So my basic setup at home is a cable mode to two linux boxes, one acts as a firewall, one does mail, web, dns, etc. Somehow one of the windows boxes behind the firewall managed to get one of the various viruses floating around out there and started spamming those in my address book. The cable company receives a complaint and shuts down my connection. I have NO problem with this, in fact its one of the reasons I like my ISP.
So, I figure out which machine got infected, clean it, have a quick look to see how the virus got in in the first place, upgrade all the virus definitions on the clients and the mail server.
Great, call the cable company, let them know that I cleaned out the virus, and they turn on my service again, quickly. I'm happy, return to work (I zipped home at lunch to do this). By the time I get back to work, my cable modem is down again. I call in, they reply that they got complaints that I'm infected with whatever virus. I ask if thse are "new" complaints since 1:00pm (When I called in to say I'd fixed everything). "Uh, I'm not sure, I'll pass you on to the network guys that do this stuff". I'm thinking this is a good thing, they'll actually have a sniff.
The network guy, tells me that they received a complaint and had to shut my modem down. I ask if the complaint was regarding an email sent after 1:00pm. He tells me he thinks its from earlier in the morning. So I explain that I cleaned the virus, and that he should turn my cable modem back on. He tells me he's going to have to charge me since I got infected twice in one day!
After arguing about it with him for 15 minutes, I finally ask to speak to his manager. I get the manager, tell him how upset I am about being charged for this, and that I'm seriously considering calling the competition as soon as I hang up with him. He apologizes, tells me there will be no charge. I ask him what's to prevent this from happening again to another customer who doesn't know any better. He has no answer.
people from sask are cool. they'll complain that their system is down, 3 hours after it goes down. their reasoning - 'we figured you were doing somethig, and didn't want to bother yuo. if you can fix it today, cool'
How true. As a Saskatchewan resident I'll vouch for this. I worked on a help desk for a year in Regina for a Sask ISP. When a system went down, we would get a flood of calls, but only 1 in a 100 was actually upset about it. Most politely asked if their was a problem and we're happy to learn it was the ISPs problem and not something on their machine.
People leave at 4:30pm and no one cares about their job.
-Expect a 7.5 hour workday (and get paid that way too).
This is mostly around Gov't jobs. Imagine that, we work a 7.5hr day and leave at 4:30pm, funny how that works out. As for not caring about their job, well, that depends on the place. I've worked at places where I couldn't wait to get out of, and it probably showed.
Expect to pay 50% marginal tax rate, PLUS 15% tax on everything you buy.
Wow, you must have been making over $100K to even come close to that. Someone posted tax rates in Canada above, so I won't repost. I make between $50K and $60K per year, and take home about 64% of my earnings (after pension and union dues). Depending on where you live there can be a 7%-15% sales tax on most things.
Free pop? Forget it, feel privileged if you get free
Some do some don't. That's not a big decision maker for me when I look for a job.
Bonuses? Ha! All the money is kept at the top, and little gets distributed to regular people
Again, some do some don't. A lot of jobs in Canada are Government or Crown Corporations, so their are no bonuses.
Merit increases? Ha! Think 2% a year.
Again, depends on your employer. I've had as low as 2.2% and as high as about 4%. I've known people who regularaly see above 5%.
Expect to see a lot of idiots and assholes working alongside with you because firing people is very hard in Canada. It takes a lot of effort to actually get rid of someone, not like the US, where people can be fired.
Has nothing to do with Canada, more likely with Unions. Yes, a union makes it more difficult to fire someone.
Christmas parties? Ha! I went to the US for a business trip, and the all-hands meetings for the company I was at had better food than our X-mas party
This is getting tiresome. Guess what, Govt jobs don't pay for big parties. Some private companies do, some don't. Its not a "Canadian" thing.
Booze and such is a no-no because every company is so friggin politically correct that they don't want to be sued.
