tough to give up.
The first is easily solved by using a service like Net2Phone Direct (which I’ve used in the past quite satisfactorily). Their rates are good, and I’ve never had an issue with call quality in the past, plus the auto-increment-to-the-credit-card thing is definitely a bonus when I use as much as I do. Only downside is it’s in $USD, though with current exchange rates, this isn’t really an issue. I’ll probably spend around $25 CAD / month even in busy months, which is still cheaper than $55 for a full-blown VOIP line with long distance included. As a bonus, I can use Net2Phone with my cell phone or from any phone from wherever I am.
There’s also the question of how my current mobile phone plan stacks up with increased usage. I have free calls evenings and weekends, and a fairly ample supply of daytime minutes. So far, I’ve never paid extra for airtime. If I ditch the land line, I’ll be using the mobile phone more often, but I’m not sure it’s all that much more. The worst offender would be between 5pm (when I leave work) and 6pm (when the free evenings kick in). For the most part, any calls I make in that time frame are short right now, so even this won’t really be a barrier.
And if things get bad, I’m sure a different mobile phone plan won’t cost $30 / month more than I currently spend, so this should still be cheaper.
So it boils down to the question of how much I’m willing to spend to keep a phone number. On some level, the fact that I’m asking this question amazes me – who would think that something like a phone number has a worth that can be measured in dollars per month, but here I am.
And perhaps that’s the best answer. It’s just a number. Yes it’s inconvenient to lose it, but a lot of my friends, relatives, and important contacts already have my mobile number. Plus, I recently moved, and the headache of changing addresses really wasn’t that bad – changing phone numbers won’t be any worse.
So, It’s time to bid adieu to my land line number. From now on my motto shall be, “Give me per-minute roaming charges or give me death.” Or something.
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2006.09.13
Posted in House and Home, This Site at 5:59 pm by Jeremiah Wittevrongel
If you’re wondering why I’ve been unusually quiet for the past couple of weeks, it’s because my internet connection at home has been down. It’s back now. I’ve got a couple of posts queued up in TextEdit, and I’ll be posting them momentarily.
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2006.08.20
Posted in House and Home at 7:39 pm by Jeremiah Wittevrongel
The condo is really starting to take shape. The blinds were installed last Tuesday, and the closet organizers get installed this coming Tuesday. Also, my dining room furniture should be delivered in a week or so, which I’ve been looking forward to.
The other furniture for the most part has been ordered and will be arriving over the next few months, and I’m pretty much done for a while. At least all of the projects that require me to do actual work (like hanging light fixtures or tearing out the stuff that was in my closets) are now finished, which is a good feeling.
Now I just have to pay the credit card bills…
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2006.07.30
Posted in House and Home at 8:14 pm by Jeremiah Wittevrongel
The condo is coming along well. I’ve finally finished changing all of the lighting I didn’t like (which amounts to almost all of it), and what a huge difference it makes.
I’ve had lots of help from friends (since light fixtures are pretty annoying to try and hang by yourself), and I’m very grateful to Jason in particular who has helped me a lot.
I’m especially grateful for Jason’s help today, mounting the last fixture – a track light in my entry hallway. How difficult can it possibly be to mount a track light, after all?
What should have been very straightforward turned out to have a few little gotchas.
First off, we had to get the track lighting home. My car couldn’t accomodate the 8ft length of track, but luckily Jason’s car could, so we were off to Home Depot to buy everything. And besides a little spat with the self check-out thingy (it really didn’t like the 8ft track), things went well.
After getting everything inside, and opening up the package, things were pretty straightforward. There was a metal plate that had to be screwed in to the junction box in the roof and wired in, and then the track had to be mounted and the lights attached to the track. Enter problem number one. The junction box was mounted in such a way that we could not mount the metal plate the way it was intended to be mounted. We had to abuse the plate slightly and create some new holes to put the screws through.
After we got satisfactory results (though breaking a drill bit in the process), we mounted the plate… with the wrong screws. The plate didn’t come with screws for mounting to the junction box, so we had to dig around and find some. After finding screws that fit correctly (second time’s the charm), the plate didn’t take much fuss to mount.
So now we have a metal plate in the roof, and it’s time to mount the track. We mark the holes (5 of them, of which we were only going to use four and then grab the drill to start drilling into the roof. Of course, me being silly, I didn’t even think that the roof might not be so easy to drill into.
I live in a concrete high-rise. Repeat after me: concrete building means concrete ceilings and floors.
