Category Archives: Rant

Oh Passport Canada, how I loathe you! I sent my Canadian Passport in to be renewed with their “Simplified Renewal” process. bullshit. My passport doesn’t expire until September 2008 but the Simplified Renewal requires you to be in the country at the time of the application. I am not worried about it for travelling because I’ve got my UK Passport (I’m a dual citizen)… but after over 2 months, I’m wondering about my passport. Two weeks ago, I sent in an email form to inquire about the status of my renewal, and they said they hadn’t received it, but not to worry because it was probably in the mail pile unopened. On Wednesday, I called Passport Canada to inquire about my passport (just for peace of mind). They said they had no record of it and they’ve already gone through their mail that arrived in September. I got very upset and asked them what they planned to do about losing my passport, long-form birth certificate, and health care card.  They said that it wasn’t their fault and that I should have tracked my package through Canada Post. I told them that they said that the package would arrive if I sent it by regular mail. I hung up the phone and was freaking out. I called my dad who said it was possible it was in the mail pile of October arrivals. He said that just to be safe I should call about replacing my birth certificate, health care card, [...]

I have had some traumatic events this week involving the bastard that calls his form of torture a profession. I speak of dentists in a whole – not just my evil dentist in particular. Yesterday I went to his horrible cave to have my teeth cleaned. His hygienist Fiona brought out the angry scraping tools first… I don’t need to describe the feeling of metal against your teeth, but it’s really like chewing tinfoil. Then she put this tool in my mouth that screamed like a drill, and honestly within 3 seconds of her putting this damn thing into my mouth, I screamed. I admit, I started tearing up out of sheer fear. This hygienist freaked out! She got really worried because I already have sensitive teeth and thin enamel. My orthodontist attacked some of my teeth with a diamond disc one day when I was 14, deciding that he needed to make more room in my mouth. He decided all on his own that he would shave my teeth of their enamel… which didn’t even work and now it is still painful to floss. So anyway, this tool that screams like a drill is apparently a cleaning tool that emits and electromagnetic buzz to attack the plaque that allegedly plagues my teeth. This tool also spurts water so I was allowed to hold the sucking-tool. Now, once this evil cleaning was done… with all the metal scraping, and violent flossing, and vicious attacking of my poor enamel-thin teeth… I [...]

So I’ve just converted, as many of you know, to Mac. After working on Macs so often at school I was sold. I’ve been saving since basically after Christmas, finally broke down and bought a Macbook through Apple Online with all my birthday money and savings. Then last night, as I’m trying to solve the iPod issues (I’ll get into that in a minute) I discover that they’ve just released NEW Macbooks! For a Macbook with the specs I got, the price has been reduced $200; For the price I paid, I could have got 120GB (over 80GB) and 2.16GHz (over 2.0GHz). I’m on hold with Apple Store right now. They just tried to offer me a $50 credit. Now the iPod issues! Oooh my. Have you ever seen a sad-pod icon? Well for your sake, I hope you never do! It means that your iPod’s hardware is screwed… and you need to replace it. Not such a big deal if you’ve got your iTunes all fine and dandy… but a HUGE deal if you were trying to use your iPod as a hard disc to transfer your songs from one computer to the other. (And your old computer is gone). I called Apple and they told me that my warranty has ended, which was weird since I swear I bought extended 2-year warranty. They also told me they could not guarantee that they could recover my songs, in fact they don’t even try. I’m actually finding this reeeeally funny, [...]

Computer Technicians need to stay ahead of the average user. I’ve been having issues while switching over to my laptop full time. I want to use my old PC hard drive as an external hard drive – so I bought a kit and installed it and ta da! I have an external hard drive. So I plug it into my MacBook and try to recover my files — mainly my school files, business files, photos and music. Everything is going peachy, until I try to recover my iTunes. All the files are “invisible” to protect music pirating. Now part of the problem is with iTunes; to discourage people from plugging in each other’s iPods and just dragging and dropping music, the files on an iPod are invisible too. So I downloaded TinkerTool for Macs, hoping to be able to access these invisible files on my iPod and recover my 3000+ songs. To be honest, I think that the average user would be using their iPod to recover after a hard drive crash or something – it’s another form of media backup. But, Apple never asked me… and TinkerTool only recovered 1300 songs. Apple describes how to move your library from one computer to another, but I didn’t think I’d need to prep for the move seeing as my hard drive was becoming external to my laptop. Anyway – so I give my mom my (new!) external hard drive, and my iPod (just in case) and she brings it into the [...]