If anything, I'd say the exact opposite is true. It varies, but almost every job I've had, from a McDonald's cook in high school, to tech analysts, and sys admin jobs, I've been out drinking with the boss. As far as lawsuits, Canada doesn't have late night ads for lawyers asking if you fell down and want to sue.
As far as the rest of your comments, I'm sorry you had a bad experience in Canada. Don't define Canada by what appears to have been a bad employer. Our health system is in need of help, but it is not failing yet. In fact, the upcoming federal election will be centered on health care.
As far as taxes, standards of living, etc. Take me as an example. I live in Regina (admittedly one of the more inexpensive places to live). I have a mortgage on a ~800 sqft house (excellent condition in a good area) for under $700/month (20 year mortgage), including property tax. I recently got rid of a '99 Olds Alero - purchasing for under $350/month. So there, the two biggest costs of living, for about $1000 per month.
Last I remember hearing about this was if you expect to claim anything, your business must have a reasonable expectation of making money. So, it might work for a little bit, but eventually they're going to come after you.
Anyone who has lived in cold weather would realize this would be very unlikely (impossible?). If a strong wind (tornado like force) were to push into a body of water, it could create a "hole" in the water. However, the sides of the hole would be water moving at high speeds. Water at high speeds requires VERY low temperatures to freeze, lower than a desert would reach.
Because of course we all know that people who use stolen credit cards would never just download their music off a P2P, they want to pay for legitimate copies.
I know of at least one woman who had her gay male best friend be her maid of honor. And no, he didn't wear a dress. He wore a man's suit, but in the same color as the bridesmaids dresses.
They don't even have to be gay. My wife and I got married with our friends in the wedding party. That included one (straight) guy on her side, and one (straight) woman on my side. Just because we're married doesn't meen we can't have friends of the opposite sex.
That is one of the best comments I've read on Slashdot in a LONG time. This is truly Canadian humour (yes, there's a u in humour up here), and truly something a lot of Canadians feel.
At my last job I had with a webhost, we were naming our servers after console game players (atari, nes, etc). sets came in very handy when we started running out of ideas.
(Please ignore (or mod down) the same post further down, this is where it was meant to be)
At my last job I had with a webhost, we were naming our servers after console game players (atari, nes, etc). sets came in very handy when we started running out of ideas.
In fact, mine just upped my limit on my cable modem. I went from 1Mbs/1Mbps to 5Mbps/1Mbps - without asking, or having to pay any more. Downladed some ISOs at combined speed of over 450K/sec:)
Wow, this has to be about the most immature excuse I've ever seen for cheating. What your basically saying is that your experience is more important than the experience of all the other players on that server combined. Either you just don't give a damn about the rest of the world, or you view yourself as much more important than the rest of the world.
Its people like you that make the game annoying for all of us. The beginner and intermediate players get turned off the game because they belive everyone is so much better than them. Those that are really good don't get credit for their skills since they are accused of cheating
I have been accused of cheating in a couple of HL games (TFC,DoD) and so have friends of mine. None of us cheat. We have good days and bad days like everyone else. When I'm having a good day, I can easily get 2,3,4 times the number of kills as deaths. I don't cheat.
From the news page, "Yesterday's Update & Today's DDOS Attack" I thought they were possibly referring to a slashdotting. However, the times don't quite match up.
Oh come on, did you check out the way Frodo's sword glowed? A blatant light-sabre ripoff, to be sure.
Apparently you don't know that the hobbit was published about 1937, some 40 years before Star Wars. Remember, the sword glowed in The Hobbit, when it belonged to Bilbo. So if anything, who ripped who off.
And if a site does this, I'll hit the back button, go back to my search results and move on to the next page. Its not that difficult to code for various browsers AND stick to the standards, without detecting which browser everyone is using.
