On the lighter side…

I’m on vacation until school starts. My parents were here for 5 days, which was nice although it was a bit treacherous going out with them. I think they may come in warmer weather in future years. They left on Christmas, and since then it’s been a bit of socializing and self-care, which means finishing up stuff around the move (like hooking up up the recording equipment), sleeping a lot, and we’ve seen 3 movies in 2 days (a lot for me, nowhere near Carrie’s record). Waitress was too “other people’s problems” for my escapist state of mind but I could appreciate it as “a good movie” if not an enjoyable one. The Golden Compass looked kind of cheesey in preview but was entertaining and the anti-religious message was still present (yes, it’s softened but I’ll take what I can get) and I am Legend was slightly disappointing as zombie movies go. The zombies were too digital. I still think 28 Days Later is the best of the genre.

Oh, and my webhost says the changeover to the new server will happen at midnight, which shouldn’t be noticeable unless something goes wrong. . . .

2 hours 30 minutes on the phone with Bell customer service in the last 48

I feel like Kevin Dillon’s character on Entourage even writing this stuff down (he’s the one who flies into a rage when they screw up his order at Starbucks), but really, between the insipid hold music, the endless proliferation of account numbers and dollar totals and the inability to get a straight answer other than “call back in 3-6 weeks” it is crazymaking. You can probably stop reading here.

So why am I upset? Because I’d like my bills for satellite service to be sent to my current address instead of my old address (I have been asking since July to have this change made), I want to know what I actually owe them (no two reps have quoted me the same dollar amount and I’ve been given four different account numbers now, two of which have never appeared on a bill; I am also being credited either $500 and change, $741 or $788 for errors they have made), and because in July I was told by Bell that they could consolidate all my services on one bill with no problem — though at this point receiving all my bills at the same address would be a miracle. This round started because we got a threatening letter in French for money we supposedly owe on account we’d never heard of. After 75 minutes on the phone with helpful people yesterday, I thought the problem was solved until I was awakened this morning with a cryptic automated message instucting me to call Bell. This morning, I spoke with two helpful and sympathetic people who couldn’t tell me anything for sure and one condescending agent who claimed to be certain about everything (which would be reassuring if it were true). He actually told me that I had requested a change of language on our account (when I insisted I hadn’t, he said it must have been Carrie, who has never called them) and said it had to be us because “no one at Expressvu would change your language without the customer’s request.” I don’t even care about the language of our bills — I can read a bill in French — it’s the idiocy that somehow we’re the source of the problem. Yes, that’s right. I intentionally opened four accounts at Expressvu and changed the language on the account in October because people at Expressvu never make mistakes. At least the Bell telephone people aren’t actually rude.

I’d switch, but Rogers keeps billing us for September and October services on a telephone account we closed in August (I’ve called them twice now; both times the agents have been polite and tried to fix the problem), and I hear similar nightmare stories about Videotron.

The Visual Culture of Frontenac at Rachel

There was much left unsaid in the blog in the past year, but I also left out some good pictures. So, in the spirit of the real estate series that told you what happened after it happened, there will be some pics coming your way in the next few days. If I have sometime intelligent for a Top 10 list, I’ll make one. In the meantime, welcome to my 2007 photo catch-up.

This one was taken out the car window from our old neighborhood at the intersection of Frontenac and Rachel. Despite a name that suggests an unspecified lewd maneuver, the “Montreal Steamie” is a steamed hot dog which has a bit of its own history. I’m not sure how old the “Old Montreal Pool Room” is and what’s called that, since it’s a long way from Old Montreal. But we drove by that sign every time we went up into the Plateau by car (unless we were foolish enough to take Sherbrooke) and on our way to and from errands at the nearby strip mall. We never went in — I figured it was a longshot for a veggie hotdog — but it had that dingy, local character of business in the area. It never had a ton of customers or a ton of cars parked in the lot but seemed to be doing fine. There wasn’t a lot of interesting signage in the neighborhood(1), but that one consistently drew comments from us and from visitors. Though perhaps not quite as many as the “serveuses super sexy” signs in the topless breakfast joints once we explained the concept to out of town visitors. Note that the one pictured in the link is now out of business. I think it may be a sign of things to come.

