My Diary #245

Life

Way too many big ticket items happened this week, and it felt, at the start of the week, like I was riding through a streak of really bad luck for some reason, especially since the specter of the broken washing machine and dryer last week was still kind of haunting me. That recovered by the latter part of this week though, and even my laundry run this week went by without incident and with fresh-smelling clothes again, so all is forgiven, I guess.

The biggest incident that happened was that on Sun, Jul 19 at 4:20 pm, there was a brief, 1-second power outage in our building. That caused my computer to reset, and my router to cycle, but did not cause the microwave or stove to reset their clocks. However, while the computer and router came up fine again after the power cycle, the Telus router was no longer receiving a connection from wherever it was supposed to get an IP address from, so even though the Broadband said it was connected with full bandwidth, the Internet Access portion of the router said "DHCP Not Connected". Instead of a screenshot, I had taken a phone picture of the router main configuration page because I needed to send it to someone over the phone while my Internet was out, so here's a redacted picture of it that looks really weird in thumbnail form:

I called Telus at 5:09 pm, and got connected to a lady doing Tier 1 support who walked me through various things, and even connected to my phone's camera using a cool remote access program with a little pointer on the camera, and she asked me to point my camera at the router and do this and that to it by circling it with her pointer. Eventually, she escalated me to the back-end team for support, and after putting me on hold for over an hour, she pulled me back and said that someone had told her they could see other people who had lost connection in the building as well, and said they thought it was likely something in the electrical room that didn't come back on properly after the power outage. She told me to file a maintenance request with my management, and that she would call back the next morning to find out if the connection had come back on yet.

This rankled me a bit, but I didn't have much of a choice since that phone call took nearly two hours and it was late Sunday evening by that time anyway. I called the emergency/after-hours repair phone number for our apartment complex, and a lady on the other end picked up the phone, created an online ticket for it, and said that I would get a call when someone processed it. That's it. It didn't end up getting processed as an emergency ticket (even though it involved the electrical room and something that allegedly didn't come on properly after the power outage) and I didn't get a callback until almost 2:00 pm the next day, That being said, that call back, when it came, said that they didn't see anything off at a cursory glance but that they would have had no idea how to deal with the Telus equipment in the electrical room anyway, and one of their techs would have had to be the one to come down and fix anything, and I did agree with that sentiment. I did recognize it to be a helpless move by the Tier 1 tech to get me off the line so she could end the call and move on to another ticket or head home.

On Monday, the same Telus lady called me back and asked me if my connection had reestablished. I said no, so she booked an appointment with one of her field techs to come down and look at my router. This was annoying too, since the earliest date by that point was Tuesday morning, and by that point I would have been without Internet access for over 40 hours. Couldn't the appointment have been made on Sunday evening for Monday?

Two mitigating factors helped dull my annoyance though. The first was that even though it was slower and websites would frequently take forever to load (and livestreams would just error out and die sometimes), I simply tethered my phone to the computer and used that Internet access (Telus Mobility, so it was also under the same Telus umbrella) anyway. The second factor was that I had asked for credit for the downtime on Sunday in an off-the-cuff manner, and to my surprise the lady was very agreeable about it and immediately issued me a $15 credit on next month's $90 bill (plus $4.50 GST, so it's usually $94.50 per month for my Telus PureFibre 3G, as stated in the past.) This actually gave me some suspicion as to how bad the downtime maybe actually was and how much they might have been hiding, but whatever, it went a long way towards mollifying me over the weekend.

So on Tuesday, the Telus technician, a friendly guy named Manpreet, came by with a big bag of tools and I showed him to the router in my house. He got on the phone with his own support team while troubleshooting my device, and ended up replacing the entire router itself (which gave me a new MAC address, in case the old one was somehow stuck), and also went down to the apartment complex's electrical room and tinkered with something there before coming back again, all to no avail. Eventually he said that they had diagnosed it to not be hardware-related at all, at least not my router, and not up until the electrical room, so it was something further upstream, but that he had no idea what it was and that the back-end team needed to look into it further.

