This morning was the second day in a row that I woke up with a pounding headache. It wasn't as bad Saturday morning, and since I was out of the house for most of the day, I generally felt pretty okay. Billie seemed fine, too, so we didn't think much of it. This morning, though, we both woke up at 10 AM with worse headaches, dizziness, and outside our window were two firetrucks and an ambulance.

Turns out for the past day and a half we were breathing in carbon monoxide. The culprit, a poorly maintained furnace in the building. A lack of CO detectors in the building also meant that a couple people were sent to the hospital with mild CO poisoning. We were all evacuated for roughly 3 hours while the fire department ventilated the building, meanwhile Billie was interviewed by CTV news regarding the whole situation (we don't have cable, so we couldn't watch it).

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Color me surprised. After sending an email to the Tim Hortons website, expressing my frustration with their staff and attaching a photo of my burned bun, I got a call today from the corporate office with an official apology. The lady on the phone was very polite and informed me she would be contacting the specific Tim Hortons that sold me the burned sandwich, and that she will follow up with me in 2-3 business days.

Stay tuned as the story develops.

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When I started my blog, I made a promise not to post any long winded rants, and I don't intend to break that promise today. I just want to share a few stories. Okay I might break it a little.

Just over a year ago I started an Excel sheet called "why i hate tim hortons.xls" where I documented every single screw up that Tim Hortons made while ordering food from any of their locations. Unfortunately, with most things I start, I never really dedicated myself to it and I stopped keeping track of their mistakes. My original plan was to send a copy of it to every nearby Tim Hortons location and one to the corporate offices, letting them know the frequency of screw-ups that they make, and point out that these are just my documented incidents. The number of unreported mistakes would probably be tenfold. I was reminded of this again today when I ordered a toasted chicken club sandwich, and the bun wasn't so much toasted as it was black as coal. It smelled like it was in a fire. It bugs me that somebody there saw it and was like "Yes, this is acceptable as food". I made the effort to return it to their manager informing them that I did not care to eat their bun. I didn't expect anything in return, I just wanted them to have their bun back.

As much as I love living in the 21st century, one of the things that bugs me the most (besides kids these days) is how completely indifferent people are towards mediocrity. It's almost become accepted. I long to live in a time when an establishment would go out of business if they consistently produced shabby products or services. I suppose it still happens with locally owned businesses, but it saddens me that places can create a name for themselves as being below average, yet still thrive. People just accept it.

I pride myself in boycotting places that are consistently poor in service or quality of products. I know it probably doesn't make a huge difference to most places, but at least I know my money isn't going into their managers' pockets. I stopped going to a particular Subway because the staff consistently took 20-30 minutes to make a sandwich when I was the only person in the restaurant. I stopped going to a particular Starbucks because their wonderful barista told me I should speak clearer next time they screw up my order.

Today also marks the day that I begin my campaign of sending one email a day to Microsoft, requesting that they include support for disc number tags in their Zune software. A feature so basic that it should have been included in version 1.0 of their software, but still isn't included in version 3.0. Instead they add a clock and game support. I guess I could play Sudoku while my albums play out of order.

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On my way home from work yesterday I stopped next to somebody who was completely focused on their cellphone. Texting or whatever. I thought it would be funny to honk my horn while the light was still red, in hopes that they would be startled and hit the gas, rear-ending the vehicle in front of them. Sort of an instant reaction to hearing a car horn while their attention is somewhere else, but before realizing the light hadn't turned green yet. The more I thought about doing this, the more it seemed like it would work.

The only thing that stopped me was the fact that I wasn't directly behind them, which would mean the person in front of me would think I was honking at them. Then I thought I could just give some kind of "I'm sorry" hand gesture in that case, but I was stuck thinking of one. There are half a dozen ways to say "hey eff you man" with your hands, but not a single way to say "oh hey my bad". At least not a way that is common enough for me to know about it in the 23 years I have been living and seven years I have been driving. I guess everyone thinks they're always in the right. SILLY HUMANS AMIRITE.

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Before you read this post, I must warn you that it is very TEXT HEAVY. It is text heavy because i am VERY PASSIONATE about this issue. Now that you have been warned, you may continue reading:

I got a new Zune 80GB MP3 player recently, and I've had a couple months to get really familiar with it. So far I've been pretty pleased with everything, but my only issues are with the software. As I expected, Microsoft only lets you use their software to sync your music between your player and PC. That means, even if you don't like it, you are stuck with it. Some people have developed a utility that lets you sync using WMP11 or iTunes, but it is kind of buggy and (I'm hoping) still in development. I am willing to live with using the Zune software, since it is fairly easy to use, except it behaves rather poorly when it comes to tags.

I have a bit of an obsession when it comes to my music being encoded and tagged exacly how I want. I spent a good portion of the past couple months re-ripping, re-downloading and re-tagging my entire music collection so I could have it just right, and I am happy to be finally done (so is Billie). When I finished, the last thing I did was set my entire music folder to read-only so that nothing could ever modify it without my knowledge. I right clicked on the folder, looked at the properties, and saw that there were 3594 files total. I deleted my previous iTunes library, dragged in my fresh new read-only folder, and confirmed that it had imported exactly 3594 songs. It did, and I was happy. +1 for iTunes.

