Henry Lum

Golden moments

Administrator — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 14:06:10 +0000

In the past 2 weeks, I have been paying attention to the Winter Olympics when I am taking a break after getting my son to sleep. Normally I don’t really care much about Olympics since it’s just another major sporting event with many mini sport competition. The difference here is that Canada is a hosting nation, embracing the world coming over to Vancouver as a really big party. Canada has shown our hospitality and you can see that on television there are tons of party everywhere in Vancouver. We have shown to the world our national pride, and in all the stadiums you see it’s basically a sea of red and white embracing our maple leaf flag, and we shamelessly tell the world that hockey is our sport. This is the kind of unity that I have not seen before and Canadians all over wants the world to know that we are a proud country. I’m planning to get a red and white jersey too whenever I actually get a chance to go shopping.

We live in a large and vast country with strangely divided politics and divided interests, but never have I seen before a united country all wanting the same thing. You can hear loudly in the stadiums and in the streets:

We want Gold.

Badly. And we did. And to top it off, we have the poster-boy of Canadian hockey scoring a golden goal in sudden-death overtime to get this gold. How golden can it get?

To all the hard-working athletes, you do own the podium, and I am proud to be a Canadian.

New year’s resolution

Administrator — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 03:48:54 +0000

I find that lately one of my pet peeves has been talking on conference calls. It’s part of my daily job to communicate with colleagues in different offices, and a lot of time we use an audio conference bridge to talk. One of the biggest annoyance I find that it of course overall poor audio quality, and we spend much of our time in these meetings to figure out how to correct the problem. Effectively the first 10 minutes of each conference call becomes a witch hunt to find who has the cheapest PC speakers or microphones. It’s not even we have participants calling in from cell phones but rather all parties are calling from some form of “fixed line”. Unfortunately poor softphones, cheap long distance, and cell phones are all contributing to poor echo cancellation – and when you add a bunch of callers to the mix who join late, a 30-minute conference call may end up being only a 15-minute affair because you’ll have to correct echo every time someone joins.

I do admit that I am occasionally guilty of the punctual part – so that’s going to be my new year’s resolution to correct this issue.

I would love to cancel my landline, and if it were not because of the audio quality I would be saving a few bucks every month.

Noah and the Eee PC

Administrator — Sun, 03 Jan 2010 03:54:11 +0000

Pat got a little child desk for Noah and we are having fun with taking pictures of him pounding on a keyboard. Look at the proportion of the original Eee PC and Noah, which Noah is a 6-month old child. To him, it’s like a 17″ laptop – perhaps that will actually become his first ever computer. I wonder if he is destined to work in front of a computer keyboard or a piano keyboard…

Noah and the original Eee PC

Chrome OS running on EEE PC 701

Administrator — Fri, 04 Dec 2009 04:46:12 +0000

Credit goes to @Hexxeh that built a live USB image so that I can stick this into my first generation netbook. I am quite surprise how fast this OS boots into the login screen, and I think there is more they can do to further trim down the fat when they get the hardware manufacturer to work with them to optimize the loading time. I think this is a great attempt to compete with things like Splashtop, and at the same time makes the underpowered netbooks a bit more useful. To be honest, my EEE PC has not been loved for a while since I do find it a bit too slow to boot up Ubuntu. Windows XP is even worse, and chrome somehow made it even worse on XP on this dinky netbook. Now that this Chrome OS is breathing new life into my netbook, I may actually use this a bit more as my kitchen laptop or even bring it outside since I can tether with my iPhone. How fun – Fast boot time will make netbook sexy again as I have to admit I am not patient when it comes to computers.

Amazon WhisperNet – your latest global wireless carrier

Administrator — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 23:25:35 +0000

Canadians rejoice, the Amazon Kindle is finally arriving in Canada after being shunned out of the initial worldwide coverage. Whether you are a book-lover or a gadget-geek this thing can make you the coolest kid in the office. What I find more interesting about this is that the Kindle can download books from anywhere there is data coverage, and Amazon has named as WhisperNet. While Amazon has put on their web site that they have built WhisperNet on top of AT&T 3G network, little is known about countries outside of the US. In fact, Amazon just provides a simple map of worldwide coverage. Had Amazon switched out to a different carrier in some country, no one would know or care about it as long as the user can continue to download wireslessly. Previously I had written about mobile virtual network operator (MVNO) is a thing of the past unless the carrier itself owns the MVNO (eg. Rogers to Fido, Bell to Virgin Moible, Telus to Koodo), because it is obvious that a virtual operator can hardly compete with the incumbent providing the same phone service. What Amazon has done here is up the ante and provide an entirely different type of service and billing plan using the collection of networks from the entire world. No phone number? It doesn’t exist since you own Amazon accounts and you are no longer tie to a cell phone company – you’re now locked into Amazon. Obviously the services you can buy from Amazon is extremely limited since it’s designed as a book reader, but Amazon can continue to offer more services over this device or other Amazon devices. Slowly this means Amazon can become a global carrier without owning any actual network; this is similar to Skype where Skype has become a global carrier in providing long distance calls.

