I wanted to write to you to share my growing concern over the excessively expensive price plans provided by Rogers to their cellular customers. This is something I’ve been upset (even angry) about for a number of months, but the recent release of the iPhone plans has pushed me to the point where I have to make myself heard.

I can only hope and pray that you will listen to myself, and the literal thousands of others who have grown extremely and excessively tired of what I would call the price gouging of your faithful customers.

When it came time for me to get a new cell phone (August 2007), I specifically chose Rogers because I knew it was inevitable that you would be the exclusive provider of the iPhone in Canada. My wife and I now both have a ”$25/month” cell phone plan with Rogers, and this is where my frustration begins. Personally, I don’t know how it is legal to advertise a ”$25/month” cell phone plan, when after you add the features needed to make the phone usable (I don’t believe a cell phone is any use without voicemail, call display, call waiting and call forwarding, along with several hundred text messages) – plus add a bunch of special System Access Fees and 911 Fees and Random Other Fees – our two ”$25/month” plans total over $100/month, WITHOUT going over our minutes. How is this legitimate? How does this have any semblance of reason at all? While I lived in Singapore, I had a cell phone plan with 200 minutes, unlimited incoming text and 1000 outgoing text, voice mail, call display and call forwarding (plus the phone was free) – for SGD $18.90 / month (about $14 Canadian dollars).

The reason I am writing this now, is because in addition to being frustrated to the point of being near furious with my existing phone plans, your recent addition of the iPhone, and the voice/data plans associated to them are downright laughable.

Oh, it’s a value pack, alright

Then, the idea that you can advertise a “Value Pack” – which basically includes Call Display and a few text messages, for FIFTEEN DOLLARS A MONTH – is verging on absurd. There aren’t even words in the English language to describe how much “Value” that package does NOT deliver. Actually, if you have the time and generosity to reply, I would love to hear how you can describe this as a “Value Pack” at all. It seems to me that this package should cost about $5/month. Rogers, however, is charging 300% of that. Then there is the interesting idea that your base plans give us “Bonus Text Messages”. Oh Yay! Seventy-five “Bonus Text Messages” with my $60/month voice plan that’s going to cost me ~$70.82/month after all my special fees are added.

Would you like some ‘bonus’ text messages with that kick in the face?

I’m also quite confused and perturbed as to how you offer Visual Voicemail as standard with an iPhone (as it should be) – but don’t offer Call Display as part of the base package. How does it make sense that I can watch my phone ring, have no idea who’s calling, wait for the call to go to voicemail, NOT know who’s calling unless I subscribe to some $15/month “Value Pack”, or purchase Call Display for $7/month, but after the person leaves me a voicemail, I can see on screen who called me. Does that make any sense at all? To anybody?

I can’t even describe how much of a marketing debacle the launch of the iPhone has been for Rogers. To have a “something special is coming July 11” banner on your web site, for days, along with no plan information is one of the biggest marketing blunders I’ve ever seen. The iPhone was essentially a product of infinite value, handed to you by Apple. I believe that the iPhone could have actually been a turning point for Rogers. A turning point where your company decided that actually caring for and listening to customers was more important than corporate greed. You could have advertised that phone 38 ways from Wednesday, and had customers lined up out the doors for miles, handing you hundreds and thousands of dollars, millions of dollars, in three year contracts to get their hands on it – and you could have offered us decent prices, decent plans, and a semblance of fairness. But instead, Rogers took their monopoly, completely botched the largest marketing opportunity their company has seen in the past decade, AND decided to kick their customers in the teeth all in one foul swoop.

I am sick and tired of being gouged on my cell phone plans and random service charges. I am so sick and tired of customer support that can’t answer my questions. I’m sick and tired of trying to get my Call Forwarding to work, and finally getting through to a technical support person telling me “Oh, sorry, our $3/month call forwarding is broken right now, I have to set you up with our $2/month call forwarding.” (I wish I could say that wasn’t a true story).

