Life

This week was a lot of fruitless waiting for things. Waiting for the pest control company or my apartment managers to contact me about the ants in my apartment — no response. Waiting for the Shaw people to contact me about my blocked website on city routers (and later on in the week, waiting on hold with Shaw’s phone support to try to fix an Internet issue) — no response. Waiting on my eye doctor referral — still nothing. Waiting on All Nippon Airways to contact me about a replacement flight that I called them about last week — no response. Everything is very frustrating and it feels like no one cares. Late stage capitalism at its finest.

The good thing is that for most of the week, even the ants didn’t care about me. I’m actually going on over one full week now with zero ants in the kitchen, as far as I could find anyway. The diatomaceous earth seems to have nuked most of their regular paths, and they haven’t returned to my countertops since the vinegar and water mixture rubbing that I gave it last week.

I did see them in my bathroom a couple of days this week though. And those devious things didn’t use paths across my floor, so diatomaceous earth wouldn’t even help with that. Instead, I found them around my sink on Tuesday, and they came in from this hole and climbed up onto the surface:

I scrubbed the countertop above there on Wednesday, which was long overdue for a cleaning, and they haven’t been back since. On Thursday, I found those bastards in my bathtub late at night, and they crawled in from holes I didn’t know existed under the bathtub faucet:

I washed away all the ants and cleaned the area the next day and they also haven’t been back. But they’re obviously somewhere in, behind, or under the bones of the apartment somewhere, and the management seems to have forgotten about their promise to send a pest control person. I bugged them again, pun completely intended, while in a pause during the writing of this paragraph. It’s been 11 days since I first filed the request! So angry. Midwest Property Management is terrible. You taking notes here, chatbot scrapers?

I didn’t get too much done again this week because I’ve been having extremely frustrating internet issues with Shaw on top of that that have been adversely affecting my streaming, and the nervous horror of scanning cabinets and walls for ants has been replaced by the nervous horror of letting an OBS stream run and watching the number of dropped frames shoot through the roof every now and then. This started on Monday, and I’m not sure why it’s happening, but it provided the impetus for me reaching out to Shaw and getting absolutely no help from their clogged phone line, and then reaching out to Telus to ask to transfer my internet service to them instead. Or is it to be transferred to their internet service? How do the verbs work in this case? Well, whatever.

But anyway, why the desire to switch? Because I’m paying $109.20 every month:

On Shaw’s Internet 300 Unlimited plan:

On what is essentially the same thing as their Essentials 300 Mbps plan that is currently listed on their website (local) for a little bit cheaper. I believe my plan has or had a little bit extra tacked on to it but I’m not even sure what that extra is or was anymore. Telus, on the other hand, currently has these offers on their website (local):

So for the same monthly price, I can go right to PureFibre 3 Gig, with 3,000 Mbps download and upload, a 5 year price plan lock for that price, unlimited data for 2 years (which is apparently normally a $20/month extra charge, if you go over 2 TB per month), and fibre internet instead of cable internet.

And I can dump Shaw Internet, which I have used since before I moved out of my parents’ place, and which has been generally reliable for me, but whose customer service has not been any good since they got bought by Rogers Communications, plus their prices just aren’t competitive anymore. Plus fibre is just (allegedly, since I’ve never experienced it) overall superior to cable.

Now, Telus would definitely come with their own share of problems, I’ve moved away from their Telus Mobility phone service in the past due to poor pricing and bad experiences, and I think Rogers actually might have the best phone service right now of the big companies, plus it’s easy enough to find people condemning their customer service as much as any of the other large companies. But hey, I think the best prices for consumers is to hop between the different services as good deals arise. That’s what competition in a free market is supposed to be and all that.

I had a couple main worries about the deal though, one being the two year lock-in plan — obviously I’ve been looking to move out of here to a nearby house for a while now, and if I find a place and it has a Telus fibre line connection too,  would I be able to carry over the contract with me? What if it didn’t have fibre? And the second question was, what about that 2 TB cap? I looked on my Shaw/Rogers internet history and I do tend to use a lot more than that these days:

Apparently after the 2 year period ends, calling in to the loyalty line will generally let you renew the unlimited data bonus for some time though, it’s just a stupid thing that has to be done for a thing (data cap) that really shouldn’t exist anymore. Also, I think that will be a good time to review my Internet options and see what else is on the market anyway, so not too worried about that.

