September 2007 Archives

If the Debian team in particular, and the f/oss movement ever want to know why most of the world considers them insane (I hesitate to say "irrelevant", but that's what came out first), the Debian team's response to this bug report might illuminate them.

For myself, I gave up on Debian after two libc / glibc upgrade SNAFUs in a row, along with the continued promise of "a really cool package manager Any Day Now, We Really Mean It" that was apt.  The sarge release was the final nail in the coffin.  It was last week when I installed my first etch box, and that was only out of personal interest.  We went from being a huge Debian shop to having it as an afterthought; there's now more SuSE in our offices and server rooms than Debian, something I'd have thought impossible two years ago.

It's been a while since I've written much about hockey, mostly because I've not seen or heard anything first-hand myself.  My sole sources of information have been podcasts and blog postings.  However, listening to the pre-Calgary game audio, MacTavish said something that struck me:

Like we've said right from the start, status quo... we have no interest in maintaining status quo... and whether it's bringing young guys in a little bit before they're ready to really make an impact and trying to develop them and get better as the season goes on, we're very open to doing that too as well.

This is new, coming from MacTavish.  He's usually pretty open and plain-spoken, quite unlike the reputation the fellow pictured here had.  It sounds, listening to Horcoff, like he was a bit taken aback (MacT said his minutes will definitely be in the 20 range, but his even-strength time and responsibility may be cut), but he's a smart guy - he'll adapt, and he also knows that if the kids struggle, he'll be right back with Penner and Hemmer.  (I usually eschew using nicknames, but hey, that's just too cute.)  It also sounds to me like this is a plan Lowe and MacTavish cooked up together, unlike in the past where the coach has sounded a little frustrated with the horses his GM has acquired for him.

Clearly the management have accepted that last year was a dog's breakfast, and have some sort of plan to address it.  Will their plan work?  Who knows?  That's the wonder of team sports, hockey in particular.  I'm not optimistic, but on the other hand, one of my favourite sayings is "the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, expecting a different result each time."  It's clear that whatever happens this year, at least it won't be the same as last.

Update about 10 minutes later: Figures, Lowetide already said the same thing, more or less.  I think the quotes on Horcoff are far more indicative of a true change to "status quo" though.  The stuff MacT's been saying about Cogliano, Schremp, Nilsson, and the rest of the kids is one thing, but it's quite another to say that the guy who was your #1 centre in a run to the Stanley Cup Finals isn't quite the guy you envisioned for your top line.  He's right though, just as he was with Mike Comrie: Horcoff is a very fine hockey player, and well worth every penny he's paid - and then some.  But when your 27 year old best offensive centre had a 79 point season playing between Ryan Smyth and Ales Hemsky, when a 25 year old Doug Weight got 104 playing with the likes of Zdeno Ciger, David Oliver, and Mariusz Czerkawski, you need to start looking for another offensive catalyst to back Horc up. 

It looks like MT rewrote an img reference I had from /img/foo to https://snowcrash.ca/img/foo, which caused things like LJ feeds to prompt for an SSL certificate.  I believe I've fixed it, but tres annoying - sorry guys.

This is good news.  Rape is one crime for which I wish we still had capital punishment, and while I hesitate to quantify assault, this is pretty low even as far as rapes go.

However, this quote:

"I'm disappointed that they didn't have security cameras to start with -- that would have been very helpful," said Jackie Long, a first-year student.

is somewhat . . . disappointing, I guess.  I understand the motivation of the comment, but I don't believe that security cameras really help with crime, either in its prevention or aftermath.  It would seem that Londonians (Londonites?  Londenizens?) would agree.  Granted, a residence hallway is not the same thing as a crowded street, but I'll just repeat what I said to some fellow staff members who considered cameras in our hallways after a breakin: the last thing you'll see on a camera is likely to be some guy wearing a hoodie and a mask smashing it.  A camera wouldn't have prevented those women from being raped.  It may not have even allowed for faster collection of suspects.

