Double Blind

Rogers has just fired their own broadside with the introduction of another virtual mobile service, Chatr, which feeds off of their own phone network (very similar to Fido, another Rogers-owned company).

It is very obvious with their pricing structure, and the cities that they are in that they are strictly trying to wipe out Wind Mobile and/or Mobilicity off the face of the planet. What’s hilarious is that Wind Mobile has no spectrum license in Quebec (other than the Ottawa-Gatineau area), and Rogers/Chatr’s service offerings are identical to the locations offered by Wind Mobile – Vancouver, Edmonton, Calgary, Toronto and Ottawa. On Montreal, they stated:

“We’re working out some translation issues in Montreal, but it will very soon be our sixth market,” Chatr’s senior vice-president Garrick Tiplady said in an interview.

Translation issues indeed! More like “There’s no rush since our competition isn’t there!”

You can be sure as Wind Mobile expands to other cities and/or expands their coverage in their existing cities, that Chatr will come up with “service enhancements” to incorporate those areas into their own “home network” as well.

Their pricing plan is, for the most part, identical to Wind Mobile’s structure, with the most notable exception that on Rogers/Chatr’s $35 plan, they charge 25 cents to recover your voicemail, and they charge for incoming text messages.

Since the coverage areas between Chatr and Wind is nearly identical, I have no idea who would sign up to them.

As I stated in a previous post, the new entrants to the Canadian wireless market are not going to be making any money. The only reason why Rogers is doing any of this is to bankrupt Wind Mobile and Mobilicity – Rogers/Chatr’s offering adds absolutely no value whatsoever to the Canadian mobile marketplace other than wasting consumer’s time as they have yet another offering to review.

An Angus Reid Survey has 47% of the people against scrapping the mandatory long form census, while 37% have supported the government.

The numbers, when you dig into them, are what I consider to be “50% partisan”, mainly that partisan affiliation is only partially and not fully correlated to whether you support the government’s decision.

One question that I think the survey should have asked, but they didn’t, is asking whether the person answering the poll in question has written the long form census, or not, instead of asking for political affiliation. It would be interesting to see what people filling in the long form census think of this question.

I have had the rarest of luxuries today, a day out by myself in the city. I really love the concept of the “tourist in your own city”, and I was in the Vancouver area for the day. Some thoughts that went through in my head:

0. The sunny, but not overwhelmingly hot weather in Vancouver is really, really nice. There is also a nice breeze.

1. Translink day-passes are $9 and is a good bargain for those that do not extensively use the transit system. A couple one-zone passes are $2.50 and two-zoners are $3.75 so it doesn’t take long to make the day pass worthwhile.

2. I was having coffee with a friend in downtown near the waterfront station and when we were sitting on one of those cement chairs around a dry fountain, a seagull pooped from up above, narrowly missing my friend and myself. He got a little bit of white splatter on the top of his hand, which was nothing compared to the brown soupy goo that was on the concrete below us. Probably the closest “bird strike” call I’ve had in my life.

3. Mobile technology is interesting – for example, I am writing this from a Starbucks near the Olympic Village Canada Line station. I was intending on doing some much-needed park board work, but the weather and environment make it far too distracting to get anything real done. This location, in particular, has really good natural light coming in and by virtue of its sub-optimal location, is not too densely populated.

4. I went to the Lonsdale Quay and resisted the myriad of goodies that were on sale there (especially the bakery – I love bakeries). I picked up some Tuscan soup thingy and it came with a bun. I forgot what the soup place was called at the Quay but it was quite tasty soup. The soup chef there said he has been making soup for 15 years. I am starting to restrain myself from eating excessive amounts of goodies since my metabolism is no longer as effective at shedding the calories, but man, looking at the stuff is mouth watering.

5. I walked around Ambleside park. Lots of dogs there. I noticed how they divided the park into an off-leash area and a leashed area. Very smart of them.

6. Park Royal South, what was interesting was that three tables in the mall had people playing chess against each other. Otherwise the air-conditioned mall felt quite sterile. The entire corridor between the Quay and Park Royal is being “spruced up”, I hardly recognize it anymore – not that go to North or West Vancouver very often.

7. The bus from West Vancouver to downtown Vancouver was much quicker getting through traffic than the cars, by virtue of having the bus lane bypass. There is so much of a crunch of cars trying to get on the Lion’s Gate Bridge – it makes you wonder if the city planners that originally conceived of the bridge would still think over 70 years later that it would be handling much, much, much more traffic but still have three lanes.