I would guess that the whole area will gentrify some more soon. It’s convenient to downtown (not that proximity to downtown guarantees anything — neighborhood ideology runs so strong here). There’s a massive condo and townhouse development in the “Angus” area where there used to be a massive trainyard (complete with giant pictures of the old trainyards and the train station facade on the Loblaw’s storefront). The condos are boring (yes we looked) but seem to attract a professional/middle class crowd that would have previously stayed north in Rosemount or east by Pie-IX in Maissoneuve. The effect isn’t yet visible on existing storefronts in the area, apart from a natural foods store peeking out from a basement on Iberville. Even though I moved away, I’ll be interested to see what happens and whether the Old Montreal Pool Room lives on.

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(1) The other business that went out of business during our tenure there was the “Depanneur Sans Limite” on Frontenac which we liked to call the “depanneur avec beaucoup de limites” since they never had any stock except for beer and cigarettes (not useful for us but probably for their clientele). Still, it was kind of sad as I’m sure it was a family business. There is now one of those video rental automat places in the storefront.

Real Estate Afterword: Things We Learned

1. Stuff is really expensive here, but cheap for a city of this size and quality. We just have to deal with it.

1A. Apparently, economists are right about markets. People (i.e., Carrie and I) can be convinced that anything is worth anything. It just takes awhile and slowly one starts to think in terms of the prices. We entered horrified at the prices and at the end, felt like we got a fair deal (maybe not a bargain but not a ripoff either) for a place that cost about 4 times what we paid in Pittsburgh in 1999.

2. Other people’s real estate agents routinely exaggerate the size of the dwellings they are selling. 2000 square feet can mean 1500 useable square feet net, or it can really mean 2000 square feet. There’s also the matter of layout, which may give you more or less wall space and storage.

3. Even though you can’t really get a “buyer’s agent” in Montreal, a good agent will be loyal and advocate for you.

4. People complain about the welcome tax, but it’s just another real estate sales tax like in the U.S.

5. Mortgages in Canada are NOT as good a deal as in the U.S. You pay a penalty for paying out early, and they won’t let you lock in an interest rate for the life of the loan. The result is that incentives are such that usually the best bet for interest rates is a 5-year fixed rate amortized over 15 or 25 years. And you don’t get a tax break on interest. On the upside, rates are lower than in the U.S., or at least have been.

5A. Therefore, the incentives for owning are largely ideological: control over one’s own space and the idea that at least part of those massive monthly payments are going into equity. I did some rough calculations before we made our first offer and discovered that owning is probably less of a good choice financially than renting (in the city at least). It is unlikely that we will, in the mid-term, make much more money owning than renting when you balance out the amount of money we were able to sock away each month in our rental vs. taxes, condo fees or repairs (where there is no condo), mortgage interest, likely appreciation over time (barring another real estate boom here, which is unlikely in the near to mid future), the cost of moving, that there is no mortgage interest tax deduction in Canada, that there is some risk given that our mortgage interest rate is only locked in for 5 years (you can go longer but no more than 10), and a maximum rent increase of approximately 4% a year. All that said, without a doubt the place we own is nicer and in better shape than the place we rented.

6. You can be picky about neighborhood, you can be picky about space, you can be picky about price. Pick two or expect to look for a long time.

7. Size and cost appear to be more or less unrelated beyond a certain threshhold.

8. Water here is FREE. In the U.S., one must pay for metered water and the use of sewers. I’m sure that our taxes cover it, but the experience of free water is delightful. It’s just the idea of it. In a proper country, one needn’t pay for the necessities of life. Oh yeah, except for heat. Oops.

9. All that reading of real estate ads did help us in one respect: when our landlord told us that it was up to us to find a new tenant and assign the lease, we knew how to put together an ad to go with our Craigslist listing.

