In doing a bit of background research, I happened across a Canadian Heritage parody done by none other than Rick Mercer -- video after the jump. To summarize -- Canada -- Gouging consumers since the advent of the telegraph.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=q0ZGkqQvAVw

I’m a self-professed tech guy, and I literally have spent the last 10 years of my life building / working on the web.  I also find things like network stacks / transmission interesting, so I’ve done a lot of reading on the topic.  So, armed with all that knowledge, I’ve been following this UBB  scandal with some significant interest.  I should also mention that in my house, we have Netflix and make liberal use of the Boxee box that Tania bought me.  With Tania being home / on mat leave -- we can pull anywhere from 3 GB -- 40 GB in a day.  Fortunately we’re signed up with a smaller ISP (Acanac) who are awesome and provide us unlimited bandwidth over cable for less than Rogers was screwing charging us.

Now, what does all that have to do with UBB -- well, lets say I was still paying Rogers (for their terrible service / low bandwidth caps) -- I’d be paying around $60 / month ($46.99 + modem rental + tax) for 60GB of bandwidth with $2 / GB of overage beyond 60GB.  Well, doing some quick math, average usage for my house is 450GB / month -- making my monthly bill from Rogers $840 / month.

Am I a “bandwidth hog”, I wouldn’t consider myself one, if I’m paying for 10mbit service, I expect to be able to use that 10mbit whenever and however I want.  If I decide I want to use 10mbit for an entire month, I’d better be able to pull down 2.5ish TB in a month without incurring overages.

Now, why am I writing all this -- because I do believe in UBB, go ahead and charge me for my usage, I really don’t have a problem with that.  The problem I have is with “what” they’re charging me.  Instead of charging me $2.00 / GB over a set limit, why not charge me a reasonable markup on what they pay for bandwidth.  If it costs them $0.05 / GB (which is what most people are estimating it actually costs Bell / Rogers), then they’d better not charge me more than $0.10 / GB -- plus a flat monthly fee for the connection (something like $20 / month seems reasonable).

So, if the CRTC decides to make Canadian ISP billing into a more utility based billing, they’d better damn well put limits on the markup ISPs can charge.  Of course all this is just me speculating -- Bell / Rogers owns the CRTC, and in the end will get what they want.

In other news I had an awesome family day weekend up in Sauble, and while Nathan decided not to sleep at night, it was still somewhat restful and relaxing. I got some starcraft 2 in with Forrest and realized exactly how much I suck, but we still had a good time. We also decided to make an iOS game, so I’m likely going to make a page for it here. I have my doubts I’ll actually finish it, but who knows.

Well, I’m hoping to finally break the cycle. I just grabbed the new iPhone app for wordpress and am hoping to be able to post quick things happeing in my life, and save the longer posts for when I have time.

—Insert Apple Rant here

This is probably the only time you’ll hear me rant about Apple – they brought out this awesome device called the AppleTV, I was super excited by it, has a really nice interface, easy to use, tied to iTunes, and was supposed to make life easier when streaming media to my TV.  Then I found out that they want you to only use the media format they use, which kind of screws anyone with any significant amount of digital video thats not in mp4 format.  Unfortunately I fall into that category, with somewhere around 1.2TB of TV recorded for viewing at my leisure.  To re-encode all of that, I’d a. have to have a ton of extra hard drive space, and b. way too much time on my hands.  So, really, Apple, get with the times already, just include the codecs in the next AppleTV update and allow me to mount my Samba share on it and I think a lot more people will buy your device.

—End Apple Rant

Even if Apple does include these features – which they won’t – I still think a Boxee box is just what the industry needs to jump-start it.  A lot of other companies have tried to bring out media center boxes, but they all suffer from one critical flaw or another; poor ui, no networking support, poor codec support.  So, I’m putting my money towards a Boxee box when they come out – looking forward to finding more details on December 7th during the Boxee Beta release.

Boxee Blog » a Boxee Box is coming!.

So, the simple answer to everyone’s question – how’s married life – I think can be summed up as, the same as life before the wedding (minus all the wedding planning).  For anyone out there looking to get married to their long time significant other, I would offer this one piece of advice, don’t expect radical changes to your relationship post-wedding.

And thats all the wedding advise I’ll offer, promise.

I’ve taken the liberty of setting up Varnish in front of Apache, I know my blog doesn’t get much traffic, but at least it should respond a lot quicker – sometimes I find wordpress to be kinda slow. I’m going to be tweaking the config, and once I have it just right, I’ll post my VCL code here for anyone who’s interested in optimizing Varnish for WordPress installs.  It also has the added benefit of protecting my blog should (hell freeze over and) one of my posts suddenly become popular.

I fixed the stupid problem I was having with tank by re-installing Ubuntu.  Since I no longer have any optical bays, I had to actually set up Ubuntu over a netboot install, which was kind of cool.  If I have some time, I’ll post some instructions on how to do it in case anyone’s interested.

To my surprise, its a notice saying they’re going to be upgrading my analog service to their new amazing “digital” service, because they can no longer maintain the analog phone lines. What a load of crock, I was actually a Sprint customer back in the day when Rogers bought them out, and I’m fairly certain that as a result of the buyout, Rogers had to maintain the analog phone lines. That being said, Ma Bell happens to own the lines and leases them out to Rogers, which I would guess cuts into their ever so precious profit margins. So, it would make sense, from a business perspective (aside from the whole giving Bell back their monopoly), for Rogers to try and stop paying the expensive leasing fees and give everyone VoIP, which costs them essentially nothing.

Anyway, the whole point of the argument, monopolies aside, is that I got the letter on July 4th. They are making the change to my line on August 1st according to the letter. Now, the real problem is that I rely on my analog phone line for my DSL, which I get through Sentex. Would seem Rogers can’t even get their act together to give their customers even 1 months notice of changes to their services. Unfortunately, you can’t cancel any contract without a month’s notice, GREAT GOING ROGERS! So, now, I’m forced to cancel my service with Rogers, get Bell to take over my phone line, and look, Rogers has lost another customer.

Really, wake up people, why can’t you get your act together and be a decent service provider like you used to be? Rising prices, crappy service, for what, a few “value adds” here and there? No thanks.

So, lots of changes around here since I last blogged, I now work as the Director of Technology for MRX & Associates and the Hamilton Tiger-Cats.  Much fun, unfortunately time is short and thus I have to keep this one short.

One other thing… Batman Rocked!

For the past 3 years, I have paid Blizzard approximately $700, and spent literally days of my life on their game. And really all I have to show for it is a few characters on their servers that aren’t really worth anything. Now, thats not to say I didn’t enjoy it while it lasted, it was a lot of fun and I definitely enjoyed the times I had with my friends. Unfortunately, they’ve moved on for the most part, and so I feel I have to move on as well.

Anyway, not much else to say about it, other than I’ve had a lot more time to spend on other games, I’m still working through Metroid, and I just picked up Mario Galaxy last night. I’ll have my opinions on Mario Galaxy up once I get a little further into it.