and things went downhill from there

I didn't think my monitor was going to break out of its power-up cycle this morning. It blinked off and on for almost five minutes before it finally switched to an epilepsy-inducing flicker and settled down. Once it has come out of sleep and settled down it looks great, but it takes longer to fix itself each time it comes out of stand-by, and I doubt it's more than one or two sleep cycles from not recovering.

It's a shame, because other than that, it's been a good monitor. On the other hand, my Dell monitor is almost twice its age, and it's still going strong.

I ordered a replacement monitor for pick-up today. It's a bit bigger than my old one, but the pickings get a bit slim as the sizes get smaller. I have a bit of wiggle room (but only a bit) on my desktop to move things around some to make it fit.

Trying to find a monitor was an exercise in frustration, though. I wanted to order it from a smaller business to support them during the lock-down. Each time I found one that I liked, though, by the time I got the search narrowed down to my local store, I discovered that it was not available either on-line, or at that particular store. After a few failures, it started to feel like an e-commerce version of the Monty Python Cheese Shop sketch.

Me: Hi, I am interested in a monitor. I see you are offering this one that has fantastic reviews.
Store: Great choice! That's one of the best models we carry, and it's on sale too.
Me: Okay, I'd like to have this one.
Store: We're fresh out of those, sorry.
Me: How about this other one?
Store: Sold the last one this morning.
Me: Well, my third choice is...
Store: Gonna have to stop you right there.

Eventually I found the buried options to tell it that I wanted to narrow my searches to only one of their stores, and that I did not want to see any that were out of stock. The one I picked is as good as any of the others I was looking at, but it cost a little more than my first choices. Not horribly expensive, but a bit more than I'd planned to spend.

I mean, we can afford it, but that doesn't make me not a cheap bastard.

On a side note, when the smaller store hit me with its first "sorry, that's not in stock" on my initial choice, I searched for the monitor in Google and discovered that WalMart was selling it for less. On a whim, I selected it on their site, and they came back with, "Oh... that one. Yeah, it's sold out."

When I was out for a walk yesterday I noticed that there was a ring around the sun. I didn't expect it to show up well in the picture, but it came through better than I had anticipated.

Every time I have been involved in a work-related move, if I move the stuff myself it all arrives intact, but if I leave it in the hands of the company movers, something invariably ends up broken.

It's like they hire their movers by heading down to the nearest detox centre and grabbing whoever stumbles out first.



atara and I went phone shopping on the weekend. We compared the phones and plans offered by our current carrier, and the independent provincial carrier. They both have pluses and minuses.

Rogers has a pretty competitive rate for a shared 10gb plan, and they have the visual voicemail system that we both like. They have the full selection of current phones, and they have a really shitty data plan for travelling to the US. Still, as shitty as their plan is, it also happens to be about the only one available.

MTS has ridiculously cheap data rates for up here (~$35/Mo would give us both unlimited, Canada-wide data). The three downsides are that they offer no data plan for travelers (the rep admitted that our best bet was to buy a burner when we travel to the US), their monthly rate is too low to qualify for a discount on any of the phones, and they only offer their visual voicemail for iPhones (ugh).

The last time our phones came up for renewal, tower coverage was one of our considerations, but when I checked the coverage map last night, it looks like the playing field is pretty even now. Working under the assumption that we would not get a discount on the phones from MTS, the overall cost difference of the two plans over 24 months would be ~$10.

I had a look at a number of the re-sellers (Koodo, Fido, etc), and while their rates are competitive, their phone selection is very limited, and mostly late models.

Finding a cell plan should not be this complicated.