letter to cusinart

It was written rather hastily and I didn’t bother to proof read it all that well.

After I had completed my B.Sc. in Computer Science in 2003 I got a fairly decent job. The pay was satisfactory and the responsibilities where, for the most part, fair as well. I felt I should of been content with my situation at the time; but, as it turned out I was often restless and questioning what my actions where contributing to my community and the world at large. I took up reading and studying a selective set of religions, philosophies and self-help techniques in an attempt to make sense of my purpose. I had over simplified my expectations and as a result was looking for an easy way to accomplish my goal of finding purpose and living a purposeful life. In the process I had made an honest effort to practice Buddhism for about 4 months. Many things failed to reconcile with me at the time and I ultimately blew it off as a idealistic philosophy on life with some disagreeable dogma.

At the end of my explorations I arbitrarily decided that I should teach English overseas. Seemed like everyone was doing it and nearly everyone came back happy and rich. I figured my service to others in this way would both give me purpose and compensation. When the decision was made, I quickly became discontent with my present situation (which was still just fine). Still not experiencing what I thought I craved, I was eager to get this moving and made a few mistakes (burned bridges, etc) as a result of my impatience. Not too surprisingly, I got quickly distracted by a chance opportunity to work in the video game industry. I immediately dropped my previously “noble” plans and jumped shipped to Winnipeg. I was convinced I would derive my noble purpose by doing this.

Not surprisingly, I did not find much purpose in Winnipeg. If anything, things got worse very quickly for me. Ultimately the company couldn’t continue and I was out of the job. Longing for what I had previously, I made post haste back to Saskatoon. I spent 6 months collecting employment insurance and looking for a job. I eventually got one 2 hours south in Regina. This time around, I had resigned myself to just doing the best I can do at what I do. I would let purpose “find me”; and so I had given up. I dabbled and volunteered a bit in teaching English. It was enjoyable and rewarding, but not my “calling”.

I again grew restless and started to make plans to do something extreme. I thought perhaps I had misread/misinterpreted Buddhism and needed a more direct approach. I looked for monasteries that taught in English in Inda/Thailand. Found one and started a dialog with them to arrange my studies. It wasn’t long after I started that process that disaster struck and they were part of the collateral damage of a local terrorist attack. Shaken by this, I dropped the idea of being a monk for a month all together. So I again looked for something slightly less extreme and more “local”. I found a few retreats in North America, but they were often expensive and full. Most also seemed to cater themselves to hipster business people as more of an “experience”. I grew frustrated and stopped looking for nearly two years.

This takes us to about 8 months ago, I was randomly googling for guided meditation audio files and happened to come across the site for Dhamma. I read about it a bit on and off the site; but more importantly noticed they had centres all across North America. This set the gears in motion for me. The hardest hurdle for me to jump was to find 10 (more like 12) consecutive days off to take the new student course. As a partner in a company, I felt I couldn’t take myself out of the operating picture for that long. In retrospect that was a silly notion to have, but it did drive me to do a few exciting things in the mean time.

While on vacation with my fiance and parents in Hawaii, I set in motion (mostly with resolve) three things:

• I would resign as partner at my job.
• I would start my own company, Sliced Projects.
• I would registered for the spring Vipassana course at Sylvan Lake.

All three if these events came to pass around the same time. I had to resign to feel like I could take the 10 days was the biggest part of all this. Again, in retrospect I could of done it without resigning. Starting my own company had motivations of it’s own as well, but ultimately the end result was that I felt I had enough control of my life to take 10 days off. That’s how I ended up going to a Vipassana meditation course.

The Course

My better judgement tells me that the best details of my experience of the course should be told in person. As a new student in the technique I’m not fully able to explain the more subtle aspects that are also the more profound. I should mention my state of mind immediately before entering the course, since I believe it played a very important role in the end results. I consider myself a skeptic about most things I haven’t witnessed first hand, so coming to this course I decided to come with not expectations and an open mind. By open mind I don’t mean willing to listen, but willing to following immerse myself in the instructions of the technique. Turns out in the first discourse video your highly encouraged to do this anyways, but I think I helped set myself up for the best possible experience.

Day 0

Having grossly overestimated the travel time, my ride share companion and I arrived many hours early. Fortunately, there were many people already there. Any interesting tension was in the air, many of us were new students and were not quite sure what to expect. It seemed like all the old students and originally taken the course over seas and had very interesting experiences to share. This fueled the general anxieties, but also removed some of the unknowns for us new students. Once registration was done, diner was served. A pleasant vegetarian meal (all the meals were vegetarian, since you take a precept not to harm another being while taking the course). The course technically starts on day zero, after taking 5 precepts as a group.