It's not that I don't trust campus police here (or anywhere else), it's just that I don't want to have to trust them; to me, the risks outweigh the benefits.  Like night lights, cameras provide a certain feeling of security that is largely illusory.  Worse still, they don't replace a human being - but you can be sure that they would provide a dandy excuse to cut back an already stretched police force.

If we want our campus more secure, I believe we need to do two things.  First is to place more power in the hands of individuals.  Encourage people to say something if they see something happening that feels wrong, and create a culture where asking somebody "what are you doing here?" is not going to cause hard feelings.  Second is to increase presence.  I see police cars every now and again on Ring Road, but it's generally fairly clear that they're travelling from one place to another, not actively looking for things.  Have officers walk about.  Have them talk to people - not in an interrogatory way, in a friendly way.  Let people get to know them and, more importantly, let them get to know the people.  Then they're more likely to recognize when something is wrong.

Without that, coating campuses in cameras will do little than to provide a lot of footage for the news media after something goes terribly wrong, and could lead to major civil rights violations in the hands of unscrupulous people.

(Camera story courtesy of Bruce Schneier, CCTV picture courtesy FreeFoto.com.)

Sigh, I just realised I'm meant to be separating tags with commas, not spaces.  Hopefully it won't republish the 15 or so tagged entries in the RSS feed, but I'm sure it will.  Sorry about that.

I was home sick today, but apparently not sick enough.  I decided to try out the test Solaris 10 x86 DVD I'd burned (to prove that a DVD burner worked) and stuck in my bag for some reason.

So, I created a new 10gb virtual disk for it, stuck in the DVD, and installed from text mode.  Great, it all went just fine.  Instead of immediately making a snapshot like I usually do, I figured I'd install vmware tools and patch everything up.  That's where things went sour.  The system registration tool didn't fire up, and smc from the command line got me this (linebreaks inserted):

Warning: Cannot convert string \ 
 "-monotype-arial-regular-r-normal--*-140-*-*-p-*-iso8859-1" \ 
to type FontStruct
 warning: Unable to load any usable ISO8859-1 font
 Warning:
     Name: FONTLIST_DEFAULT_TAG_STRING
     Class: XmRendition
     Conversion failed.  Cannot load font.
  Java Accessibility Bridge for GNOME loaded.
 java/langNullPointerException

And no smc window. After some faffing, I did some searching, and found, among others, this, which pointed to a bug report. As best I can tell, it would seem that installing the vmware drivers on the guest OS caused some issue with X, breaking all the Sun admin tools.

This may have been a mistake of mine, I'm not sure, but it doesn't exactly leave me with a warm fuzzy feeling. If Sun don't test their tools under VMWare using standard configs, they ought to be, and this would likely have been picked up right away.

So I'm using the disk space for an install of Ubuntu 7.04, which I'd intended to do anyway.

Perhaps all it takes is practise.  This time, I spent twenty minutes reading my chapter and making notes, five minutes selecting which notes to polish, and another ten minutes reducing 125 words to precisely 100.

Today I submitted some corrections and suggestions to a security researcher in an attempt to help the security community by providing some editorial service.  We had a fairly long discussion in the #pauldotcom IRC channel this morning about the editorial process.  I am convinced that one of the answers to Richard Bejtlich's post about why academics ignore security professionals is the apparent lack of editorial control and process over the publications of professional security researchers.  Hopefully I will be able to provide this service to others and help to prove my point.  Somebody said that Maynor's article regarding his Apple wireless exploits was pretty much the current state of technical writing.  (It was that article that spawned my rant.)  Without going into the technical particulars of that paper, it's pretty obvious that the publication either lacked an editor, or the editor was asleep, as there's some pretty bad phrasing and at least a couple instances of horrible spell-check laziness there.