The next step was to perform the same process with the Zune software. After dragging everything in, it told me there were 3592 songs total. Awesome. Two missing, now only if I knew which ones it decided to ignore. I deleted everything from the Zune software and tried again. 3592. Every time. I was forced go through album by album until I found the missing two songs. Eventually I narrowed it down to a song from Mezzanine by Massive Attack and another song from Rated R by Queens of the Stone Age. The problem was duplicate song names. In the case of Mezzanine, track 5 and 11 were both called Exchange and (Exchange), and I guess the Zune software wasn't smart enough to distinguish the two, even though they were correctly tagged with separate track numbers, and the 2nd even had brackets around it. On Rated R, the problem was with Feel Good Hit of the Summer which was is the first song on the album, but also included as the first song on a bonus disc. I guess the Zune software wasn't smart enough to distinguish between disc number tags, either. I was forced to (with great pain) rename the songs so that the software could realize they were indeed separate songs.

After confirming that both the Zune software and music folder contained exactly 3594 songs, I synced them with my Zune and again, confirmed that it contained 3594 songs as well. I quickly browsed through my Zune to make sure that it had correctly imported all of the album art (another thing I am terribly picky about), which it had, but another tag related issue was brought to my attention. The Zune software actually was smart enough to sort multi-disc albums properly, in the expected order of disc 1, track 1-10 first, then disc 2, track 1-10 second, however, the software installed on the Zune likes to do it a little differently. Instead of what you'd expect, it sorts it as track 1, track 1, track 2, track 2, etc., mixing disc 1 and 2 while completely ignoring the disc number tag. My only option in this case is to rename the 2nd disc as "Album Title (disc 2)", which is really ugly. Since I only have a few albums with more than one disc, I decided to leave them as they were and hope that Micorosft fixes the problem in a new patch, although it baffles me as to why the software on the PC and the software on the Zune player would behave so differently.

The next step in my epic journey was to copy all of the songs from my Zune to my computer at work. I figured that since I had already taken care of the tag issues, it would be a breeze. I dragged everything to my PC, and did a quick check to see how many songs it had found. 3592. AWESOME. I checked the Massive Attack and Queens of the Stone Age folders, and saw everything was there. I haven't had the time to narrow down the problem this time, but I dragged everything into iTunes anyway. I wasn't surprised to see that iTunes managed to import 3618 songs. Somehow during the process of copying everything from my home PC to my Zune to my work PC, 24 extra songs were fabricated out of nothing. I'd like to hear these songs, but it'll have to wait for another day to figure out what they are.

On the plus side, the Zune software didn't overwrite any of my tags, despite a quick scare when I noticed some differences between how it displayed "featuring" artists. I specifically formatted all songs featuring another artist to be written as "Feat. Some Guy", but the Zune software, for reasons currently unknown, displays them somtimes as "Ft. Some Guy" or "feat. Some Guy". After checking the tags, I found that they were untouched, and it was just the software that was displaying them differently, and inconsistently. Why. It also "forgets" the album art and release year when displaying your library on a PC other than the one in which you originally imported the songs. And again, after checking the tags, everything appears how it should be.

After browsing a few forums, I noticed other Zune owners are having similar (and other, more annoying) problems as me. Hopefully Micorosft takes notice and does the right thing.

In somewhat related news, I watched this video with Adam Savage from Mythbusters over the weekend. He talks about his obession with various things, and if you think I am too obsessed with trivial things like MP3 tags, then watch this video.

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They are about 13 years late, but my two work friends Keith and Brent came up with the best prank idea ever. Everyone knows about Ironic by Alanis Morissette, right? After telling me their idea, the three of us decided to set up a website, asking for donations of spoons from anyone on the internet. If you don't feel like sending us a spoon, you can give us a quick paypal donation that will go towards the purchase of a spoon. If you haven't caught onto what we're planning yet, once we collect 10,000 spoons, we're gonna stick them all into a box labeled "knives" and ship them to Alanis herself.

It will be the greatest prank. I am telling you.

We figure that sending the package of spoons to her publicly available fanmail address will be good enough, seeing that she probably doesn't get a whole lot of fan mail these days except from maybe a few obsessed fans. We also hope that receiving a box mysteriously labeled "knives" in the mail doesn't strike anyone as overly alarming. HERE'S HOPING.

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I bought a new cellphone about a year and a half ago from Telus and it worked really well, except it had a bad habit of refusing to boot up if I ever turned it off or the battery was allowed to die. As a result, I always had to make sure it stayed on and the battery had at least 25% charge left, just to be safe.

A few weeks ago, I went to Calgary for a NIN concert and I took a few photos when my phone was already dangerously low on battery life. Sure enough, before the night was over, my phone was completely dead and it wouldn't turn back on, even if I plugged it in.

After some googling, I found out this is a pretty common problem with this particular model of phone, and apparently Telus offers an extended warranty for this specific problem that will last until October or November 2008. The only catch is that they can't do the service locally, and I have to mail my phone away for 2-3 weeks.

So after some more searching I found that you can force a reboot if you plug the phone into your computer via USB if you have the proper cable (CA-53), which I had, but threw away a couple months ago while thinking "I'll never use this".

So it's been 2-3 weeks since I had a working phone, and I could have shipped it to Telus and gotten it back by now, but I am too stubborn to do something like that. And in this time, I've realized that apart from the occasional text message I don't really use my phone very often. It's just sitting on my desk collecting dust. One less uncomfortable brick in my pocket.

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