My move to the USA was very rushed.  I literally had less than 3 days to pack an entire house, gather my belongings and declare everything for the USA.  Suffice to say, I declared a fish and nothing else.  After I had physically moved to the USA, I did not receive anything.  My personal belongings were delayed with customs, lost in the wrong end of the country, and finally arriving 91 days after I had left Canada.

Luckily, or as I thought, I received everything.  Sure, a lot of items got smashed, destroyed and needed replacement, but I received all my crap.  Today, I got a surprise!  2 more boxes of crap I completely forgot about.  Do not ask me how they found my new address, but those guys in brown found me and brought me some crap I’ve forgotten about.  As soon as I opened those boxes, old memories really came back to me!

Inside these boxes, apparently a possible threat to national security, were all my old electrical hacks.  I built fm transmitters, directional mini antennae’s, magnetic debit/credit card reader, and a whole lot of other random and useless junk.  Most of these were indeed pet projects, curious endeavors and simple fun I had as a young teen.

Curiously, or what I can remember, everything I packed in these boxes did arrive.  No markings, no government stamps, nada.  Even my big copper coil tied to a capacitor was in this box.  I’m too scared to fire it up to see if it still works.  The thought of sending an EMP shock wave across my apartment and cooking all my hard drives scares me a little.  Unlike back home, I no longer have the luxury of big fields of nothing to test my experiments.  Except for 7th grade science fair, that was a lot of colourful tv screens…

Today, I brought my car in for an oil-change.  It was scheduled to take an hour or so, but I did not have the time to wait around and took their rental car to work.  After being in the shop for most of the day, I received a phone call letting me know I had a “few” problems.  Not only did I have a bunch of “problems”, but they decided to fix them for me without asking.  I had a complementary service and full tune-up scheduled from 40,000 miles, under warranty, that I was going to use in June.  Instead of charging me for all these problems, they used my free 40k tune-up, without doing the tuneup!  They told me I’d need to get an alignment done too, but I’d need to make another appointment for that; it would have been nice if they called me in the morning and told me all this right away…

Anyway, back to my post.  BIOS updates.  After driving my car around, I started noticing some things.  First of all, my odometer was wrong.  I brought the car in with 36737 miles on the odometer, the trip odometer said 301 miles.  After I left, I had 36739 on the odometer and 8 miles on the trip odometer.  Am I being overly anal? Possibly, but it was still odd.  My radio station presets were gone!  Also, they used to be labeled A0 to A9, now they are labeled P0 to P9.  The last time I mucked around with my car’s computer, my sunroof started acting up, so did my passenger airbag detector.  Oh, my passenger side window was a little odd too.  Either way, I decided to log into the car’s computer again.  Disappointingly, I got myself a lovely hyperterm connection error.  Seems like the qnx subsystem is off-limits for the time being, until I find time to figure it out again

Assuming you are using their mobile browser, on their mobile devices, you should not be charged for your browsing.  Use a third party phone?  5 cents a kilobyte.  Yes folks, welcome to 90′s.  Even using a third party browser will ding you heavily.

I am used to talking other European providers and their “unlimited plans” (capped at 200MB) and really ranting about them, but Rogers Canada?  You would think Canada’s sole GSM based monopoly provider would be friendly and nice. 

Well, this post is a rant and a way to get by their greedy ways. 

Seeing that I may have a slight influence and this will get a LOT of attention, I will just say what you need to know.  If you are crazy enough to pull it off, awesome, but I will *not* help ANYONE with any extra data (cheap pun intended)!

Rogers mobile phones use a builtin browser and that uses a specific APN.  That APN has “free” internet.  Take that APN, use it to connect with another program (or computer data card), and you now have “unlimited” and they’ll think you’re using their browser. 

If you know what I am saying, you are already on your way.  If you do not, sorry, wrong camp guys.  I put “free” and “unlimited” in quotes, only Rogers knows best how to fix/screw their customers.

Disclosure:  I work with mobile phones, I used to be a customer of Rogers (5 years with them and another 4 years when they bought their only competitor).

What do I plan to do with this server?  I have no idea.  I put in 1TB of storage on a RAID 10, 4x500GB drives, SATA2.  There is about 2GB of ram and it is running Windows 2003 Server as its host and VMWare server running another Windows 2003 Server and Debian J  I will most likely use it as a form of storage and offload my web traffic on it when my other servers are overloaded. 

Nothing like hosting your own backup solution, just need to upgrade my encryption algorithm:  3DES (encrypt/decrypt/encrypt, 1 KEY).