Day 1, 2 and 3

I won’t bore you with the details of the schedule, but I will mention that this is no “vacation” or “retreat”. It’s a course and it has long hard hours. You essentially are meditating 10 or more hours a day. The first three days you practice a through the nose breathing meditation that trains your mind to be aware of the subtle sensations you are capable of feeling. This got painfully boring for me by the third day, since I’ve already done this form of meditation for years. I had convinced myself that if something new didn’t present itself on the fourth day I’d leave the course. The evening discourse presented what we would be doing the next day and it was surprisingly not what I expected.

Day 4

During day 0 there was a brief mention of “Sittings of Strong Determination”. Turns out today was the day you start those (actually it could of been day 5, I wasn’t keeping the best track of days). I was once again tested in my resolve to stick with the course. My advice to anyone on their first sitting of this type is to keep your mind busy with the technique as much as possible. Your given just enough instructions up to this point to know what to do, but the evening discourse pulls it all together. Every sitting afterwords was a cakewalk compared to the first and I learned a few interesting things about myself as a result.

Day 5 to 8

Practice, practice, practice. There is a very strong emphasis in this course to practice seriously and diligently. I took it to heart on all but the 8th day (my snow day). As each day progressed your use of the technique is expanded in small ways. The discourses generally pull together the theory of the technique and impart general nuggets of wisdom to you. There was a few Buddhist dogma’s brought up that seemed out of place in a non-cecular course (mostly about reincarnation). The instructor and assistant instructor both urge you to think for yourself and ultimately told me those parts of the discourse were not important to leaning and applying the technique. Generally time went fast with the exception of the 8th day. For whatever reason on the 8th day my mind insisted that I purge all the creative ideas that had accumulated since the start of the course. I basically wrote the first 1/4 of an amusing sci-fi in my head most of the day. I thought of a few interesting products for the iPhone and Wordpress as well during the day. The down side was that my sittings dragged on because of my distraction.

Day 9

Letting myself go on day 8 turned out to be the best thing I could do. With my minds buffer emptied I found a new found resolve to concentrated and apply the technique. The day literally flew by and I meditated for about 13 hours this day alone. I experienced the more advanced stages of the technique multiple times and came out of meditations with swells of emotion and tears. It was this day that many insights about life came to me. It was also the day I acknowledged the value in practicing Vipassana, even if I don’t currently agree with all of the topics brought up in the discourses.

Day 10

After mid morning meditation we are released of our vow of noble silence. It’s somewhat ironic that after 9 days of not talking you have nothing particularly insightful to say. The men exited the hall and kinda cheered (one of those lame half hearted ones). The ladies had a much more emotional exit from the hall with hugs and tears. It didn’t take long for everyone to do introductions again (how do you remember the names of people you can’t talk to for 9 days?). During rest periods everyone would form large groups and talk about their experiences so far in the course and the usual mixer conversations. We were warned meditation would be hard now that our minds had this extra source of distraction, but I actually found my meditations where a nice break from all the chit-chat. We learned the last and final step of the Vipassana technique that day, which is a little hokey to be honest; but at this point I couldn’t say it wasn’t worth doing based on my experiences so far.

Day 11

This day starts like all the others, but they throw in an audio discourse in the middle of morning meditation. At 7:15 or so we were “free”. Breakfast was served and volunteers had started to tear down the site and pack things up. I left with great feeling of rest, joy and general balance.

If you are interested in more details about the course or my experience, just ask me in person. So far I’ve been a very passionate about in sharing my experience to the people I’ve seen. Jolene has noticed a “glow of joy” about me. I generally feel “better” both physically and mentally. Most importantly, I don’t have this yearning for something more or feeling that I have no noble purpose.

If you look at current UBB for utilities, the connect/service fee goes to various aspects of operating that utility. Usually maintaining the infastructure, improving infastructure, equipment given/leased to you, service and support and all the other aspects of managing that utility. It works particularly good in Canada because it allows a company to spread the cost of providing service to hard to reach areas out amongst a larger demographic. If you look at the utility rates these companies charge, it’s usually a fairly marginal markup on the costs. They do build some of the “service” related fees into that price at times, but generally it close to the “bulk” or “market rate” for the utility. (For an example, go digging here: SaskRateReview )

UBB does solve a problem ISP’s have faced for more than a decade (maybe even two). When you give unlimited, some people try to actually use it as such. You might say, why offer it if you were not prepared to service it. It’s a fair question that I’m sure some marketing departments would attempt to explain. The reality is that ISP’s have been playing the averages for ages now. It wasn’t until recently that the average consumption of bandwidth has been accelerating. A fair reaction to this is placing limits on packages at fixed prices. Many ISP’s adopted this ages ago, mostly because the infastructure was not designed to handle a few people with huge appetites for bandwidth.

