everburning

Since I start my new job at AideRSS on Tuesday in Waterloo, Stacy and I have been busy getting the condo ready for sale. I spent a good portion of today steam cleaning the carpet in the living room.

While the steam cleaner works well at picking a lot of gunk out of the carpet it doesn’t do so well with cat hair. The hair just kind of clumps together into balls. Stacy spent a bit of time picking these up as our vacuum cleaner sucks.

Once we got sick of this method we went and bought a Dyson. If you don’t have a Dyson go buy one, it’s awesome. We didn’t have to steam clean the bedroom as the Dyson made the carpet look new. Damn, the amount of cat hair that thing sucked up. Was an impressive sight.

So, with the carpets almost clean, the holes in the walls filled and primed and about 1/2 of our stuff shipped up to my parents house, we should be ready to have this place on the market in a few days.

Here’s to hoping for a quick sell.

A friend of mine has just returned from many moons out in Vancouver working for big game companies to start his own indie company. He’s keeping a blog of the trials and tribulations of starting a company and creating his first game.

It’s been pretty interesting so far. If you’re interested, check it out over at http://streamingcolour.com/blog.

So, Stacy and I were planning on going to Seattle this week for a vacation. We wandered off to the airport early this afternoon and arrived at about 2.20 (our flight was for 4.20 so lots of time.)

At this point we ran into what must have been the longest line I’ve seen in an airport. All queued up for the Delta checkin. Ok, fine, I’ve been in lines before, we join the line. We wait. And wait. And wait. Three steps every 10 minutes isn’t much progress. The clock rolls around to 3 and we’re starting to get a bit nervous. You have to check in an hour before your flight so we start looking around for any Delta people on the floor that we could talk to. There was an American Airlines guy but he was just helping his passengers through the Delta line.

At about 3.20 I jumped the line to ask the guy at the Delta counter if we should be moving up as we had the 4.20 flight. I was, tersely, informed that everyone in the line was waiting for the 4.20 flight. Back to the line I went. 3.30. 3.40. 4. 4.10. 4.20. By this point we were about 10 feet from the start of the roped off section marking the beginning of the line. According to the flight board our flight was still on time. 4.30. 4.50. 5. 5.10. Ok, about 10 people left in front of us in line. Well, except for all the people that keep budding into line. And the people that take 45 minutes at the counter. What could you possible be doing that takes 45 minutes and the ticket agent to be on 2 phones at the same time? Yes, she had a phone pressed against each ear.

Keep in mind, in all this time Delta hasn’t said anything to us. There are no Delta agents in sight except for the people behind the counter. The GTAA (Greater Toronto Airport Authority) agents keep telling us that a Delta agent will be out soon to tell us what’s going on. No Delta agent appeared.

5.30 rolls around and an agent stands up and says Ok, everyone in line will have to be rebooked on a flight tomorrow. At which point a lot of people go ape shit. The two ladies in front of us were trying to get a connection so they can get to England. It looked like that managed to brow beat the agent into giving them a ticket.

Stacy and I didn’t bother. I called up Expedia and after an bit time on the phone got a full refund from Delta and most of a refund for the hotel. We’ve got to pay for one night but that’s it. Not too bad. Sounded like she didn’t’ have too much trouble with the Delta office either. Other people in line were calling and Delta was telling them they were still able to get on the flight or it was their problem for being late (not what you want to tell someone after they’ve been in line for 3 hrs at your ticket counter.)

So, kudos to Expedia for getting everything cancelled and the refunds for us. Delta, bite my shiny metal ass. I’ll never book on your airline again.

Stacy and I went out car shopping today. Stacy has spent some time over the last few weeks looking at car information, gas consumption, dealer locations, all that fun stuff. Today we set off to test drive a few of those cars. Here in lies that tale.

We started at the Honda dealer. Stacy is a big fan of the Honda Fit so we took that out for a drive first. The car we took out was a dealer car, so one year old, 47,000 km on it. Priced at 17.5k. The fit has a really nice drive, good acceleration, handles well. Not a lot of space. Just in terms of the around the block test drive I could feel my leg cramping on the gas pedal. Not good if you’re going to do any driving up to Owen Sound. The fit would probably be perfect for Stacy. The Honda guy was offering 3.9% financing so the price wasn’t too bad.