As a prime example, last weekend we had the mother of all blizzards blow through south Saskatchewan. (I had to spend 2 hours shovelling out the next morning, almost couldn't get the front door open). However, I never once lost the satellite signal. From my experience, the only time I have lost signal, is when there are electrical storms overhead, or in the direction your dish points. Aside from that, I've watched TV in most weather conditions that the praries can throw at you.
HL2 shouldn't even have been on the list. Aside from the conspiracy theories surronding the code-leak and such, we know the HL2 is almost done. HL2 is definitely NOT vaporware. We had the story over on games that said people had compiled and were selling them! To me, that says the game is almost done. Now, even though they are rewriting it, we now they pretty much had a working version. Even a rewrite shouldn't take more than a few months.
Half-Life did/sort of does. Now instead of a CD-Key, you have a SteamID - basically the same thing. A unique identifier that says, you have paid, and can play. However, the nice thing now about Steam is that, I can now safely throw away my HL-CD. Its useless.
Since I've signed up for my Steam account (requries a CD-Key), if I wipe out my machine, I just have to download the latest copy of Steam, and install it, log in with my username(email)/password and I can play. If I want to install another Steam-supported mod, it just takes a couple of clicks in the Steam interface (and the time to download and install). No more searching for the right version of the mod on the net and worrying about signing up for accounts just to download a mod.
Now admittedly, Steam still has its share of problems, but this is not a bad way to setup games that are mostly used only for online play. It would be nice to see a LAN enabled version though, so I could play the game without connecting to the Internet. Valve says its coming.
So its my first week doing a consulting job for a web hosting company. Part of the project is allowing clients to manage their own email accounts from a web interface. I'm writing a front end similar to Omail-Admin to vmailmgr. They hadn't given me a test domain to work with and instead told me to just use the companies main domain. Well, I had everything working fine and was beginning the last part, the section to delete accounts. I had created several test accounts and was using Omail-Admin (as well as console tools) to check my results. Well, I wasn't paying attention in Omail-Admin and deleted one of my test accounts. On my front-end, it still showed the account being there (hadn't refreshed). So, I proceeded to delete it. Well, it deleted the *next* account, which happened to be the VPs. Luckily he used POP3, so there was no message store, and nothing important was lost. Well, at least it pointed out a flaw in my logic that didn't check which account it was deleteing.
After that, and my contract was over, I was offered full time permanent work, so they weren't too upset with that little incident.
Slashdot Mirror
So my basic setup at home is a cable mode to two linux boxes, one acts as a firewall, one does mail, web, dns, etc. Somehow one of the windows boxes behind the firewall managed to get one of the various viruses floating around out there and started spamming those in my address book. The cable company receives a complaint and shuts down my connection. I have NO problem with this, in fact its one of the reasons I like my ISP.
So, I figure out which machine got infected, clean it, have a quick look to see how the virus got in in the first place, upgrade all the virus definitions on the clients and the mail server.
Great, call the cable company, let them know that I cleaned out the virus, and they turn on my service again, quickly. I'm happy, return to work (I zipped home at lunch to do this). By the time I get back to work, my cable modem is down again. I call in, they reply that they got complaints that I'm infected with whatever virus. I ask if thse are "new" complaints since 1:00pm (When I called in to say I'd fixed everything). "Uh, I'm not sure, I'll pass you on to the network guys that do this stuff". I'm thinking this is a good thing, they'll actually have a sniff.
The network guy, tells me that they received a complaint and had to shut my modem down. I ask if the complaint was regarding an email sent after 1:00pm. He tells me he thinks its from earlier in the morning. So I explain that I cleaned the virus, and that he should turn my cable modem back on. He tells me he's going to have to charge me since I got infected twice in one day!
After arguing about it with him for 15 minutes, I finally ask to speak to his manager. I get the manager, tell him how upset I am about being charged for this, and that I'm seriously considering calling the competition as soon as I hang up with him. He apologizes, tells me there will be no charge. I ask him what's to prevent this from happening again to another customer who doesn't know any better. He has no answer.
