My Shaw Consumption

By | February 21, 2011
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As far as Shaw and I are concerned, we’re done. I returned my phone modem, received my final invoice and will have a cheque coming to me for the extra amount I paid.

However, before all of my access was taken away I had a chance to log into the new MyShaw portal and take a look at the fancy bandwidth usage meter. I love data, especially historical data of anything I do, from Google Reader to the music I listen to. If there is a graph about my usage on anything I love it. It was a given that the new Shaw bandwidth meter would appeal to me but I found the results interesting.

The bandwidth meter on DD-WRT was useful but the one on Shaw is just so pretty. I also found that there were some days the DD-WRT wouldn’t track data, and after a few resets I lost historical data so the Shaw bandwidth meter was my first time seeing my Internet usage for the last few months.

Prior to Shaw reducing the download limits on their High Speed package I would have been fine on most months, but when it was dropped to 60GB my usage was consistently above that. In January I increased my package to High Speed Extreme (100GB usage limit), signed up for Netflix and Usenet and my overall consumption actually decreased. If I stayed with Shaw I would have been fine with a buffer of 40GB but I stand by my choice to switch.

What stands out to me is how heavy my bandwidth usage was in the summer months. We were busy painting, doing house work and being outside, I wouldn’t have thought we were online that much but those months were higher than ones in the tv season. It’s no surprise that my upload was on par with download. When it came to torrents I preferred a 1:1 ratio, but I never considered how much that would be on a month to month basis.

Maybe it’s because I’m only a few weeks into my Telus usage and they haven’t processed my first month yet, or that they never intend to meter customers usage, but the Telus bandwidth meter is showing zeroes. For my personal benefit I will keep an eye on my Telus usage and see how it compares to Shaw’s and see what long term affects Netflix, Usenet and having a PVR have on my consumption.

My Experience With Telus and Optik TV

By | February 16, 2011
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February 9th was my first day with Telus and here is a recap of my experience with Optik TV, Optik TV High Speed and Home Phone so far.

Installation
Two technicians arrived for the install within the scheduled window and spent 90 minutes running cables and setting everything up. The two TV’s I had hooked up were in rooms with a pre-existing coaxial and telephone drop but they still replaced a few lines. They were able to pull a phone line to my entertainment unit downstairs so the modem would sit where the previous one did. The technicians were friendly and helpful for any questions I had.

After everything was up and running I was given a quick run through the PVR functions, the Actiontec router interface and a few other tips on the service. They left me feeling confident in the tools and I didn’t feel that they rushed anything.

Television
I am sure this is a feature with Shaw, but having never used their PVR services (I used digital cable for several years) having the name and telephone number of an incoming call appear on your TV is incredible. I called the house several times just to see “SEAN GURSKY” appear in the top left corner (photo link). We have to cover the length of the house to reach the nearest phone and if we were able to see who was calling we could determine if it was worth getting up or not.

The second biggest wow is being able to pause live TV. By no means is this feature exclusive to Telus, but I never really had the chance to play with this ability and it’s incredible. I never thought I would benefit from having a PVR but now I wonder how I lived so long without one. We will still continue to download shows but now we can fill up the PVR with shows that aren’t widely available or things we don’t follow episode to episode and enjoying watching when we have the time.

Telus has an iPhone app to browse the program grid, view your recordings and schedule a recording. The app is convenient and I could see myself using it frequently.

I did have two problems with the HD PVR but they were both solved by doing a system reboot.

The first was being unable to create a new account for Remote Recording. I was given an “Error 500: Service Unavailable” and every time I tried I got the same message. The next issue was not having any audio on HD channels over my HDMI connection. The video would come in fine, and audio on SD channels worked but just not on HD. I restarted the system and both went away and my question list for Telus support went from two to zero.

Telephone
With the move from Shaw to Telus we downgraded phone features. With Shaw we had caller ID, voice mail, call waiting and probably a few other ones that added to our monthly bill. A part of why the Telus bundle is so cheap is that the telephone is bare bones with one feature. We opted to have caller ID, as our phones have a built in answering machine and call waiting is not something we used that often.

Although, there is a semi-solution for call waiting with Optik TV. If our land line is occupied and someone is calling us they would receive a busy signal but on the television we would see who attempted to call us (the same way we do now in the top left corner of the screen). It’s not an exact solution for call waiting but it’s a nice alternative for the rare times we have two people wanting to speak to us at once.

