Is it just me? Satellite tv

Years ago, we switched from satellite to cable television.

But now, at our new house in Peterborough, I made the mistake of switching back.

i have heard not very nice things about the local cable provider here - not the one I am used to - so decided to go with Bell.ca for everything.

Honestly - am SO not impressed.

Phone service is fine.

Internet - sucking! Constant issues re: which account I want to send email from because Bell won’t allow Rogers to go through - so can no longer just hit reply to and send … I have to remember to also change the sending account.

And TV - OMG it is MAJOR SUCKING!!  We have two tvs - one up, one down.  And on both of them, the sound and video are SO NOT SYNCHED. I hate that.

On cable (at our other house) - occasional problems specific to one channel/show or another - but here it is on every single channel all the time. It is incredibly distracting and annoying.

I’m not a big TV watcher anyway - but now I don’t enjoy ANY TV at all.

Searched their site looking for troubleshooting info tonight - didn’t find anything, and online chat isn’t available now (and doesn’t tell me when it WILL be available; also annoying). Will try again tomorrow - but I’d be interested to know if this is typical of satellite television. If you use satellite, please do tell!

Tags: bell, custumer service, Internet, television

flitting

We had our open house at our new place in Peterborough yesterday - it went really well, I thought, although I would have liked to be able to stop time a bit so that I could have spent more time with everyone that showed up - I felt constantly torn between wanting to go play with the babies or talk to my mom/sis/niece/etc and other friends…. tried to spend some time with everyone but it just didn’t feel like enough. It was GREAT that so many people came though.

Pretty lazy day today - I’ve been ill for several days now and needed a lazy day and - aside from a few brief bursts of energy during which I managed to get quite a bit of our stuff moved upstairs to where it belongs (now) - and tell Ross where I wanted things hung and so forth, mostly I’ve just been mucking about with my Farmville farm on Facebook- did a complete redo; changed the layout and bought a barn; all sorts of fun and totally nonproductive stuff.

Cooked up my lamb sausages for dinner - bought them at the No Frills up the road meaning to cook them and put them out for the open house yesterday but just didn’t have time. They were REALLY REALLY good though! Ross enjoyed them too, even though he had already said he didn’t much want anything to eat.

School starts tomorrow; no classes this week, but lots of orientation activities. I already have the certificate re: being a TA so don’t need to attend those sessions - but still meetings and social events I should go to. Am looking forward to getting going on my PhD - SO much to learn - but with a bit of luck and a whole lot of work, hopefully I too will be as knowledgeable - and self-assured as many of the people who are further along and intimidated the hell out of me when I met them at various events this summer.

Perhaps someday it will be my turn to intimidate the hell out of others LOL

Tags: flitting, graduate school, infections, lamb, university

Tattletales

….gotta love em!

Was at our local TDCanadaTrust today - and while we were there (getting a new bank card because hubby misplaced his wallet)  - the woman who was helping him asked if I was Lauralee…. and when I said yes, proceeded to tell us that someone had called them to tattle on me for saying bad things about them on my blog.

Maybe I’m bad - but I found it exceedingly amusing.

I did, in fact, write about some of the hassles we had with TDCanadaTrust. I also provided updates - when they apologized, and when they got a new and not incompetent bank manager - and when we started to deal with them again and were well-served - all of that made it into this blog as well.

And its not like any of it - even the complaints - were secrets - I actually included the link to this blog in my emails to TDCanadaTrust’s customer service department. Regularly.

What did the tattletale think they were going to do, anyway? Slap my hand and tell me I was bad? Put me on the time out chair?

Some people have WAY too much time on their hands.

But hey - I rather like the whole tattling thing.  The more people know about crappy customer service, the more inclined businesses are to FIX it.

TDCanadaTrust in Midland has a new bank manager that seems to be working hard to CHANGE things for the better at the branch - and we are dealing with them again BECAUSE they are providing much better service these days.

So there you go, Tattletale - how ’bout you call and tell them I said good things about them? Nah…didn’t think so. Where would the fun be in that?

Tags: customer service., tattling, tdcanadatrust

Home Depot Update

Further to yesterday’s post about the less than satisfactory response received from our local Home Depot - thought I’d let you know that while there may be issues at our local store, the corporation IS listening and did respond to my concerns.

Someone from their customer care centre left a message on my post - I emailed them, and received the following response:

Thank you for getting back in touch with me, I appreciate it. We have made many recent improvements in our stores and I am really disappointed to hear about the lack of customer service that you received at our Midland Ontario store. I have forwarded this information to the store’s management  to make them aware of what their customers are experiencing and in order for them to improve our customer relations. We really appreciate your feedback, that is the only way for us to know where improvements are needed.

    Please keep my email handy and if you ever need anything feel free to get in touch with me directly, you can also reach us on Twitter and facebook.

Tags: customer service., Home Depot, Midland

Home Depot

We have been doing a whole lot of renovations at our Victoria Harbour house - and as a result have been making frequent trips to Home Depot.

For the most part, they’ve been pretty good - but I’m a little disappointed that they didn’t offer to do anything about the craptastic pkg of flooring we ended up with this week.

About halfway through the box (tiles already installed) we discovered a white (as opposed to chocolate brown) tile - and below that, a couple of dirty and broken tiles as well. Since most of the box is already on the floor and we aren’t interested in ripping it all up, telling us to “just bring it in with the receipt” isn’t exactly all that helpful.

An apology - and perhaps a gee, I’ll make sure to let people know that they need to check returns better - would have been enough.

Maybe I’m just too demanding?

