I can’t believe how naive some companies think we are.  I was reading an article on an IT website which indicated that Canada was one of the worst countries offering high-speed Internet when it comes to price and speed.  While reading the article, it mentioned some facts I wanted to check out, so I went looking at some of the major providers available to me, and found this ad.

Basically, it indicates that Rogers has a $45 mega value combo.  Funny thing is though, if you look at the details the price is $50 (written quite clearly as the BASE price), and fees on top of that.  Now, I am willing to let them get away with $45 plus additional fees (even though I wholeheartedly disagree with the practice, it is pretty common in the industry), but come on Rogers, don’t you give your customers any credit at all?

They not only market it as the $45 Mega Value Combo, but everywhere it is referenced, it includes the $45 price tag, which is incorrect, given the fact the information clearly states otherwise.

It amazes me that companies who do this kind of thing continue to get customers.  Canada, we all need to stop these companies for charging us WAY TOO MUCH for the service we get. We have the infrastructure in place to offer these services at a much lower price.

This is just another reason (on top of what is becoming a very large list), which keeps me away from Rogers as a customer.

Check out the IT World article for more information.

I got to coding again last night and came up with the idea of listing all the files in a directory, then saving all the file names to a text file.  For those of you who follow the WiiBrew scene, I have quite a few .WAD files which I wanted to keep track of.  I had about 100 files, all named descriptively, and I wanted to track which ones I had, and which ones I still needed to download.  So I fired up Visual Studio, and starting writing some code.

The result is a new application which allows me to select a directory and an extension, and get a list of files.  After the list has been created, the application allows me to save the names (with or without extensions) to a text file.  I will be posting a tutorial on how I accomplished this, and I have plans on rewriting the code to a WPF application to make it a little easier on the eyes.

I have posted the application to Codeplex again, so anyone can download it.

I was working on another project in C#, and decided to make a simple help screen which would display some rich text instructions to the user on how to use the application.  My thoughts were to simply include an RTF file with the project, and pull the data from it to display in the help screen.  Then I thought to myself that because the project is so small, and is deployed as a simple executable, adding another file to the mix just makes things messy. My solution was to input the rich text directly into the Rich Text Box control, thus eliminating the extra file.

This project will be available for download on Microsoft’s Codeplex.

Our usual Canada Day festivities include a fabulous fireworks party held on a friend’s beach in Erieau.  Every year, we see more and more people come out for the event, and each person brings a few more fireworks, which are a bit bigger than the ones brought the previous year.  Since none of us have a pyrotechnics license, we can’t get the outrageously large fireworks, but I think that we do pretty well – in fact, I would say that we top the Erieau firemen fireworks show, at least for the last few years.

This year estimated that we lit approximately $6000.00 in fireworks off, and it was worth every penny spent. The setup took about the same as last year – 30 minutes to lug all the fireworks down to the beach, then about an hour to set them all up.

I would like to thank Scott for providing the place, Scotty G for providing the tunes, and the “pyro crew” as they are affectionately known (and as their t-shirts read) for lighting them off so the rest of us could enjoy the show.  It truly is a team effort!

So, without further adieu, here is my homage to the festivities!

I am in the process of developing a Silverlight application that will utilize the NetFlix API to get movie information. Basically, the application will get the information from NetFlix when adding a movie to a database. The information can then be accessed by other users to see my movie collection. I have created the “Add Movie” page so far, and everything seems to be working well. I next to take the information, store it in a database, then create a page to retrieve the movies from the database (I haven’t yet decided what information I plan on storing), and allow users to search my movie collection.

Stay tuned for updates, and some source code soon!