Please, for the love of all things holy and good in this world, make a change. Make a difference. Do something for your customers. For once. Please. Prove to us that you actually listen, that you actually care, and that the voice of the customers can actually make a difference. Prove me wrong.

• Get rid of the crazy “System Access Fee”.
• Give us fair rates for our iPhones.
• Stop pretending that $15/month constitutes an “iPhone Value Pack”. There is no value to be found in that package at all.
• Give us fair rates for unlimited data, for all phones, not just iPhones.
• Start modeling your business after other companies who care for and listen to their customers.
• Start modeling your business after other companies who care for and listen to their customers.

That’s when I’ll sign a 3 year contract. That’s when I’ll line up at 5am, and wait 83 hours if I have to, to get my iPhone.

Please. Listen to us. Prove me wrong.

There is an awesome article over at seattlepi.com containing the text of an email written by Mr. Gates regarding his experience trying to download and install MovieMaker on his computer. The email really cracked me up, and I think it’s worth a read.

It’s probably also worth noting, that instead of all that rig-a-ma-roll, one could just buy a Mac (which happens to include iLife, which includes iMovie). The Surgeon General agrees that my strategy would keep your blood pressure a lot lower, and increase your life expectancy by about 10 years.

One thing that I love about Seth Godin is his unceasing efforts in trying to make companies see that they need to treat their customers with respect. This is made evident again in a great little piece he wrote about Apple’s $200 iPhone price drop that the mediawenttotown on.

He talks about a bunch of things Apple could have done to make the early adopters “ok” with the fact that they were just out $200. But then he goes on to say:

The key is to not give price protection to early buyers (that’s unsustainable as a business model) but to make them feel more exclusive, not less.

I wish more corporations would take the route of doing everything in their power to make their customers feel respected. To make their customers feel like they have a choice and could take their business elsewhere (even if they can’t take their business elsewhere).

I went out and picked up a new MacBook Pro yesterday, after the display issue on my wife’s iMac got so bad that finally the machine has become unusable. We’re gonna do a little swap – she’ll take my MacBook, I get the MBP, and the iMac is going to get thrown off a bridge or something.

What I wanted to comment about here is Apple’s Migration Assistant – which absolutely and undisputedly rocks my little world.

After pondering the long hours I was in for getting all my apps reinstalled, settings, passwords, serial numbers for apps, bla bla bla up and copied and running onto the new Mac – Nick pointed me to the Migration Assistant (which I’m not sure I even really knew about) and off I went. Plugged in my male-to-male FireWire cable into both machines, and booted the MacBook into Target Disk Mode (hold down ‘T’ while powering up until the FireWire symbol displays on the screen). The Migration Assistant asked me what users I wanted, if I wanted the Applications as well, and blammo. I went into the hot tub for a while, and when I got back I had my user, files, documents, library, settings, applications und alles.

So far there are only two apps that didn’t come over seamlessly, and those would be Parallels and Mozy (which, if you haven’t tried, is the best backup software I’ve ever laid my hands on), both of which I needed to reinstall, but after a bit of fiddling are working fine again. All told this thing saved me hours, and I’m sure I’ll use it again on my next Mac purchase.

I just wanted to blog about this because there are a ton of people having this problem and Apple is doing jack about it.

For examples, please see some photos on flickr (broken G5 iMac screens).

I purchased a G5 iMac (w/iSight, 1.9GHz, S/N W85422*, conveniently out of the range of those covered under the iMac G5 Repair Extension Program) on October 31, 2005. About one year and one week after the warranty expired it started to grow pretty vertical lines on the LCD. Today we’re up to 3 pink, 2 blue, 2 yellow and 1 grey line that stretch vertically top to bottom on the LCD panel. Each line is about 2 pixels wide, and each one is aggravating.

Oh, and by a ton of people, you can find about four million threads on the Apple Discussion Forums. This link alone contains a link to about 20 other topics with the same problem.

Apple: Do Something About It.

As cited on MacRumors and a bunch of other places:

Denny Strigl, Verizon’s chief operating officer, decided to pass on the iPhone deal and says he has no regrets: “Time will tell” if he made the right call, he says.