So, after determining that the drill bits I have are clearly not up to the task, it’s back to Home Depot to grab a 1/4″ concrete bit. Then we fought for the next 30 minutes or so to put 3 and a half holes in the ceiling. The fourth hole ends up going nowhere – it was slightly misaligned, and it seemed like we hit something in the concrete about 1/2″ in that didn’t want to be drilled through.
No worries – I figured three well-anchored screws would be enough to hold up the track. Besides, there was already enough concrete dust on the floor.
Now with plastic plugs firmly placed in the roof, we got the track up and started screwing it in. Jason had to make another *ahem* adjustment to the metal plate to get everything to line up, but we got it all in after some fiddling, and nearly stripping one of the screws (which we managed to remove and replace). If I had any doubts about 3 screws being enough to mount this track to the ceiling, they vanished at this point. I suspect you would break the track before the screws would give. They’re quite firmly in place.
We then discover a third problem. Our little adjustments (read: drilling new holes) to the metal plate will make mounting the plastic cover that is supposed to hide the metal plate a tad problematic. This problem can be solved by creative application of some longer screws. I’ll pick some up next time I’m at a hardware store. For now, the plastic cover is missing, but that’s OK. Besides being a little ugly, everything is fine.
Now for the big test. Jason clips the little bit into the track that gives it power, and then he pops a light in. I throw the breaker back on, flip the switch and… nothing.
So the breaker goes back off, we review what we’ve done, and can’t see any reason why this wouldn’t work. The other fixture on the same circuit is still working fine. So we check the bulb, the light, and other stuff, and fiddle a bit, and still nothing. Finally after some more fiddling on my part we realize that the little bit that provides power to the track is a bit finicky, and it wasn’t clipping fully into place. Voila, we have light.
So to review, we now have a track in the roof, that works, sans little plastic cover thingy. I get the other lights (5 in all) placed and fiddle with them to get them aimed correctly. But my job isn’t quite finished yet.
The fixture I took down and replaced with the track was mounted directly into the ceiling, not to the junction box. The builder opted to do this for the simple reason that the fixture wouldn’t fit if it were mounted to the junction box like it normally would be. So out come those plugs in the ceiling (which are now very visible), and up I go with the polyfill to fix this mess. It took about 4 layers of polyfill to get things straightened (these were 1/4″ diameter holes, 1-1/4″ deep). Now, if you don’t know exactly what you’re looking for, you really can’t tell there were holes there.
So my adventures in lighting are now over, except for a plastic cover that needs some new screws. The place definitely looks a lot better than it did before the new fixtures, and the track was an excellent choice for the hallway – the hallway seems a lot larger now that it’s better lit, and you can actually enjoy the artwork on the walls. Certainly not as easy as it appears on TV, but it’s done.
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2006.07.22
Posted in House and Home, Music at 11:48 pm by Jeremiah Wittevrongel
Now that I’m settled in my new home (and it does feel like my new home now), I’ve realized that something is missing.
During my third year of University, I had a theme song (in my own mind, at least) for the apartment I lived in. The song itself is irrelevant, but it still evokes memories of that apartment.
In a way, I also had a theme song for each of the following two rentals I occupied, though one of them happened by accident. And rather than evoking memories of the basement suite I lived it, it evokes memories of falling asleep on the couch in said basement suite while in the midst of reviewing my Abnormal Psychology notes. Thankfully it doesn’t evoke memories of the multi-colored carpet that adorned the stairway. But anyways…
My last place didn’t really have a theme song. Not that I can think of, anyways. Perhaps Toxygene by Orbital or The Hand That Feeds by Nine Inch Nails come close, but neither was really a theme song. Or maybe 光 by Utada Hikaru (though it would have to be the unedited version of the dance remix from the Kingdom Hearts soundtrack, in Japanese, not English).
The more I think about it, maybe that’s why my last apartment lacked personality in my mind – lack of a theme song. Or maybe I was over-Ikea’ed. Who knows.
Anyways, my I’ve decided that my current place needs a theme song. The best candidates that I have so far are probably Time’s Scar from the Chrono Cross soundtrack, and the Dragons of Earth suite from the X soundtrack.
Another possibility is to make it Melissa by Porno Graffiti (from the Fullmetal Alchemist Complete Best album), since I bought that album around the same time I took possession of the condo. Or maybe I should go with something more jazzy like a Thievery Corporation track. I guess I really don’t know what I want.
I’ll have to give it some thought as I continue assembling light fixtures, furniture, and art for the place.
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