There are two cruxes to the problem that I see here. One is the ISP’s claiming infrastructure can’t keep up with their customers growing demand. Funny, what were the big three spending their profits on all these years. Rogers, Shaw, and Bell have all recently (and historically for that matter) had very successful years. Apparently they didn’t think to spend any of that money on improving infrastructure to keep up with growing trends of more people using the internet and more people streaming media on the internet.

Second crux is that the ISP’s immediately when to what is an utility model, but didn’t switch to utility pricing. Many people have mentioned it before, but $1.50/GB is far to much to charge as a utility. Look at the price U.S. resales it at: SliceHost, Amazon and RackSpace. Between 30 cents and 10 cents? Surely, it must be more in Canada right? Nope, take a look at hosting pages and how much transfer they include: eHosting, Cirrus Tech and The Wire. All these companies host geographically in Canada. For whatever reason Canada covets the $/GB numbers, but the numbers are interesting regardless. eHosting is ~ $1.09/GB and that includes fully managed dedicate server (actual hardware) on the other end. Cirrus Tech includes 2,000GB a month for their hosting which works out to $0.095/GB. Again, that includes hosting on a machine. The Wire sells dedicated co-location with 1 Mbps connection for $129, which typically gives you ~300GB a month. $0.43/GB that includes rack space and power.

To be fair, some comparing hosting provider charges for bandwidth isn’t 100% fair. They are usually right on top of a few trunks and often negotiate peering agreements (if they are large enough to do so). So that’s the price when your at the doorstep. In theory, in a utility market where there is a service fee plus UBB, the cost of brining it to the door is either all in the service fee, or wrapped in to the metered rate. In either case, if the ISP’s in Canada are claiming it costs an order magnatude more to provide internet service to the door. You have to wonder why electrical companies are not going bankrupt left and right. They provide a far more reliable service to nearly EVERY possible place in Canada.

The solution is not clear at this point. These ISP’s clearly want to make money and there is nothing wrong with that. UBB, if done fairly, would not be putting us in this uproar we are in right now. It seems like most Canadians get that UBB is like moving to the utility model, but they also recognize the rate is not well connected to the costs. That’s something economics would usually fix over time, but perhaps the meddling of the CTRC and government is preventing such an event to take place. There are broader concerns that the big “three” are going to generally match that each other do as well. So if one does it and makes money, why not the rest of them. If that’s the case, perhaps government intervention is required to break those companies up into something smaller. Or, god help us, regular internet services as utilities (a last resort IMHO). What I do know is, the current UBB pricing is not reflecting a fair rate, something we should definitely be doing something about (preferable with your wallet and voice).


./pear mage-setup

That should update everything to work as expected for updates and the like.

Ingredients:

• 500ml can of crush/stewed tomatoes
• 500ml can of black/mixed beans
• one cup of frozen corn
• 1 tsp of onion powder
• 1 tsp of garlic powder
• 1 tbsp chili powder
• 1/4 tsp of sea salt

Directions:

1. Mix all ingredients in sauce pan.
2. Heat until hot (if I’m not immediately hungry I simmer on medium heat for 5 minutes to bring out the chili spices more).
3. Eat.

5 Minute Chili ready to serve

The deception, in my opinion, is that they let you pick a backup funding source. This is made out to be a feature for you. It’s actually a feature for the merchant. See, if you don’t have enough money in your account you get NSF’ed. Then, paypal finds out and charges your credit card. Granted, this makes sense, but I feel it also gave a false sense of security to the purchaser. It doesn’t give you anything. If you happen to be at your low cash balance for the month and you get a few recurring charges… the fee’s can add up fast (I guess that depends on you bank… mine is $40 a hit). It gets better!

If you’ve setup paypal payments through a merchant in the past and have a regular amount of business with them they can setup some sort of magical way to remember your preferences and just charge your paypal account like they did last time. This isn’t a “recurring” bill or a “subscription”. It’s some feature I’ve never seen in the paypal API as of yet (and I’ve got it right beside me). So, when I went to renew my domain this month it decided to just go ahead and charge my bank account first… with out asking me. So bank, another $40 charge on my empty bank account. I’m not even sure how I can change this “preference” in paypal. GoDaddy.com doesn’t seem to offer a way to change it either. I guess next time I’ll just opt to use my credit card directly. Which brings me to this.