I don't claim that my writing is perfect - far from it - but I do claim that getting a second, third, or fourth opinion on a paper before it succumbs to a few thousand or more page hits is not a bad idea.  If anybody wants some vicious commentary on the state of sentence construction or even just spelling in their paper, I'd be happy to provide it, keeping my own temporal restraints in mind.  My own technical chops are poor, but I would like to think that I know a few things about writing well.  I often claim that my honours degree was built less on solid research and more on clear writing.

I thought I had previously written about how I have adopted what Merlin Mann calls 'Inbox Zero', but I can't see any mention of it.  I will just say that I've been successful at reducing my work inbox (personal mail is something else, I have two accounts) to 0 each and every time I check it for over a month now, while my 00ToReply folder has never gone above 24.  (Many of those items I should probably just reply to or accept that I never will; they involve work things for which I am not strictly paid to think about.  Replies to meta-questions posed by my grandboss, for instance, regarding mission statements.)

Having said all that, my next project in my quest for self-improvement and efficiency is to be a model - a paragon, a champion, perhaps the epitome - of succinctness.  That is to say, now that I've made good inroads on how I handle email coming in (and how I generate outgoing), I will try to reduce the effect I have on others.  To that end, I want to write less, and have what I write mean more.

A Livejournal friend of mine is doing a series of posts that are no more than 100 words.  (It could be that they are each precisely 100 words, I haven't checked.)  I'm taking a seminar class in cognitive science where one of our assignments is to produce about 100 words on our readings for that week.  I am taking the relative  as a challenge to produce precisely 100 words for each of these assignments.  I admire the clarity and brevity of posts by people like Seth Godin - he manages to pack a lot of information and ideas into relatively few words, his posts are usually well under 100.

Obviously this post is a failure at brevity, but I will endeavour to improve.  One potential issue is that one thing I've always prided myself on is the clearness of my writing.  More than a few people have told me that they find my documentation easy to understand, for instance, although it is usually no less wordy than this post (or most of my emails) are.  I need to somehow balance economy of words with maximising nuance, without killing myself.  (It took me an hour or so to do my readings this weekend, ten minutes earlier to decide what my writing was going to be about, and almost half an hour reducing my text to 100 words.  That's not really tenable.)

A couple of nights ago, we had a pretty yummy meal of salmon with cabbage and curry.  Normally I despise cabbage, and curry I can take or leave - although I find myself liking it more as I get older, so perhaps I've sufficiently cauterized my taste buds with coffee and beer now.  Linda originally found the recipe on a vegetarian site, printed it off, and promptly forgot the URL, but this is pretty close.

Quick to prep, quick to cook, and in our experience, quick to eat.

My ISP's DNS servers seem to suck, so I looked at OpenDNS, after seeing it mentioned a bazillion times on
Wired's compiler blog.  I have a FreeBSD box running a local caching nameserver anyway, so I told it to use the OpenDNS servers as forwarders instead of my ISP's (Rogers).  Instant faster lookups, hurray!  I also played around with the DNS blocking things (having a wilful stepdaughter can be trying, let's just say that), and successfully blocked my wife from facebook.  So, I figured it can't hurt too much, and I'm letting it block most categories of adult websites now.

So far, so good.  We'll see how it goes long-term.

I don't know about anybody else, but I cringe every other time Laforge opens his mouth.

I think there was a time when hockey players made less than $5 million a year and they weren't so picky about where they lived, you know . . . In some cases, hockey players make so much money . . . that the WAGs (wives and girlfriends) want to live in Toronto and Los Angeles and Florida and wherever else is sexy.

Yep.  There was a time when the servants just shut up and took what they were given, like good boys and girls, and men were men who told their women to shut up and follow them anywhere, or they'd see the back of the hand again.

It can not do the reputation of the Oilers any good for him to still be beaking off about Pronger a year after the fact.  Maybe he's trying to give Bill Wirtz a run for his money?  Lowe sounded kind of embarassed in his quotes; I'm sure he'd like to tell his boss to STOP HELPING already.