10. We discovered the city. In the process of considering different living options, we discovered many neighborhoods that we otherwise wouldn’t have visited. Many Montreal natives have a strong investment in neighborhood and wouldn’t consider living outside a few particular places. These are especially conditioned by language — there is still a strong sense that language ought to determine where you live. Like the impulse to own (vs. rent), the impulse to live in a particular place is also largely ideological. Sure, real estate wisdom says that it’s “location, location, location,” but the truth is that there are so many attractive locations in the city that the choice turns on other things — familiarity and comfort being two of them.

As immigrants, we see the city differently than “natives” do.

Our neighborhood is largely understood as a Francophone neighborhood, though we hear many other languages spoken (including, sometimes, English) and so have concluded that while there may be a plurality of Francophones in Villeray, there is not a majority. The majority might even be Allophone at this point. Still, we get questions about why two Anglophones would live in a Francophone neighborhood. After 3 years in Hochelaga-Maisonneuve, we see nothing strange about it at all.

Thus ends my discourse on real estate.

Why I Hate WebCT, Part II

My initial post on the subject has actually made the rounds at McGill and some people are talking about ways to fix things. I appreciate that. In followup correspondence, I listed some other things I hate about WebCT, and since the first post was a hit at least three people, I thought I’d post these as well.

More reasons why I hate WebCT Vista:

–you can’t customize layout. This is a problem because the overall design concept (popups, icons, etc) seems very 1995. It could be much simpler and more straightforward. Compared to much of the web it looks amateurish. I dress well for my students and wouldn’t mind a well-dressed website to go with the look.

–they want you to not only use their bizarre jargon for course organization but to force the students to learn it – what’s worst about it is that it implies a particular approach to course design (thus reducing the prof’s freedom and reducing variety for students – rather than giving in, I work around this)

–sign up sheets are designed for classes of 25 and are unusable for classes of 250 with conference sections (I had a long back and forth with tech support about this last year and there was no available solution)

–announcements are something students must seek out apart from annoying pop up windows (they should appear on the course homepage when the course comes up) — only my dedicated students seem to be aware of them (this was much less the case when I was able to customize the layout in earlier versions of WebCT and when I used to do my own course websites)

–I post reading questions for each reading to help guide students. I linked all the calendar dates for the course to reading questions for the assigned readings in winter 07; but when I updated my course for fall it wouldn’t let me move the dates forward despite there being buttons for this feature (there is a tech support record of this and I was told that they could not fix it in my case). If I’d had used fewer capabilities of the calendar, I might have been better off.

–it takes several mouse clicks to delete an old file, upload a new one, erase the old link and create a new one with a correct name (there should be an “update this file” option for powerpoints and such that I post online). Even uploading a fresh powerpoint involves several mouse clicks when it should be a simpler operation.

–rearranging icons on for files inside a folder is a logistical nightmare akin to playing a game of Tetris, though strangely rearranging columns in the gradebook is easy. If they figured it out once, I can’t imagine why they didn’t figure it out a second time.

–the search function for discussion boards is extremely limited

–conference section enrollment can’t control access to messageboards, so students often post in the wrong place and their TA doesn’t see it.

–when you write multiple choice questions, you can’t save preferences for questions (e.g., letters not numbers for answers and scrambled) which means that you have to be sure to tick the correct boxes for each question.

These are the issues off the top of my head. For each of them I have found workarounds or simply given up. WebCT automatically updates enrollment, which is nice, and the online practice quiz worked great. I find it somewhat tragic that the software is weakest in supporting large, intricate undergrad courses, where I think courseware could be the most useful. It’s also fails to make things easy that should be — like updating a course from year to year with small revisions.

Real Estate Part VIII: Denouemont

After the Mont-Royal disappointment, we continued looking. We began settling in for the long haul. After all, it was coming up on a year of looking and we hadn’t found the place of our dreams.

On the first Sunday in June, Carrie was out of town but I saw a few promising places in the paper, so I went on my own. Of particular note was an old industrial space on Normanville in the Petit Patrie, just south of Rosemount. The place was a just-renoved ex-industrial space, on a mixed use block. At the end of the block was the old incinerator, decomissioned several years ago and now under consideration for a variety of uses. The area is in transition. North of Rosemount (the cross street at the corner), Normanville is one of the most beautiful streets in the Petit Patrie. South of Normanville, it’s a little grey still, and there was at least one business still on the block.

