Thank You

On every day, we are thankful for our freedom. Thank You. To all of the veterans, of every nation, everywhere, who have given us that freedom.

New Site: MyRecommendations.ca

We recently opened our latest site, My Recommendations. While a full site design is in process, the site is up and in production, noting our recommendations (both for good and BAD service). Be sure to check it out.

My Recommendations is designed to be a referral site - we will be allowing others to post their own recommendations - a place where users can find recommendations for a wide variety of companies and their overall reviews. Similar to Yelp, but more of a personal take on it. We hope you enjoy it.

Company Recommendations: Around the Home Handyman services

Company: Around the Home Handyman - Norm (Norman) Richter - NOT RECOMMENDED

This company is NOT Recommended. Here is a link to their BBB listing. Note that the Around the Home BBB rating is not an "A" as noted on other sites.

(something I don't usually do here is comment on individual businesses or go on non-technical tirades. This is an exception to the rule - so if you're looking for tech comments, please ignore).

On a personal note, I can appreciate people can't work for free these days. It's tough - but any company who offers a one-year guarantee for their work should not be charging for problems with existing work (new work, yes - but work that they originally did? Absolutely not).

We have used Around the Home handyman services, owned by Norm Richter (also listed as Norman Richter) for two separate pieces of work: roofing and flooring. The roofing job was done extremely well and on budget. After the flooring work, we will never use them again.

The flooring job was a mixed bag. We were originally quoted about $1600 for a kitchen and mudroom renovation. Since we were paying by the hour, it was expected to go higher. The final tally was over $3000. Originally expected to take 3-4 days, it was over a week. Time was ADDED to the bill that was never received until we forced the issue as noted below.

The initial tiling looked great - but had some problems that were evident 3 days after the job was completed. This is where the problems began.

There was a crack in one of the tiles and several holes in grout around the floor. The biggest problem however is the supposed one year guarantee. FOUR months after we initially called and reported the problem, Norm finally came around to fix things, saw and reviewed the problems with the tiles and grout. The next day, they only fixed the tile (and replaced another) but did not correct the grout problems, blaming us. Keep in mind this was FOUR months after we tried to get them to come in.

Subsequent follow-ups was that he couldn't do the work for free (even though it was part of the original work) and that we should have used an insurance company's tilers to fix the grout that was caused by his work. He then subsequently blamed our floor.

I wish they had told us up front that they could NOT do the job properly.

Needless to say, I would NOT recommend them for any flooring work.

More details can be seen on our new recommendations site.

Help Save Bam Bam

If you don't know the story, check it out here

Yeah, obviously people shouldn't be taking wildlife and taking care of it, but when it's been there for years and is now domesticated, the government shouldn't move it to a zoo who is going to be PAID for breeding it.

That's just wrong.

Gladwell on Defining A Racist

here's an excellent article by Malcolm Gladwell (from Blink) - all about
gladwell.com: Defining A Racist

Celebrity Rand Fans

Celebrity Rand Fans

Apart from the obvious ones on the cover, those noted with the Atlas Shrugged Movie project, the list?

Rob Lowe, Vince Vaughn (???), Sandra Bullock, Christina Ricci, Sharon Stone, Jerry Lewis, Tom Selleck, Ashley Judd, Eva Mendes, Steven Spielberg, hmph - the list goes on....

Jacksons looking for good health for Barbaro, not big bucks

Having gone through spending thousands on our animals, I hope Barbaro survives. It's good to see that even in a business like horse-racing, compassion will hopefully win out.

SI.com - More Sports - Jacksons looking for good health for Barbaro, not big bucks - Wednesday May 24, 2006 10:48AM