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February 10th, 2012
11:20 am - Fairway Mechanical
A while back, I wrote a story about Mike Preston, the crook that took our money to install a geothermal system but ran away afterwards. Well, few days ago I was contacted by a gentleman named Ryan from Green Monsters. It turns out that Mike is back only this time with yet another business named "Fairway Mechanical" and he is scamming people again, just like he did with his older businesses. A quick search I found Fairway Mechanical on the BBB website and guess what? it has an F (that is on a scale of A+ to F), good job Mike! you never disappoint me.
Anyway, here is what Ryan had to say:
"Mike Preston is working in the Hamilton area selling and installing furnaces and hot water tanks. His current company is called Fairway Mechanical. His web site lists the address for the company as "Ancaster, Ontario", with no street address. On yellowpages.ca, Fairway is listed as located at 592 High Vaule Rd, Ancaster (which does not exist - he probably just made up an address because yellowpages.ca wouldn't list him without a street address).
My company Green Monsters did 3 energy audits for Fairway Mechanical's customers. Preston did not pay us for those audits as promised (each time, he promised to be on site with payment, but was never on site), and now the homeowners will not receive any of the ecoEnergy grants Preston promised because their energy audits were not paid for or processed. The advisor who did the audits noticed a red flag when doing one of the audits - the quote that Preston had given the customer listed hand written grant amounts that seemed unusually high.
Preston is still out there, please be aware!"
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January 26th, 2012
11:50 pm - Chrome vs Firefox?
Hmmmm, this is a strange one.
Long time ago, Chrome started attacking IE displaying a download link on Google.com with "A faster way to browse the web", ok, that might be true if you use IE, especially pre-IE9
But I just noticed now that this now shows even if you use FF.... hmmmm that might not be true, since FF beats chrome, especially with the latest javascript JIT optimizations.
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January 18th, 2012
04:41 am - More from CIBC
Well, I am not sure how long this story will go, but it appears that the incompetence has no limits sometimes!
Of course after having the recent terribly bad experience with the worst bank in Canada I started moving away my services from CIBC. That of course doesn't mean cancelling everything as it will probably be a slow moving process till everything has moved.
The problem is that an item that I have previously bought with my City credit card broke down, and since it has been out of warranty for few months I decided to use the credit card extended warranty, which is now a CIBC credit card oh no!
Typically, this is an easy process, but I wasn't expecting it to be this time around. So I pick up the phone and make the call.
There is a number listed online that handles the insurance at CIBC for my card so I call that number. Of course with a headache of press option 1, press option 2... etc. I reach someone there, I explained
( Read more... )
Current Mood:  aggravated
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January 12th, 2012
10:46 am - Browsing experience with Android tablets
One of the biggest problems with Android tablets is the poor browsing experience you encounter sometimes. It appears as if websites want to render themselves as a smartphone.
As a developer I view the same problem from the other side; I cannot tell when an Android device is a smartphone or a tablet, they all report "Android" in the user agent. And in cases when I want to display different UI based on the device size, I end up having to add exceptions for each hardware maker, oh and there are plenty of them!.
The problem seems to come from one of Android's greatest features (screen size agnostic) that's become Achilles' heel. Yes, this design works when you are building a native app, but it doesn't work when building a web app since the server has no clue what device this is. There are basically two workarounds to overcome this:
1. window.devicePixelRatio: Well we can use javascript to get the device pixel ratio, but doing things in JavaScript is too late in some cases, we need to detect the device ahead of time (at first render), JavaScript runs after the page has been downloaded. Of course we can work around this problem by creating landing pages that will redirect or postback with the pixel ratio, this is counter intuitive especially that we are talking about mobile devices (slow connections and limited data plans) and want to reduce network chattiness.
2. -webkit-device-pixel-ratio in css media selector: We can build different css files based on medium or low or high densities, include all of them in the page then select the appropriate one based on the pixel density. This works well for Android, but we will have issues when we want to target iPads, PlayBooks or Kindle, how many selectors do we want to add in the page? The server can render different selectors depending on the device used.
These two alternatives are not easy to build, and add extra complexity especially for the basic websites that the average web designer cannot handle easily. iOS makes it very simple for the poor old web developer, there are two screen sizes iPad and iPhone and if you build separate UI for each it will render reasonably well. Basically a web developer can simply target the iPhone and let the iPad render the desktop version, which seems to work well most of the time.
Finally, there is also the blurring line between tablets and smartphones, is Galaxy Note a tablet or a phone?