One of my many hats is security, which means sometimes I need to check out a system's passwords to see if perhaps somebody set something stupid. Since it's far more effective to tell somebody "your stupid password abc123" (which I've now seen in compromises twice!) than it is to ask them what it was (sometimes they won't admit to it), I've occasionally had need to bruteforce them.

Somebody in #pauldotcom pointed out that there are MPI patches for john the ripper, which makes me happy; now I have something I can use my test cluster for.  There's also a list of tools here and Muts has been working on adding a cluster setup for john to Backtrack. (The first and the last may be related; I've not had the chance yet to check them out thoroughly.)

It's everywhere now, Pisani's out (probably long-term) with ulcerative colitis. One thing about being a sports fan, you learn a fair bit about things that can go wrong with the human body, at least on a surface level. Some things, like this and Tjarnqvist's inflamed pubic bone, I could have done without knowing about, but hey. Hopefully Pisani makes a speedy recovery, the team is going to miss him. I'm guessing an A on his chest might have been coming, given that one of Horcoff or Moreau are almost certainly going to get the C, and Smyth's A is obviously also gone.

More practically, if San Fernando goes on the long-term injury list, will the Oilers get some cap relief and find a replacement to spend his $3.4mm salary? Everybody's talking about Mike Johnson, but that RW is looking awfully thin.

Thanks to a friendly prof (yes kids, some do exist), I discovered that apparently somebody at Imprint decided this humble site was worthy of mentioning in the Frosh week edition. Can't say I've ever really seen myself described in print as "awesome", but hey, same paragraph as the Daily Bulletin? Kinda neat.

One place they missed was the uwaterloo Livejournal community, which is a decent place to ask for and receive information. I read it regularly, post there on occasion and answer a few of the questions, as do at least a couple other staff members and a few profs.

So, welcome frosh?  I didn't really notice a flood of new visitors, but hey, maybe eventually.

When a player agent says it's not really about the money - it's about the money.

Tavares should sit down and wait his turn. The draft age has been challenged several times in professional hockey; Ken Linseman succesfully challenged the 20 year old draft age in the WHA. Most recently Phil Kessel challenged it (a fact of which I had not been aware) in an attempt to be drafted in 2005. The US Supreme Court overturned a lower court's decision to find against the NHL on the grounds of antitrust regulations. I'm not sure what grounds Tavares's lawyer intends to use, but presumably not those ones, since the Kessel case is still fairly recent and any lower court is presumably going to look to a Supreme Court decision. (The masochistic among you can read the decision by Googling "nhl draft age 20 18 lowered court 1980"; the top hit for me resulted in the following link. Warning: Word doc, you can see the HTML version in Google's cache here, perhaps.)

It's funny though, I seem to recall Tavares saying earlier that he was just going to let things go as they would, and that he wasn't interested in this sort of thing, and so on. I mean, yeah, he's allowed to change his mind, but I can't help but think he was being coached as to what to say (as most hockey players seem to be). Floating trial balloons and letting the agent take the flak, maybe? Tavares now says: "Being drafted with a lot of these guys into the CHL and seeing them moving on, learning and growing and getting experience with NHL teams and pro teams, it's tough on me sometimes to watch and wait.'' Yeah, I remember being 16 too - it was tough to wait. That's life. I can see this one going up on locker room walls though: "Obviously I want to be challenged and that's the big issue.'' Hm, the OHL isn't challenging enough? True as it may be, sounds like a challenge to opposing players to try to run him out of the rink.

At any rate, while Tavares and his agent can legitimately make a claim that his short and long term income will be affected by this, I'm not certain that ought to be sufficient grounds to allow him to be drafted early. Plenty of businesses have plenty of reasons for excluding people from employment, and as his agent says himself, he could always sign in Europe. The NHL is *not* preventing him from making a living playing hockey.
(Image courtesy moviescreenshots.blogspot.com.)

