Peter's Useful Crap

My apartment came with an electric, fake fireplace that served no good purpose and also took up an inordinate amount of space in the room on the other side of the wall. The large box on the other side of the wall had been built specifically to cover up the small protrusion of the fireplace. The fireplace and box had to go.

Despite my best attempts to be handy around the house, I accept the fact that my attempts at this job would have resulted in more harm than good. So I hired a handyman / general contractor. Some of the people I asked for handyman recommendations said that they wouldn’t even recommend the ones they’d used. I can strongly recommend the handyman who did the work for me.

The handyman is Michael Murphy. He is based in Vancouver and does most of his work in Burnaby and New Westminster. He works under the “Yellow Van Handyman” franchise of HomeTask. I was simply walking down the street one day, saw his van parked outside of a store, and took one of the business cards attached to the outside of the van. The HomeTask website is handy in itself, because each of its contractors has a review page. Michael Murphy’s page had nothing but positive reviews.

From my experience, here are some of Michael’s qualities:

• Communicative via phone and e-mail
• Prompt
• Friendly
• Meticulous
• Resourceful
• Professional
• Knows his stuff on a wide range of related issues
• Tidy
• Will explain things in an understandable way
• Gave a free and detailed on-site quote before work began

The job to remove the fireplace was done very well, from the actual removal, to the wiring work, to the re-building of the wall, to the finishing and painting.

Here are the “in-progress” pictures:

Here are the “after” pictures:

Now it’s as if the fireplace and accompanying protrusion never existed. The process was fun and painless!

If you’re searching for a bank machine on THE EXCHANGE ATM network (or any bank machine for that matter) in the Burnaby South Slope / City In The Park area (near Edmonds SkyTrain station), you’ll find one in the BC Hydro building. Use the same entrance as if you were going to visit BC Hydro itself. In fact, there’s an entire G&F Financial Group Credit Union branch in the building. The one catch is that you are limited to the building’s public operating hours, which is during the day (currently 9am to 4:30pm) Monday through Friday.

When I first used the ATM locator on THE EXCHANGE’s website, I couldn’t figure out where exactly the machine was, because I thought there would be a separate, outside location for it. I had made a couple of tours around the building one evening to no avail. So if you’re as clueless as me, perhaps this post will help you.

And now to turn this into a mini City In The Park neighbourhood review, here are some random notes on the area. The BC Hydro building also has a nice, relatively affordable, lunch cafeteria that I recommend. If you’re new to the area or just visiting, check out the three nice, main green areas (Taylor Hill Park, City In The Park, and the Byrne Creek forest) and the local and organic, but “not any more expensive, and sometimes cheaper than many other grocery stores” Choices Market. Looking for a mail box? There’s one at the corner of Station Hill Drive and Sandborne Avenue. It’s a relaxing, friendly, and convenient neighbourhood.

My small company has been using voip.ms for our landline needs for over 2 years now. Its low rates, ease-of-use, medium-to-good call quality, and top-notch online management interface make it a recommended telephone line provider.

Rates

Canadian and American phone numbers can be purchased for $2 and $1 per month, respectively, not including any airtime. Airtime rates are 1.5 cents per minute incoming, and 1 to 1.25 cents per minute outgoing within Canada and the US. Long distance rates are quite competitive and well-detailed on voip.ms. There is no minimum usage per month, and for us, the pay as you go model is flexible and very cheap.

(For residential users, you can also get a package of 3,500 incoming minutes for about $6 per month.)

Making use of VoIP services

Using VoIP services, which basically use your Internet connection to route calls, does have a bit of a learning curve.

Equipment-wise, you need a device to plug into your router and serve as the phone. This can take the form of an all-in-one hardware device:

The particular phone above costs above $100 new.

Or, it can be an adapter called an ATA into which you can plug a traditional phone:

The adapter above often comes with other VoIP plans (voip.ms requires that you get your own device) and can sometimes be found in some retail stores for about $35. If you search on craigslist, eBay, or similar online classifieds site, you can find second-hand ATAs.

You can also use a cheap or free software phone such as X-Lite. This way, you can make and receive calls from your specific phone number through your computer. (This has come in very handy for me before.)

Things can get quite complex if you choose to host your own telephone exchange system, but that is certainly not a requirement.

In all cases, you have to enter in at least the provider’s server name or IP address, as well as your login credentials. There are many other settings you can tweak, depending on your device. The voip.ms website is good at providing instructions for many common devices, and their online support has been quite helpful in my experience.

Once you get the hang of the equipment and new concepts and terminology (which I won’t go through in this post), things mostly run themselves. You can usually take and use your device anywhere in the world where there is an Internet connection available.

Call quality

To an extent, VoIP calls are at the mercy of your Internet connection, so you need a high-speed connection for decent voice quality. Depending on how your internal network is configured, busy Internet usage can compromise call quality.

voip.ms calls are of good or excellent quality. Although they’ve noted the occasional server issue, we’ve never been adversely affected by one. Calls with choppy reception have happened in rare occasions, but they have never persisted. Compared to a landline, which is almost flawless, voip.ms cannot yet claim that type of true consistency.

