Category Archives: Technology

Woo some goodies…

Today Maggie, Brandon and I went out for dim sum with Will & Michelle and it was fun! We haven’t seen them in a while but we talked about kids, their new condo and about the wedding last year that we couldn’t attend unfortunately… The food was good but Brandon was pretty fussy and cut lunch short. I’m always surprised how quickly he can “recharge”, he slept for about 5 minutes before we got home and didn’t need to sleep again in the afternoon!

Earlier I also picked up a hockey bag to lug my airsoft gear around, my old Pantac gear bag has a large tear on its side and is no longer usable so I figure I would replace it with something else. The hockey bag works, it’s large enough to carry my gear (even my plate carriers) and doesn’t look like anything suspicious, which is helpful when you have nosy neighbors haha.

Time will tell if this was a good $50 investment…

Jason came by in the late afternoon, he got me to look at his M16 PTW because last time out it was chopping too… I couldn’t take apart his inner barrel for some reason so instead I just gave him one of mine and afterwards it fired ok for me. Hehe he was also kind enough to drop off my new “tactical iPad case” and I have to say it’s pretty darn cool!

Fits pretty well but it’s also a bit bulky… Still I absolutely hate the stock Apple case so I think I’ll use this thing more and see how it goes.

Henry also came by to pick up his CA CQBR, there was nothing wrong with the mechbox his jamming issue was due to a stuck hopup rubber. Busy day, I’m looking for a much quieter time tomorrow, Maggie has to go into the office so it’ll just be me and the boy.

No 3G data plan for iPad?

Looks like pickings in Canada are slim for those looking to get mobile service for their iPads… It’s a pity, yes I know I can sign up with Bell or Rogers but seeing as how I absolutely hate both of those companies, I’d rather go without than sign up with those jerks.

I did look at Virgin Mobile however its data plans aren’t as good as the big guys but it may be my only option if I want data for my iPad. Telus has a flex plan (like Virgin) but I know people who have had bad experiences with them too. What to do, what to do…

On another note, my mom is in Orlando and hopefully I’ll have pictures of our new place down there very soon. 🙂

Happy Chinese New Year (early)

Well this certainly has been a fun weekend so far…

On Friday Mario, Stephen, Helene, Jason, Jessie & Logan came over to our place for dinner. It was a spur of the moment thing and we even got to celebrate Jessie’s birthday. 🙂 We didn’t do much, just ate dinner and sat around talking (which I quite enjoy) but people didn’t stay over long. J&J wanted to get Logan home and Brandon was pretty tired so we wrapped things up just aver 9PM.

The weather was poor so I decided to drive Mario home, on the way I went to my parents place first as I bought my Aunt Dora’s old iPad (she has an iPad 2) and wanted to pick it up but more on that later. The drive was pretty slippery on the local roads but the highway was alright. I’m certainly happy that I have my Michelin X-Ice 2 winter tires on though and they were definitely worth the money!

As most of my friends know, I’m not an Apple fan but I couldn’t pass up this deal. Aunt Dora was letting her first gen 16GB 3G iPad go for $200 and it seemed like a pretty good deal to me.

Initially I was told that the iPad was the 32GB model but for $200 I can’t complain. I did notice that she had her name etched on the back of the iPad but meh it doesn’t bother me either. It comes with what I think is the stock case which is a dust magnet and I’m sure it’s only a matter of time before I replace it. The iPad has been jail broken though I did not install many apps yet. Brandon also likes playing with the thing a lot.

Tonight we went to my parents place to celebrate Chinese New Year and man I ate too much. Typical family gathering, lots of food and fun and I’m always so happy to see people give Brandon a lot of love. 🙂 He played his part too and was very cute the whole night.

Now I’m just relaxing, little B is asleep and I’m watching a bit of TV. Tomorrow will probably be low key too, just the way I like it. 😀

Nice long weekend…

So as I mentioned earlier, I had a nice long weekend and man was it action packed. 🙂 On Friday I bought some computer components and totally overhauled my computer, about time too as my rig was easily 4 years old already. I picked up an Intel i7 2600k along with 8GB of DDR3 memory, a Gigabyte P67 motherboard, Seasonic X760W PSU and topped it off with a Zotac GeForce 580. I know Intel will be refreshing its CPU line up shortly but I’m no longer an enthusiast and didn’t want to wait. I reused my hard drives, I wanted to go SSD but had a hard time justifying the price considering I purchased a 300GB WD Raptor early last year.