Tags: customer service., Home Depot, Midland

Need a mortgage?

If you’re in Central Ontario - or even in Toronto - I can highly recommend Donna Mullen and Associates.

A friend recommended we contact them, and I SO wish we had and never had dealings with the other mortgage broker we tried in Midland. The whole house purchase thing would have been EVER so much cleaner, easier & less stressful. Unfortunately, we didn’t choose so wisely, and ended up losing a whole lot of time, sleep & money - and almost, the house.

After all of that though, we contacted Donna Mullen & Associates, and the Royal Bank - and both of them came through for us with a minimum of fuss, and very quickly.  Most impressive - especially after the hassles we had already been through.

Oh - and an update about TDCanadaTrust - between the fact that we’re back to only dealing with the financial advisor that we used to deal with before all of the crap happened - and the new manager - we’re finding them a lot less aggravating these days. The service is much better, and our FA has been great at helping us get access to some of the equity on our house. Huge improvements!

Tags: Donna Mullen & Associates, Midland, mortgage, Victoria Harbour

Upgrading -> Nitro PDF Pro 6

One of the joys of doing the grad school thing is that I work with a LOT of PDFs … so I have been making good use of the Nitro PDF Professional software that Nitro so graciously provided me after I wrote about their free PDF –> Word converter on this blog. You can use the free PDF –> Word Converter…and now the free PDF –> Excel Converter as well …but you won’t need to if you actually buy the software, which is well worth having.

I downloaded it again while I was away at summer school (using my new-ish netbook which didn’t have it installed already) and this time ended up with Nitro 6…which has even more cool features! I am especially fond of being able to add annotations in notes right in the file; it saves me a lot of time and aggravation when I need to go back and find just the bits I wanted to use. I used to make notes in a Word file all the time - but that was no where near as convenient as having them right in the pdf. Now I can just keep the pdfs I’m working with on my flash drive and move them - complete with all of my notes - between the 2/3 computers I work with in any given day.

With Nitro PDF Professional and Zotero, which is a way cool plug in for Firefox that I should write more about (I’ll do that next time)  - the hundreds of PDFs I end up downloading and working with over the course of a semester are ever so much more organized and most importantly USEFUL!

Tags: Nitro PDF Pro 6, pdfs, SEASR, zotero

Lexmark Printer

Don't let the ad deceive you - the Lexmark printer does NOT print colours at all well.

Next time I decide to buy a printer you can be damn sure that it WILL NOT BE A LEXMARK.

I bought my little Lexmark mostly because it was little - I wanted one that I could easily transport between home and the motel last year. But it has been a pain in my posterior and I am so frustrated with it I do believe it shall soon find a new home in the big green bin at the end of my driveway.

Not only are the ink cartridges for it expensive, the printer is set to revert to using good quality for every print job - even if you don’t close the file at all.

 It irritates me.

And the very expensive cartridge has a lousy output too - I needed to print one long document last week and it went through an entire cartridge to do only HALF of it. Bugger that - my Dell irritates me now because a tiny little bit of plastic snapped off in the lid to the ink holder. it doesn’t MATTER - it CAN and does still print - but there is a sensor in there somewhere that occasionally gets its knickers in a knot and will refuse to even try because, it says, there is a cartridge stall. There IS NOT.

Just now the Lexmark refused to continue my print job because the colour cartridge was empty. What the hell difference does that make when I’m printing in black and white? I don’t CARE that the colour cartridge is empty - and I do not much appreciate the constant alerts about ink levels either - even after I’ve bought replacement cartridges and clicked the damn box that said so. I sould not NEED to buy colour cartridges for the Lexmark because their colour cartridges print CRAP - even brand new ~authentic~ Lexmark colour ink prints washed out looking CRAP that I would never use for anything that matters.

Printers have become increasingly obnoxious, y’ask me. And Lexmark SUCKS.

So …now I’m looking at HP or Canon … recommendations, anyone?

Tags: lexmark, POS, printer

More About “my” heron

New Cottage Country Pest Control Logo

So …the picture I posted in my last article is now being used as the company logo for our new pest control company which will serve Huronia, Simcoe, Muskoka and some of the Kawarthas - all in Ontario for those of you that don’t know.

My youngest managed to cut him out of the picture for me…and made a line drawing as well, that we’re really happy with.

I wrote an article today on our company blog explaining the rationale for using the heron as the Cottage Country Pest Control logo.

Still waiting on some very necessary mail - but aside from that all  is going well with our business startup …. database is developed, and we’ve got business cards, flyers and t-shirts. Tamara (my other kid) is working on some more content for the Cottage Country Pest Control website: the bedbug page will go up tomorrow and then we’ll be onto roaches and ants. Now all we need is some more customers! Oh, and less rain would be good as well.

Tags: ant, Barrie, bat, bedbugs, Cottage Country Pest Control, environmentally responsible, Honey Harbour, Huronia, Kawartha, mice, Muskoka, Orillia, Port McNicoll, Port Severn, roach, Simcoe, spider

Why We Love Living on Georgian Bay

This morning while I was waiting for it to be time for my nontraditional student friends to come to my place for lunch, hubby pointed out that “our” heron was back …

 Is he not the most gorgeous bird?

I took a lot of pictures of him - also a video which was cool because as I was filming, one of the many carp that are spawning on our front lawn right now swam through and I ended up with video of him as well. And a picture - see him? or her? I don’t know how you tell with a carp.

I can hardly believe that I’m leaving this for 4 out of the next 5 weeks. What was I thinking?

Tags: Georgian Bay, Ontario, Victoria Harbour