Internet
I have similar download and upload speeds to when I was on Shaw High Speed Extreme. According to speedtest.net my download speed is nearly 15MB and upload is 0.8MB. If anything my upload speed is lower than with Shaw, but as I am no longer relying on torrents this is not a concern.

I have been using DD-WRT custom firmware on my Linksys router for over a year and I got accustomed to the features it gave me. Now with the modem/router combination of the Actiontec V1000H I’m finding myself a little restricted. There are plenty of administration features on the Actiontec, but it’s not what I was used to or I don’t fully understand how to recreate what I had on the Actiontec.

I had a hurdle trying to figure out how I could administer my SABnzbd install remotely. This wasn’t a problem before so it was a frustrating issue. Previously I set the proper “Port from” and “Port to” for port forwarding on the Linksys DD-WRT and it worked fine. With the Actiontec I wasn’t sure if I have the port forwarding information correct, if Telus was restricting a web server from running or something else. As simple as the Actiontec interface is I wasn’t sure what the optional part of the port forwarding information I had to set up. Ultimately I changed my SAbnzbd install https:// listening port to match the one I would connect to from http://my.ip:port and it worked.

The current issue I am having is signal strength from the downstairs Actiontec to the upstairs Playstation 3. With the Linksys I increased the strength of the wireless signal (TX power) and added Windsurfer parabolas on the antennas. This allowed me to stream SD content without an issue and even 720p across the house.

Currently the Playstation 3 has a 50% signal but it occasionally buffers on SD content. I transferred the Windsurfer parabolas on to the Actiontec but I’m not able to increase the wireless rate to anything above 100% (photo link) so I’m at a loss for what to do. I have a few things in mind to resolve the problem but they involve time and money. Currently I’m thinking of:

  • Putting the DD-WRT powered Linksys in between the Actiontec and my home server ethernet connection and use the Linksys to boost the signal to upstairs
  • Upgrade the network card in my server from the current D-Link 530TX to Gigabit Ethernet card
  • Piggy back on the coax cable running upstairs to either transfer the signal from coax to Cat5 or use the coax cable as a lead to run Cat5 up to the living room

With that said, this is my problem and not one that was caused by the Telus service or installation. I need to upgrade my network and I just have to determine the best way to do that. My PS3 Media Server will send 93MB/s to the wired PS3 and 8MB/s to the wireless one (photo link), thus filling a 100MB connection and could account for why it sometimes has issues and sometimes doesn’t.

At the end of the day the Internet connection is reliable, I have solid speeds and while watching Optik TV I never noticed my Internet speed to decrease.

So far my experience with the Telus package has been great. With Usage Based Billing taking a back seat my move may have been premature but I am enjoying life where grass is greener. I may still be in the honeymoon phase of everything so I will write another post in a few weeks to see how I am finding the services then and if there are any issues that have appeared.

My Stripes Split

By | February 2, 2011
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To say I loved The White Stripes would be an understatement. I have travelled several thousand kilometers to see them play, followed them for three days on their 2007 tour and they have dominated my last.fm charts since I joined.

Jack White was my inspiration on guitar. The music of The White Stripes is simple, but how he executed it is what made him unlike any other. He would play a plastic guitar, run it through a Sears brand amp and use every defect and imperfection to make something beautiful.

They were my favorite live act, where on any night the audience could get something new. Nothing was prepared. Nothing was written down. It all happened based on the mood and crowd interactions. Their free flying, anything was possible attitude made them stand out amongst other successful commercial acts. Over the years the music industry would change how they were perceived but they remained true to giving it their all, never making it easy on themselves and always being creative.

Perhaps that is why it makes it so hard to come to terms of their break up. They could have carried on making records and going through the motions, instead they took the road less travelled and ended the journey before it ruined what they had.

It is for a myriad of reasons, but mostly to preserve What is beautiful and special about the band and have it stay that way.

I often think back to the road trips with friends in 2005 and 2007, or how Astro will always raise my spirits, regardless of how tired or what mood I am in. The memories I have associated with The White Stripes really will last a life time and I’m grateful for what I have, and with anything good, I just wanted a little more.

I will remember The White Stripes for a lot of antics with the media, a self perpetuated mystery, and interesting music videos. When all that is taken away it is easy to forget how much emotion a simple song can carry and I think the performance of White Moon in the last scene from the 2009 documentary (The White Stripes Under Great White Northern Lights) is a fitting scene to have your career fade to black on.

Farewell Jack and Meg and thank you for allowing us to join you on this trip.