8. The Canada Line at the downtown Vancouver location headed south was packed. It is clear that they are going to have to figure out a way to increase rush hour capacity.

9. They were giving out free samples at Starbucks of their sandwiches, and they were very recently heated up. I took two samples, and they were quite good. While I wouldn’t go out of my way to order them, I could see why others would – they had the right amount of “crunch” and taste.

Now back to my boring work!

I notice with amusement that the Green Party of Canada apparently has a party constitutional requirement for a leadership race every four years. 2010 is a leadership year.

Apparently Elizabeth May is trying to get this requirement changed, but there are party members that are disagreeing with this and want to replace May.

I will say this (March 2009) and say it again (August 2009): As long as Elizabeth May is leader, the Green Party of Canada will never win a seat in Parliament.

Bernard Schulmann and Greg Morrow have some further thoughts on the issue – especially the Morrow article, which explains all of the mass resignations and staffing changes that have gone on in the party over the past bit. It has long since been clear that Elizabeth May is driving the party into the ground and that the only way that the party will continue receiving votes in elections is just through sheer inertia of the “Green” name as opposed to anything the organization is doing to attract voters.

I believe a voluntary long form census would provide statistically useless information simply because of selection bias – it would make the results easy to manipulate by statisticians as they perform “corrections” to this data.

However, I also do not like the argument of the other side that claims that a mandatory census form would result in reliable information. For example, nothing prevents people from just entering in bogus information in an attempt to retain their confidentiality. I am sure people that don’t like intrusive government questions will just give what they believe to be the most politically correct answer, or an answer that is most to be expected of them when they mail in, as opposed to getting truly reliable answers.

In today’s age, I don’t think anybody believes that the government can keep information secure, so expecting a government agency to keep your census return secure for 90 years is not a reasonable expectation. I am not sure how confidential the census data truly is – if they treated the information just like the CRA treats a tax return then at least there is an audit trail for access to that information. Still, you hear occasionally a CRA employee getting fired or charged for improper access of information, so it makes you wonder how many of these cases were settled internally without it being elevated to the public domain.

As such, while the information is desirable to have, the ability to get that information reliably will continue to degrade over the next few decades.

I’m back from my break in Alberta.

I find it interesting that a lot of people will not do long-distance driving at night. I find driving at night is always easier than driving in the day (as long as you are not doing it in winter) simply because you can drive a lot faster and not have to worry about passing the inevitable slow vehicles on the road.

Even though Google said that the trip from St. Albert to where I live in Chilliwack is 13 hours and 15 minutes, I managed to do the drive in 10 hours and 40 minutes, even including three stops along the way (two for gas and one for bathroom).

At around Blue River, BC it was very cold at night and there was frost on some of the trees. It was also very foggy in certain areas, so much that you could only see three or four strips of yellow line in the middle of the road, so if a moose or something was on the road at the time you had no chance even at a reduced speed.

There was also an impressive lightning storm around Mount Robson Provincial Park.

There was also a deer crossing the street at the junction of Highway 16 and Highway 5 in Jasper National Park. Other than this it was an unremarkable drive.

Now what is rather eerie is that there is an elderly couple that lived in the suburb of Edmonton that we went to and they went for a trip to Chilliwack, but apparently never made it (credits to 89.5 Hawk FM News):

Alberta RCMP are asking for help in finding an elderly couple who left their home in St. Albert for a B.C. vacation

They left July 3 and haven’t been seen since.

Lyle Thomas McCann, 78, Marie Ann McCann, 77, were driving a 1999 green and white Gulf Stream Sun Voyager motorhome and towing a light green Hyundai Tucson.

They were headed for Chilliwack to meet a family member on July 10 but never showed.

Police say their motorhome was last seen in the Edson area on July 5.

The motorhome’ s Alberta licence plate is NBZ 836 while the trailer’s plate is ZPK 289.

… today, this was updated to:

Almost 3,800 people have joined a Facebook group to help an Alberta family find their missing parents.

Marie Ann and Lyle McCann, both in their late 70s, have been missing since July 3rd.

They were driving to Chilliwack to meet up with family members.

Mounties say their disappearance is ”extremely suspicious.”

The burned remains of the couple’s motorhome was found in a remote area near Edmonton, but the SUV they were towing is missing.

The Mounties are conducting an air and ground search.

My hopes that it ends well for this couple, but given the fact that there is a lot of “remote area” near Edmonton it looks like they were robbed.