- Posted by mateid on July 2, 2010
With the webhost4life.com nonsense almost sorted out I stopped by at vistek.ca to rent the Canon EF100/2.8 Macro for the weekend. I don’t have a dedicated macro lens, and in fact I’ve never even tried one until today. I also picked up a EOS 50D on Wednesday and I couldn’t be happier with it. We headed out to Prince’s Island Park with the whole family and put the lens through its paces. Honestly I was pleasantly surprised with the results. The image quality is fantastic and the macro shots turned out great. It also doubles very well as a portrait lens. I think I will rent this one more often. At $20 for the weekend it’s an absolute bargain if you have a macro project lined up. Next weekend I will try the EF 70-100/2.8 L IS and head out to Spruce Meadows for some horse jumping – the kids love it!
- Posted by mateid on July 1, 2010
I have finally decided to change hosts after numerous issues and ridiculously poor customer service provided by webhost4life.com. I’ve been with them for a few years and things were decent for a low cost windows hosting provider. They moved me to the so called “new platform” in January and all hell broke loose. I’ve had nothing but problems since – the control panel is poor, many feature that were available previously are gone and the site was constantly down. The support now requires a “premium” subscription to get any kind of timely response to your inquiries and they’re utterly useless. This culminated last week when I’ve been told I cannot run different versions of ASP.Net on my account. Imagine that! So I’ve decide to cancel my account and move to maximumasp.com. I’ve asked for a refund and here is the pearl I got from their support:
Hello Matei,
I am writing this email in response to your inquiry on the Support ticket #7217628. Our records show that your account 'mateid' has been upgraded to the new platform on January 12, 2010. While migrating, the account to the new platform, we haven’t migrated the payment transactions for the account. We do not have the billing records for your account which existed before the migration.
However, I have canceled your account 'mateid' on July 1, 2010. In order to refund the unused amount to your credit card, please fax us the proof of payment made for your account in the old platform or you can provide us the receipt. The fax must be sent to 1-781-998-8340 and it should include your account username and the ticket number. Once we received your fax, we will refund the unused amount to your credit card.
If you have any further questions, please don't hesitate to contact us. We are available 24x7.
Are you serious? How clueless do you have to be to loose your transaction records? I sure hope they find it because I really want a refund for the 6 months remaining. If you’re planning on using webhost4life.com to host your site think again. Save yourself hours of frustration and try another hosting provider.
- Posted by mateid on July 7, 2009
I’ve experienced some interesting issues with the Bing Maps web services, specifically the token service. Looks like it’s been a problem for some folks, and this time Google produced no conclusive results.
The symptoms are that despite entering your account id and password correctly you cannot add a Web Service reference from VS 2008. You get an error message similar to this:
There was an error downloading 'https://staging.common.virtualearth.net/find-30/common.asmx?wsdl'.
The request failed with HTTP status 400: Bad Request.
I’ve tried this on several machines with the same result. Hitting the site via IE works fine. Normally you have the option of using wsdl.exe/svcutil.exe and generating your proxy and this is what I normally use for web services. In this case that doesn't work well since my project is a Compact Framework project. The usual tools don’t seem to do the job, there is no switch that allows to specify the target framework as Compact Framework.
The trick that worked for me was to download the .wsdl as common.wsdl and serve this file from my Web Development Server. Once this is set up, you can go ahead and add the Web Service reference from VS and point to this locally hosted common.wsdl. This should allow you to generate a web service proxy for the token service.
- Posted by mateid on July 6, 2009
A few more shots I’ve taken over the past few weeks. The first one is in Vancouver, where I just missed ALT .Net. It was amazing how crowded the bay was, the weather was fantastic and there were quite a few sailboats about.
Next couple of shot at Calgary Farmer’s Market. I have a couple of more of the textured ones, there was a small shop selling a variety of items made of felt. The colors and textures were too much to resist.
Enjoy!
- Posted by mateid on June 17, 2009
I have a ‘98 Subaru Legacy GT which has now developed the infamous head gasket issue. There’s 180K on the clock, and I just got back from Vancouver where I missed the ALT .Net conference due to a variety of mechanical failures. Ballpark figure around $2200 to make this go away. Who knows how bad the damage is, there is so much junk in the coolant now it’s hard to tell. I really like this car, but this is depressing. I need a 2005-2006 GT with a manual transmission, that’ll cheer me up.