Eat it, Rogers

I've been telling myself over and over, quietly inside the depths of my mind to cancel my Rogers account. This summer after seeing the ads for Mobilicity and Wind - 39.55 for unlimited text, talk and data and having my Sony Ericsson x10 die on me, it was time to switch.

I decided to go with Mobilicity after reading a number of reviews and such. My decision mostly came down to availability of locations in the Ottawa area roaming policies and the fact that their website is pretty cool. I bought HTC Panache for about 600$ and cancelled my Rogers account for about 500$. It was a pretty big kick in the wallet however it was certainly worth it.

Living and working downtown, I don't require any extended network coverage. When I go to somewhere that doesn't have cellphone reception, I often find myself not using a cellphone anyways.

So having a Teksavvy Cable Internet connection, Mobilicity for a cellphone, I have reduced my total communications costs to below 100$ per month - about 72$ to be exact.

It's a good world to live in when access to the biggest source of information and global communication is less than my grocery costs.. isn't it?!

Btw, both of these companies don't have contracts. I think this is excellent. They win by providing good service. Besides who needs contracts? It's not like everyone is suddenly going to stop using the Internet or cell phones is it?

Also, Rogers really sucks. I called them and said that numerous cell phone providers are offering more for more than half the price that they are offering. I asked them what they could do to provide a competitive alternative to this. They said nothing and so I went Mobilicity the next day.

Trip to TravelPod

After working at MARSWorks for close to three and a half years, I was contacted by a talent agency in San Francisco about a job opportunity at TravelPod (located in Ottawa). I went into the first interview and wowed them with my technical knowledge and later sent them some references and some code I wrote in college for a custom web framework.

A short week and a bit after the initial interview, I was signed on for a three month contract, and after a month and a week I have been signed on fulltime.

This move has been a great shift in terms of career and where my interest has been going lately. I am working on a well established active website that has a lot of users and we work at optimizing SEO and Revenue generation. I have been learning a lot about a different side of the web and it has been great.

I will miss the atmosphere of MARSWorks, but I am wholly enjoying the experience of working at TravelPod.