The problem with allowing users to specify metadata when they file a request is it doesn't always mean the same thing to them as it does to those who handle the requests. Even if you supply definitions, users won't necessarily read the definitions, and even if they do, interpretation differs. For instance, urgency: something may be incredibly urgent to that user in the sense that they feel dead in the water until that issue is resolved; however, if that issue affects only them, it's probably more important to take care of an issue like a downed research group server first. (Even that is fraught; like most organisations, we have a few users generally deemed to be more important than everybody else, even if we pretend that everybody's equal.)

Our own silly take is allowing an urgency of "24 hour", along with "not", "urgent", "emergency", and "by date". For instance, I see a request outstanding in our system right now that is essentially a user asking for some education on the use of the rm command; it has the urgency flag set to "24h". What does that mean? I don't know, but the user set it. Looking at the item, I see she probably set it because after 24 hours, the answer no longer really mattered; she'd already taken care of it herself. However, it will become an issue again next term (she was cleaning out course accounts). So now what? We're discouraged from changing urgency flags ourselves - the user set it, after all - but clearly, the matter is no longer very important (until 2 January 2008 or so, at which point it will again presumably attain "24 hour" urgency again). Our documentation states:

The "Urgency" field in the Create Request form provides an indication of how urgent the request is to the person for whom the work is being done. It is used to determine a rough starting position for the work in the "Upcoming Projects" part of the work queue, unless of course it's an "Emergency", in which case it's added to the "Emergency" section at the top of the queue.

Clearly our documentation needs to be updated, as it doesn't include this 24 hour notion, but I suspect it would go something like this: "An item which, if not resolved within 24 hours, ceases to be important, and so may get done on an 'as time allows' basis, or not at all." Neither of these outcomes are generally satisfying to the user; in fact, the former is often a synonym for the latter, and not just in our organisation.

In any event, without reading a request in its entirety, this particular flag is meaningless, and due to differences in interpretation, it may actually impede communication. We like to allow our users to feel "in control", even if they're really not - but how far should we go in so doing?

I accept that airline security is the responsibility of everybody who flies. However, this story seems to take it a bit too far. Said a representative of the Canadian Air Transport Security Authority:

The lesson to be learned out of this, and the message to other passengers is, to really be aware of what you can and cannot bring onboard with you, because even something as innocuous and innocent as a Swiss Army Knife, which is a prohibited item, can create enormous delays and headaches.

The reason this man was able to board an airplane carrying what later turned out to be a multitool was security didn't stop him in time. Now, yes, he should have known that he wouldn't be allowed onboard with a knife, but maybe he just forgot. I almost have; if putting on a Leatherman with your belt and pants every morning is part of your routine, you forget that some people might take a dim view of you carrying the tools of your trade with you. Marketers carry Blackberries; I carry a Leatherman Super Tool. The people who fell down on this were that woman's co-workers - the ones who should have stopped him before he cleared security. How is it his fault that somebody else screwed up on their job?  The lesson to be learned is not that you need to be really aware of what you're carrying (we already learned that, thank you very much), but that the Transport Security Authority blames other people for their mistakes.

Reason number 10,542 why I would rather have three root canals in a day instead of flying.  (Actually, I've had a root canal, about 3 years ago; it was much less painful than flying Air Canada from Pearson.  At least dentists don't make you wait in line for 3 hours before they deign to seat you, and the seats are more comfortable.)

Astute readers may notice that I've re-added the BANPC sidebar - apologies to my fellow non-partisan Canucks for its weeklong absence, I'm still figuring out the new template system. Next thing will be figuring out how to change RSS/Atom exports to at least have an option for full-post + comments feeds, and changing this somewhat-attractive-but-bland colour scheme back to my familiar Oilers colours, or perhaps Carolina^WUNB colours.