Also:

Given Apple’s cultlike following, however, Verizon isn’t taking any chances. Strigl says Verizon is already working with a manufacturer — he declines to say which one — on an answer to the iPhone. “We do have a very good response in the mill,” he says. “You’ll see that from us in the late summer.”

In my opinion, what Denny Strigl missed the boat on, is that there is an extremely good chance that there is no answer to the iPhone.

Just like there is no answer to Mac OS X. It either is Mac OS X, or it’s not. Just like there is no answer to the iPod. It’s an iPod or nothing – and it sure as heck isn’t a Zune. As far as my money goes, I’m going to say that the only thing time will tell for Strigl is how bad a decision they really made.

Don’t know what to say on this front except I’m totally speechless. It’s only a matter of time now before the rest of the labels are forced to crawl out from under the luddite rock that they’ve been hiding under, and follow EMI’s brilliant move into the non-DRM arena.

Note to EMI Executives: As soon as it becomes available, I will immediately go through my purchased music from iTunes, and upgrade all EMI albums to DRM-Free, happily paying the extra 30 cents per track. After that, I will find and buy more DRM-Free EMI albums just to celebrate this glorious day. Thank you, from the bottom of my heart.

The nice thing about writing a little ‘signup’ application for a class that your wife teaches is that you have full control over the hijacking of that application any time you feel like it. See figure one:

Fortunately for me I didn’t get shot down, and we got some Gold Class seats at VivoCity.

Today, unfortunately, is not turning out nearly as good as yesterday. My mac is seriously on the fritz exhibiting the following completely random and seemingly unrelated ‘features’.

1. Adium can not connect to any of the IM protocols I have configured including Yahoo, MSN, AIM and GTalk.
2. Microsoft Word opens all files as Read-Only so if I want to modify them I have to “Save As…” first.
3. Although CPU usage is completely normal, the entire systemm locks up at random, and I can barely switch between applications or type at a normal speed.
4. My Airport signal strength indicator is in a “permanent off” state. My laptop is 100% convinced that my Airport is turned off, but I’m connected wirelessly to my network as I post this.
5. DNS is completely screwed. I have to hit Shift-Reload sometimes 3, 4 or 5 times to get a page to show up in FireFox or Safari because it can’t seem to resolve random hosts. (This could partially, maybe, explain the Adium behavior.)
6. Random applications terminate as soon as I start them. Yesterday it was Remote Desktop Connection. I would start it up to connect to a Windows box, and it would terminate before I could do anything. Today it’s photoDrop droplets that are crapping out.
7. Mail.app won’t download any of my Mail (potentially also could be related to network issues, I suppose).
8. Often when I start an application (say, TextMate or iPhoto for example) – I can’t click on any of the menu items in the menu bar. They’re locked. Which means I’m limited to only being able to use the functionality of the app that I remember via keyboard shortcuts, until it magically decides at some point in the future (20 minutes, 40 minutes – it’s all a great guessing game) when it decides it will permit me to now click on said menu items.

As I’m typing this, SuperDuper! has just finished backing up all my user files, and Mr. Laptop is now going to receive a full enema. I sure hope that this isn’t a hardware problem, or I’ll be severely unimpressed. At least the thing is under warranty. But if Apple is going to take my laptop for a week while they try to figure out what’s going wrong – I might have switched to Ubuntu by the time they give it back to me.

If you thought Steve’s demo of Multi-Touch on the iPhone was impressive, you need to see this TED talk from Jeff Han, who is a research scientist for New York University’s Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences. Get the feed or download a zipped copy of the QuickTime file.

This is multi-touch gone crazy. The keywords that grab me are “low-cost”, “scalable” and “high resolution”.

This is a must-see.

My favorite podcast, hands down, is the JavaPosse. There’s nothing quite like sitting back with a cup of coffee and listening to Dick, Carl, Tor and Joe yammer about Java (and/or technology in general) – especially if they’ve been drinking.