My Switch From Shaw to Telus

By | January 22, 2011
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If you looked at my contact history with Shaw over the last week they would think I was suffering from memory loss. I called to ask about cancellation policies, removed basic cable from my package, upgraded to Shaw High Speed Extreme and then called to schedule a service cancellation for my remaining products…all in the span of 72 hours.

When our cable was terminated on Monday I was surprised by what was left. I thought there would be a few channels like CBC or CTV that would come in, but they were fuzzy. Some channels I thought to be static came in clear like E! or MTV. I wasn’t able to pick up anything using Over The Air and I wondered if I made a huge mistake. We don’t need cable but it’s nice to have something to turn on for news or some other programming, which I thought would be the case with farmer’s vision.

I didn’t expect there to be nothing on the other side of a silent coax cable so I began researching. I went from looking at big and unnatractive OTA antenna’s, wondering if this would be too extreme for me and then wound up looking at Telus’ Optik TV option.

I was still confident on switching from Shaw to Telus but when I discovered the $15-$15-$15 for the first year deal for Internet, Phone and TV from Telus I contemplated signing up for TV…something I disconnected and thought I could live without only a few days before. I wrote down a lot of numbers and different scenarios and when the $15-$15-$15 promo ended after 12 months I would still be saving over $20 for all the services I had with Shaw. Those savings still covers Netflix and a Usenet subscription so I end up with more for less.

Optik TV is a relatively new service offered by Telus so I had a lot of questions about how it works, how it affects bandwidth, limitations of it and everything a Customer Service Rep told me (which was backed up by my online research) made me more sure of my switch to Telus than ever before.

I contacted Shaw and told them all the reasons why I was leaving and scheduled the Telus install for the second week in February. There is no guarantee that Telus won’t change their bandwidth policy and when that time comes I will be where I am now but at least I was able to tell Shaw how I felt with my wallet.

I have been with Shaw since 2006 and never had a problem with their services and was sad to go, but I hope I made the right decision and that I have a good run with Telus. After I have been using Telus’ services for a week I will write again and see if the move was worth it and if the future really is friendlier on the other side.

My Photobook Canada Review

By | January 19, 2011
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In August 2010 I registered for Groupon. There were a few interesting deals that showed up in the weeks following my registration but in September a deal appeared for Photobook Canada. Incidentally that deal remains as my only purchase on Groupon since I registered six months ago.

The coupon was for $35 purchase that got me a $110 credit to be used on any photo book order from Photobook Canada. With our England/France trip coming up in a month I thought this would be a good way to create a scrapbook from our trip without having the hassle of printing photos, buying extra sheets and plastic covers and, most importantly, finding a photo album that we liked and could expand in size.

In December we got serious about creating the album and put a few days of effort into putting it together, here are my thoughts on the Photobook Canada process.

Software
I was intimidated by the software at first but after a bit of time experimenting with the features I became quite comfortable and still never utilized all of the capabilities of the program. Once you have added your images to the album you can select different page templates for each page, alter the background color, apply borders to items, manipulate images, add text and shapes.

We didn’t know where to begin and we feared our inexperience with the software would produce a poor quality album but we took it slow, started by adding images we wanted onto a page (no layout or theme, just the straight images) and worked our way through the trip.

The page templates are incredibly useful and I feel the pages we used a template on were the strongest of the book, but they only serve as a guide and could be modified and adjusted. I never felt restricted with the software or that it was holding me back from doing something I wanted to do. We were able to lay images on top of each other, scan brochures and other mementos we picked up on our trip and still give it a hand made scrapbook feel without the glue or double sided tape.

On my 15″ MacBook Pro running a 1440×900 resolution I never found the interface to be too cluttered or crowded. I was able to see both pages I was working on and still access all the tools. I was able to “Preview” the photo book and flip through the pages, but if I wanted more control I could export the album as a “Proof” and look at the pages as images. This gave me a good feeling for what the final product would be and it didn’t disappoint.

Ordering
Through the Photobook Canada software I was able to upload my order to their website. I had a few connection issues with their server so I had to try uploading a few times but on the third attempt it completed. This created some confusion on Photobook Canada’s side as I had someone from the company email me a few days after I uploaded my order (I uploaded it on December 23 so a few days to catch the issue and write me is expected) saying they couldn’t find my images and I would need to upload them again. However, a few minutes after that message I received another one saying they located my order and would begin the printing process.

From the time of placing my order to receiving the product was 23 days. This was longer than I expected but the Photobook Canada website talked about delays around the holiday season so I expect if you don’t order during a busy time the turn around time would be faster.