/></p> <p>But the place was amazing. They’d carved the building into four quadrants and doubly insonorized the walls, so that one wouldn’t have neighbors above or below and each unit would have two floors. You bought roof access and a bit of outdoor space on each floor with the condo, and they’d carved some beautiful skylights that went all the down to the first floor (it’s hard to explain and the pics are no longer on the net). The place was breathtaking, though it did have a few flaws. I didn’t like what they’d done with the kitchen. I found it to be the kind of kitchen that looks good for showing but wasn’t well laid out for cooking and was inefficient with storage (and there wasn’t nearly enough). The bathrooms were beautiful but there was zero, and I mean <em>no</em> built in storage.</p> <p>Nevertheless, the place was a sight to see. I took Carrie and Sandra to see it and they both loved it. Really loved it. I came around, despite the kitchen, and there was something to be said for finishing a place yourself. And it was in the Petit Patrie, a neighborhood we knew we loved, and a 10-minute walk from the Rosemount metro stop. But the sellers wanted $439k for it, which seemed like they were charging extra for the “privilege” of finishing the place yourself. So we decided we would bid but lowball them. We offered $390k, and then we waited. After making the offer, I started to get nervous about the cost of finishing the place. You never really know how much that sort of thing costs, and this condo was already close to the top of our price range. And I felt like I was paying extra to rectify the seller’s bad design decisions regarding storage in the kitchen and the lack thereof elsewhere.</p> <p>While this was going on, another week had passed and it was Sunday again. There was an intriguing open house in Villeray. We went up there and the power was out on the buzzer. The only reason we got in at all was because some other people were leaving. We came in and were totally blown away. The place was beautiful and finished. The design was amazing, the light was good, and it came with storage and garage. It was also big enough — 2000 square feet (or just under) but with lots of wall space for our books and tons of storage. The condo looked out on a beautiful, tree-lined residential street. The Jarry metro station was half a block away. We walked around the neighborhood and checked out the amenities. They looked pretty good (and in fact we’d checked out a house in the neighborhood so we already knew a bit about it). We called our friend Debbie, who lives several blocks away, and asked her opinion. She raved about the neighborhood. Suddenly, we weren’t so certain. One place was in the Petit Patrie, a neighborhood we knew we loved. The other seemed like a better place. I could give you adjectives, but the bottom line was that after a year of looking, we just knew we loved it.</p> <p>We returned the next night with Sandra so she could see it. She was also impressed. The current owner showed us around and when she asked him was what wrong with the place, he said “we have to move. That’s the only thing that’s wrong with it.” We would, of course, do a few things to make it our own, but it was just right.</p> <p>I don’t remember the sequence exactly, but it seems like the next day the counteroffer for the Normanville place came in. The guy dropped the price a lot — to maybe $415k, with an absurdly early closing date (they obviously needed money from the sale). But this time it was us who had to walk away from the negotiations. We told Sandra to apologize profusely on our behalf, and that we’d be back if the negotiations on the other place fell through. Our dream home was listing for $399k. With some counseling from Sandra, we came in at $385k with our first offer. She tells us that she went in and made a hard sell — she told the owners and the agent that we were bidding on another place, and so they were in competition for our money. Apparently it worked. The sellers accepted our first offer. We were elated. I’ll spare you the mechanics of buying except for a “what we learned” aftermath post, but I can tell you that since we moved in, I haven’t had a moment of buyer’s remorse. At first, we thought it was a choice between quality of neighborhood and quality of place, since we thought the Petit Patrie was a more happening neighborhood. It turns out that we were wrong. The Petit Patrie is great but Villeray, or at least the part of it within walking distance of our place is wonderful, <a href=as I suggested in a much earlier post.

A few pictures are below. We’re “moved in” but not fully settled. There is still much decorating to be done, there is no overhead light in the dining room and 3 months later, my studio still isn’t hooked up. That’s what winter break is for. . . .

/></p> <p><img decoding= Posted byJonathan SternePosted inReal Estate Saga, Text1 Comment on Real Estate Part VIII: Denouemont