A few months ago they launched a Google group in which I am an avid lurker, and very occasional poster. One of the more recent threads was surrounding third-party iPhone application development. I think that the winning comment in this thread was this one:

The simple question here is therefore “Is this phone of any further interest to the Java community/Java Posse?”.

He might as well have said:

If it’s in the world, and it has nothing to do with Java, we shouldn’t discuss it or have any interest, and said object might as well be used as toilet paper. If it’s not Java, it can kiss my bleeeeep.

Forget the fact that it’s a phone – and I could care less if it had anything to do with Java whatsoever. I don’t care if I can write or run 3rd party apps on my phone, or my iPod. I want a phone so I can (go figure) phone people. Of course, all the other iPhone stuff is awesome as well (calendaring, sms, voice mail, iPod, photos, videos, etc.). Why, for the love of all things good, would a community write off said device claiming it no longer deserves “any further interest [from] the Java community” – because it doesn’t have Java on it? Maybe the Java community should stop having interest in hard disks, or RAM, or digital cameras, or iPods for that matter – simply because they don’t allow for third party Java application development on them. I’m making a pact right now. I’m not going to purchase another stick of RAM until I can plug it into a USB port on my laptop, and write a third-party Java app for it that makes it light up, or sing, or something.

Unfortunately, this is the collective wisdom that (stereotypically speaking) the Java community now tends to bring to the table. Let us look at a fictitious (but not fictitious at the same time) example:

Jim: Hey there, have you played with Ruby at all?
Greg: Are you crazy, that stupid thing?
Jim: It’s got some really powerful syntax, and I can’t believe how fast you can prototype apps in it.
Greg: Nothing more than a stupid toy language.
Jim: Have you used it? Have you seen how powerful some of the APIs are?
Greg: No. I’m a Java developer.
Jim: Why don’t you just take a look, see what you think?
Greg: No. If it’s not Java, it’s stupid and useless.

Right. Thanks.

And yes, there’s a difference.

I started researching AllOfMP3 about a month ago after hearing about it for the first time from a friend, while at their place for dinner. I read through all the spiel, the Russian Federation, Russian Licensing, The Russian Multimedia and Internet Society (ROMS), lawsuits, et cetera.

One of the best presented articles on the legality and ethicality of using a site like AllOfMP3 was a piece that I found here.

I’ve been looking to find new ways to purchase music (yes, I have been using the iTunes Music Store) mostly because I find that music, as a commodity, is priced way too high. Well, maybe it’s not even that the music is priced too high, but what really bothers me is knowing that the amount of cash that actually returns to the pockets of the musicians any time I happen to purchase an album is a measly pittance, compared to the amount that goes to the labels. To add insult to injury, we have this “association” (I’m looking at you, RIAA) that in its so-called pursuit of justice starts to randomly sue thousands of Americans whose names they might as well have pulled from a baseball cap. Didn’t they try to sue an 11-year-old girl? And a dead person? At any rate, the RIAA clowns think that it would make them look really smart if they seriously laid the smack down on AllOfMP3 with a $1.65 TRILLION dollar lawsuit, which in actuality (in my opinion, anyways) made them look like confounding idiots more than anything.

At any rate, now that I’ve made clear my disdain for record labels and the RIAA, I’d like to point out that I find it interesting the number of discussions floating around on the Internet about the issue of whether or not it’s “OK” to download music from a “legal” service like AllOfMP3.

What I notice is that there is a severe muddying of the water as people discuss this, because most people take the approach that if something is legal, that there is no reason whatsoever that they should feel as though it is ethically or morally questionable to purchase music from a company like AllOfMP3. To be honest, I have been seriously toying with the idea for the past few weeks, and probably can’t count the number of times I’ve visited, wanting to sign up, but ultimately deciding against it. And today I think I’ve reached my conclusion that even though I feel that the way that AllOfMP3 is operating their business in Russia is probably legal, it’s certainly not ethical. Granted, I don’t think that the RIAA or record labels in general treat people, customers or artists with any sort of decency either, generally speaking. But using the questionable ethics of the RIAA and record labels as they shaft artists and sue customers as a personal excuse to justify purchasing music from a company that is shady at best, ethically and legally, is just jumping into the mud with them.