One thing that stood out is that once my order was put into “In Production” the status never changed. Even a week after delivery it hasn’t been updated. I’m compulsive about order tracking, but for others it may not be important.

Final Product
The book was packed extremely well. It was covered in plastic, bubble wrap and a tight cardboard box. The box would need to be cut in half in order for any damage to come to the book and the final product looked flawless.

I ordered a “15×11 Large Landscape Imagewrap Cover – ImageWrap Matte Lamination” with 46 pages. Including shipping and paying for the additional pages I paid $22.05 over and above the original $35 Groupon order. For $57 we got an incredible product and an even better deal. If I had to pay full price for the album I probably would because the cost of materials to create a photo album on your own would come close to $100 (or more), plus the time to create it would be far greater than the hours we spent on this.

For value and final product I would highly recommend Photobook Canada. We will keep their name in mind the next time we have to create a photo album.

My Unplugged Cable

By | January 17, 2011
2 Comments

The recent news of Shaw enforcing their bandwidth caps have a lot of people upset, including me. I have been contemplating a life without cable television and relying solely on Netflix, streaming from the websites of the network and downloading shows for a few months now.

This all meant that I would be consuming more bandwidth, and with Shaw’s decreased bandwidth caps and charges for exceeding those caps I had very few options.

For the last half of December and all of January I have been struggling with the question of what to do. On January 16 I decided to take my scraps of paper with costs, caps and act on it by calling Telus and Shaw. There were no surprises with the call to Telus. The numbers they provided me matched my calculations and my call to Shaw was of little help.

I was told that other companies will charge, regardless of what they say. This video says that Telus won’t enforce bandwidth caps and I really want to believe them, but there is some underlying emotion that makes me dread returning to Telus.

It’s a numbers game, and be it bandwidth or cost, the future is friendlier and cheaper with Telus. I will save $9 a month if I bundle my Internet and home phone services with Telus, but with Shaw’s 30 day notice to cancel services I can’t make the switch overnight and will continue to hum and haw over this while I figure out if it’s best for me.

If I stay I am subject to bandwidth caps and paying more per month, but with Telus their situation could change and they could decrease limits and start enforcing, leaving me with no where to go and being inconvenienced for nothing.

In the mean time, I cancelled television to pay for the cost of Netflix and Usenet memberships. We will still have OTA channels and whatever else is on farmer’s vision but soon the coax will be cold and then I will really see how much bandwidth I consume when it’s my sole provider of entertainment.

My Twenty Ten in Numbers

By | December 31, 2010
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Following in the footsteps of the 2009 year in review I thought it would be interesting to gather the same information and post them here. Some of the results are to be expected, others are a surprise. It’s interesting to see the trend in this information as a lot of what appeared wasn’t available or accessible to me until the last half of the year.

Top 10 Google Queries
1. lost season 6 soundtrack
2. *
3. from:53.522911,-113.520347 to:53.522911,-113.520347
4. corkhole poster
5. ups 1ZY511176793770653
6. london luton
7. google translate
8. 1Z8F73V8D900199952
9. usps CP684389748US
10. apple trailers

I really, really wanted to know when the sixth season of Lost soundtrack was going to be released. And when I found out there was a second release for “The Last Episodes” I used the same search query later in the year.

I don’t understand what * and from:53.522911,-113.520347 to:53.522911,-113.520347 are doing there, perhaps * is a blank query but I can’t see it happening that much to claim the second result on my query.

The third entry are longitude and latitude coordinates for near the Timms Centre for Arts on University Campus, which makes no sense to me. In July the World Wide Photo Walk was held there but I can’t understand how I searched directions to and from the same location for a one day event enough times to make it the third result.

I searched for the arrival of three packages enough to make them in my top ten, I guess it’s hard not to be compulsive when you track something travel across the country.

I used my personal Gmail account to look at my Web History so the results are from searching while logged in with that account. My busiest month for searching was in December with 1,320 queries recorded, and my least active month was in June with 628.

Top 10 sites
1. en.wikipedia.org
2. answers.yahoo.com
3. wwwapps.ups.com
4. www.google.com
5. epguides.com
6. www.amazon.com
7. www.imdb.com
8. www.ehow.com
9. mbradyclark.bigcartel.com
10. maps.google.com

Wikipedia was my top site in 2009 and it holds strong this year, and there were three other results that stayed in the top ten from last year. The combination of answers.yahoo.com and ehow.com appeared because they were a resource when it came to home improvement questions that came up in the condo and house. The rest are my compulsive nature to rename TV show episode titles and checking IMDB to answer the question “Where do I know that guy from?”.

