Dale: Did you know I built a bridge once?

Emerson: Sorry?

Dale: A bridge.

Emerson: No I didn’t know that.

Dale: I was an engineer by trade.

The conversation carries on, with Dale describing how much shorter people’s commute to work was as a direct result of the new bridge. He starts to list off the number of hours that the bridge had saved people from being stuck in their car, driving to and from work.

This speaks to me powerfully, because it subtly reveals how desperately we, as people, desire to build things that matter.

Currently, I’m a Rogers customer (for my iPhone and Carly’s boring phone), and in our townhouse we have precisely zero cell phone coverage. I often have “No Service”, but even if I do manage to squeak a bar, I never answer my cell phone inside as the call is immediately dropped. If I forget to turn on call-forwarding and my phone happens to ring, if it’s important I have to grab the phone and make a run for the exit. By the time I reach the sidewalk in front of our house, I have full bars.

So there’s the back-story.

I wanted to give Virgin Mobile a try on the data plan for a few reasons:

1. I’ve had less than awesome experiences with Rogers in the past, and with a new iPhone around the corner along with a completed / nearly complete contract – I wanted to see if there were better carrier options.
2. I wanted to see if Virgin Mobile would get reception in our house (doubtful, but wanted to see)
3. The plan is slightly better (or so I thought) – $15 for the first 500MB (instead of most of the others which charge $15 for the first 250MB)

I grabbed a Virgin microsim from Best Buy around 8:30pm and came home. The Virgin web site seemed to indicate that these plans needed to be activated over the phone, and can be done super quick and easy. I gave them a call that evening but they were closed (it was after 9pm) – so I just waited til the morning.

So the morning of September 22nd, I phoned up Virgin Mobile to get the plan activated. Spoke to a CSR who took down all my information and told me they needed to do a credit check because I’m a new customer. I told him no problem. He asked for a credit card or social insurance number. I gave him my credit card number.

At this point, I was on hold for about 10 minutes while the credit check was being processed, and when he came back he said “Sorry, I just learned that we can’t activate this over the phone, you’re going to have to go into one of our locations to show them your ID and get a credit check done.” What? Seriously? That’s not what your web site seems to indicate. He told me I could go to any location that sells Virgin stuff like The Source, Best Buy, etc.

Later I happened to be out near a mall that has a “Source” store. I walked in and they were closed for renovations (not Virgin’s fault). So I drove over to Future Shop. The guy at Future Shop says “Sorry, I don’t know why Virgin told you that, we can’t do your credit check or activate your data plan here.”.

So I phoned Virgin mobile back and talked to another CSR. I told her I went to Future Shop and they couldn’t help me. She had no idea why Future Shop couldn’t help me, and reassured me that I could go to any store that sold Virgin cell phone products and have the plan activated. I asked her if I could go to London Drugs (I was within about 10 blocks of one). She said unequivocally that yes, I could go to London Drugs and they would do it for me.

Not believing her (I’d seen this before) – I phoned up London Drugs and spoke to the appropriate people there. They told me over the phone (and saved me a drive over) that they had absolutely no ability to activate the plan or do the credit check that Virgin Mobile was asking me to do.

After that I just gave up. I phoned up Rogers and they added a data sharing plan to my iPhone’s data plan for $10/month and had the whole thing sorted in 10 minutes. I have to say I was really pleased with my Rogers experience and interaction this time around – but seriously, when will Canadian cell phone carriers get their act together?

I found this tidbit from Twig’s Tech Tips, which did exactly what I wanted. Using an iFrame like this (no src attribute):

<iframe id="preview-iframe" width="320" height="240"></iframe>

You can use this jQuery call to replace the contents of the iFrame:

$('#preview-iframe').contents().find('html').html(data);

• Nutritionists
• Massage Therapists
• Estheticians
• Hair Stylists

Some other folks who could easily benefit from using EasyCal (and we have a few of these as trial customers) include:

• Tutors
• Photographers
• Consultants (of all types)
• Life Coaches
• Private Swimming Lesson Instructors
• Tattoo Parlours

EasyCal is a great way to take bookings online. We’re working on some skookum features right now like repeat bookings, and taking payments online via PayPal – to help you get paid for your services quicker.

