sketches of the mind

After a 15 year hiatus Cirque Du Soleil returned to Toronto. I was fortunate enough to catch the show last night at the Air Canada Centre with Neesa and her brother. This was my 3rd Cirque Du Soleil show (I saw Quidam in 2004 and Verekai in 2006, both in Sydney) and as always it was a feast for the senses!

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Comment I submitted via the TTC website online comment form just now:

Having travelled to Sydney, Australia recently I noticed something that I thought was really great about the Cityrail system in relation to weekly and monthly passes.

In Sydney passes can be purchased on any day of the month and the machine will calculate the expiry 7 days or 30/31 days from the date and time of purchase. This is really flexible, and in contrast to the current TTC system, does not limit the customer’s purchasing options. Logically it makes sense to offer a weekly or monthly pass from the date and time of purchase, not from the beginning of the month only or the beginning of the week only.

I would encourage TTC to investigate the possibility of implementing a similar system for purchasing weekly and monthly passes.

I have also had feedback from visitors to Toronto who suggested that a weekend pass would be a good idea, instead of having to purchase two daily passes.

I love the new website design, can’t wait to see it go live!

Regards,
AC

Fingers crossed that the message goes to somebody who cares.

So my friend Emma sends me a message on facebook to let me know that she saw me on SBS news the other night. She then sends me another message to say that the video is available online!

Yeah totally random… I didn’t even know that I was being filmed. I happened to be at Bondi that day for a training course and was at lunch with some folks from the training course.

You can see my 5 seconds here:

The full video can be viewed on the SBS website for a limited time until SBS takes it off (in the ‘Videos - Watch Online’ section, you need to scroll down, click on ”Oil Prices Spark Recession Fear”. I’m at 1:19).

Funny thing is that the footage has absolutely nothing to do with the story! Ah wells, I’ll still take it

Last week was L’Oréal Fashion Week here in Toronto. A classmate from my Digital Capture 1 photography class suggested that we go check it out so I registered online for an industry pass (even though I don’t work in the industry I figured that I could fudge it) and on Wednesday night I made my way to Nathan Phillips Square for Night 3 of the event. The industry pass cost $50 and could be used all week. It also allowed entry to the photographers’ area, also referred to as “the pit”.

Walking into the registration tent I wondered if the staff would ask me for credentials to prove I was actually in the industry but to my surprise they did not. I even managed to help my classmate Chris get a pass (we claimed that he worked for me) so score! It still cost him $50 and there was a risk that we couldn’t get into the 8pm show because from what we were told, with eight minutes left until the scheduled start, it was packed.

Chris and I entered the main tent and were met with the world of glitz and glamour. Everybody had their game face on. Here you were either somebody or you wanted to be somebody, and it was clearly evident with all the gorgeous and well dressed people walking around. Chris and I sported our cameras and our industry passes around our necks so we easily passed as photographers.

Being our first time at the event we didn’t know where to go to catch the show and see the runway. There was a large congregation of people towards the back of the tent, and we guessed that the runway was nearby but we couldn’t see it. At first it seemed that we had no hope of getting to the front. So we stood at the back of the queue for a good fifteen or so minutes before I noticed some blue lights coming out of a tent in front of us. I pointed Chris to it and suggested that maybe that was where the runway was. The girl next to us then mentioned that with our industry passes we could bypass the queue and go right in! So we did just that.

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One thing that puts Canada behind many other countries is the extremely high mobile rates available to consumers. I quickly realized that something was amiss when within the first month of activating my wireless (mobile) Rogers pay-as-you-go SIM card I had used up all of the credit that I had purchased. I had assumed that there would be enough credit to last me at least three months, if not six!

What I discovered was that not only was I being charged per minute for my outbound calls but I was also being charged for incoming calls! What a joke. This concept was completely foreign to me as I didn’t have anything like this on any plan that I was on in Sydney.

I complained about the situation to my friend Emery, a true Torontonian, and he was quick to point me to the following chart:

At first glance the chart looked potentially fabricated, like somebody was taking the piss out of the Canadian mobile data industry and exaggerating the figures. Experience however tells me that it may be closer to the truth than I had originally thought.

Rogers, Fido (also owned by Rogers) and to a lesser extent Bell certainly have the market in their grips. “Oligopoly” some would call it.

On a positive (more positive than otherwise) note Rogers has two attractive plans for saving on mobile rates - the $1 a Day Unlimited Evenings & Weekends Plan and the 1¢ Evenings & Weekends Plan. For more info on these refer here. As always be careful to read the fine print. I’ve decided to stick with my All Day plan simply because it’s unlikely that I’ll be forcing people to call me after 8pm, which is where I’d get most benefit/savings from those plans. I may have to think about it further.

Related reading
- Canada Worse than 3rd World Countries when it comes to Mobile Data Access
- Canadian Mobile Rates and the effect