Markus’ Blog

Yep, a week from now, our condo on Fraser Street will be pretty empty. The movers are scheduled to come at 9am next Saturday. And they’ll take everything that’s still left (other than our clothes) and take it to our storage locker. We’ve already taken quite a bit of stuff ourselves, but we’ll have to get a bigger locker to fit our furniture. Hopefully they’ll have a 10×10 locker available in the same building that we are in now. It wouldn’t be too much fun having to lug everything across their driveway / yard into the other building. We shall see. In fact, we should find out today, if they do or not.

Looks like we’ll be having an unplanned brunch out, today, before lugging around more boxes. I worked hard to convince my dear wife to go to Crave for brunch. Gotta go places while we still live close to them. — Besides, it wasn’t that difficult at all to put my plan into action.

I guess I am an early bird this time around. I upgraded to WordPress 2.6 only three days after it was released. Let’s hope there are no major security holes in this release.

Normally, I wait a few weeks, preferably till the x.1 release comes out. However, I liked the revision feature, so I made the jump.

A month from today, the buyer of our condo will take possession. That’s pretty darn soon.

On the other hand, we’ll be moving out of the condo even sooner! Moving day is August 2. That’s three weeks and a few days. We are — sort of — trying to take advantage of the long weekend. We’ll “lose” one day of it due to the move, but there will still be two more days off after that. Days to relax and chill out. Besides, August 2 already counts as “mid month” as far as mover’s rates go, which is always good.

We’ll be staying Downtown for the following not-quite two months (till September 27). That’s when it’ll be time to move to our new house in New Westminster!

Exciting times and a “first” for either one of us. Brigette’s first time living Downtown and a first for both of us living in our own house, on property that we actually own.

Time for a change. The theme stayed the same (Gemini-Plus), but the blog colours and the photo up top changed.

I took the previous picture showing the Downtown skyline from Stanley Park in May 2002. Yep, that was quite a while ago. The new picture, showing Downtown Vancouver from Locarno Beach, is, indeed, brand new (taken on June 15, 2008), as evidenced by the presence of the Shangri-La Vancouver .

Everybody is writing about Rogers and their ridiculous iPhone plans these days. I will, too, but with the slight twist of comparing Roger’s plans to the plans available in Austria rather than the US.

The situation in Austria is different in the sense that the iPhone is offered by two cell phone providers: T-Mobile and One. That alone makes it more difficult for the individual provider to be as stupid as Rogers.

As of today, XE.com reports an exchange rate of $1.60 for €1, which makes things a little more expensive than they would have been even a month ago, compared to the Canadian Dollar.

T-Mobile:

Phone: €49 (8 GB), €99 (16 GB)
Contract duration: 24 months (changes to other iPhone plans allowed)
One-time activation fee: €49
Classic plan: €39/month: €0.25 per SMS, 1000 combined airtime minutes (mobile + landline in Austria)
Supreme plan: €55/month: 1000 SMS included, 1000 airtime minutes for each of the following categories T-Mobile, landline, other mobile carriers, voice mail (that’s 4000 minutes total)
Incoming calls: unlimited
Data plan: 3 GB of traffic included in the above
Data overage: €0.10/MB

One:

Phone: €149 (8 GB), €229 (16 GB)
Contract duration: 24 months (no changes allowed)
One-time activation fee: €0
Monthly fee: €10 for (Sep. ‘08 till Dec. ‘08), then €25
Airtime: 1000 minutes (all of Austria, cell and landline)
Incoming calls: unlimited
Data plan: €14/month for 100 SMS and 3 GB of traffic
Data overage: couldn’t find any information

Bottom line:

Not the greatest, but certainly more affordable than Rogers. From T-Mobile, you can purchase an iPhone for $158 ($79+$79), sign a 2-year contract and pay a monthly fee of $63, and that gives you more than Rogers: $199 for the phone and $115/month for the plan, locked in for 36 months. If you go over your bandwidth limit, it can still get expensive, but not as expensive as Rogers.

At the end of the day, I don’t think I’ll ever get the philosophy behind Roger’s iPhone plans. It’s the be sneaky, screw the customer over, take advantage of our monopoly, hope the customer runs past their bandwidth limit so we can charge even more approach. Customers are going to realize that (and they already have), and they’ll be rightfully pissed because of it. Rogers could have had a instead. Had they offered reasonable prices, they wouldn’t have been able to handle the stampede of eager customers, making good money in the process and not alienating their current and future clients. But no, they need to be stupid morons and try to make money the blunt (rub-it-in-our-face-we-are-the-monopoly) and sneaky (we-hope-you-exceed-your-bandwidth) way. I hope they get what they deserve, i. e. barely any iPhone sales. That’d be fun.

Would I, personally, be getting an iPhone if we had plans like the one offered by AT&T? Yes, absolutely. How about the T-Mobile or One plans from Austria? Maybe. Not sure. It’s on the verge, but still manageable enough that it could, realistically, be a yes. And with Roger’s plan? Hell, NO!