He spent over two hours here, which was longer than his booked appointment time of 1.75 hours, and I knew that he had another appointment with some other customer to go to. But even though he tried leaving twice, his remote support team sent him back to me twice to try some further fixes, all to no avail, but which I did really appreciate too. In the end though, he said that they had figured out that the Telus PureFibre 3G connections were down through the entire complex, but the lower tier ones were still working (specifically, "32 or 64" of the ports that provide the 3G connections were down, but others were fine), so he swapped a dongle in my router out and set me up what he claimed was a Telus PureFibre 1.5G connection with "up to 1,500 Mbps download speed" and "up to 1000 Mbps upload speed". (local) as a temporary measure so that I would have some wired Internet while they figured out what was wrong with the 3G connections. I asked if that meant that he would have to come by and replace the dongle in the router once the 3G connection was restored. He said yes.

Well, that was something. I had no issue with him or his team's effort while he was here at all, and we even had a friendly chat where he asked what games I liked to play, and then said he liked playing PUBG but was not very good at it. He asked for game recommendations and I said he should try out ARC Raiders (local) as it was in a similar genre but better.

However, he said that he would be in touch when he got any updates on the ticket with his support team, and as the week went on, all I got was silence from their end. The only communications I got from Telus was a notice saying that my ticket had been resolved and was going to be closed (and when I called in to dispute this, some Indian guy in a very noisy call centre said that there was still a ticket open with the back-end team but that my original ticket was going to be closed for optics reasons because the technician had already come by in person), and a survey asking me if my issue had been resolved. Manpreet had also gave me his business card so that I could contact him if needed, and I messaged him on both Wednesday and Friday morning asking if there was an update, and he said no in both cases. The ticket was still in Pending and that was the only update he had.

This frustrated me greatly, especially since that I had done several speedtests over the past few days and found that the alleged Telus PureFibre 1.5G connections wasn't quite living up to its promises.

While I know that the top speeds are only theoretical, 430 Mbps download and 65 Mbps upload is not even in the same ballpark as 1,500 Mbps download and 1,000 Mbps upload. Especially the upload. Are people actually paying for this nonsense in the building? These are almost the exact same speeds that I was getting when I was on Shaw's cable modem service. Those are cable speeds, with fibre name branding on it!

I told Manpreet that I was going to file a complaint with CCTS (local), or the Commission of Complaints for Telecom-Television Services. They're an ombuds service that helps move and resolve complaints (local) against telecommunication companies (like Telus) in Canada. Manpreet didn't like that and said it hadn't been a week yet since he came by on Tuesday. I said that as far as I was concerned, the issue started on Sunday, since that's when I first reached out to Telus, and when I consulted Gemini to ask if I was being unfair to them, Gemini said that I was under no obligation to wait for the technician's arbitrary timeframe. Although Gemini is a sycophant anyway, and I had already resolved to file it before asking it, a little extra validation didn't hurt, I suppose, especially since the CCTS gives Telus a 20-day window to resolve the issue. Why would I wait a week or longer and only then start the 20-day window?

Most of what pissed me off though was the lack of communication from Telus and how long the ticket was stuck in pending. An entire work week came and went, and I even had to take a couple days off work for this, and there was no news or movement at all? For a complete apartment outage (for the 3G service) which they acknowledged? I asked for several things from the CCTS form (this is a screenshot of part of the PDF summary file that I was sent with my responses afterwards):

And the CCTS immediately accepted my complaint 16 minutes after I filed it, and a whopping 3 minutes after I emailed them with supporting documents and chat logs:

That was on Friday morning, and part of my request/demand was daily updates until the issue is solved. I don't know if that was the cause of what happened next, but on Sunday morning I got a text from Manpreet telling me that the support team had solved the issue and he needed access to my apartment's electrical room to fix it again. He was willing to come down right away and do it but I told him that our rental office isn't open on Sunday, so he said that he'd come by on Monday morning instead. I'd like to think that that complaint lit a fire under some executive and manager to immediately get the ticket moving, but who knows for sure. A 7-day outage is ridiculous.

I hate the arrogant telecommunication companies here in Canada. Manpreet himself was fine, it's the businesses themselves that are the issue. But I've had issues in the past with Virgin Mobile, Telus on other issues, and Shaw as well. They're all grossly overpriced and their services are awful, and it seems like there are just no good options anywhere.