In a way it’s frustrating. It’s frustrating that the most ethical way to purchase music puts money in the hands of the grimy RIAA and record labels much more so than in the hands of the artists whose music we love. But regardless of that fact, I’ll be continuing to give Apple my money for my music purchases for the foreseeable future.

Apparently at least a few people think that the iPhone will be a hit:

I first saw a screenshot similar to this on a Flickr photo stream belonging to Dave Shea (a fellow Vancouverite, I might add). I jumped over to Google Finance to take a peak myself, and the picture says a thousand words. It’ll be interesting to see how things progress over the next 6 months, but in the mean-time I’ll admit I’m salivating over the pretty iPhone.

Lots of questions seem to be going around, especially with regards to Java support, and I found an interesting quote from Mr. Jobs hisself, surrounding Java support for the iPhone:

Java’s not worth building in. Nobody uses Java anymore. It’s this big heavyweight ball and chain.
-Steve Jobs

I found this quote via David Pogue’s Blog which was in turn a quote from an interview that John Markoff had with His Steveness.

I’m not sure if Steve has jumped on the Rails bandwagon (yah, that was supposed to be funny), or if he just has a hate on for Java in general. It’s also worth noting that up to date Java support on Mac OS X seems to be a bit lacking as well. In order to run Java 5, Mac OS X 10.4 was required, and now it’s sounding like in order to run Java 6, a mandatory update to Leopard (Mac OS X 10.5) will be required as well.

It is quite possible that Kathy Sierra writes what is the best blog on the Internet. The relentless shift from developer-focus to user-focus is something that is becoming more important pretty much on an hourly basis.

One thing that really got me thinking about this was the recent video of 37 Signals (Jason and David) that’s been making the rounds, you know, the Mac one.

Albeit the video is a bit on the glam side (maybe I’m only saying that because I don’t have their stunning good looks?). At any rate, one of the things that David says in the video is:

“We’re trying to affect both our peers in the industry and also customers out there, just raise their level of expectation…”

This seems to go along with the whole theme of Creating Passionate Users – but why I bring it up here is for the following reason (Warning: Gross Stereotype Ahead):

People who write apps in Ruby on Rails care about user experience. People who write Java apps don’t give a rip.
-me

(Ok – I’ll make an exception for JIRA). I can feel the flames flying this way already, but this has been more often than not what I have observed in the past year or so. It’s not that Rails provides some sort of Magickal Code that isn’t possible to provide in a Java-based application – it’s that Rails makes it easy for the developer to integrate those features. I mean, forgive me if you like Java Server Faces – but the last time I looked at that code – I ended up in a psychiatric ward for a month before deciding that I’ll just stick with JSP, thanks.

After our Singapore Ruby meetup a couple weeks back, I was chilling with Herry and Choon Keat over a bite to eat – and the primary things that we seemed to be constantly coming back to when discussing Java vs. Ruby were along the lines of:

1. It makes us more productive
2. The code is cleaner, smaller, simpler, less bloated
3. It’s easy to create rich, responsive and enjoyable user experiences
4. We are a lot happier when we’re coding in Ruby.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that Ruby is now the de facto standard language and “you will be assimilated” all borg-style, I’m just saying that if it’s a feasible language to use for a given project, and Java is equally feasible – I’ll take Ruby in a heartbeat.

It’s about time that the end-users of software start raising their expectations, and time for developers to deliver software to their end-users that doesn’t suck. And one of the major driving forces of this in the past 12 months has been Ruby on Rails, along with some great JavaScript libraries like Prototype and Script.aculo.us. So thanks, guys.

I was trudging around, reading blogs, and whatnot when I came across, among other things, Dave Shea’s blog, and his entry reviewing the Mighty Mouse – I definitely laughed out loud on this. Good stuff, and I couldn’t agree more. The one that came with my G5 iMac continues to aggravate my wife on a daily basis.