In the coming weeks I’m hoping to have a few more posts talking about some specific use cases, and how you can use EasyCal to help grow your business. For more, you can always check out the EasyCal blog.

If you go to edit your theme’s functions.php file, add this line:

add_filter('widget_text', 'do_shortcode');

You’ll be able to use shortcodes to your heart’s content. Credits go here and here.

1st Boot: 1 min 33 sec
2nd Boot: 1 min 17 sec
3rd Boot: 29 sec
4th Boot: 33 sec

The boot times were calculated by me completely shutting down my MacBook Pro. Once I turned it on, I waited for the chime, and started the stopwatch on my iPhone. I stopped the stopwatch on the iPhone immediately after all icons were visible on the desktop, and the items in my menu bar had opened (DropBox, Rivet, Evernote).

I’d been looking at the Seagate Momentus XT hybrid drives for a while (with particular interest since I read the review from Anandtech), and now that I needed a new drive (and needed it faster than AppleCare was going to get it to me) – I headed on down to NCIX and picked one of those suckers up.

For those interested in such things, I picked up the 500GB model (ST95005620AS) for about $150.00. It came with firmware SD22 installed.

I could never be bothered to perform detailed benchmarking on stuff – that’s what reading Anandtech is for. But here are my two observations so far:

1. This drive is FAST
2. This drive is LOUD

Boot time is cut to about 1/3 of my previous, after a few boots to get the SSD portion of the drive warmed up. Launching apps (Firefox, Safari, Adium, Aperture, Mail, 1Password, etc.) is ridiculously fast. Often less than a single bounce for Safari.

For reference, it’s worth noting that these observations are now being made while I’m using a 15″ MacBook Pro (Intel i7 / 2.66GHz, 4GB RAM) – when I first installed the drive it was in a 15″ MacBook Pro (Intel Core 2 Duo / 2.53GHz, 4GB RAM). I could say the same about the older MacBook Pro. Very fast.

As I also mentioned, it’s loud. It’s extremely obvious that there is a drive spun up in the machine, much louder than any previous drive I’ve had in any of my previous MacBook or MacBook Pro’s.

Overall reviews (generally speaking) for the drive are hugely mixed. I read reviews from Amazon, Newegg and NCIX. There are a lot of people happy with the drive, and a lot of people unhappy with the drive. Common complaints include corrupt files (not sure if some of these people had any clue as to what they were talking about, or might have simply got a bad drive, which happens sometimes. Deal with it.), but the largest complaint seems to be with drive spin-down. Several people note that their drive spins down on a regular basis (e.g. every 25 minutes), and then their machine will beachball as they wait for it to spin-up again. Seagate seems to have released a firmware update (SD23) that supposedly addresses this.

Several people have also complained that they can’t get the firmware update to work. I hadn’t noticed any spin-down problems, but just for kicks I thought I’d try to update the firmware. I downloaded the ISO, burned it to a disk, rebooted, let it boot into whatever forsaken version of DOS they use, and within about 30 seconds I had new firmware installed without so much as a hiccup. So that’s my experience.

I haven’t decided for certain if I’ll keep the drive (although I’ll take a 15% hit from NCIX for a restocking fee), simply because of how loud it is. I might opt for the tried and true ‘normal’ Seagate Momentus until they have some of the kinks worked out, but I still have about 5 days to decide.

Anyways, after some googling and trying a few things, I found that this did the trick for me:

cd ~/Documents/Microsoft\ User\ Data/
rm -Rf Office\ 2008\ Identities/

Hopefully this can help you if you need it.