After installing Windows 7, I immediately installed Battlefield 3 and that’s when the fun happened. 🙂 I wrapped up the single player campaign on Friday (fun but short) and played a bit of mulitplayer. My new machine doesn’t “feel” much faster than my old computer when I do my office work but my god it’s many times faster when playing games, that’s for sure! Nice that I’ll be ready for the new generation of games, at least for a little while…

Saturday afternoon Stephen, Mario and I went to Chris & Jim’s Werewolf themed game and it was fun. I was not officially tasked with a command position in the game thread but on the field, as usual I was asked to lead. Things started off slowly but the night progressed nicely. On the second and third restarts (after all the humans were dead), I got a lot of action and man I have to say I absolutely love my PVS-14!!! 😀 It’s seriously not fair but whatever that’s not my problem right? Despite having a technological advantage, it was still quite difficult as the majority of the play was in tight quarters indoors. Still I was able to stealthy move around for most of the game, even when I was stalking the other human faction. 😉

At around 2AM Mario, Stephen, Brian & I were on a mission (all of us had NV, we could see everything! :)) and as I was walking through the rear of the second building, I happened to walk right off the loading dock (about 50cm off the ground) as I was scanning for targets outdoors and didn’t really watch where I was going. As I fell though I twisted my body so I landed on my back and thus saving my PTW and PVS-14 from potential damage. I hurt my right ankle a bit (it’s a bit swollen today), my right knee (sore but ok) and my right elbow (very tender, didn’t have elbow pads and I hit the ground with some force…) but so be it, that’s the price one has to pay if they want to play right.

On the way back I felt pretty good but after consuming 10 chocolate timbits (I was hungry) I began to get really tired, so tired I had to pull off and let Stephen drive. Luckily he was completely alert and didn’t mind taking over.

Today I didn’t do much, I played with Brandon, took a nap in the afternoon and played with my computer a bit more. All in all an excellent weekend and I’m so excited to start my new job tomorrow! I won’t have any trouble going to sleep tonight, I’m still pretty wasted from the night game.

All good

So my hotmail and MSN Messenger are back up and to ensure this doesn’t happen again I’m going to remove my work machine’s outlook access to my hotmail account. 🙂 I have to say even though the automated “help” system sucked, the support team once you submit a ticket actually worked pretty fast and I was only blocked for around 24 hours.

Last night I attended a game at CQB Paintball and it was fun. I don’t usually play games Sunday night as I hate getting up the next morning (getting up this morning sucked) but it was fun and it was a good crowd. Haha I laughed when one of the other guys asked if I were a newb since I was in civilian attire. 😉 The games were pretty good overall, I got to use the 40mm launcher quite a bit and even got to use the PVS-14 when it got dark so all in all a good game.

I did get shot in the ear at ~5′ and that kind of sucked (even though the guy told us he wasn’t hostile and wasn’t suppose to be playing the part) but that type of thing happens.

Woo Maggie & Brandon return in less than a week, I can’t wait!!!

Sigh Windows Live problems…

So it looks like my computer at work has a spam bot or something on it as it’s sent out a shit load of spam emails the last couple of days and because of that Microsoft has suspended my account. 🙁 Man talk about a freaking pain in the ass, what makes things worse is that the Microsoft automated help is of absolutely useless as it keeps going in circles… Anyway I’ve changed the PW and escalated the problem, hopefully it’ll be fixed soon. Till it has to my family and friends please use my colinsun.com email address to contact me and my MSN will be down as well.

God.

Internet Usage Based Billing

So I know I’m late to the game but yes I was also outraged at the CRTC ruling that allowed the big ISPs (who lease out their networks to smaller player) to force the smaller providers to adhere to the same ridiculous bandwidth rules that the big telcos have in place.  Basically Bell Canada wants to limit anyone who runs DSL with them to 25GB a month and if you go over your limit, you have to pay $1.95 GB per gigabyte up to 300GB or something insane like that.  I think there is a limit on overages but I’m a bit fuzzy on the details because well I’ve been busy with Brandon.  Rogers was going to enforce something similar in July but now everything is temporarily on hold as the CRTC said they’d take 60 days to review its original decision.  The Conservative government has already said it will overturn the ruling if the CRTC remains in place.

While I’m glad to see that consumers are getting well less screwed I’d just like to let you know, if you’re using Bell, Rogers, Shaw or any of the big ISPs you already have some sort of UBB in place as all of them have strict bandwidth caps.  There are many reasons the big guys say they need to do this but to me it’s basically a cash grab.  I love the infrastructure argument, considering only “the last mile” of the connection is privately funded while the rest is paid for by the tax payers.  Next about the regular users subsidizing high bandwidth users, do the people who use less of than their caps get refunds?  Finally as technology progresses, more and more data will be available online, games, youtube, netflix, etc it all requires more and more bandwidth by putting these caps in place now, the big ISPs can reap huge rewards in the future.

