Clearly the people at Shaw don’t read my blog ;-(

I got a call from their digital phone sales folks today, who ‘noticed’ that since I have their high-speed Internet and cable, I might be interested in their newest offering, Digital Phone.

Apparently they didn’t ‘notice’ what I’d written about their service. If they had read my blog they would have known that two and a half months ago I did try their phone. The results were so bad that I cancelled the service a few days later.

Interestingly, this is the first time I’ve heard from anyone at Shaw about it. They never did follow up on why I was disatisfied with the service.

Today’s call was a complete fluke, and the sales person was super surprised to hear that I’d used the service and rejected it months ago.

She wondered why I hadn’t kept the service to see if they could fix it.  Huh?  Let me see:

-I’ll buy something you’ve been advertising as dead simple, no disruption, and great quality.
-You’ll send over not one but two service techs who spend 3 hours putting in the ‘service’ which ends up only working on one phone jack.
-In the process the service guys screw up one of my other land line jacks so that it is no longer functional.

The ill-functioning service aside, I’m super ticked off at the holes left in my wall where the service technicians installed the HUGE modem (he never did ask me if it was ok to screw into the wall). I’m equally ticked off that they completely totally screwed up one of my land line phone jacks (it no longer works, period).
And based on their ZERO interest in following up with me at the time, or in the two and a half months since I tried them out, I have ZERO interest in their service.

I will gladly continue to pay for my functional-since-day-one Vonage account.

We finally got our hot tub fixed, ironically during a record-setting hot spell in Vancouver. Oh well. It’s a delight to look out the window and see naked people in the backyard again.

Our cat Ozzie is quite the hunter-gatherer. He’s been bringing home shrews in various states of, um, er, disection. When we mentioned this to Eileen’s mom, without missing a beat she replied that that he’ll probably stop soon because “shrews taste bad”. I’m not sure where this bit in information comes from, but apparently it has escaped Ozzie’s attention.

I’m hooked on The Granola King granola. One of our clients is Capers Community Markets and while in the store a month or so ago I picked up a bag. I’ve been mainlining it ever since. I can’t get enough of the stuff, and it has become my latest obsession. Granola King – you’re – um, er, the King.

The third in our series of podcasts with Anthony Bourdain, and his new book The Nasty Bits, is now live:

http://feeds.atlargemedia.com/raincoast

577 pieces of Lego goodness.  Complete with a brick for brains. 

The pre-order of Mindstorms NXT package showed up last week, just in time for Matthew’s birthday today.

He’s been busy building and programming it all day.  So far everyone’s impressed. Except Ozzie the cat.

Hey. It’s part two of our three-parter with Anthony Bourdain. 

Earlier this month I got to spend the day with Anthony as part of our Raincoast Books podcast series.  He’s the best selling author of Kitchen Confidential and host of TV’s No Reservations.  He as in Vancouver to promote his new book, The Nasty Bits.

Barbara-Jo is to the left of Anthony

Anthony agreed to wear a wireless mic for the day and I followed along squeezing in questions in between his media visits. He also signed autographs at Barbara-Jo’s Books to Cooks in Vancouver.  This podcast is an audio glimpse into that hour of signing and talking with fans.

Grab is at http://feeds.atlargemedia.com/raincoast.

If you havent’ heard part one yet, check it out at the same URL, and make sure you come back next week for part 3.

The Surrey (British Columbia) Art Gallery/ Surrey Arts Centre is looking for proposals for digital audio artworks – and there’s money in it.

Artists are offered the option of using the Gallery’s TechLab and its resources as a studio for production, if they wish to work on site as an artist in residence. Otherwise, artists will develop their work in their own studio. Artist’s sound exhibition proposals may be an installation that surrounds the visitor, or may be in intervention within the Gallery’s facility where people will be invited to listen, or may involve negotiating modifications/improvements to the architecture of the exhibit halls to make them audio art-responsive.

Deadline for submissions in July 10th – so get in touch right away if you have an idea. Liane Davison is the curator, email her artgallery@city.surrey.bc.ca .  Best to read these two documents from them first:

1. Call for Proposals (pdf)  2. Tech Lab proposals (pdf).