What incentive is there for a consumer to even offer to pay straight from their account when they have to have a CC to back up the transaction anyways? I don’t see any reason at all to even have my account linked to paypal anymore (after $160 of NSF fees…). I’ll pay straight from my CC for purchases. If I get some extra cash in the account, I’ll use my paypal debit mastercard to take it out.

• http://kivanews.blogspot.com/2009/06/letter-from-kiva-about-pilot.html
• http://www.kivafriends.org/index.php/topic,3922.0.html

The whole idea of micro loan’s is that the lender and receiver have a more personal relationship. I know I’m borrowing $100 to Mr. Business owner, he fixes motorbikes. Plan’s to repay his loan over 8 months. You also know about your broker. How much volume they’ve been doing, their repayment rate, their default rate, etc. The system is setup to reward due diligence on part of the broker. It motivates the receiver to pay back, because of the personal nature of the loan. Last but not least, you get to decide for yourself if it’s a person/business/idea/broker that you want to support.

The thing everyone has to remember is that if Kiva fails in America, people will just stop loaning to American’s because of the represented risk. No one in their right mind would loan through a broker who didn’t have an acceptable repayment rate and a very low default rate. This applies to all brokers with Kiva, not just the American brokers.

What I think is more amazing about Kiva is that you and spread your risk around. Given the rate of defaults in general, your chances of losing $25 is very low. From what I’ve been able to observe, most default’s get partial payments anyways… so even then your chance of a complete loss of investment is low.

Really, the only criticism I can throw at Kiva is that it’s a 0% return on investment. Really, I figure it’s more like donating to charity, but you get to keep donating the same set of money over and over again. Doing many times the initial value of good with the same money. I’ve already reinvested $65 since I started. With $125 in the pot at the time. That’s 50% ROI if you look at it as charity.

Basically, if you script any sort of table changes in MSSQL you will eventually need to use this code. In MSSQL’s infinite wisdom they made default values on NOT NULL columns occasionally have a mysterious constraint. Ordinarily, constraints on fields on tables are easily found in INFORMATION_SCHEMA.TABLE_CONSTRAINTS; but, these particular constraints are hidden for whatever reason.

This makes removing them programmatically very difficult, since they insist on putting a timestamp/guid on the end of each auto-generated default constraint. SO, this useful page on the MSDN provides a way to query the actual name of the constraint given the table name and column name. This, allowing you to remove it before you do something completely crazy like delete the column.

Of course, if your not in to scripting your database migrations then you can just use Management Studio and delete the column.

I bought light fixtures for my bathrooms 2 months ago. These were brushed nickle with patterned glass plates. Fairly large and hefty suckers and really really bright. I paid $84 and $67 respectively for these fixtures. I figured that was a fair price considering their size and output capacity.

Fast forward to today when I’m looking at chain-able T4 fluorescent fixtures. 12 inches of fixture costs a crisp $55.  Step it up to 24 inches and your looking at $90 (a savings of $20!!! Woo…).  Plus they don’t come with coupler cables to wire then in series, so your looking at $5 for that. I’d need four of the 24 inch segments and a few cables… total was reaching the $400 mark to light 10 feet if cabinets.

When I put it like that, it doesn’t sound so bad… which is what I’m guessing they’re counting on. Having already done my research online I commented that the exact same brand online in Canada ships for about $15 less a fixture. She pointed out that I’d pay shipping and I counter that I only pay one tax. She was stumped on that one, but said she would see what she could do to match the price.

Not even 15 second later, her superior clear says “no” to that request and she returns. Mean while on my iPhone I’ve found even CHEAPER fixtures and they come with all the wires and they’re touch to turn on instead of those old rocker switches. I ask if they have connections to order this brand of lights… and it turns out they don’t. So, with that information in hand I left the dejected sales people to contemplate why they even bother to sell utility lights at such a marvelous mark up.

Btw, I bought my lights here:  Savio Lighting and it cost me $160 CAD.

First things first: booking. I booked by phone as I had some questions about the various types of rooms available and the laundry service. My call was answered promptly with, “Can you hold? *click*”. A local radio station came on the line before I had a chance to say a word. This is unfortunately very common these days, as most people will just say yes anyways; but, kinda rude to not even let me speak. Moving on…

I booked myself into a business class suite. These suckers have nice big chairs and high speed internet (every room has high speed and wifi btw). That was $10 more a night, but it was also on a secure floor, which I was assured was never “loud”. I also confirmed the existence of self serve laundry.

Two days later I arrive after a long day of driving and working on-site. Check-in was nearly painless, except for the standing around part. It took 5 minutes for someone to show up to front desk… not exactly presenting yourself as a leader in hospitality here.