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November 8th, 2011
07:46 pm - My first experience with CIBC - the worst bank in Canada
When I first immigrated to Canada, I knew very little about the banking system here. So I arrive with some cash in my pocket to keep me going for few days, and a draft cheque from an RBC (UK branch) for 10K. A great old friend of mine picked us up at the airport and took us to a hotel. He told me that he banked with CIBC, so he took me the next day to his branch so I can open a new bank account and cash my cheque. When I went into CIBC I was treated like an outcast! They refused to open a bank account for me because I did not have a permanent address in Canada! I told them that how can I possibly have a permanent address if I have just landed the day before. In fact I cannot rent an apartment because I don't have a bank account and cannot cash the cheque the I brought with me! Anyway, they told me that they would not be able to help and basically left me out hanging on the street looking for a way out! Thankfully I went to a different bank and things were sorted out within minutes!
( Read more... )
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November 6th, 2011
08:23 pm - The worst credit card service rep in Canada
In a previous entry I was speaking about the problems I was having with CIBC's new master card. The problems did escalate further as things got worse not better!
I waited another couple of weeks and I see that the payment still didn't go through. I was getting a little worried because a) interest will start to be charged and b) my card was running out of limit since it hasn't been paid in a long time. I call back the customer service and ask directly for a manager this time. I told them that this is the 4th time I have called about the same issue and have been put at least 2 hours combined on hold so I wanted to escalate the issue. I spoke with Bocar. Bocar seemed like your average bank employee who has no clue how the system works. His story kept changing, at first he told me that the system never carries the automatic payment and I need to sign a new form, then I explained what happened to my account and he said ok, "let me listen to your conversations with previous reps" after it he came back and told me that things should be fine and the payment should go through, it didn't work before that because my card hasn't been activated, the system was waiting for me to have the card activated. This didn't make much sense since my card has been activated for at least a week before then, he told me that I should give it few more days for things to clear up.
This time around I wait 2 weeks, I checked my statement and I see that there is now hundreds of dollars charged in interest. To me, it looked like the situation was getting out of hand so I paid the balance, I was pretty sure at that point that these employees are just incompetent, and have only wasted a good 4 hours of my time in dealing with this.
( Read more... )
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November 4th, 2011
11:41 pm - The worst bank In Canada
This is the first part of a series I will be writing about the my experience with the worst bank In Canada. Not surprisingly I just tried to Google "The Worst Bank In Canada" and about eight of the results on the first page showed nothing but the infamous CIBC!
Perfect I said, I am not alone on this.
My experience with CIBC starts a while back when I first immigrated to Canada. And I thought that I should not go to that bank again! The years have passed by and somehow I drifted towards having CIBC accounts, unfortunately. But my initial feelings with this terrible bank were not misplaced and CIBC did not take long to prove me right!
I used to have a Citi-Master card for about 10 years, and was quite happy with that card, not only because of the awesome features and rewards that card has, but I personally think it is the best card you can ever have in Canada, with features like purchase protection, price protection (Yes, when the price drops, CITI would actually pay you the difference!) and zero annual fees how can you go wrong?
( Read more... )
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October 5th, 2011
08:37 pm - The death of an icon
Today marks a very sad day in the world of Technology. Steve Jobs, one of the greatest icons in technology has passed away after struggling with Cancer. At such a young age I can't think of how influential he was in our lives. Love Apple or hate it, Steve pushed technology through Apple and the competitions so that we all have a better life.
RIP Steve
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September 29th, 2011
11:27 pm - Bezos the new Jobs
Jeff Bezos might not have all the glamor and marketing coolness Steve Jobs have, but he is probably the most sophisticated genius marketeer of our generation. He single-handedly made e-commerce mainstream, made buying books and merchendize online a normal thing, competed with e-bay, created the tablet market (Kindle was way before the iPad), made the storage cloud a big trend and is now into streaming, etc.
But the mother of all announcements was yesterday. Many tablet makers tried to steal some market share from the iPad and most have failed miserably, the most recent spectacular failure being the RIM PlayBook.
( Read more... )
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September 3rd, 2011
04:57 pm - Alberta's pipeline to the Gulf
While driving today I heard that there are some protest against building a pipeline to transport oil from Alberta's oil sands to the gulf of Mexico. While not a big fan of all these protests, they are only a magnet for people who would protest about anything and everything, but I thought to myself, hey! why are we sending a pipeline of crude oil all the way there?
I could think of two reasons: The first, having access to the Gulf itself, so the oil will be exported there easily, and the second, having access to the refineries in the gulf region.
( Read more... )
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