Maybe one of them is: http://www.webcall.ca
C'mon, what about a secret "Cow From Twister" level hidden in your favourite game!
people from sask are cool. they'll complain that their system is down, 3 hours after it goes down. their reasoning - 'we figured you were doing somethig, and didn't want to bother yuo. if you can fix it today, cool'
How true. As a Saskatchewan resident I'll vouch for this. I worked on a help desk for a year in Regina for a Sask ISP. When a system went down, we would get a flood of calls, but only 1 in a 100 was actually upset about it. Most politely asked if their was a problem and we're happy to learn it was the ISPs problem and not something on their machine.
Wow, where to even start here:
People leave at 4:30pm and no one cares about their job.
-Expect a 7.5 hour workday (and get paid that way too).
This is mostly around Gov't jobs. Imagine that, we work a 7.5hr day and leave at 4:30pm, funny how that works out. As for not caring about their job, well, that depends on the place. I've worked at places where I couldn't wait to get out of, and it probably showed.
Expect to pay 50% marginal tax rate, PLUS 15% tax on everything you buy.
Wow, you must have been making over $100K to even come close to that. Someone posted tax rates in Canada above, so I won't repost. I make between $50K and $60K per year, and take home about 64% of my earnings (after pension and union dues). Depending on where you live there can be a 7%-15% sales tax on most things.
Free pop? Forget it, feel privileged if you get free
Some do some don't. That's not a big decision maker for me when I look for a job.
Bonuses? Ha! All the money is kept at the top, and little gets distributed to regular people
Again, some do some don't. A lot of jobs in Canada are Government or Crown Corporations, so their are no bonuses.
Merit increases? Ha! Think 2% a year.
Again, depends on your employer. I've had as low as 2.2% and as high as about 4%. I've known people who regularaly see above 5%.
Expect to see a lot of idiots and assholes working alongside with you because firing people is very hard in Canada. It takes a lot of effort to actually get rid of someone, not like the US, where people can be fired.
Has nothing to do with Canada, more likely with Unions. Yes, a union makes it more difficult to fire someone.
Christmas parties? Ha! I went to the US for a business trip, and the all-hands meetings for the company I was at had better food than our X-mas party
This is getting tiresome. Guess what, Govt jobs don't pay for big parties. Some private companies do, some don't. Its not a "Canadian" thing.
Booze and such is a no-no because every company is so friggin politically correct that they don't want to be sued.
If anything, I'd say the exact opposite is true. It varies, but almost every job I've had, from a McDonald's cook in high school, to tech analysts, and sys admin jobs, I've been out drinking with the boss. As far as lawsuits, Canada doesn't have late night ads for lawyers asking if you fell down and want to sue.
As far as the rest of your comments, I'm sorry you had a bad experience in Canada. Don't define Canada by what appears to have been a bad employer. Our health system is in need of help, but it is not failing yet. In fact, the upcoming federal election will be centered on health care.
As far as taxes, standards of living, etc. Take me as an example. I live in Regina (admittedly one of the more inexpensive places to live). I have a mortgage on a ~800 sqft house (excellent condition in a good area) for under $700/month (20 year mortgage), including property tax. I recently got rid of a '99 Olds Alero - purchasing for under $350/month. So there, the two biggest costs of living, for about $1000 per month.
I must be your neighbour... its a virtual whiteout here in Regina, SK.
Last I remember hearing about this was if you expect to claim anything, your business must have a reasonable expectation of making money. So, it might work for a little bit, but eventually they're going to come after you.
Anyone who has lived in cold weather would realize this would be very unlikely (impossible?). If a strong wind (tornado like force) were to push into a body of water, it could create a "hole" in the water. However, the sides of the hole would be water moving at high speeds. Water at high speeds requires VERY low temperatures to freeze, lower than a desert would reach.