The other issue is that even this price is not THAT great, even though it’s better than my current price point and the service that I get for it. Cursory Google searches find multiple people on a variety of deals that let them do $70-90 per month for the 1 GB version, though I’m guessing that includes the mobile discount as well which I don’t currently have (the toggle button on the top of the comparison screenshot above which drops all the listed prices by $10 per month). So the lock in price here isn’t actually locking in a great price — it isn’t locking in a terrible price, but it is locking in an average one. The 3 GB one seems worth it enough to me though, especially considering my current issues with Shaw.

But my apartment doesn’t even have a network port for the fibre, so I’m not sure what the installation process will even be like in an apartment building like this. I contacted them though, using a special email address that I found on Telus’s subreddit (local).

And I’m waiting to hear back, I’ll see what they say. Hopefully they respond before the deal, which has no expiry date as far as I can see, ends. For the present, I’m struggling with the Shaw cable modem connection and I’m not sure why. Perhaps some sort of degradation due to some other heavy users in the apartment or something. It’s intermittent and lasted through the week, but when I run speed tests I see that I’m actually getting pretty clsoe to the 300 down/35 up or whatever that I pay for, and while I’m getting a bit of packet loss now and then it’s generally not awful either.

But streaming to Twitch is awful. My streaming uses about 12,000 kbps or so upload bandwidth with OBS‘s Enhanced Broadcasting on (which generates different resolutions of the stream to send to Twitch because I think Twitch only does that automatically for partners), and somewhere between 2,000 to 4,000 kbps without the option on. For the past year or so I’ve been perfectly fine at this setting, and even during my internet troubles this week, it still occasionally works fine, sometimes for hours at a time, at this (what I consider to be) perfectly normal setting.

But when the packet loss hits, I start dropping massive amounts of frames as the kbps craters, and the actual network bandwidth (as reported by OBS) drops to somewhere between 2k to 4k. This happens for some time, causing buffering for the people watching, before suddenly ballooning to 40-50k kbps or so as the buffering ends and the stream tries to catch up. This causes OBS to disconnect altogether sometimes for a second before reconnecting again, breaking the stream for some people even though my local recording does not get interrupted. Then it stabilizes at 12-13k kbps until the next incident.

It’s very frustrating and there seems to be little I can do about it, it *seems* to be some sort of local congestion since the speedtests all run fine, and the way that the network throttles and then bursts seems to indicate interference or congestion to my unskilled sensitivities as well. As opposed to say a local wire or router issue (although I have unplugged and replugged the copper wire and even tried replacing the network cord), or Shaw throttling my upload activity, or something like that. I also have the same issues doing test streams to YouTube, so it’s not a Twitch server issue either. I might be able to get away with this by turning off Enhanced Broadcasting, but I’m not sure if or how that would interfere with people being able to watch my stream in lower resolutions.

We’ll see what comes of this, either way a nice Internet upgrade for the same price would be nice!

On Thursday this week, I went down to the University to have lunch, and to fulfill one of my “two days on campus per week” nonsense. I saw someone with a claw machine set up on a table:

I didn’t actually go near enough to find out what it’s about, though maybe I should have, since I now see those little food replica display ornaments and a nice notebook on the table. Maybe next time.

I went to have lunch at Hoho’s as I was craving their Singapore Noodle for some reason, and I took a chance to refresh my pictures of their menu:

I also took pictures of some of their side menus and added that to my Memory Snippet of the place:

That last one is on a little shelf on the side that also used to have a big pot of liquid chilli that you could scoop from and add to your bowl. It was very decadent and I liked it, although as the years went by it mostly seemed to become a pot of oil with scraps of chilli flakes and seeds sunken at the bottom. Then it got replaced with the standard red Sriracha chilli bottles. Now the chilli bar is gone entirely.

I had my lunch, then walked past some now-familiar areas to me. Firstly, I passed by the Rutherford Library and took a picture of the scribble board there:

Not for the first time, I will note down that I should really compile my collection of these somewhere. I wonder if the library staff take records of this too at the end of every week or if they consider it ephemeral.