Get to my room, which was adequate in size and features. I proceed to setup my laptop so I can continue working on my clients project. I left my spare cat5 cable on-site, so I had to room service myself one. No big deal, but it took 30 minutes. After getting a cable, I discover the internet does not work. I call front desk who tells me to call the wireless support number for the wired internet support.

I call Sasktel’s special hot line and we go through some real basic stuff like: Is the light on? Which just so happens to be whats wrong with the magical box. So they advise me to get the hotel to swap the box for another box.  So another call to front desk and 30 minutes later a new modem (which honestly did not look very new… but they assured me it was “new”).

It took about all of 2 minutes to discover that modem didn’t work either; so, I called Sasktel back and they told me they would send someone to fix it… in 4 days. I briefly pressed the issue, but understood that it just wasn’t in the cards to get them out here any faster. I called front desk again.

This time they send the “manager” up to try to work some magic on my computer. This amused me, but sadly I had packed my laptop up in anticipation of being moved to a room that had working internet access. After explaining the problem was not with my computer, but with the modem and/or the line, he conceded I should be moved to a new room.

After 30 minutes of him trying to find the cheapest available room for more than an evening in the hotel, he took me to the “spa” suite. We tried the internet there and it didn’t work either. Well, most perplexing, but he suggested that he could reset the Sasktel stuff and give it a try. So he does that while I stand in the spa room turning the modem on and off every so often. At some point it started to work and I checked my email. He came back and was happy it worked, but not wanted to try it back in the room we just came from.

So… back to the old room. Internet still didn’t work on there, so he once again stood there and haggled with front desk for the cheapest possible room. Which apparently was the room we were just in. So, a free upgrade he says! Off to the “spa” room.

“Spa” room is a room with a bathrobe and microwave. It’s also slightly larger and appears to contain a hide-a-bed with no sheets or blanket. It’s also double the cost of my business room and did not have a comfy chair. Of course, it was the same price as the business room for me… so score !?!

Not much exciting happened between that Thursday and Sunday. Room service seemed to take a disturbingly long time to come. House keeping ignored my DnD sign twice… On Sunday I needed to use the free laundry facilities.

Threw my load in at 5pm and came back 45 minutes later. Still washing my clothes apparently, so I took a swim. Came back 30 minutes later and it was obvious the washing machine was stuck on the finial spin and rinse cycle. I caught it before another rinse and then had to leave while I waited for the dry to free up. Came back an hour later and the dry was still in use, the timer put back to 80 minutes. Came back 80 minute later and met the guy who had his laundry in the drier.

As this point, it was obvious the dry was not working. This poor guy had a small load of socks and underwear in there since 4pm. It was now 9:30. He stuff was still more than damp to the touch and barely warm. The dry was obviously broken. Which left me with a pile of soaking wet clothes (two sweaters to boot!). I called the front desk and asked if they had any capacity to help me. She was less than helpful with “umm… aahhhh… errr…” and “gee, that’s not good”. I inquired about getting access to house keeping to use their driers, but she assured me that was impossible since she didn’t have keys.

Apparently Sunday night, the hotel has no staff except for this one girl at front desk. I guess that’s plausible, but I decided to test it. I called front desk from my room (previously called from the pool) and asked if I could get a set of cutlery and a plate. “Sure”, she says. 30 minute later (I swear they time it to 30 minutes on purpose…) I get myself a plate and cutlery. Well, proves she was at the very least lieing about any other staff… and I still have my doubts no one on staff could of granted me access to the driers. Oh well… moving on.

I managed to tell my story to Dean who picked up my clothes and run it threw the drier for a while. Brought it back and I let it hang dry the rest of the night. So, in the end it worked out I guess; but, no thanks to the hotel.

Checkout was possibly the saddest part of the experience. I was checking out a day early, but past checkout time. Understandably there is an “early” checkout fee. I’m fine with that, but I wanted something for the laundry fiasco I had to endure. Front desk staff themselves couldn’t help me and all the management were in a meeting behind in the room behind front desk.

Now, if I was in the customer service industry, I’d feel it would be okay to knock and ask a manager to help with a client. I dunno, maybe I’m crazy or something; but, it seems so simple… Anyways, they made me wait 12 minutes (I stood there staring at the clock…) until the meeting was done. The manager came out, looked the situation over and said there was nothing they could do. They already upgraded my room for free. I was understanding that the room was upgraded for “free”; but, also explained my position that it was for the lack of working internet and not the laundry fiasco. She insisted there was nothing she could do and started to turn away.

At this point I was tired and about to let go; but I instead said, “How about you waive the early checkout fee?”. Which, to my surprise she said, “Fine”. She turned away without another word and left. Kinda rude… but victory I guess?