Markus’ Blog

I went to my first strata meeting yesterday night. Brigette was at school, so I went by myself. It was an interesting experience. I met most owners in our building, which has a total of only 27 suites. Everybody seems nice, friendly and cares for the building and what goes on in and around it.

It was a pretty good and informative meeting, but it also showed some areas that need serious improvement. Most things that didn’t go over quite right are due to lack of experience, I think. The building used to be a rental property and was converted into an owner-building less than two years ago, so nobody on the strata seems to have a lot of experience of “how it works”.

During the good parts, I learned about roofing options, contents insurance, fire drills and other useful stuff. The not-so-good parts were organizatorial and related to budget issues.

For one, they should have really set up chairs for everybody, so we could have all sat down — or if that was’t possible, tell people to bring their own. They didn’t say anything and there were no chairs. That meant I got to stand for two and a half hours.

Secondly, the budget for 2007 was mostly identical to year’s with some unexplained increases. It looket like there was little or no effort put into it by council to question items or try to make it more sensible. The budget has some pretty high figures in it (for photocopying or landscaping) that don’t make much sense. Yet, they stayed from last year or even increased. Also, everybody except for me voted to approve it. So, on one hand council didn’t do a great job with the budget, but the owners didn’t think about it much, either. — It was mostly me asking some questions. The only answers I got were: “We took that from last year.” “We went over last year, so we increased it.” “Errrr…I don’t know. I guess we could combine them together next year…”

Lastly, there were quite a few by-law changes. They didn’t go over them individually or at least section by section. They asked “Does anybody have any questions?” I asked a few. Then there were a couple more (not many) asked by others. No explanations other than the questions asked. Then we were asked to approve or reject the by-laws. All of them at once, the whole package, from pets to rental restrictions to quiet hours, etc., etc., not individual paragraphs. Not good. It was a very diverse package. Again, it was passed, just like the budget.

Over all, it’s looking a bit like owners in our building say “yes” too easily.

Brigette’s on council now and acting as the council’s treasurer. Let’s hope that her financial background and both our ideas and thoughts will help make a change for the better and improve council work and strata meetings going forward.

Apparently phishing e-mails from paypal.at are currently really “in”. I got one last Thursday (to my Austrian university e-mail account) and didn’t think much of it. The fake site was still up and running when I tried it out. Curious computer geek that I am, I had to investigate, of course. I checked to see where the server running the fake PayPal site was hosted and it turned out to be Vanderhoof, BC of all places. I am pretty sure they got hacked and the owner of the server had no idea that his site was hosting fake PayPal pages. I reported the site to PayPal, because what else am I going to do.

I find another e-mail with very similar content in my spam folder this morning. Either I didn’t notice last time or maybe the pages were in English then (I really couldn’t say), but today I realized how awfully wrong the German text on their web-site is. They are trying to convince you that a payment needs to be cancelled (and they’re just rambling on about it), so you have to enter all your information. The usual.

Sentence structure and vocabulary are all wrong, the scam so obvious that I am wondering how desparate somebody needs to get to try and pull off a scam that bad.

Wichtige Nachricht - Bitte bestätigen der Rückerstattungantrag für die Zahlung an DELL INSPERATION E1505 , durch das Durchführen der folgenden erforderlichen Details. Dieses ist sicherzustellen daß dein Rückerstattungantrag echt ist. Alles fängt in fettem sind vorgeschrieben auf.

Sounds like they ran an English text through babelfish or something. “Schuldpostenkarte”?! What the hell’s that? Probably their attempt to litterally translate debit card, I would guess. Doesn’t work that way, sorry guys.

Deine Karte Informationen eintragen - PayPal empfiehlt sich, eine Schuldpostenkarte anstelle von einer Kreditkarte zu verwenden, wegen des höheren Sicherheit Niveaus von diesen. Es ist immer sicher, die Schuldpostenkarte zu benutzen, die mit deinem Scheckkonto verbunden wird, das z.Z. zu deinem PayPal Konto angebracht wird.

My absolute favorite is their submit button at the end of the page that reads “Antrag Restätigen”. Yeah, sure. That’s like saying “Bubmit application”. Who clicks on that?