Moving on from that bit of unpleasantry, an electrician hired by my rental company came by to install my balcony outlet in the middle of my complete Internet outage on Monday. I joked with him that he came on the best day since the Internet outage meant that I wasn't doing anything particularly important on the PC that day anyway and it was no issue to turn off the outlet (and eventually flip all the breakers in the electrical box in the apartment) so that he could install the new outlet. He also mentioned that he was surprised that our apartments did not already have a balcony outlet, since they were quite standard. We agreed that it must have been built just before it became a normal thing, and I said that since I offered to pay for it, I expected that the rental company was probably quite happy to upgrade an apartment without having to foot the bill for it. It was still worth it for me since the benefit was mutual though, so that didn't bother me, and this was what it looked like in the end.

Oh sorry, that's the indoors picture. I meant this one on the outside of that same wall socket.

It's pretty neat, the plastic lid over top of the GFCI socket can open from two distinct directions, the right side or the bottom side, though not both at once.

The electrician wore a shirt advertising a company called Four Elements Electric Ltd (local), which has a crappy lazy-loading website which won't load anything below my current browser viewport, so that local capture had to be done from the bottom of the page, which leaves an ugly floating bar in the middle of the page. If my apartment ever burns down though, look for one of those people listed on the page above.

After he left on Monday, and since my Internet was down anyway and the weather was nice and overcast, I went down for the first of two visits this week to the Taste of Edmonton food festival going on down in Churchill Square. Everything linked to that visit has now been catalogued on a separate, overly-detailed blog post that I published a couple of days ago, and which I will link here. That page is heavy, with 242 images and 3 .pdf files linked to it in some form or another.

While I was gone though, I barely missed a delivery from UPS, containing the camera that I was going to use on my balcony. This irked me a bit because it had been delayed a couple of times, and now they were going to deliver it to a UPS pickup point that was about half an hour away on foot the next day, but it was technically my fault for not being chained at home 24/7 until all my deliveries arrived, so I decided to treat it as a mini-excursion the next day and walked down to that place to pick up the package, some lunch, and an ephemera piece or two.

That UPS pickup point turned out to be a shop named Honor Computer Systems, which is an interesting footnote because the last fully premade computer I bought, while I was still living at my parents' house, was from them! Back in around the year 2004 or so, I believe. They're not really a retail shop though, at least not now/anymore, with boxes everywhere and only a handful of small shelves with spare parts on them, and a single attendant who was in the back room but came out when I entered the shop to ask for my parcel. I guess being a UPS parcel delivery point is one of the ways they stay afloat or something these days. Look at their website (local), it's amazing! Well, most of it (local). They don't even have an online product page anymore.

On my way back, I picked up lunch from a nearby restaurant called Calgary Trail Noodle House. I last visited this place three years ago, back when my blog posts were still nine sections long (goodness), just after the end of the COVID-19 pandemic and a little bit after the switch to ban plastic bags. It was deserted at the time, though there were dirty plates everywhere, but now it looked like a normal restaurant again and there were three other groups of people there besides me, so I'm glad things seemed to have worked out somewhat well for them. There was still only one guy manning the entire front area there, probably the same person as before, and they still gave me a regular plastic bag to take away my food in even though those were supposedly banned, which I do appreciate as I still strongly disagree with that ban.

Why? Because, as it happens way too often, and did happen in this case even though the food was in a plastic bag, some sauce spilled out and ruined not only the bag but the reusable bag that I had put it into as well during my walk back home. Thanks, Justin Trudeau, thanks. Despite generally being a progressive, liberal person, I find the propaganda (local) around this to be stupid virtue signalling, and so do many others (local).

Anyway, my camera box was also gravy-smeared but the camera itself was fine. I haven't had time to actually configure and install it though, what with all the craziness of the week, and the many, many parts that the camera and the wireless access point included in their boxes. I did configure the wireless access point successfully though, with Gemini's help, which is a lot of the way there. Maybe I'll try to finish it up next week and see what other parts I didn't think about needing and have to order in.

