Back to my adventure, enough of my rant.  After driving up a few thousand feet up a muddy mountain, I arrived at my lodge.  Wow.  It was amazing, just perfect for me!  It even had a stockpile of wood outside!

After a great night, I slept in.  I couldn’t help it.  I was too comfortable at that lodge and I could sleep next to that woodstove all day!  However, I got my butt out of bed and started my climb.  I never made it to the top (~12000ft), but I did get to around 10,059ft (verified by gps).  The glacier was too soft and I did slip a few times.  One of the slips really hurt my wrist and that just took too much of my energy to keep going.  The climb was not too hard, I never had any straight climbs or inverted angles, it was just a wall of ice.  My normal camera was out of service, luckily I got a great shot from my cellphone camera.

Will I go again?  HELL YES.  When?  I have no idea.  Will I persue a higher peak?  Probably not.  I enjoyed this type of climb and will seek out other climbs like it.  Mt Rainier, here I come again!

I rented a log cabin in the Canadian rockies for this weekend.  I will be using a skidoo to get there.  The log cabin has a woodstove, a ton of firewood and 1 bedroom.  The cabin is near the “base” of a popular climbing route, so I should be among climbers. 

I am hoping for clear weather as I will be making this climb with one other person and no one else.  Packed my bags with 2 ice axes, picked up some expensive crampons and some quality bungie rope…hopefully I have time to take some quality pictures  

Other plans?  Nothing… just sit on my ass and relax, no cell phone service, no electricity (without a generator, that is).

I should be back Monday or Tuesday.  If not, send someone to pick me up, I’ll be around 52 09N 117 27W (google it…) and skidooing the river to route 93 (yes, I have my permit!!)

Today, I am going to rant, complain and really put down a specific company: “Avalon Communities”.  They won property management company of the year in 2007.  In all honesty, I live in a quiet, relaxing apartment.  I do not hear my neighbors at all.  It’s a great place.  However, if I have something broken, or have a question, that is a whole other ballgame.   Stopping before I get too far, this is not the point of this post.  This post is about GREED.

When I first moved here, the prices were just raised by a couple of hundred.  Right away, that should have been a red flag.  I questioned them and they offered me a free months rent.  That was great, an extra month to save money! My greed got the best of me and I signed a lease.  I did not want to feel stuck here for too long, so I signed a short lease.  I paid a bit more per month, but I knew I wouldn’t be permanently stuck.  I fell in love with my apartment, it’s close to work, close to local shops and away from most people. Did I mention quiet? 

Unfortunately, all good things must come to an end…but it should not have been so soon!  My apartment complex is now considered a “luxury” apartment complex.  This week, almost my entire floor received a personally delivered notice.  Effectively, once your lease expires, your rent will be increasing by at least $200, some people (like me), $400.  The letter was essentially: “Thank you, now fuck you.” (Slapshot reference).  I thought, wow, the prices in the area must have skyrocketed!  I look at rent listings in my area, but they are still well below my apartment.  What gives?  Apparently, this entire building has no vacancies!  What better way of generating income by raising rent on apartments people call home.

As of last night, I’ve been packing and finding a new place to move to.  I can honestly say, it was time not well spent*.

*For lawyers: Avalon’s motto is time well spent, my line was “time not well spent”….

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

 It was quite amazing, impressive and that just made my day.  When I went down to claim my lost luggage, it was there!  My bags were there!!  Of course, not everything was perfect.  I discovered a few new holes and missing parts to my suitcase and my locks were cleanly cut off (yes, TSA approved locks).  Oh well, getting back to a sunny, blue sky, Seattle REALLY made my day.

Back to flight woes, found out why there was a whackload of cancellations: Plane “crash” at the airport I flew out of.  I took off just before that plane.  The freezing rain really took its toll and the plane just couldn’t stop on the runway.  So, the plane was parked on a snowbank.  No injuries, just one less of a plane to fly.  My flight got re-routed after take off because our landing gear was frozen.  That was fun.  I did not find out till after the flight landed.  Apparently, they were expecting a worse landing.

I do know one thing that is for sure: If I actually make this flight, somebody else will be blogging about missing their flight and being screwed over, once again, by NWA.

 Luckily, I’m getting a hotel tonight.  I am writing this from the terminal, too lazy to check for the city.  I am not 100% sure where I am right now, but it is either Pittsburg, Pennsylvania or St. Paul, Minneapolis.  Was this on my itinerary?  No.  Final destination?  Seattle.  Some bad weather and many delays caused my connection in Detroit to be shifted to either Pittsburg or Minneapolis…I was just too damn tired and slept most of the flight and I did not hear what the captain said.  With the slew of people (88 or so) complaining around me, I just found a power plug in and went online  

Hopefully there is something fun to do in (insert city here) and I do not get mugged doing the above.  I will whine to NWA tomorrow night, after I arrive at my destination.  Hopefully I will eventually see my luggage one day.  I’m worried I may never see my bottles of Raki 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).