Ness’ Outpost

My auto insurance policy came up for renewal in March of 2008. I did not receive any of my documentation in the mail concerning my policy renewal - but since it was not returned to sender The Personal assumed I had received it. I only discovered that I was driving with out updated insurance documents when I renewed my license plate sticker on April 30, 2008. I doddled a bit, but eventually did call The Personal and requested a new set of documents be mailed to me. These documents never arrived — and interestingly enough The Personal representitive that I spoke to does not have a record of this communication when I called to argue my payment of the penalty fee.

Since the documents didn’t arrive and I was now aware that I was diving with old insurance documents I started talking to friends and family about their insurance. I discovered I was being grossly over charged compared to the market for my 2002 Chevrolet Cavalier. I knew people with 2006 vehicles paying less insurance with the same deductibles as myself! What is even worse is that I was receiving a discount because of my OSPE membership — the premium could have been even higher. I shopped around and found a far better deal than The Personal could offer me and wanted to switch. I cancelled my policy and was charged an exorbitant fee to do so.

My final payment which is to be made on June 16th - I’m sure mostly is composed of the penalty fee for cancelling the contract - is approximately $280. My monthly payments were approximately $175.

I was a good customer, always paid my bill on time and never had an NSF payment failure to The Personal. I started my auto insurance plan in late 2005 with them. Only in March of 2007 when I had to change my address and get rental insurance did my auto premium jump greatly. This was explained to me because I live in Mississauga.

The only leverage I have left in this situation is to write about my account and discourage others from doing business with The Personal because of the way I was treated.

• I was not notified of my renewal
• I continued to pay my bill on time every month
• When I discovered my renewal had passed and found a better deal The Personal was not willing to admit their inability to provide me with the information I needed to make a timely decision.
• I did not ask for a refund. I only wish not to pay the penalty fee for contract termination as I did not knowingly enter a new contract. The insurance business has me here though as policies automatically renew if no action is taken.
• I will make my money back by switching in 3 months. But this is still my hard earned money I won’t get back.

My only advice to others in a similar situation is to do things in a different order. My proactive order was what has caused problems for myself. Had I recorded proper documentation of my call to request my renewal package I would be in a far better bargaining position. When you call the first time be sure to notify the agent that you did not receive any renewal documentation.

Please avoid doing business with The Personal. I never had to make a claim but I hope they are excellent at customer service during that time of need because they over charged me while I lived in Mississauga and were forced me to the letter of my contract.

My cancelled policy number was: K2568236 Feel free to quote that and provide them with the URL to this page.

Once I move from my apartment and can also cancel my rental insurance I will be one customer The Personal will never see again.

Grant and I braved the snow storm from earlier in the weekend and headed out onto Lake Simcoe again to try and find some tasty perch to jump into our bucket. We were supposed to have two more come along, but the 1.5′ of snow we had dumped on us the previous day didn’t give them a warm fuzzy feeling about driving up to Keswick.

The good news is that Grant has an all wheel drive Subaru so we didn’t have any problems and the main roads were cleared in plenty of time for our arrival. The Albertan and Naval man who were supposed to join us were easy targets the next day at work for their fear of snow.

Grant and I did alright pulling in 13 and 15 fish each. A few were too tiny and had to be released, but we had about 16 eating sized fish which Grant kindly cleaned and then cooked at his place. Lauren really appreciates that!

Once again we went out with Simcoe Fishing Adventures and other than Grant forgetting his wallet in the car on shore things were great. I’d highly recommend you contact Whitey if you’re looking for a pleasant day of fishing.

Lauren was feeling a little stir crazy in late February and promised a friend of hers that we would come visit in southern Quebec. So we loaded up Lauren’s Vibe and headed out on the road for a destination about an hour south east of Montreal.

The traffic in Ontario was fine since we left on a Thursday we let rush hour in Toronto clear itself out and then hit the road. Unfortunately that decision put us in rush our in Montreal. But not to worry we arrived at our destination just before sunset which was great because we were ripping down snow covered country roads. ;)

Overall it was a nice little holiday. We hit the town pub for dinner, I found a bunch of great deals at the Woolrich store in town and made the girls sit around and wait for me while I shopped. That doesn’t happen very often - talk about role reversal.

Check out the photos.

We had the “non-extravaganza” ice fishing day today. A bunch of guys from work get together and head up to Lake Simcoe for some ice fishing to have a few BEvERages and catch some fish.

I’m a little embarrassed and yet proud that I pulled out the largest fish today. A 1 pound rock bass. I didn’t think it would stand but the bite died off after the morning, and we moved after lunch. The move put us in a weed bed that turned out mostly smaller perch and no pike as I would have expected from a normal day on Simcoe.

Check out the photos. Thanks Whitey at Simcoe Fishing Adventures!

I’ve been working on a hardware upgrade for nesser.org over the holidays. I’ve almost migrated all the things that I use from the old machine to the new.

I’m running a RAID 1 array of hard drives. This allows me to mirror all the data from one hard drive onto the other in case one of them physically fails. I will be able to recover my data from the other and rebuild the array once a new hard drive is inserted.