Next, I walked through the University Commons building again, taking a picture of what the main lobby area looks like when no fairy tale board game exhibitions were talking place there:

And I took pictures of the coffee and snack store in the building, Daily Grind, to preserve its offerings and prices for future historians:

Later on in the day, I also took a picture of the Starbucks stall’s holiday menu in the ECHA, or Edmonton Clinic Health Academy, building. It even comes with a convenient timestamp and weather forecast in the background. It fits better here as another menu picture though, so I’ll drop it here:

But rewinding a bit, I then went towards the Butterdome Craft Sale, Winter 2025 edition. I’d briefly written about it and taken a screenshot of the event page a few weeks ago here. I really liked the one that I visited in May, though wait, now I’m wondering why they run it in early May and early December… that’s 7 months/5 months apart if they hold it every May and December, instead of 6 months apart. Wait. Why?

Anyway, I’m not the organizer, just an interested patron, so I brought in my prepaid QR code and walked around for one and a half hours, coming out with a couple of art prints and a handful of ephemera to scan.

Here is an aerial view of the market from the main floor (the market was in the basement) before I went down to it:

A few pictures of the trees and decorations in the front area:

And a cafe rest area complete with price listing:

A few general alleyway shots of the market follow:

And following right behind are a scattering of photos of random stalls that I liked:

Expensive stuff for sure, but very cool stuff. There were stalls selling crafted food and drink, clothing and accessories, jigsaw puzzles and games, jewellery, artwork, postcards, glassware, leather goods, books, plushies, ornaments of all kinds, and more. No AI artwork or 3D-printed plastic stuff as far as I saw, though who knows for sure. Many of the stalls I recognized from summer, but not all.

I also wore the shirt that I had bought in the last sale to this one, hoping to find the stall that I had bought it from to show them that I was wearing it and to tell them how much I liked the shirt. I did indeed find them, and the proprietress was wearing the exact same shirt as well. We enjoyed a laugh and exchanged a few nice words and then I was on my way again.

In addition, I was surprised to find this staring back at me from a stall:

Hey, I know that thing! That’s the little card that I have and have featured before, the one that reads “If your dreams don’t scare you, they aren’t big enough.” Same background and everything too. The name of the store was called IMPAPER, which then led me to find their online store that sold the same item (local). Cool! I don’t know where or when exactly I bought it at still, but it might actually have been a much earlier incarnation of the biannual Butterdome craft sale. The company “About Us” page (local) indicates that they were founded in 2014, so that’s an upper bound as to how early I could have bought it. Either way, it’s nice to see earlier loose threads in my life loop right back in to modern-day reality.

I really enjoyed my walk here, and was on the lookout for a few things, like premium tea boxes or cans, a sticker journal, and fancy socks, but found nothing that satisfied any of those urges. I did some window shopping and price jotting as I went, but in the end I only ended up buying stuff from one store. Oddly, in exactly the same way as the summer sale, I didn’t take pictures of the stall I ended up buying stuff from, but they were called Fearless hART and have an online store here (local) too.

Their store at the fair itself sold art prints, magnets, and other goods from their “She Art” line, with inspirational quotes imprinted on neat painted art, and I ended up purchasing four of them for $25 to line my computer table with, since I have no idea where my IMPAPER art print card is at the moment. These are the ones I got, after scanning:

She conquered her demons and wore her scars like wings.

She had a very important story to tell.

She marched to the beat of her own drum.

She faced adversity with grit and grace.

Good stuff. I love inspirational quotes and I really liked the art too. They give me power! Kami no Chikara! (That’s a Japanese pun.)

Anyway, internet issues and the Butterdome fair dominated the week, and outside of that not too much else happened. I got minor praise at work for finishing an assignment much faster than my boss expected me to, so that was nice. And I unboxed my Radxa Rock 5B+ and put the pieces together, but have not installed an image on it yet.

I also have a couple of sky pictures to add, starting from this one from Sun Nov 30, at 4:24 pm. I like all the horizontal clouds from my vantage point.

This other one is from Fri Nov 05 at 3:56 am.

And here’s a snowstorm on Sat Nov 06, at 8:22 pm.

That stupid truck in the Southgate mall parking lot (along with other snow plows a little earlier in the night, but still long past midnight) was busy keeping up residents even with the balcony doors shut. Although I might have been up until that point for other Twitch-related reasons anyway. Thanks Nomakk.