There was still one more piece of drama in the week, which occurred on my second trip down to the Taste of Edmonton, on Wed, Jul 22. The day was fairly hot, clocking in at about 29°C, though not overwhelmingly hot like it is elsewhere in the world. Still, fairly hot for us, but I thought that I would be fine since I had an umbrella that acted as a parasol. After six different helpings of food though, and a can of IPA that Jah wanted me to try even though I almost never drink alcohol, I was taking the air-conditioned train home to Southgate when I felt the skin around my forehead feeling tight.

I didn't think much about it and still felt perfectly fine, but when the train reached Southgate LRT Station, the single escalator leading up was out of service as usual (part of why ETS is terrible, their station escalators are frequently out of service) and so I joined the queue of people slowly shuffling up the stairs. About two-thirds up the stairs though, I started to feel faint, and by the time we reached the top, I knew I was in trouble. Thankfully, there was a nearby empty bench, and I sat down on that to try to compose myself as a wave of dizziness and mild panic hit me, the world closed in, and my hands and feet started to feel numb. I brought out my water bottle to try to hydrate myself.

The next thing I knew, an escalator maintenance person was shaking me awake from some sort of dream that I was having but did not remember. He asked if I was alright. I said that I was, and had fallen asleep, and he pointed to my poor White Rabbit water bottle that was lying on the ground beside my bench, the water in it spilled out all over the floor. Oh. I apparently blacked out for a few minutes, less than ten minutes for sure according to my watch, but I'm not sure how long exactly I was out cold. Sweat was also dripping down my face and body, and while I was conscious at that point, I was still feeling too faint to move.

I found out that I could lean forwards a bit with my arms on my knees and that seemed to work as a recovery position though. So I did that for a couple minutes, and rested as another wave of people from the next train arrived and walked past me towards the mall and transit centre. A couple more minutes after that, I was feeling better so I stood up and shuffled home without incident.

However, when I got home and started to clean up, I felt faint again in the middle of the shower, and sitting down in the shower didn't help either. I immediately shut off the tap, made a half-hearted attempt at drying my hair, then grabbed my clothes and a couple of towels and stumbled towards my bed. I quickly laid down the towels, one over the pillow and one over the bed, and then just flopped my wet self down onto the bed and went horizontal there.

During this time, I experienced multiple bouts of it feeling hard to breathe, or rather, it seemed like I would "forget" to breathe sometimes and then have to inhale deeply a few times to catch up. Even though it didn't fully match all the syndromes, this told me that it was heat exhaustion (rather than an adverse effect to alcohol, though that might have helped with dehydration) because I had experienced this breathing oddity one time before in the past. Looking back at that post and the syndromes I listed then, I never felt any body temperature fluctuation this time, and so had no shivering, but I did also had hearing issues when I first sat down at the bench in Southgate LRT Station, though there was no ringing and that cleared up fairly quickly too

I had no issues remembering anything either, so I replayed the events of the last few hours as I lay in bed. We ended up cancelling our anime group watch that day, and at some point after I had mostly dried out, I mustered enough energy to slip on my clothes, before lying back down. Two or three hours passed before I finally felt much better, and got up to have another, proper shower, and then cook soup for dinner in my fancy new pan. The rest of the night was spent in nonbiri self-care mode, and it was 11:00 pm or so before I finished my dinner, but nothing went further awry, much to my relief.

Due to that whole episode, my Taste of Edmonton 2026 article took longer than usual to write up and post this week, and it is unlikely that I will make my way down to this year's KDays (local), which is running concurrently and ends this weekend, as all the remaining days of the event were forecast to be pretty hot or thunderstorm-stricken as well. Animethon (local) is a 50-50 as well. And I might visit the Heritage Festival (local) this year, but that depends on the weather next weekend too.

Those were the biggest things from the week, and there were a couple of smaller events here and there that I would highlight on a slower week but this post is way too long already. For my own future searches, I will add three footnotes. The first is that I went to get more San Marzano D.O.P.-certified tomatoes from the Italian Centre this week on the way back from picking up the UPS package from Honor Computer Systems. This was first recommended to me by Gemini back when I visited the Italian Centre on May 20 2026, according to my spending ledger spreadsheet, which much to my puzzlement I apparently didn't catalogue in my blog (it would chronologically have been in this blog post).

