Videotron and Cable Internet

I returned to Quebec City once again, after almost 2 weeks of Waterloo (non-?)adventures. Jorghnassen will be able to fill in the rest of the details, but I knew that I had to return here. For whatever reasons, I still had to return to settle some things.

One of the things I did before leaving for Hongtario was downgrade my internet service from Videotron, seeing that I would not be around for about half a month. There's three plans that home consumers would consider: the basic, the high speed, and the extreme high speed. When Big Pu signed me up for cable service eons ago, there weren't such distinctions and the limits were completely nonexistent. Once Videotron started getting more popular and people started downloading even more videos and crap like... well, you know... they created the other types of accounts. BASIC (or "Super Ultra Light") for the person who doesn't know any better; HIGH SPEED for the user who likes to do moderate browsing and downloading but still has to say "OMG WOAH HORSEY" every so often; and EXTREME (or "Pirates Ahoy!") where nothing is limited and the bandwidth should be enough for the, uh, Connoisseur of fine digital media.

Videotron rolled me over to the High Speed account, which I have kept until last month. I then decided to downgrade the account to Basic, which I knew would lower the down and up limits, from 20GB/10GB to 1GB/1GB. But I didn't know that the bandwidth would also go down from 7Mbps/820kbps to 600kbps/128kbps. Yay go cable >:( But at least it helps to not go over the limit too quickly, since everything downloads so fricking slowly!!! (*head exploding in frustration*)

Then to make matters worse, by the time I turned on this computer from 2 weeks of inactivity, there were 11 WINDOWS UPDATES, all security related. So I blew through about 1/10 of my limit in one day. (If it keeps up I'm going to have to call the guy and tell him to change my account again.)

/Internet account whining.

In other whining, I have yet to obtain a criminal record check that doesn't cost 60 bucks and two blisters only to be inadequate for the picky needs of the OCT.

Here's PJ the 3rd, with new best friend Mama-Mega-Modem. 

Old Skool

(Telephony) Kickin' it old skool!


Real old skool! [Expletive deleted] yeah!

Strawberry Shortcake, my sister's old school bed cover that complemented my old school Smurfs bed cover.

The Videotron folks sent two guys over today to migrate my crap Bell service over to the Videotron telephone service. My mum paid 40$/month/something crazy under Bell. Combined with cable modem and basic cable tv service, the new telephone system would cost less than 20$/month/something cheaper. What's the catch? Well, you need to have subscribed to all three of these services to get that price. Thus, I would estimate the cost of everything together to be 80$/month/something sad.

Anyway, they worked around for about 3 hours, trying to figure out where the phone feed was for most of that time, until I finally got the service. And I managed to pick up year-old dustbunnies at the same time. Sadly (!) I have to give up using the old cable modem (with the busted plastic power insert) for this faboo black mega-modem. And on top of that, my (stupid) phone that always got tangled up in everything stopped working properly so I replaced it with this old school black rotary phone. (Now, I have no clue if the rotary thing still works, or if the phone company lets me use pulse dialing, but what the hell - I barely call out anyway.)

The guys were very nice. One of them saw my degrees on the wall and was impressed, and he saw the "Great Baseball" Sega Master System game sitting next to the door and was also impressed. I think the general lack of any sense of self-respect in this apartment was impressive. He was most impressed when he pulled out the phone cord in the kitchen, having found it in a state of complete crapness (ie. holey and exposedy) and found that the phone still worked.

APPEND

I keep checking back on ECN's site for jobs in Quebec, and now it seems that my old school is missing both a phys. ed. teacher and the french teacher.

Rant arrgh

Mama's being all pissy again. This is her point of view.
1) I am too stupid and ignorant of the "real world," I can't communicate properly, and I can't "yell at the kids" to "make them listen to me," thus I will never be a good teacher, or any kind of teacher whatsoever.
2) She has known enough people in her lifetime that she knows how people should act in certain roles. Which is also why I will never be a good teacher.
3) I sit around at home doing godknowswhat because I enjoy it, and I don't do any jobhunting whatsoever.
4) The internet is stupid and high-speed cable is completely useless because it's too expensive.

She went on and on into a huge blanket lecture (yell?) about how I will never amount to any sort of teacher and that I should just do whatever, and sometimes lie in job applications... especially to be hired as a secretary (or whatnot) since it apparently doesn't matter that the job qualifications state that you have to be vocationally trained in secretarial studies.

---

I don't think there's any amount or set of words that can quite convey the complete rage and frustration put together into a hurricane of pent-up yelling and destruction that I could possibly contain inside my chest and throat. Who doesn't yearn for the day when they can utterly defeat the spite-filled words of their unbelieving parents by just simply doing everything that they never trusted or understood what you could do?

But that day does not come soon.

I'll let you know what I am doing after it is done.