Features and online interface

The impressive voip.ms feature set and online management interface are what really set it apart from several other providers that I’ve seen and used.

Among the many features of voip.ms are:

• 3-way calling
• Inbound caller ID
• Editable outbound caller ID. (I’ve found other VoIP providers to be inconsistent with outbound caller ID, but voip.ms has performed just as well as traditional landline providers.)
• Tons of call routing options, including call forwarding, ring groups (ringing multiple lines or numbers at once), time-based conditions, and failover numbers
• Digital receptionist (“press 1 for…”), calling queues
• Caller ID filtering
• Voicemail to e-mail, with editable voicemail greeting
• Configurable length of ringing time before an inbound call should go to voicemail
• An almost instant, detailed call history that can be filtered by number and date, and that can be exported.

With VoIP in general, phone numbers are a separate concept from phone lines, and one of the most simple but powerful advantages of this is that you can mix and match number-line combinations.

The voip.ms online management interface is intuitive and lets you control almost everything you could imagine about a phone service from your browser. It is possibly the best example that I know of an online interface empowering the consumer and giving them choice and control. Every feature that I listed above can be managed on the fly, and updates take effect almost instantly.

Order or deleting numbers or plans is also straightforward.

Overall call strategy: add Skype

Using a combination of Skype and voip.ms, our calling costs are less than half what they were two years ago, even with the fact that we’ve added more employees, numbers, and lines. Skype-to-Skype calls are free, and creating Skype conferences with a mix of multiple Skype accounts and landlines is easy and powerful. When landlines are involved in outbound Skype calls, they have very reasonable per-minute and monthly rates.

In British Columbia Premier Gordon Campbell’s televised speech on October 27, 2010, one of the things he announced was a provincial personal income tax rate cut. This cut amounts to a 15 per cent tax reduction for incomes up to $72,000, effective January 1, 2011. This makes BC’s personal income tax the lowest of any province in Canada and is a substantial reduction. To illustrate his point, he used a few bar graphs, one of which looks like this:

The graphs are basic and do not contain y-axis labels. In the graph above, it would seem that British Columbians’ provincial tax rates are about 2.5 times less than, or 40% the amount of the next highest taxed province of Ontario.

Using a simple provincial income tax calculator and entering the graph’s example income of $70,000, you get the following results for provincial income taxes: Ontario $4,500 and BC $3,900. Reducing the BC amount by 15% for 2011, you get $3,300. While this is not an exact calculation method, it gives you a rough idea of the actual numbers. The difference is about 1.36 times; put another way, BC’s provincial rate is about 73% of Ontario’s.

The main problem is that the bottom of the graph starts somewhere around $2,500 rather than $0, thus failing to provide the full picture. The horizontal red line further increases the perceived difference.

Putting these numbers on a 0-base y-axis, you can still see that BC’s rates are the lowest — and by a meaningful amount — but the difference is not magnified:

Non-zero y-axis graphs are widely used in the media and marketing efforts as an easy way to distort or sensationalize data. It’s interesting to see the government doing the same, even when it would seem like they didn’t have a reason to. It’s like they’re so used to playing spin doctor that they don’t know how not to.

To see all of the graphs, and the rest of the Premier’s address, check YouTube.

November 17, 2010 update: After all this fuss, the BC Government has now announced that they are cancelling the announced income tax reduction.

Minimizing or eliminating the use of plastic grocery bags is finally becoming mainstream, with many people carrying around reusable shopping bags and companies everywhere selling and giving away reusable bags. But what about one-use, plastic produce bags? Depending on how much and the types of fruit and vegetables you buy, the amount of plastic you waste in the produce bags in a given trip to the grocery store could be comparable to the plastic in the shopping bag.

Most plastic produce bags are recyclable, but it’s still a one-use bag, and the efficiency and usefulness of recycling such plastic is questionable. You can also wash the bags, but if you do that by hand it can be a bit of a hassle, time-consuming, and that takes a lot of water. This is not to mention what you hear about toxins leaching out of plastics.

Enter reusable produce bags:

They’re small enough that you can stick a few in your reusable grocery bags for convenience. They’re light, so they’re not excessively inflating the cost of your food when weighed. They’re made of washable (and apparently recyclable) mesh polyester, although to be fair that’s still plastic. You can put them in the washing machine with your clothes, thus not taking up any extra resources. There are built-in drawstrings so that you can tie the bags if necessary.

I bought some such bags called Tazzy Totes from Choices Markets in Metro Vancouver (specifically the White Rock location). It cost about $8 for a pack of 3 large bags and 1 smaller bag. This is certainly not cheap, but I’d argue that it’s worth the fact that they’re reusable in a relatively convenient way. And some stores might give you a tiny discount on your grocery bill whenever you use them.

Tazzy Totes are the first commercially available reusable produce bags that I’ve seen, but I’m sure they could be improved upon. For example, on some of the bags, the small handles at the end of the drawstrings had pointy edges that scraped other clothes in the washing machine — I cut off the handles.

Update: I’ve noticed a potentially more durable, stretchy alternative called carebags.