no iPhone after all?

Rogers just announced their iPhone plans; they’re hideously expensive! I was expecting Rogers to abuse their monopoly power, but I’m still a little surprised…

http://www.rogers.com/web/content/wireless-products/iphone_voice_data_packages

between $60 and $115 per month for basic voice and data. The $60 plan is 150min airtime, 400Mb data; not much really, especially if you start pushing images around. Ugh. Fido hasn’t announced rates yet, but they’ll probably be the same. So the options seem to be:

– buy an iPhone anyway, and suck it up. (That’s *three times* what I’m paying Fido for my voice plan).
– by an unlocked iPhone from the US, and only use GSM and WiFi. Lots of people are happy doing this.
– buy an iTouch instead.
– Abandon Apple; go with a “small factor” laptop instead, like the EEE or the HP/Dell equivalents. (Yes, I said Dell in my weblog!!! :)

posted at 10:44 am on Friday, June 27, 2008 in Personal | Comments (1)
  1. David Brake says:

    Well I for one am a happy Touch user. Though if I were you I would be tempted to wait for the next model of iPhone and hope that meanwhile something happens to fix Rogers’ attitude…

camping weekend

We just returned from our annual gang weekend at The Pinery. We left Thursday and came back Monday this time, because the kids’ school schedule made that easy.

The forecast was for rain rain rain all weekend, but it didn’t turn out that way! We arrived and set up in the rain, of course, but Friday was absolutely gorgeous all day. Saturday morning we woke up to rain, but we had our giant pancake breakfast anyway, and by the time everyone was sitting around stuffed the sun came out. We were scared off the beach around 4PM by a line of thunderstorms, but most of them missed us. There was a severe weather warning for Sunday night, but again, that missed us to the south. The worst weather we had was probably the major hailstorm we hit just as we passed through Kitchener on the way home!

We spent two days at the beach, and one day on a “nature hike” (really an excuse to walk to the Camp Store and buy ice cream!). The boys had a great time exploring the beach and the woods by themselves; between GPS and FRS radios, there was no danger of losing them :). The bikes didn’t get used as much as they have in past years; maybe we’ll stop carting them around, which will leave more space for other stuff in the truck.

There was some excitement, of course! Brian and Nancy’s new dog escaped on Saturday afternoon, and spent almost 24 hours running around in the woods before they finally captured him again on Sunday. We “lost” at least one boy three times over the weekend (it’s hard to get truly lost there, since there are barriers everywhere; beach, campgrounds, river, and roads). I forgot to turn off the dome lights in our truck, and so by Monday morning it wouldn’t start. I’d already used my portable power pack to recharge the trailer; apparently the lights draw more power than we thought they did (either that, or Keiran accidentally turning on the furnace drained a lot of power :). Still, no harm done; Rick gave me a boost, and I was able to start again after running the truck for several minutes.

We now know that we don’t have to spend 30 minutes back and forth with the trailer in the campsite; it turns out that the position we finally picked we could have just driven straight in :). Ah well; hindsight is 20-20, and all that! On the other hand, Michelle et al and Paul/Anita are moving a bit closer to the comfort station next year, so we might follow them and switch campsites again.

Definitely a fun time, and I’m looking forward to our road trip this summer!

posted at 2:06 pm on Tuesday, June 24, 2008 in Personal | Comments (2)
  1. Nita says:

    Was much fun – hopefully next year I’m not galavanting around the province and can actually relax…

  2. chk says:

    Yes, _that_ is likely to happen…