There’s a good article in The Star

While addressing the CRTC decision is a good start, Canadians will be disappointed — some even surprised — to learn that Internet “metering” is already almost uniformly in place. The “caps” are the existing and common provider limits on usage, above which you are billed extra. They are unlikely to disappear anytime soon, what ever the CRTC decides after its review.
Source: The Star

Yes we’re generally suckers here in Canada and the big ISPs know this, that’s why they pull BS like this all the time.  If you haven’t yet, switch your ISP to one of the 3rd party providers (I’m on Teksavvy and love it) not only am I not restricted to what I do online, it also costs less!

TekSavvy cable is FAST!

So for the last year I’ve been using TekSavvy as my internet provider and I have not had any problems with its DSL service, other than it being relatively slow. Speed tests show I get about 2.5Mbps down and 500Kbps up which I think is slower than average (advertised 5Mbps down, 800Kbps up) but that’s what you get when you are far from the switching station.  Anyway in the summer TekSavvy rolled out its cable internet service and it’s something that I’ve been interested in for a while.

I briefly used Rogers cable internet after moving into my house (due to my Primus nightmare, those jerks yes I am still bitter about it) and it was pretty darn quick so I had high hopes for TekSavvy’s cable internet too (since they piggy back off Rogers).  The technician came to my house two days ago to hook things up and boy is it fast! At 8AM in the morning (yeah I know it’s early and not many people are online), speed tests say I get 22Mbps down and I just tested it at 9PM, which should be during peak times and I’m still getting a solid 19Mbps down!

😀  Yeah I know the server location is at its most ideal spot, whatever I still love it!  It’s definitely worth the added cost over the DSL service, hehe I love my torrent speeds.  Anyway yeah just wanted to share!

The star of the show and a new TV

Yesterday a few of my friends came over to see Brandon and it was great.  Thanks to Ali (who spearheaded the whole thing), Frank, Jenny, Neil, Mike, Ange & Istvan for coming over, the Sun family certainly had an awesome time! =D  LOL I had so much fun that I forgot to take pictures of things, that’s got to be the first.  Maggie told me later that Brandon was fussy earlier in the day but when the guests were over, he certainly performed and was at his cutest.  We ordered pizza from Pizza Pizza and they screwed up our order and the food ended up taking about an hour and a half to get to us (sent the order to the wrong store) but I guess at least it was free. At around 9ish the folks left, it was past Brandon’s bed time anyway.

Time for a new TV

Earlier in the week my old Viewsonic 37″ LCD TV died (yeah I know, I bought it a long time ago when I didn’t have money lol!) which really sucked because I wasn’t looking to replace my TV just yet.  Anyway forced into it, I looked at a bunch of reviews and decided to pick up a LED TV, specifically the LG 42″ LE5300.  It’s suppose to be a good mainstream LED TV and many of the reviews I’ve read said so, so I figure why not.  We then went to a few stores to get some quotes and settled on a deal at Futureshop.  At the store I asked if they could give me a better deal and the sales rep upgraded me to the higher end LG Infinita line (same size) for the same price ($899) so I figure why not let’s do it.

I take the TV home and after lunch I hook everything up. At first everything looks good, the picture is great and the TV is very easy to use but wait a second there’s no audio coming from the TV!  I tested the TV with my PS3 through HDMI, my Wii through its AV connectors and finally video and MP3s on an USB stick and nothing worked.  Pissed, I called Futureshop and the sales person (the only person I could talk to) tells me to bring it in and he can test it, before I do that though I also called LG’s customer service and they were of no help… =(

Grudgingly I pack everything up and haul the TV back to the store and after about 45 minutes of fiddling, they were also not able to get the sound working on the TV.  So now I have a choice, ask for a refund or pick up something else.  His first offer is is giving me a $40 discount on the original model I wanted, lol yeah that’s not going to work.  He then tells me about this 47″ LG LE5400 (which I thought was only a BestBuy product) that they have in the back and I’m intrigued.  I was kind of wary of going with another LG TV but to be fair I’ve had pretty good luck with LG products in the past and the other TVs in the same class (Toshiba, Panasonic and even Sony) were a lot thicker!  I mean what’s the point of buying a LED TV that’s only 1 or 2 CM thinner than an equivalent LCD right…

So I play it cool and tell the sales guy that Maggie is not really interested and she really just wants us to get our money back so we can get something else and he asks me to wait a second.  He then says I can have the 47″ LE5400 for $1050!  Yeah that’s good enough for me because I distinctly remember it selling for $1299 at BB when I was looking up prices earlier. When I get home the first thing I do is set up the TV up and thank god everything works.  In the back of my mind I was wondering if I should have gotten them to test the TV in store but I figure two in a row is next to impossible right?

Now I have a new pretty LG 47″ LED TV and boy I have to say this thing is damn thin, its only around 3cm thick!

Isn’t it sweet? =D  Heh I threw in a picture of Brandon for good measure, yeah he’s not going to sleep tonight easily…