Because of course we all know that people who use stolen credit cards would never just download their music off a P2P, they want to pay for legitimate copies.
They don't even have to be gay. My wife and I got married with our friends in the wedding party. That included one (straight) guy on her side, and one (straight) woman on my side. Just because we're married doesn't meen we can't have friends of the opposite sex.
That is one of the best comments I've read on Slashdot in a LONG time. This is truly Canadian humour (yes, there's a u in humour up here), and truly something a lot of Canadians feel.
(Please ignore (or mod down) the same post further down, this is where it was meant to be)
At my last job I had with a webhost, we were naming our servers after console game players (atari, nes, etc). sets came in very handy when we started running out of ideas.
In fact, mine just upped my limit on my cable modem. I went from 1Mbs/1Mbps to 5Mbps/1Mbps - without asking, or having to pay any more. Downladed some ISOs at combined speed of over 450K/sec :)
We also have one of the top employers in Canada for several years running Sasktel (Where I start work in just under two weeks!!!)
Wow, this has to be about the most immature excuse I've ever seen for cheating. What your basically saying is that your experience is more important than the experience of all the other players on that server combined. Either you just don't give a damn about the rest of the world, or you view yourself as much more important than the rest of the world.
Its people like you that make the game annoying for all of us. The beginner and intermediate players get turned off the game because they belive everyone is so much better than them. Those that are really good don't get credit for their skills since they are accused of cheating
I have been accused of cheating in a couple of HL games (TFC,DoD) and so have friends of mine. None of us cheat. We have good days and bad days like everyone else. When I'm having a good day, I can easily get 2,3,4 times the number of kills as deaths. I don't cheat.
From the news page, "Yesterday's Update & Today's DDOS Attack" I thought they were possibly referring to a slashdotting. However, the times don't quite match up.
Busted him? You should have given him a treat while saying "Good Dog"
Apparently you don't know that the hobbit was published about 1937, some 40 years before Star Wars. Remember, the sword glowed in The Hobbit, when it belonged to Bilbo. So if anything, who ripped who off.
And if a site does this, I'll hit the back button, go back to my search results and move on to the next page. Its not that difficult to code for various browsers AND stick to the standards, without detecting which browser everyone is using.
As a prime example, last weekend we had the mother of all blizzards blow through south Saskatchewan. (I had to spend 2 hours shovelling out the next morning, almost couldn't get the front door open). However, I never once lost the satellite signal. From my experience, the only time I have lost signal, is when there are electrical storms overhead, or in the direction your dish points. Aside from that, I've watched TV in most weather conditions that the praries can throw at you.
You can always try game -1 (that's negative one).
HL2 shouldn't even have been on the list. Aside from the conspiracy theories surronding the code-leak and such, we know the HL2 is almost done. HL2 is definitely NOT vaporware. We had the story over on games that said people had compiled and were selling them! To me, that says the game is almost done. Now, even though they are rewriting it, we now they pretty much had a working version. Even a rewrite shouldn't take more than a few months.
TFC2, now that's a different story..
Half-Life did/sort of does. Now instead of a CD-Key, you have a SteamID - basically the same thing. A unique identifier that says, you have paid, and can play. However, the nice thing now about Steam is that, I can now safely throw away my HL-CD. Its useless.
Since I've signed up for my Steam account (requries a CD-Key), if I wipe out my machine, I just have to download the latest copy of Steam, and install it, log in with my username(email)/password and I can play. If I want to install another Steam-supported mod, it just takes a couple of clicks in the Steam interface (and the time to download and install). No more searching for the right version of the mod on the net and worrying about signing up for accounts just to download a mod.
Now admittedly, Steam still has its share of problems, but this is not a bad way to setup games that are mostly used only for online play. It would be nice to see a LAN enabled version though, so I could play the game without connecting to the Internet. Valve says its coming.
After that, and my contract was over, I was offered full time permanent work, so they weren't too upset with that little incident.