Bell is ass raping Grandmas

Rogers is too.

For a princely sum of ~$25/mo you can get a whopping 2 (that’s TWO) Gigabytes worth of data to download from the Internet. Like omg, a whole 2 gigs? Really? Cuz that’s, like, half of my little USB stick.

Who’s going to pay for such a crappy plan? Grandmas, who just want to share some photos with their grandkids. And what happens when the kids send Grandma a digital video they made for her birthday? BAM! Grandma has to pay extra PER Gig over the measly 2 GBs.

And now Bell wants to limit the usage of all the small ISPs that buy service from Bell AND throttle traffic when there’s no need? FUCK YOU BELL. The only reason you have this monopoly is because of your infrastructure. Your infrastructure was built with taxpayer money. So fucking lay off the other ISPs, do something real to grow your business, and stop ass raping your customers!

I particularly liked one person’s comment: “A box of expired cereal can run that company better.” Amen.

P.S. Don’t even get me started on 15cents for incoming text messages!

Willis vs. Airport

WARNING: Lots of words ahead, for illiterate viewers click here to see what happened to me visually.

So, as some have heard I had quite an interesting time at the airport the other weekend. I was on a brief holiday from Canada back home to Jersey for my older brothers wedding, which was excellent. All was going well until my run in with customs at the Ottawa Airport. First, after waiting in a long ass line for about 30min, I spoke with one lady and attempted to explain my sitch. She didn’t buy what I was selling, so after gathering a few more tid-bits of information I was told to go to another line to wait. After another 15min I spoke to a guy and produced my training letter which seemed to convince him and I thought I was in the clear. I started to make my way out and just before I could taste the freedom another lady glanced at my papers and said, ‘oh, you go down there’, directing me down a hallway.

I cautiously walked down to, sigh, yet another line and several tables with people’s personals strewn about. One couldn’t help but notice how different everyone else looked compared to me…yes, I am a white male getting hassled at the border. Again, I waited another 20min in line until it was my turn up-for the second time I thought this would be cake, the gentleman swabbed my bag for God knows what and just as I was ready to pack it up he sees my laptop. Here is a little backlog about the room I was in, technically it was no mans land where anything could be done to me and I couldn’t do shit to leave. I wasn’t even aloud to make a phone call to let my ride know to put extra padding on my seat, cause I was getting bent over. The guy asks me some stupid questions like, do I use the computer online? do I download stuff? and then the striking one, do I have any obscene content on it? Definition of obscene: child p0rnography, rape or bestiality images/videos. My 80gb harddrive was search using OSX spotlight search, for *.jpeg, *.gif, .avi, *.mov and other such files. Each of these searches took 10s of minutes. Feeling confident that I didn’t have anything wrong I waited patiently while he scrolled through what seemed like thousands of images on my machine. NEWS FLASH: I’m working on image object detection for my master’s thesis and I have several public image databases loaded on my laptop. Along with that I had several face image dbs for a facial recognition project I had done last quarter. More questions started to arise about why I had so many images of a specific person and I tried to explain the jist of it, but I doubt he bought it. After the long drawn out searches he said I could leave, so I walked out feeling a bit disappointed that I didn’t get a reach around or even his number.

I just get pissed off more and more every time I think about this-so hopefully this will be the last time I have to visit this topic. I would enjoy if anyone else has good stories of their border crossing-comment it up.

</rant>

Benjamin Willis