Makes me almost feel sorry for the idiots staging this. ALMOST. I’d still like to give them a good kick in the butt (or some other area nearby) for being scumbags. — Come to think of it, they should actually have to serve extra time for being so stupid.

I started out in Canada by taking the bus to work, while I lived on West 12^th Avenue, near Granville Street and worked downtown.

After I moved to North Vancouver — I was working in Burnaby by that time — I drove. Then, for an eight to ten month period, I was able to car-pool with our landlord and friend Mark. After that, I drove alone again for a little while.

I am taking the bus to work again. I chose to do this a few months ago, because my employer allows its employees to expense their transit passes if they return (or don’t even request) their parking pass. Very neat, I have to say. Even though I like driving, I quite enjoy just sitting on the bus / skytrain, not having to deal with rush-hour traffic: I like driving not stitting, if you know what I mean. On top of that, I save on gas and, now, on car insurance as well, since this arrangement allowed me to finally sell my car.

When I started taking the bus, we were still living in North Vancouver, and I took the #232 and #28 busses to get to and from work in Burnaby. Now, in Vancouver, it takes two transfers instead of one, but the frequency is much better. A 15 minute interval during morning and evening rush hour was the best North Van had to offer (during the day and at night it’s a 30 minute interval). Also, now we have a bus stop right outside of our building, not a seven minute walk away. I am taking #8, #9 and the Millenium Line now. After two weeks of doing so, I have to say it’s working out quite nicely. Although this morning’s problems with some trolley wires in Vancouver had me spend an additional half an hour waiting for busses, which wasn’t too much fun. That’s the downside of going electric, I guess: you need wires. I hope this doesn’t happen too often, because with the exception of this morning, it’s been really good. Also, I really like knowing that there are no fossil fuels burnt to get me to work. (British Columbia generates most of its electricity via hydroelectric power plants.)

I wish more companies in the Lower Mainland offered their employees incentives to take public transportation. It would go a long ways towards solving the current grid-lock problem we are facing in the Greater Vancouver Area and it’d be quite a bit cheaper than some of the road work that’s planned in the course of the Gateway Project, while at the same time keeping the air cleaner.

Roast chicken with potatoes, stuffing and brussel sprouts. White wine. Pumpkin pie for dessert. Yummies.

Our Thanksgiving dinner this year consisted of said bird, stuffed with onions, garlic, lemon, rosmary and thyme. It went into the oven at about 3pm this afternoon and made our new appartment smell all yummy. It tasted equally as yummy.

We also opened the first bottle of two German Rieslings that we got as a wedding gift. Very tasty. Thanks, Drew.

On top of everything else, we used our new dining room set for the first time. Having dinner at a real table, no hunching over to eat off of a coffee table, was a real “hey we’re grown ups now” experience.

PS: No, we don’t have Thanksgiving in Austria. Not like that, anyways. It’s a religious thing there. Austria (mostly Catholic) is a little different from Germany (mostly Protestant), but you get the idea when you read the article from the German embassy.

It’s a little surprising, but none the less true: There’s only a bit over two months left till we’ll go on our honeymoon. I am very much looking forward to it. I have never been anywhere warm over Christmas. Neither of us has in fact. It’s going to be nice^TM to walk down the beach on Christmas Eve.

We sat down yesterday evening to go over the stops of our Caribbean cruise (by Royal Caribbean) and figure out which excursions to go on and what to do in each port. This was not the first time we had done that, but this time it was to actually finalize and book things.

Here are the map and itinerary of our nice cruise:

We’ll be on one of their smaller ships, the Empress of the Seas. A smaller boat means more stops, especially at smaller ports, the ones that are too small for the big, massive ships. That’s a good thing, it gives us the opportunity to see and explore more islands.

We think we’ve found a good balance of going on excursions and just hanging out, relaxing. It’s going to be great fun.

It actually looks like things are coming together slowly. Our place is starting to look less of a mess (mind you there are still quite a few boxes waiting to be unpacked), and the majority of the contractor work is done now. Who would have thunk.

It wasn’t an easy journey and it’s not quite over yet, but it feels good to see the place starting to look like we envisioned it.