This is also posted as a comment over at Ellen Roseman's blog. It is a fairly long letter I wrote to Kevin Crull, who is currently the VP in charge of Residential Customers at Bell Canada, and posted via Canada Post on the 14th of August, 2007. To date, I have received no response. Thank you very much Bell, you provided exactly what I paid for (most of the time), and not a penny more. Maybe I won't get any better service elsewhere, but I'm certainly willing to try. At least the begging / whining telephone calls from Bell wondering how they can get my business back have stopped.

#
For reference, my telephone number is currently 519-xxx-xxxx, which is the same number we held with Bell since we opened our initial account in June, 2001. Please note that I do not wish to be contacted by anybody from Bell with reference to this letter except for the person to whom this letter is addressed: Mr. Kevin Crull. I understand that Mr. Crull is very likely a very busy man, but it is his name on the card to which I am responding, so I feel entitled to demand his attention. While consulting Google in an (unsuccessful) attempt to find a mailing address to which I could send this letter, I found a weblog posting by Ellen Roseman that you replied to personally, Mr. Crull, so I have taken the liberty of Cc:'ing her as well, in the hopes that she will find this letter of interest.

I am in receipt of your card, which was undated (and lacking a return address), but was postmarked 07 August of this year. In it you invited me to contact a member of your team at 1-877-449-0774. However, I do not want to speak with a member of your team in order to discuss anything at all, as there is very little discussion to be had. I merely wish your company to know why it lost me as a customer, or at least, why I am extremely unsympathetic to displays like this card.

Firstly, the card was addressed to me as I have addressed my letter to you: first initial last name. I know your full name is Kevin, you signed it to your letter, just as I know Bell knows my full name. The fact that my name was used precisely as it appears in the telephone book tells me that Bell doesn't care to find out my full name. Furthermore, while the note itself was obviously professionally printed on fairly nice cardstock, and the envelope was also of fairly decent quality, my address was obviously printed on a cheap inkjet printer that needed its heads cleaned. To be perfectly frank, this was not a great impression to give, as a company which has taken approximately $7,000 from me in the last six years.

Secondly, I had to dig around to find your mailing address. Ultimately I found it it in a copy of the Yellow Pages; I think it's quite telling that the only mailing address obvious on Bell Canada's website is one for investor relations. The address was not included in the note with your name signed to it; only a telephone number was given. I know why that is, it's so that if I want to tell Bell something like what I'm describing in this letter, I have to give a customer service representative a chance to try to win me back. Your company must give its customers a full range of options to use in order to contact it, and one of those options ought to be regular old land mail. Quite frankly, I'm not interested in having to justify myself to somebody I've never met why it is I've chosen to switch to Rogers Home Phone for my service.

There is not one single reason why I chose to terminate my account with Bell, although it's mostly because we were spending more money than we had to. Living in an apartment building, our telephone lines aren't the greatest and there's nothing we can do about it, so we were paying for Bell HSE services that we were unable to use: our maximum throughput was limited to about what we get paying half as much to Rogers for their cable modem Lite package, because of the excessive amounts of noise on our line. Additionally, every time it rained outside, our HSE service would be interrupted for anywhere from 30 seconds to five or ten minutes. I realise that these issues are beyond Bell's control, but they're also beyond mine.

Finally, I will illustrate why I do not believe Bell customer service to be so much as a shade better than any other large business in the world, and worse than many, with a personal anecdote. The sort of note I received today would have been much better received about two years ago, when our land line service with Bell stopped working abruptly. When I called that evening to complain, I had to navigate a menu in order to get in contact with a customer service rep, who promptly put me on hold, even after I told him I was calling from a pay as you go cell phone - because, of course, my land line was non-functional.

When the CSR returned about five minutes later, he told me that he could see nothing wrong from Bell's end, and that was it. He could schedule a service call for me, but warned me in no uncertain terms that if the field technician found nothing wrong either, I would be billed for the service call. After telling him that yes, I was sure I wanted somebody to come visit, he scheduled an appointment for me the Friday of that week (I had called on a Wednesday) for some time "between 8am and 5pm." Nonplused, I asked for a more precise time frame, as I was going to have to take time off work, and was told that was as precise as it got. I took a full vacation day to stay home, and no technician had shown up by 6pm.