From there we wandered down the road and, on a lark, stopped in at the Volvo dealer. We both assumed that Volvos would be outside of our price range. Again we took a look at the used cars and test drove a used S40. This one was 2 years old and 60,000 km I believe. The S40 handles really well, has really good acceleration and is quite comfortable. Given that the Volvo is one of the safest drives on the road the S40 was a serious contender. The dealer got a bit offended when we said we were comparing cars and one of the cars we were comparing too was the Honda Fit. There is just no comparison he said, heh. He got a bit pushy at the end trying to make the sale, We can only give this price today kind of thing. The financing would be at 7.0% but the numbers didn’t seem too bad in the long run. The Volvo was definitely in the lead over the Fit. Plus, he gave me a bottle of water which is always nice.

From Volvo we cross the parking lot to the Volkswagon dealer. We got what must have been the pushest, most useless dealer at this point. Tell me what you want we’ll sell it to you today. Um, we want to look at the City Jettas and the Rabits. Tell me what you want we’ll get you into one. This repeated for about 10 minutes, without us getting any information or seeing any cars, before we ditched him and went to look inside. I’ve had a Volkswagon before, the car was pretty nice but when I got rid of it I was starting to have issues with things going wrong. We bailed quickly due to the sour feeling left by the dealer.

We continued our trek up to the Nissan dealer to take a look at the Versa. Apparently the Versa is a really hard car to find. We asked about availability and the dealer basically said, give me a list of 5-8 colours you like and I’ll try to find one of those. We quickly left as neither of us wanted to play colour lotto with the car.

Leaving Nissan I informed Stacy I wasn’t built Ford tough so we skipped the Ford dealer.

As our last stop of the day we went to see the Saturn Astra. The dealer kind of looked at us funny when we asked about used Astras, apparently they’ve only been available in North America for 4 months. So, no used cars. But, Sebastian (the sales rep) quickly told us some of the features and the price range of a new Astra. This certainly peaked our interest so we took one for a test drive. The Astra handles really well, we took it out for the longest test drive of the bunch and Sebastian gave us lots of interesting information on the car. Along with trying to get me to take some corners at 100 km/hour. The Astra lacks a certain amount of punch that some of the other cars may have but I’m not looking for something that needs a lot of kick. As long as I can get up to speed before something else hits me I’m good to go.

So, we went back to the dealer, talked price and we’re picking up our new Saturn Astra XR 4 door with sun roof on Wednesday. We got lucky and a silver Astra XR with the features we wanted had just arrived the day before. Apparently the Astra has been moving off the lot pretty quickly for them. The interesting thing being, because Saturn has a 0 down, 0% financing for 72 months the Astra actually ended up being cheaper monthly payments then any of the used cars we looked at. That’s with us getting the extended warranty on the Astra (so, 5 years on the Astra instead of 2 or 3 on a used.) They also give you a 500$ gas card which is handy.

Now I just need insurance. Oh, and Stacy needs to get a full license.

So, the local Rogers store got some iPhones in today. Stacy and I went up to grab two. We got Stacy’s without too much hassle (cost an extra 25$ but not too bad), she’s a proud new iPhone owner.

Getting one for me, well, thats another story. When we got Stacy’s it used our ‘upgrade’ credits from Rogers. The credits reduced a 150$ service charge to 25$. So, trying to get mine we didn’t have any of those credits so the iPhone would cost me 350$. That’s more then half again the price of the 200$ phone. In order to get the iPhone for the 200$ normal price I have to wait until my account gets its credits topped back up. Which will be a few months, which conveniently for Rogers is when the 6gig/30$ deal is no longer available so I’d have to get the 100$ plan to get the same amount of data.

I tried to explain to them that by not getting the phone I won’t be signing up to their 30$/month data plan. So, in 6 months they would have made their 150$ plus extra back. That didn’t fly, with the iPhone they won’t make exceptions.

The really stupid part, this is all because I’m an existing Rogers customer. If I was a new signup I’d get the 200$ price, no problem. Because I’ve been a Rogers customer for a few years I get screwed.

Hows that for customer satisfaction?