Rob’s Blog and Flog

I’m tempting fate today. I put the summer tires on. Of course, there was freezing rain on the way up to the stealership. This should be fun. Maybe I can find another homeless guy to dent up my car again in another vain attempt to rescue me from an icy fate. Maybe…. Let’s hope! I need matching dent on the passenger side.

We`re currently interviewing for salespeople at Virtual IT. What a joy. So many people think they can sell, and perhaps they can. But selling yourself if the first step. Here`s the exact text of an exchange I had with one candidate. Needless to say, they didn`t get the interview.

My first mail to her:

Good afternoon. Thank you for submitting a resume to Virtual IT. We are going through the submissions this week.
Your resume indicates that you are in Vancouver, but I see a 647 area code phone number. Please reply with your current location.

Thanks

Robert Hof
Virtual IT Ltd

and a somewhat curt reply:

My current resume shows my new Toronto address and Toronto phone number.
Please see attached. Where did you find the old resume?

Thank you,
xxx

ok, perhaps this resume magically arived. How else would I get a resume? Hold on - it came from TorontoJobs.com - as did a lot of resumes. I never posted the job there, I think they harvested it from my Craigslist post. I`ll give her the benefit of the doubt:

It was emailed to us via Torontojobs.com. Did you not apply for the position? Torontojobs.com seem to have hijacked our craigslist job post

Rob

Benefit of the doubt. See, I`m patient, I`m a nice enough sort. But when I get a reply like this:

Sorry which position exactly?

I just completely lose my mind. Don`t people want to work???????

I’m sorry, if you can’t remember sending us a resume, I don’t think we have a good fit here. Best of luck in you job search

Regards

Robert Hof

Note to all job seekers - KNOW WHO YOU SEND YOUR RESUMES TO! That`s a $200k a year job out the window for her. As they say on the evil dating sites: `good luck in your search`

I’m going to try to update the Real Estate section of the blog at least bi-weekly, now that I’m actually a property owner again.

On March 3rd, I closed on a triplex in Hamilton. The circumstances surrounding the purchase were complicated, but the short version is I was quickly going to need somewhere to live, and I didn’t feel like renting again while waiting for the Kissana quest to get resolved. A great opportunity came up here, and while it’s not the great investment that the Toronto property is, it was good enough to make the plunge. The mortgage and taxes are covered by the rents on units 1 and 2, and the tenants pay thier own electric bills. All that’s left for me to pay is the gas, which should average out to about $220 per month over the year. I can work with those numbers

In Toronto, the Kissana saga lingers on… on February 29th, I had been summoned to a discovery by Kissana’s lawyer. Kissana proceded to go AWOL, and my lawyer advised me that the discovery was going to be a non-event. He was going to go anyway (gotta love laywers, never miss an opportunity to create billable hours ), and I decided to go just for the experience. To date, my court experience has been limited to small claims. I’m enjoying the experience!

So, given that the other lawyer can’t find his client, he isn’t there. But guess who shows? Kissana! In the flesh! I finally get to meet the source of my frustrations. He’s looking for a new lawyer - again - perhaps one that will do even more work before he figures out the retainer won’t get paid. My guy says he’s quickly running out of options. Who knows, I may have my house in Toronto by the end of the year. One can only hope. I grew up here in Hamilton, and swore I`d never move back. At least I have some great friends in this city, which helps a lot.

I`m jumping around a lot, I`m sorry, but it`s Friday so you`ll have to excuse me.

I also wanted to mention that I`ve set my mortgage up here to use the Smith Manoeuver. I`ve been researching the process for several months, and I am convinced it`s the way to go. I`ll post more on the setup in the next few days.

From 1995 until 2001, I had the pleasure of building and owning one of Hamilton, Ontario’s largest independent ISPs - NETinc. Yes, back in the old days, before high speed. It was high speed, in fact, that was the major factor in us shutting the doors in 2001 - I’m a margin hound, and when it drops below 10%, I’m no longer interested in playing the game. Independent ISPs have mostly vanished in Canada in the 21st century - Cable companies and LECs (the phone companies) control –insert whoppingly large statistic here– of the residential internet market. Residential Internet access is effectively a commodity business now - price is king, and the difference between a 2mbps connection and a 7mbps connection matters only for the most technically savvy.

Today, in my morning Blog reading, I noticed an article over on the UK Site The Register, showing how Bell canada is throttling the internet connections of their reseller customers. What does this mean? Well the only way to be an independent ISP in Ontario is to buy wholesale service from Bell. You pay a ridiculous fee per end user, plus you also pay for the big circuit on which all of the customers are handed off to you. Bell is supposed to transparantly pass the data between the customer and the ISP. Well, this article says that they’re not doing that anymore - they’re imposing their own network policies on those of their customers.

As an independent ISP, I’ve felt the force of Bell squeezing me from all sides. Looks like they’re up to it again. I guess the only frontier left is wireless.

I read a bunch of blogs daily, and comment on them quite a bit. But I’ve never used Wordpress’s Trackback feature. I just read a great article at Problogger which describes how to use them. I’m using this as a blatant test to see if it works. Sorry for the commentspam, Problogger!