I did like them a lot in my soup bowls though, so this week I stopped by on my walk back home to pick up several more cans of this. Depending on the brand, these tend to go for somewhere between $6.50 to $9.00 a can, which is pricey, but they are so nice and they're large cans that last for two full pans of soup.

The second footnote is that I've been quite taken recently with watching a Twitch channel named MidnightSumo (local), which features sumo matches from Japan, televised on a streaming website called Abema which I am passingly familiar with, with English commentary by the host of the channel. Both the chat and the community seem pretty good, generally being both knowledgeable and civil, and learning how the matches work and the struggles of the sumo wrestlers to get promoted up the rankings, plus looking all the stats (local), which I always love, has been quite a neat rabbit hole to explore.

He also plays old, weird commercials during commercial breaks and downtime, and somehow syncs the day's tournament replays to end just as the next day's tournament starts, using some sort of witchcraft. The community is far too big (and chat too noisy) to stand out and make friends in though, and I will probably only really hang out here while a major tournament is going on for now, and those seem to happen six times a year for 15 days each time, but I gave him my Amazon Prime subscription this month. Maybe I'll check out some of the amateur tournaments in between too.

Lastly, the third footnote is that Kel did eventually make it to her new apartment in China, but only after a day's delay as she missed her connecting flight in Vancouver due to a three hour or so delay at Edmonton's International Airport, which apparently suffered a brief power outage that evening (Sat, Jul 18 2026). She did get to check out a new lounge in the international departures section in Vancouver though, which I have not been to yet myself, and her apartment is also notable in that it apparently has a panic button that starts an alarm that the residence manager had to come deactivate. HA. Tigey can't wait to press that when he gets slighted by her next time I visit her.

And to close out this section, here's some weather stuff. Firstly, here's an evening picture from my balcony, circa Thu, Jul 23 2026 at 9:51 pm. It's pretty. And so are you.

Then, on Sat, Jul 25 2026, a HUGE orange-alert level thunderstorm rolled into Edmonton. It lasted for maybe 45 minutes starting from about 9:28 pm before it passed completely through, and the peak of the storm was about 20 minutes or so, but boy was it a peak. The early part of the storm had lightning constantly flashing over and over in the sky, like a broken, flickering street lamp, and the second part had rain lashing so strongly that it was blowing sideways into my balcony and through the screen door again. Crazy.

The first video here was recorded from inside my apartment, through the doors, and captures the lightning flashing over and over. The second one captures the later part of the storm and its sheer strength, and was done by sticking my hand out the ajar balcony screen door.

And then, by 10:14 pm, the clouds had taken their leave and lady evening had put on her gown again.

Games

I apparently didn't add this in last week since most of it was written already by the time we did this, but Satinel and I played a little bit of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Splintered Fate (local) last Saturday, since she had bought the DLC for the game during the last Steam sale. This was just enough for me to get my final achievement, which was stupidly locked behind one of the DLCs, and for Satinel to get her second-last achievement. Thanks and good luck on your last Mouser one! Teehee.

We also finished up Sniper Elite v2 Remastered (local) this week, bugs and all, and started playing one of the dev studio's other games, Zombie Army Trilogy (local). Sniper Elite with zombies, minus some tools. The early maps, from what assumedly was the first game in that spin-off series, suffer from the same type of nonsense that Sniper Elite v2 does -- low-poly models, lots of invisible walls everywhere, and a certain amount of jank with the weapons, hit collision, AI, and other things. But so far, it seems fun. And at least it doesn't pause when we tab out! Although it doesn't even have borderless windowed mode somehow, and it hardlocked and crashed me to desktop once already.

In terms of solo play, the early part of the week found me playing some TROUBLESHOOTER: Abandoned Children (local), and then some Deep Rock Galactic: Survivor (local). Nomakk (local) started playing Hades II (local) this week though, so I pivoted back to that this week and started a new save file. I haven't played it since shortly after 1.0 hit, so I remembered little about the game's story, and it's more fun more or less aligning myself to a streamer's own playthrough anyway. I will probably try to push myself to 100% it this time through and not completely fall off again, as I might not be able to get back on the wagon for a third try at the game if I fail this time.