Top 10 Artists
1. Michael Giacchino (1,827 plays)
2. The White Stripes (882 plays)
3. Philip Glass (698 plays)
4. Hans Zimmer and James Newton Howard (637 plays)
5. Bear McCreary (571 plays)
6. Hans Zimmer (530 plays)
7. Ludovico Einaudi (501 plays)
8. U2 (374 plays)
9. Matthew Good (296 plays)
10. Florence + the Machine (290 plays)

Bear McCreary is knocked off the top spot in place of Lost composer Giacchino. Like my search queries above indicated, I really wanted to listen to the season six soundtrack of Lost and listen to it I did. The first season six album was released in August and the second was released in October so there wasn’t much time to shoot it up to the top of the charts.

Overall the number of plays in my “Top 10 Artists” are down from 2009 but I think those plays were distributed to other artists outside of the top 10. I found it difficult to see how many tracks I listened to within the calendar year so I wasn’t easily able to verify this but my listening habits at home, work and on the iPhone all stayed consistent so I would suspect the tracks played stayed similar too.

Top 10 Tracks
1. Michael Giacchino – Life And Death (47 plays)
2. Hans Zimmer – Time (46 plays)
3. Hans Zimmer – Waiting For A Train (44 plays)
4. Hans Zimmer – Half Remembered Dream (43 plays)
4. Hans Zimmer – Paradox (43 plays)
6. Hans Zimmer – Radical Notion (39 plays)
7. Hans Zimmer – Dream is Collapsing (38 plays)
8. Hans Zimmer and James Newton Howard – A Watchful Guardian (34 plays)
8. Hans Zimmer – We Built Our Own World (34 plays)
8. Hans Zimmer – 528491 (34 plays)
8. Hans Zimmer – Mombasa (34 plays)
8. Hans Zimmer – Dream Within A Dream (34 plays)

There are 12 songs listed here but with a five way tie for eighth I had to include the extras. Guess which soundtrack I listened to a lot this year? The non-Inception Zimmer song was from the second disc of The Dark Knight soundtrack, which got a lot of plays when I discovered its existence in February.

There weren’t as many flights in 2010 as there were in 2009, but there were passport stamps in England, Paris and Iceland.

I drove my VW Jetta TDI over 14,000 kilometers and filled up the vehicle 17 times. I didn’t file a single police report this year but I did have someone threaten civil action against me.

Including this entry I wrote 42 blog posts in 2010, I made 610 tweets and one Facebook status update. In July 2008 I talked about my fears of using Twitter and the decline in blogging, and I think you can be active on both…if you make the effort to do so. Unfortunately, I rarely tweet and I rarely blog.

I don’t think my lack of tweets and blog updates are related, I think it’s just that I have been busy and don’t have enough time to fill a 140 character space with my thoughts let alone write a several hundred word update. I wrote a few posts in December to catch up on what I had been meaning to write in November so if I can write a few posts a month in 2011 I’ll consider myself active.

I sent roughly 420 emails from my @gmail.com and @seangursky.com email accounts and 70 from my @hotmail.com address. I made two orders with amazon.ca, two with amazon.com none from amazon.co.uk and two with monoprice.com. I thought I ordered more online this year but I guess they were through other methods besides Amazon.

Rough calculations are that I took nearly 7,850 photos with two different cameras this year. 7.65% of my photos taken this year were done in the two weeks in England/France. The majority of my total photo count came from my Canon EOS T1i/500D which had over 5,350 actuations and the Canon 5D had 2,500 actuations.

2010 is in the books, 365 days until I count it down all over again.

My Year in Facebook Updates

By | December 19, 2010
2 Comments

The My Year in Status Facebook application has appeared in my News Feed quite a bit over the last few weeks. I am a sucker for “year in review” things, and was surprised by how many status updates some people did throughout 2010. I know I don’t post status updates on Facebook frequently so I was curious what my year in Facebook updates looked like.

I wanted to do this covertly so I had my Privacy Settings for Applications, Games and Websites in one tab and my Facebook Profile open in another tab, ready to remove the application and any posts it made after it had generated my numerous updates into a single image.

The result was a little surprising…

One update is all I made in 2010. I thought I was going to have a big blank page but it looks like I had something I wanted to tell the world about.

Maybe in 2011 I’ll have no updates?