Lots of software upgrades have taken place and I’m finally running a current Linux operating system again. The hardware is power efficient running a VIA Esther processor at 1500MHz and the CPU runs fanless, but of course the power supply does not. This makes it nice and quiet as well.

RAM has been bumped up to 512 from 128 in the old machine with a massive 80Gig hard drive.

It just shows that you don’t need a huge power sucking work horse to do basic things like web serving, email, and data base work. That is unless you are serving for a site like Digg or Slashdot. I have a feeling that my network pipe would be the bottle neck and not my hardware in case I ever get swamped with traffic. But I haven’t left it to chance either, my firewall ensures that only a trickle gets through and not a tsunami of network traffic.

All that is left to do now is the following services. I’d like to get them finished up before new years eve so I can decommission the old machine to the dumpster for the new year.

• SVN
• Trac
• munin

I picked up some new skates from the Burnhamthorpe Hockey Experts store. I ended up spending a little more than I wanted, but I use them enough so it’s worth it.

I’ll be riding in a pair of Mission Fuel 120XPs come the new year. Now I’m looking forward to Friday morning hockey. Even though they have been baked and feel like my current boots I wonder how many blisters I’ll get breaking them in. They are definitely a stiffer boot.

We all went to Grant and Chantal’s for her big 3-Oh! early surprise birthday party. After a great night of Indian food, blender alchemy, cup cakes and board games Adriana and myself woke up just after the crack of dawn to go fishing.

On the ride up to Guelph we found a live bait vending machine at a gas station (yes, I know… vending machine at a Pioneer) but they were not stocked any more since it is a little out of season now. It was too late to find a bait shop in Guelph so we were stuck with artificial tubes. After finishing our coffees with lazy fishing — cast, catch the bottom and let your bait float on a secondary line just off the bottom, wait, repeat — we decided that more active means of catching fish should be sought out. So we went back to Grants place, I dug for some worms in the garden and we tried that again in the river behind Grants.

The Jack (aka Northern Pike) showed up below the spillway in the river, it was my 3rd or 4th cast and I had him on. A beauty of a fish he made 3 or 4 good runs before tiring and calmly coming into the shallows. We had a hard time landing him as my net with a 1′ diameter and about a 1′6″ rubber netting basket was far too small. I suggested the scoop onto shore method that didn’t work out so well so I started to manhandle the fish on the line and pull him up over the 1′ break wall we were standing on. A quick bite of the line — I didn’t tie on a leader, and now I’m kicking myself for it — and the Jack was off with my lure! A short distance release.

Ah well, Adriana and myself had a good look at him struggling to get him onto shore he was easily just under two feet long and a beauty of a fish. If you catch him, and a 1 ounce blue and silver little cleo is stuck in his lip let me know. I’d like my lure back, it’s caught a few fish.

Last night my hockey skate blade was loose and I couldn’t tighten it. There are 3 bolts on each of my Mission skates which I bought in the late ’90s.

I played on them last night since there are 2 other bolts still holding the blade in the plastic holder but when I walk “heel to toe” on the rubber mats the steel noticeably moves around instead of just creaking.

Before my game today I took them into a hockey shop near the rink. These guys specialize in hockey. There were a pair of Graf’s on the wall for $750. The younger guy in the shop started talking about drilling out the bolt since it is was just spinning and wouldn’t tighten any more. The problem being that they can’t get any hardware for the skates since they are at least 7 years old.

The shop couldn’t help me so I played on them again. I don’t think they affected me on the ice, but on the bench they sounded bad and I was a little concerned about going over the boards and cracking the steel blade when I landed. I’ve done that before and had them replaced just a year ago now it seems.

On the way to pick up Laurens car at the rental place we stopped off at the Hockey Experts store on Burhamthorpe near Mavis. The guys there took it in, started breaking them down and checking things out. Then they discovered the plastic holder was eaten into by tightening the bolts over and over again. Using a copper rivet and a nylon washer they were able to tighten the bolt down.

It doesn’t quite use a stick of gum, a scuba mask and a lighter, but hopefully it holds out until Christmas time. There should be a new pair of Mission skates on sale with my name on them.

The guys at Hockey Experts were amazing and didn’t charge me a thing for their time and a few pieces of hardware. A great experience even though the floor staff is young the guys behind the counter at the repair shop knew their skates. I’d suggest you visit for your repair and replace needs.

Good ol’ Bobby Tables. A good giggle from XKCD.

Lauren and I went to the Toronto FC game vs. New York Red Bulls at BMO field. It’s at the Exhibition grounds which is right by the lake. There was some interesting weather patterns moving through the area and we were submerged inside a cloud for most of the game. The good news is even though everything was moist there wasn’t any problems seeing the pitch. There isn’t a seat more than 60 to 80 rows back at the field and I don’t think there actually is a bad seat in the house.

I took this neat shot of the field, CN tower and light stand at the game. The fog rolling in off the lake gives it a much softer look.

We had a scotch egg which is a hard boiled egg surrounded with sausage meat, battered and deep fried. Yup, it was as good as it sounded.