The carriers have already taken note on this and I’m sure there will be more copycats like Amazon becoming a global wireless carrier by introducing some form of specialized wireless services. I do hope Amazon will be successful with Kindle so that it can prove to all the carriers in the world that the carriers don’t really own the customers just because they own the network. I believe that innovation, great services and competitive pricing will win loyal and happy customers.

Hmm, perhaps I have a reason to switch to Andriod afterall…

Administrator — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 21:23:08 +0000

The people in my office has been convincing me to switch from my iPhone to an Andriod phone because of various reasons, but I’ve never bothered to look at them because I think they are all the same as smartphones. I just don’t see them as any different although I keep on hearing things like iPhone don’t do this and that. Personally I don’t get bothered by the fact that Apple maintains tight control over their product and it’s not as open as Andriod because we still have hordes of people making apps for Apple.

However, with today’s announcement from Google that they will giveaway the GPS navigation on their Andriod phones for free, this may finally be a game-changer. Google has literally poo-pooed on TomTom and Garmin’s stocks when these companies solely depend on selling navigation devices. Nothing beats free when compared to a $80+ app. Of course with Google you still need 3G data access to pull maps from Google, but I don’t think Google will take long to figure this out to allow caching locally on your phone. Well I don’t know if Apple will actually allow Google to put the navigation app on the iPhone because this will literally mean TomTom/Garmin will have to give them away for free as well, and today marks a new low for navigation apps. If it’s not available on iPhone I would seriously actually switch to Andriod just because of this software, especially Ontario has finally outlawed fiddling around with phones while driving.

I actually find product makes a lot of sense for Google because Google sells ads locally, and this product definitely gives Google another piece of important real estate to serve ads for local businesses to the user. Google had all the technological pieces for a long time so it’s just a matter of time before Google realizes can actually make a competitive product. With GOOG-411 running for years, I’m sure Google has collected enough user inputs to make their speech recognition engine useful enough to understand what the user says for navigation, and I think Google will work hard to continue to own this piece of real estate (your phone screen) while you are driving.

Nothing really beats free – and free can be a real game changer especially in the technology sector. I really want to download the “Free” book written by Chris Anderson but it’s actually not free in printed form, or at least free outside of US. I did download the audio version for free but I don’t know whether I would like to listen to a book though. I should try the local library for free books.

If I can find a dream job at eHealth Ontario

Administrator — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 03:55:12 +0000

After the eHealth Ontario spending scandal broke out, I thought it was just another one of those poorly managed government agencies with bad spending habits. I was curious about the latest audit report written by the auditor general and how news was saying it was a scathing report, so I decided to read it over. Oh my God after reading it, I am totally amused by the abusive power and how they can continue to run a bottomless money pit for years. On top of this, the level of incompetence is high and the strategy was dead wrong from the start. Even the auditor, which I’m pretty sure he’s not a techie himself, took a few direct swings at their idiocy of their IT strategy. I was literally laughing by the time I read that SSHA (Smart Systems for Health Agency) was trying build an entirely private high-speed network from scratch and that is disconnected from the internet. The operating cost is $200 million per year (out of the $300 mil this year) and the core network is already outdated, and, “approaching end of useful life” before there is any real application running on it. In auditor’s word, they’ve built a super highway with only a few cars running on it. The core network is also very unstable with outages lasting intermittently for as long as a 2-week period; imagine you are a practitioner who needs information quickly and that would be the worst nightmare for a patient.

Beyond the incompetency, the auditor also slammed hard on the abusive power that they had. The agency is literally run by consultants, where you have senior executives that are hired as consultants that has the power to hire more and more consultants working under consultants. The auditor pointed out that they had only 30 employees but employed over 300 consultants working in the ministry. If I can bill $300 per day working as a “consultant”, I’ll be happy to work for a few years and called it a retirement. The auditor did find out that a few consultants were able to hide behind the process and earned $2 million over just 7 years. Boy this IS my dream job.

Anyways, this whole mess sure sounds like a deliberate attempt to rake money out of the taxpayer’s money. In fact, the auditor general did comment in the report that he had trouble getting into the agency to perform a real audit. I’m actually a bit mad at Ontario for shafting us with new taxes after new taxes and claim victory. First it came the health tax that everyone has to pay and now we will have another tax revenue generating machine called HST coming next year.

If someone can tell me how to get a consulting job or how to find to an untendered contract at eHealth. I can keep dreaming.

