The Mind of Matty G

Former Future Contracted Fido/iPhone Customer - UPDATED

Here’s an open letter to all the Big Contacts that were on RuinediPhone’s Blog:

To whom it may concern:

Let me begin to say, I have respected the Fido brand for many years. I haven’t had a Fido phone due mostly to the fact that I or my mother have worked for the competition for years and have had ridiculous discounts that I would never expect you to fulfill.

I was caught up in the excitement surrounding the iPhone, and its release here in Canada. I was so excited that I cancelled my account with the competition and ported my number to a Fido prepaid phone, just so the upgrade to the iPhone would be quick and seamless.

When the rates were released, the excitement died. Not only would I have to pay $20 more than I currently do; I would lose 100 minutes per month, unlimited incoming calls, 125 text messages and call display for that price. The uproar that you may or may not have heard about on ruinediphone.com seems to revolve around the lack of data included in the package. This is easily solved: match the unlimited browsing feature that Bell will have on the Samsung Instinct, which I believe is either $7 or $10 per month. Also, having a “mandatory” 3 year contract turns off a lot of possible customers. The rest of the world offers unlimited browsing and shorter contract terms; maybe you should match the rest of the world and actually lead the other phone companies to lower prices.

It’s not too late to “sweeten” the deal for the iPhone. Drop the contract obligation, add some minutes, make the data unlimited and maybe you will get Bell shaking in their collective boots - like they were before you released the monthly pricing. Having heard the uproar, you are allowed to react and make the thousands of rabid iPhone fans happy again - along with your shareholders.

iPhone Disappointment

So I got out of my contract with Telus over the excitement of the iPhone launch in Canada.

Old news, I know.

So I got a prepaid Fido phone in hopes that when I upgraded to the iPhone I’d still get the good deals they give out to new Post-paid contracted subscribers.

I know, I swore off contracts for the rest of my life, but the iPhone would have stuck with me for a few years. As my wife and every other person who knows my gadget fetish laughs their collective asses off.

Then, the moment of truth as Rogers announces pricing for the iPhone rate plans came out. Then the uproar.

At first, I thought I wouldn’t use more than what I got with the lowest plan ($60, 150 daytime minutes, unlimited evenings and weekends, 400MB).

Then I realized that $60 actually meant $74.45 plus tax. $60 for the plan, $6.95 for the “System Access Fee” (quotes like that never mean anything good), $0.50 for the 911 fee (which is understandable) and $7 for call display. That’s about $25-30 more than I was paying with Telus.

You all saw the uproar. I think that fuckrogers.com should have stuck… however, maybe it’s not very professional. Enter ruinediphone.com and look at the 30,000+ signatures (mine included, I signed at about the 12,000 mark) that are saying that they aren’t going to buy an iPhone from Rogers. You’d think that at least 30% of those actually were going to buy an iPhone from Rogers/Fido, but now aren’t.

I still have friends that work for Bell Mobility franchises. Before Friday, they were sweating bullets. They probably thought that Rogers was going to offer unlimited surfing for either the $7 or $10 a month - or even match AT&T in the states with the $30 high speed unlimited data. But no… 

I emailed one of my friends of the Bell persuasion and told him that I don’t think Bell will have much to worry about.

And now Bell is offering the Samsung Instinct which is the CDMA equivalent of the iPhone (well, not really, but it’s closer than most). No iPod, but it has touch screen with the multi-touch (once again, sort of) and removable/expandable memory that plays music of the un-copy protected persuasion.

Let’s do a comparison, shall we?

And that’s just what I’ve read in the last 20 minutes. There are some assumptions on Bell’s unlimited mobile surfing (I’ve read $7 and $10, so I made it the more expensive option), for example, among other points. Don’t take this comparison as gospel. 

If anyone has anything else to add, please feel free.

Wordpress a-go-go

I can’t believe that I’ve hammered out two Wordpress themes in less than a month.

I’ve never gotten one done to my liking completely in, well, less than a month. My first attempt at a completely-from-scratch template was CAMfest, a local arts and music festival website that I did for free ’cause it was a charity, getting off the ground. It was fun. I hammered away at it while they had a placeholder website available to the public.

Fastforward to now. I was asked to finish one website which was coded in PHP, which had no database backend.
Isn’t that slightly pointless?

I upgraded it to Wordpress. I gave them adding and editing new content with an interface that a monkey could use in the time that it took the last guy to code a PHP site with no database. And added videos too.

I just finished up another template for a bunch of professors from a bunch of the colleges in Ontario. Creating art for math. It seems like an oxy moron. And I know, some would argue that fractals are art created with math. Moving on.

After all that I’ve taken in with creating these two templates - getting my feet wet, so to speak - I think I may create a step-by-step giude to creating a Wordpress template from scratch. Might be an interesting writing assignment for myself.