To be honest, I can’t say I’m really that impressed with all the new iTunes features. But the one thing that I was really excited about was the new fetch album art feature color of the icon.

As you can see below, pretty much every icon in my dock has blue, is blue, or goes well with blue. That stupid green iTunes icon looked really out of place.

Thank goodness they fixed that.

As Carly and I were setting up our new place, we got her some “office space” in a nook in our master bedroom. As she does quite a lot of work on the computer, she ended up with the G5 iMac in there, which left me with only one development machine.

The perfect opportunity had arrived for justifying a new development machine, so utilizing Carly’s ed discount, I managed a new MacBook along with an almost free 30GB iPod (thanks to that promo Apple has going on right now).

So far I am very impressed, although there are a few shortcomings. Most noticeably there is a bit of a jagged edge right along the wrist-rest at the front of the MacBook, so my wrist often feels quite agitated if I’m not sitting up nice and straight while typing. I purchased a wrist-rest-guard thing to protect against discoloration, but that’s not what’s causing the agitation. Other than that I notice just a slight imperfection near the vent where there is a noticeable bubble of plastic that doesn’t quite seem to fit as perfect as it ought to. The MagSafe connector is great, but it looks very cheaply built. Hopefully it doesn’t light on fire. The RAM was dead easy to install (once I went out to buy a #0 Philips screwdriver, that is). All in all – I am super impressed. Currently running a trial version of Parallels, which seems pretty great. I notice a bit of mouse lag, and some right click delays, but that could be due to the wireless mouse I’m using. Not totally sure yet.

After about 5 days of use, I’m a very happy MacBook owner. Yum.

Jim Louderback, editor-in-chief of PC Magagine has recently posted an article entitled Boot Camp: Apple Bobs for Suckers.

He rambles on and on about how Boot Camp is a snore, and that the only reason people want an Apple Computer these days, is because they look sexy. Hello? Jim? Where have you been for the past 5 years? He says that “there are dozens of better-looking notebooks out there than those tired, industrial-looking iBooks and PowerBooks that dribble out of Infinite Loop.”

He goes on to give some examples about one of the Toshiba Portege’s and the Acer Ferrari, of which I must say I find neither at all appealing.

Following this, he bashes the Mac Mini saying that it can’t do high-end graphics. Jim, wake up for crying out loud. The Mac Mini is a budget PC for home users, not a high-end workstation for graphics professionals. When’s the last time you picked up a $500 Dell box and handed to a professional graphic designer telling them that this 512MB machine with an 80GB disk is all they’re getting.

Unfortunately, the pain doesn’t end there. He starts rambling on about how useless it is to run Windows on a Mac right now, because there aren’t any Desktop machines with expansion slots. So we’ll never know if we can use our ancient legacy SCSI adapter on the Windows install on our Mac.

One quote that I’m afraid I just can’t leave alone is this one:

The really creative computer users are the case modders who build extravagant designs to house their systems.

Jim? What are you talking about? I thought the really creative computer users were the ones who build awesomewebapps, wrote amazing webframeworks, utilized technology to improve business, and made completely unreal artwork, among other things. But then again, clearly I’m mistaken. Apparently the only really creative computer users are ones who do build “extravagant designs to house their systems”.

The remaining sections of the article are labeled “Reliability”, “Flexibility” and “Price”. But I’m afraid I’m out of time, and feeling rather nauseous at how biased and clueless Louderback seems to be. The whole point of Bootcamp is to:

a) Ultimately, to get people to switch from Windows to OS X.

b) Help you run that one windows-only app you just can’t live without.

The hypothetical situation, I’m sure, is that your PC user Joe will buy a Mac, install bootcamp, and maybe use 80% Windows and 20% OS X. Then they’re going to get a bunch of malware and viruses on the Windows install, at which point they’ll be using 60% Windows and 40% OS X. Then they’re going to go through Driver Hell to try to get their new digital camera to work on Windows, and realize that if they use OS X, they just have to plug the camera in and it works. Now we’re up to 60% OS X and 40% Windows. Can you see where this is going?

Wake up and smell the coffee, Jim.