PS: If you feel like getting a good laugh or want to get mad, you can read the lengthy report here.

Debit transaction fees

Administrator — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 05:04:55 +0000

I just recently discovered Scotiabank quietly changed the fee schedule for my Powerchequing account. I learned this the expensive way and this really pissed me off. I haven’t been a heavy debit user until recently as I want to change my spending habit. Originally their powerchequing account is a great choice because they waive all your banking fee if you maintain a $2000 balance or you pay a flat fee. I have been running this assumption for many years because I have been a loyal customer for this account ever since university days. Not only they removed the unlimited transaction feature to a paltry 15 free self-service transaction a month, their additional transaction fee is a ridiculous 65cents – and they don’t grandfather my existing plan. I learned this the hard way by buying McDonalds with debit and you can imagine how many 65cents I paid to Scotia for each meal I had. I understand that convenience come with a price, but I just didn’t even know about this change as I do not receive any monthly statements. The mails or phone calls I get from Scotia are all marketing related. If they were to call me about this fee change and upsell me an upgraded banking account (ScotiaOne?) then I wouldn’t be so mad about this; rather they choose to use my contact to sell me insurance products.

Even though phone/internet/cable companies (they are really all the same) are getting bad rap for expensive pricing, at least they won’t increase fees in stealth mode and will always grandfather your existing plans. If there is something CRTC ask them to increase price, they always make it clear in their letters. I do get marketing calls once in a while but they are actually quite reasonable.

I really don’t get why banks require your phone number and verify with your actual address – they just use it to sell you stuff and not to help you with customer service.

I’m a goner now – just opened a no-fee PC Financial account. I’ll see if PC is going to ruin my banking experience.

I’m a freecycler

Administrator — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 01:11:09 +0000

Today is the day I become a freecycler - after seeing how wonderful freecyclers are in the community and how we have benefited from this, I’ve decided to part ways with my dusty GameCube and GBA and put it up for freecycle. I have thought of selling it through Kiijii or Craiglist for a few bucks but I really don’t want to spend the time to find just a few bucks. There are some really generous freecyclers in Markham and it’s great to have such a community. We needed a baby bottle sterilizer for Noah so Pat asked for one and we ended up getting the top model from Advent. We got a few more great baby items that we didn’t want to spend money on. I’ve now become a generous freecycler too; perhaps I should dig up the rest of my computer parts pile and freecycle them.

Pat recently caught the garage sale bug too, but actually it’s a great excuse to drive around the town to look at other houses.

HDTV setup

Administrator — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 03:30:30 +0000

After looking at my Bell ExpressVu bill on Friday and keep on seeing this rental fee every month, I finally decided to buy a receiver and get rid of this rental unit. This rental thing brings me back the memories of renting a landline phone from Bell when we first got a landline many years ago. The HD receiver unit was priced at $199 and they give you $100 credit only if you are a new customer who’s willing to sign up to a plan. Too bad I am an existing customer and all service provider here take you for granted and no I didn’t get any programming credit. Fortunately I have a pile of gift cards from Futureshop so I used it up and paid a little bit to take the unit home.

I had to phone in activate the receiver, but I had a strange feeling that they are trying to rip me off with extra installation fees. What happened was that when I plugged in the power on the unit I get no satellite signal. After reading out the unit serial number and software version, the agent was pretty quick at telling me that my unit’s software is old and it may not work. No way I am going to run around Futureshop to get another unit so I hang on and kept on bugging her about how to interpret the signaling screen. Since my satellite dish was installed by a Bell technician before I had no reason to believe that the dish is not aligned properly; my existing PVR receiver was just working fine this morning so Thursday’s storm had no affect on the dish. The agent then started to sell me a Bell technician to come and tune the signal for a fee or for free if I sign up for an HD package; she wasn’t even willing to activate my receiver unless I get a technician to come first because the signal was “poor”. I grew quite frustrated and asked her more stupid questions while I was fiddling around with the controls to stall for time. I ended up doing a full scan on the satellite by accident but it ended up working and I got a locked in signal with a satellite. I think the real problem was that the receiver need to take a long time to get a lock which makes sense and the agent then had to activate my receiver afterall.

Supposedly the good thing about this HD receiver is that it allows you to plug in an external hard drive to turn the unit into a PVR. It’s a huge improvement from fixed harddrive inside the unit. I still haven’t make this work yet with my old laptop drive, perhaps it doesn’t like slow harddrive so I am going to try a proper desktop drive when I get one.

I had little to compare with in terms of HDTV with competitors; it’s fair from my perspective but I think it’s a half-step down from over-the-air CBC that I could receive here in Markham. I won’t complaint much since I don’t need to pay extra from standard def to get some of the same channels in HD.