Flash Insanity

The title may sound like I’m frustrated. Really, I’m not. I just think this will be working on a level of Mathmatics that I should have gone to school for.

Now that I would have been frustrated with.

I guess a little background information is necessary. I’m developing a way of plotting user inputted co-ordinates and getting flash to convert it to draw it on the screen. The way that I want the user to enter the co-ordinates - specifically for circles - having a start/end point and a center point. But from what I’m learning (as I go), Flash uses a Quadratic Bezier formula to create a circle (which takes 8 curves to create a realistic looking circle). How would I translate what is essentially 2 coordinates into 8 curves (of which each has 3 sets of coordinates)?

I’ve downloaded Ric Ewing’s draw methods, and I hope that with the drawWedge method, it will make creating circles a hell of a lot easier.

My Rants for the Day… in code!

I thought for the two things that I wanted to rant about, I would make that much geekier, by writing it in Actionscript.

car.prototype.setSpeed = function() {

var maxSpeedKmph:Number = 80;

if (vehicleLane == “right”)

vehicleSpeed = (Math.Random() * 20) + (maxSpeedKmph * 0.85);

} else if (vehicleLane == “left”) {

vehicleSpeed = (Math.Random() * 20) + (maxSpeedKmph * 1.25);

}

};

Ok. That’s about as much as I can stand. Basically, if you’re in the fast lane, you should be *at least* going the speed limit. Please.

The other thing that I find annoying: Has anyone heard that the Ontario Provincial Government, who has labotimized the Health Ministry over the last 15 years (over the course of three parties in power), has added to the stupidity: they are now paying for sex change operations. This from the people that do not pay for dental or eye exams. Both things that I think might be a little more important to the health of the populace. As far as I am concerned, a sex change falls under the medical umbrella of plastic or cosmetic surgery. So is the government going to pay for my nose job because I feel that God didn’t give me the right nose shape?

There’d Be Days Like This

My prof told me. I had a serious mental block. Designing a math site. I think that might be an oxy-moron. However, as I look at all the “math” websites (be it non-profit, profit, or school based, it seems that if I design anything half decent it will be better than anything out there. Those designs are HORRIBLE. I’d link to a bunch but I’d be afraid of backlash. Instead I’ll point point you to the only website that had to do with math that had any kind of design sensibility: Sylvan Learning Centers.

The interesting thing is that my “inspiration” for the day came from a little ball that is some kind of geometric puzzle. Interestingly enough, I solved it in a matter of seconds, while two of my collegues, who I’d say are better designers than I am, couldn’t solve it, or didn’t have the patience.

Well, I don’t particularily want to design anything half decent until I know what the logo for said math said looks like. I just don’t feel comfortable with the idea.

Of Work and Blogs

Just When You Thought It Was Safe

I wrote a while back about Facebook killing my inner child. Seems I’m not the only one.

If you’re asking yourself, “Who is this guy?” He’s the executive producer of a rather successful science-fiction franchise. And a writer.

It’s No Wonder

Yet another mud-slinging session in parliament. I’m really getting sick and tired of this sort of thing.

Just read this for the back story. I don’t want to reiterate the whole stinkin’ thing.

This is yet another reason that voter apathy in Canada is at an all time high. So here’s my take on the whole thing:

1. The Liberals are accusing the Conservatives of bribing. Talk about the pot calling the kettle black. Do we remember the reason that the Liberals got voted out in the first place? Oh, that’s right. We don’t remember. The collective memory of Canada is shorter than the attention span of an ADHD kid.
2. The Conservatives are making bribes. Can we say Liberals all over again? I think they should just merge those two parties, give the other parties (that seem to actually give a damn) a chance to get into office. Except the NDP. I shudder at the thought of “Prime Minister Jack Layton.” I need to go and clean myself now.

There are some days when I wish I didn’t care about my country and its political system. That might account for part of my high blood pressure.

Learning the Meaning of Irrelevance

Yet another class of “Interactive Design.” I’ll give you a guess on what program we’re using. If you said Flash, you’d be dead wrong. Almost as dead as the program we are using. Macromedia Director. Buggy, unstable on the school supplied MacBook Pro (complete with Intel processors), and browsers don’t even read it because they haven’t made a plugin that’s universal.

Not to mention the fact that out of all the people who have graduated recently from the Multimedia program here, maybe two people have used Director in a job.

The sad thing is, I really do like the teacher.  She can be a little hard to follow sometimes, but I think she does do a half decent job of getting us to understand the coding conventions she uses. Sometimes I think that she isn’t thrilled about what she has to teach, especially with the way some of the students behave in her class; admittedly like me, who is writing this blog post instead of paying attention.

If someone can give me some glimmer of hope that Director will be updated (the date that Adobe was supposed to announce its fate has come and gone) I may give this course another chance. Otherwise, I hope for the sanity of the future Multimedia Designers at Durham College that this course will be exchanged with another or that they would focus on Actionscript programming.