Plushie of the Week #238

When Kel was at my parents' place last week, she showed me a blue cat plushie that she and a couple of friends she went out with had picked up from an Edmonton IKEA store. It apparently came in a set of three, one a purple rabbit, one a green bear, and this little blue cat. I assume she didn't end up paying for it, as I was told nothing about that or exactly which day it was purchased, or even which IKEA it was from specifically, but Kel walked away with this one from the set, while each of her other two friends also kept one of these little animals. Aww!

The product itself was easy enough to find on the IKEA website though. It's this one, named GREJSIMOJS (local), and there's a cat, bunny, and bear as advertised. Good job remembering the colours and species, Kel!

Pictures circa Jul 17 2026. Front:

Back:

Underside:

Dreams

Jul 20 2026

• Snippet: All I remember is having two magazines in my hand, and going up to the second storey of a department store in order to find a rack to put it on, as I had borrowed it somewhere from there to read it. I eventually asked a store clerk who was looking at me, and after she took a look at the two magazines, she pointed out that one of them had no price tag markings that indicated that it was even from their store, whereas the other one had an old one, and suggested that I just keep both of the magazines.

Jul 23 2026

Dream 1

• I was walking home through a city rife with gangs, avoiding the city streets and using the red enemy dots on my minimap to navigate away from them as I knew that some of them were hunting me.
• I cut through a park and was followed by a young couple who was headed in the same direction but wasn't sure how to navigate the dozens of little paths leading through the park. Without formally greeting them, I walked slightly ahead of them, listening to them chat to themselves as I informally guided them down the paths.
• At one point I tried to take a shortcut down a dirt path but noticed that they stopped and refused to follow, uncertainly continuing to walk down the regular cement path that the dirt path branched off of instead, so I abandoned the dirt path idea and went back to the regular concrete path, going back just in front of them.
• Near the end, once we could see the exit from the park, we also split off briefly to take alternate paths that were visible to each other at all times to reach the end.
• Once we exited the park, we finally spoke to each other briefly for the first time, as they thanked me for the guidance before we left in opposite directions.

Dream 2

• I was kicking a balled up piece of paper along the ground together while walking through a building with a friend. This was part of a much larger game of paper football that multiple people were playing as part of two opposing teams. We were on the second floor, while the football net that I was going to kick the ball into was on the fifth floor.
• I kicked the wadded up ball of paper into an elevator and we both went up on it, although when we first emerged we were on the third floor for some reason, but it didn't click that we were on the wrong floor for me until we left the elevator lobby and the passages looked unfamiliar. We went back to the lobby, and went up another two floors.
• Once we reached the fifth floor, we started navigating the passage toward the goal, but my friend noticed that my right slipper, which was the one kicking the ball, had an ant on it. I removed the slipper and then saw more bugs coming to swarm over it, including larger spiders and something that had tendrils wrapping around the slipper.
• My friend pulled out his chemistry set and put it on a nearby table. He said that he'd fix my slipper, he just needed a few minutes to whip up a concoction that would drive the bugs away. I nodded and stood on one leg while leaving the slipper with him.
• We then got waylaid by a chatty guy who was interested in what we were doing and wanted to befriend us. We made small talk with him but he was asking annoying questions, and as my friend was finishing up the mixture, I verbally lashed out at my friend with mock frustration at something about the chemistry process that not only did I know I was wrong about, I also knew that he knew I knew I was wrong about.
• The chatter then left, and I apologized to my friend, who by this point was pouring the mixture over the slipper, which immediately chased all the bugs away. I said I wanted to bring some negativity and awkwardness into the conversation so that the other guy would leave us alone. My friend was unperturbed and said he had figured out what I was doing. He finished and packed up his chemistry kit while I donned my slipper again and we continued kicking the ball on towards where the net was.

Jul 26 2026

• Snippet: I found a couple of ants crawling around on the wall of my kitchen, and suspected that they had followed the visiting sumo wrestlers who were performing in my living room, since they walked around and then came in to my apartment on bare feet. That, or it was because of all the recent rain that forced them to seek higher ground. I contemplated squishing them right away and then calling the rental apartment to send in pest control again. What a bother.