Socialwrite.com

Updates from November, 2006

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  Keep it simple stupider

  Jevon 11:53 am on November 29, 2006 | 0 Permalink
  

  This might just be the perfect cellphone for me. Intentionally simple and throwaway cheap.

  I have been watching my cellphone habits for the last year with some amount of seriousness and I have to say, surprising as it may be, I only use my cellphone to call people, and occasionally I store phone numbers in the phone book (brain-memory is much easier to input into I have found)

  In the past year I have made some pretty dramatic changes in my cellphone habit. Laurel and I got sick of paying upwards of 60-70$ a month for her, and into the 180-250$ range for me (and I can imagine what some of you pay each month…)

  When I was travelling in the US for the better part of last year, my Telus phone was super cheap (10c/minute, with roaming) but my Rogers phone would cost a fortune for a 5 minute call.

  In the end I picked up a cheap Pay as You Go SIM card at pharmacy and used that.

  So, I have switched to a 5$/month plan. That is 5$ per month for 40 minutes and 20c/minute overage, and a $6.95 “system access fee” (don’t even get me started).

  Laurel has gone with Fido Pay as You go.

  On balance, I spend about 20$ per month (with overages) and she spends less than 10$ on cellphone usage. We TXT with eachother for the most part and for business, well, I hate doing business on a cellphone anyway. It is generally not fair to a client or coworker as I can’t give them my full attention. So I usually do my calling from my new VOIP setup. The total cost of my VOIP setup is about 5$/month total, and that covers my worldwide calling needs.

  So, if I have managed to learn one thing in the last year… it’s been that it is possible to stop paying the university tuition of a Rogers/Telus/Bell executive and you can take back a couple thousand dollars a year that is yours, not theirs.

  Stop wasting your money, analyze your cellphone usage patterns and get a plan that fits you better. You should even think about making changes to your habits. As a “small business owner” (whatever that means), I had one of the most lucrative usage patterns in the country (traveling to roaming zones and making a lot of long distance calls) and I was able to change my habits with no interference into my day to day business.

   
• 

  We came, we demoed... did we?

  Jevon 12:06 am on November 21, 2006 | 2 Permalink
  

  So, we demoed a few things tonight, but made a bit of a mistake,. we sort of mis-judged the crowd a little bit. A should-have-known-better moment mostly.

  The idea was to get up there and instead of just running through our software for the whole time (there were lots of things to show off, REST support, social network analysis, implicit rankings and participation rewards, our jabber-compatible buddy list/messenger implementation, and a few others), we would talk about how we made a whole lot of mistakes with our first version and that we learned from them, and were making a much better new version — and that there were good reasons to do that. Hey, I still think it is a worthwhile lesson to share.
  The balance of it was that most people weren’t really all that impressed with the simple piece of software we put in front of them.

  I can understand where those people were coming from, democamp is for technical demos, not as much the hybrid tried.

  So, sign up on firestoker.com for the beta., when you get an invite you will get to see all the cool shit we have in store, and we’ll be glad to have you.

  Comments from Martin, Rohan

   
• 

  Oops

  Jevon 3:01 pm on November 20, 2006 | 0 Permalink
  

  Did we say we would demo tonight? Well, let’s see what we can put together and we will give it a whirl.

  Keep your pants on.

   
• 

  See and Be Seen

  Jevon 8:02 pm on November 13, 2006 | 0 Permalink
  

  Tomorrow night is the Mesh 2007 Meetup/Drinkup hosted by Mark, Stuart, et al. and as far as I can tell it is the To Be Seen geek event this year now that Democamp has grown larger than most of it’s original members seem at all comfortable with.

  I am thinking that if people get drunk enough, a “Mesh Meetup” might become a monthly thing. Hell, if they have Stella and Guiness on tap (which they do) — I’d be there every second week!

  Oh yeah, and it looks like Albert just got bought, so we’ll all have something to gossip about.

   
• 

  Revenue Canada at it again!

  Jevon 11:29 am on November 8, 2006 | 4 Permalink
  

  I just got off the phone with Revenue Canada. It seems my bank didn’t pass along a few recent GST filings.

  This could have all been a big deal. Revenue Canada could have put the blame on me right away and could have been cruel. Instead, they called, left a message with a number for me to call. When I did call them, a real human picked up the phone, looked up my account and we walked through it together. I was actually quite sure I had made some sort of mistake (paid to wrong account or something) and felt a little anxious, but they dug in, looked up old records, etc and concluded that we need to to call the bank., so they called the bank with me and we got most of the issue worked out.

  The truth is that the whole thing took them about 15 minutes. Had they gone the other way, put the blame squarly on me and made me try to figure it out and fix it on my own, I would have, in the end, used up far more than 15 minutes of their time. I can only imagine how many times I would have to call in for bits of information, each call probably taking 10 minutes of their time.

  This is the third great experience I have had with them. My first experience being one, 5 years ago now, where I made endless amounts of mistakes. They spent a lot of time with me on the phone and were fantastic.

  Thanks Revenue Canada! (who gets to say that about their tax man?)

   
• 

  Race Day

  Jevon 11:12 am on November 1, 2006 | 0 Permalink
  

  Head of Trent – Race Day Hosted on Zooomr