Calling customer service again, I was told that no, the rep had no idea why nobody had shown up, and was promised a service call Saturday, although at least the timeframe (early afternoon) was more precise. Ultimately, however, it didn't matter, as again nobody showed up.

I called a third time to register my displeasure - again, keep in mind, this was on a pay as you go cell phone from Fido - and was again told that another service call could be scheduled, but if nothing was wrong in the eyes of the field technician, I would be billed. I scheduled a call for Monday, but my phone was again mysteriously working by Saturday evening. I must say, I was sorely tempted to let the technician show up (or not) Monday, and then to contest the charge with Bell and the CRTC when I was billed for it, but I didn't want to waste a technician's time for the fault of the company for which he or she worked.

I also seriously considered submitting my own bill for a customer satisfaction survey to your customer service department at my standard rate of $500 an hour for the approximate length of time we were without telephone service (approximately 65 hours, or $32,500 plus tax, as well as the one hour of Fido time at 25 cents a minute). I chose not to do so as I felt it would not get paid anyway, and no tax benefit would accrue to me for keeping a bad debt on the books as it might have if I was still running a business for myself.

No apology was extended by the customer service representative when I called in to cancel my appointment, nor was an offer of pro-rating my service for that month extended. No mention of my wasted day and a half was made. In fact, I felt that the representative thought I had been lying all along, and it was clear to me that he wanted nothing more than to get me off the line. To further add to the insult I felt, I spoke with a different representative each time I called, and had to re-explain the full situation - including previous interactions - each time. During these explanations, I could hear the representative typing away. Since I cannot believe that actual notes were being taken regarding my case, I had to wonder what they were, in fact, typing. All in all, these interactions left me feeling incredibly insulted and dismissed.

In short, our major reason for staying with Bell after this event was largely inertia and the desire to keep our internet and telephone services bundled. Our major reason for switching was financial, but the reason why I am extremely unlikely to ever again pay Bell for service is because I do not frankly believe that Bell service is worth very much money at all. It seems to me that Bell's attitude towards customer service can be summed up by the infamous VMS "see figure one document" (for instance, see Netfunny's posting), and the only reason why it has chosen to send out note cards to customers who finally dump your company is what some would call a naive (and what others might call a cynical) attempt to try to convince those customers that Bell really cares about them. I do not believe that Bell - any moreso than most other large businesses - really cares about me, but rather about the income that I represent. Given that, I don't think Bell can blame me if I jump ship the instant it makes financial sense for me to do so.

Incidentally, I am told that given that I live in an apartment building where the demarcation point is not accessible by me personally, it is against CRTC regulations to levy such charges as I was threatened with against one's customers. I don't know for sure if this is true or not and won't waste my time looking it up, but if I am ever in that situation again, please be assured that I will make it my business to find out. In any event, I do not appreciate being threatened by a company to which I have paid a great deal of money for a service that is not working.

I realise that this is an extremely long letter, so as thanks for your perhaps reading this far, I will offer a (free) bit of unsolicited advice: give your customer service representatives much more latitude in being able to offer customers service, rather than causing the customer to have to demand it. Give them the ability to offer a free month or two of services when they encounter customers in a situation like mine. Your call centre managers should all read books on customer service and business by people like Seth Godin, and encourage their employees to do the same. I assert and believe that this sort of service and education would more than pay for itself in the long run. I see from your Bell web page that you hold an MBA degree and an otherwise impressive resume, so hopefully this sort of advice is not entirely new to you, but I would like to impress upon you that if I felt that Bell had such a commitment to customer service, I might never have left in the first place and would be more sympathetic to pleas to return. However, should I change my mind, I assume that the offer of waiving my reconnection fee has no expiry date, and so I will hold on to my copy of this card as binding proof of this offer.