So back in September (or was is August?) I bought a little device called the BT300 by a company called Bytecc. It basically took your PATA/SATA drive and turned it into an external drive. It worked great at first, I plugged in some old IDEs and started copying files onto my main hard drive.  I was done with it, so I put it in a corner and never used it again.

Until recently when I bought a new WD hard drive and installed Win 7 on it. I took my old Maxtor and plugged it into this device to copy the files into the new hard drive. (I did not have enough cables to keep it plugged in) So I plug it in and within seconds I see the device start to smoke. I fucking panicked and quickly unplugged my old hard drive to hopefully save the data. Data was safe. However the thing started smoking for no fucking reason.

So I decided to do some research and read some Newegg reviews. It turns out that others have had the same problem of the device going up in smoke, while others have had the hard drives fry, and even some had the PSU of the device melt. I tried going on the Bytecc website to try to get an refund or something. Unfortunately their website is fucking created by some fucking asian guy who can’t speak any English.

“RMA service is only for campanys directly buy merchandise from BYTECC.
Not for enduser or consumer.”

I’m sorry, what the fuck is a campany? Is that like a camp? But I guess I shouldn’t be too shocked with this company and bad English. There was a sheet of paper that came with the device that read “If plug-in the connect incorrect, may cause damaged”  That really made a lot of sense.

The device itself has a few flaws. The USB cable is retardedly short. The casing of it feels like it’s going to break at any moment. You actually have to remove the casing if you want to plug in a 2.5″ laptop PATA drive. But one thing out of this really shocked me. On a regular hard drive it’s pretty damn hard to plug in the molex cable upside down. On this device you can do it with no additional force. If you look closely, you will see that there infact is a groove for how it’s suppose to go. Problem is that groove doesn’t stop it from going in. Way to fucking design something Bytecc.

Rogers is an evil giant in this monopolized world of cellphone carriers. A lot of companies have tried to step in to stop them. Fido was one, then it got bought out by Rogers. Then came Solo (Bell) Virgin (Bell) Koodo (Telus) but all of them are owned by the evil giants. Then today was supposed to be a magnificent day when the wireless world would be changed. Yeah, fat chance.

Wind came in and tried to change everything. They have a decent strategy but it is still lacking perfection. For starters, they use some really messed up spectrum (1700 I believe). They have all of 4 phones, which one of them is something decent. And their plans are really out of whack. Either you can get something REALLY cheap and good. Or something REALLY EXPENSIVE but good. There is no mid point. For example, with my current Rogers plan I have, I pay 45 a month for 150 mins, and 500MB. Going over to Wind, I’d have to pay 15 for Voice and 35 for UNLIMITED data. Sure I get more data, but I don’t fucking need UNLIMITED. I barely get to 200MB a month anyways.

I can see Wind being beneficial to some people, but I don’t see this current strategy satisfying everybody. Me being one of the people. This wouldn’t be a problem to me really, if they didn’t fucking advertise themselves as being “the first company for the people, by the people.” Fucking wankers.

Back when I first got my XPERIA I got a lot of comments on it. The ones that pissed me off the most were the ones saying “why the hell do you need a 600 dollar phone?” Well here’s the thing, I don’t NEED a $600 phone, but it’s a nice thing to have. For starters, I have the ability to check my email anywhere. If I am walking down the streets of Toronto and I get an email I can reply to it with no problem. I just pull the device out from my pocket, slide out the keyboard and begin writing. I can satisfy my Facebook addiction at anytime and I can read up on my favorite RSS feeds. Basically, it serves me as a really small laptop and sure, it’s never going to replace my Vaio, but for a quick task like posting a Facebook update the phone gets the job done.

But Matt, the iPhone is only 199 why not get that? No asshole, an iPhone with no contract is $680 for a new one. That’s even more expensive than my phone! If I wanted a contract I would have gotten one and gotten a better deal on my phone. It seems that a lot of people don’t understand telephone prices. They all don’t know that you CAN infact buy a phone without a contract and it seems like the $199 pricetag is only 199 and nothing else. Read the fine print. In order to get that price you have to sign a 3 year contract, and pay more than 60 bucks a month for service. You end up paying for more than what you need and end up losing money in the long run.

Moral of the story? Cellphones are bloody expensive and only have a ~500mhz processor*.

*On select phones.

I’m fucking tired of this Bell bullshit I’ve been seeing around. The first one is the whole “GET MORE THAN ROGERS FOR LESS THAN ROGERS” marketing campaign.  Yeah, more service outages maybe. Bell and Rogers offer pretty much the same services for the same price. Bell Internet has faster internet, but less bandwidth for the same cost. So where is all this MORE FOR LESS crap? I don’t see it. When you offer a shitty service you can offer it for cheaper as well.

Fuck Bell’s “Perfect for laptops” campaign as well. They never explain why their shitty DSL is better on laptops than Rogers. Do laptops have some sexual attraction to DSL or something? I think not. Both services work with a laptop, and the average user won’t see any difference between the two.

The next Bell thing I will complain about is there choice of technologies. CDMA, Satellite, and DSL. CDMA is so inconvenient for a customer who wants to buy a new phone. Majority of the cellphone market is GSM and use SIM cards. Satellite dishes have to be readjusted, calibrated, setup, etc. With cable I just plug it in and I have it, I don’t care if Bell has a free setup. It’s something that you don’t have to do. 

Fuck Bell, Rogers might have some bullshit like $150/month internet but Bell has bullshit like charging you for paper billing. 2 bucks a month.

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Forget talking on the phone, text messaging is the ultimate way of communication. I mean, who needs a phone anyways? It seems the youth is becoming less and less social. Now, before I get started I would like to state that I DO infact send text messages. But I usually send them when I am not free to talk. So if I am at work then you will probably never get a call from me. But because sending a text message is silent and it doesn’t bother anyone, I will send one. That circumstance is the only time people should be able to send a text message. Yet, you keep hearing stories how some people send 7,000 text messages a month. No, that wasn’t a typo, seven THOUSAND. Out of that 7,000 I bet you half of them were something short and stupid like, LOL or Hi. You know, in the time you tried to have a conversation over text messaging you could have just called the person. Your 300 count conversation could have been shrunk down to a few minutes on the phone.

I sometimes heard that sending a text message is faster. Bullshit, I can talk WAY faster than you can type on your phone. Calling is so much easier, sending a text message explaining something can be impossible. You need to sometimes actually TALK to someone to get a point across. Another thing is when people text me when I am driving to go pick them up or something. Well good job asshole, I can’t really respond because I am driving. If you call me I will answer because I can just put you on speaker and not have to look at a shitty phone while driving.

Now, don’t call me an idiot. I do my research on hipsters and I know that text mesaging is more popular with girls, or that girls make guys text. I tell you this, if your girlfriend doesn’t want to talk over the phone then there is something wrong with her. Don’t be a pussy, call her and talk to her if you really like her.

So what did we learn today? Unless you are at work, or taking a shit there is no need to send a text message. Just call the person and have a conversation with them!