And as I read this letter from Cameron McCuaig, the Vice President of Client Care at Bell, I marvel at the line “thank you for choosing Bell”. As if I selected them from number of worthy opponents. Actually, Cameron, I “chose” Bell 4 years ago because I couldn’t stomach being with Telus anymore after having worked for them for a  year and a half, and I didn’t like any of Rogers’ phones at that time. So congratulations on being the slightly less foul smelling pile of garbage back in December of 2004.

Speaking of greedy cell phone carriers acting like you’re getting a deal, have you seen the new iPhone plans from Rogers? Their cheapest plan rings in at $60. For that you get:

• 150 weekday minutes, unlimited evenings and weekends (note: evenings start at 9pm, when those of us who work for a living to keep paying those cellphone bills are starting to think about heading to bed)
• 400MB data (which may sound like a lot but you’d be amazed at how quickly emailing and web browsing will eat through that 400MB—oh, and better stay off Google Maps, that’ll leave a dent)
• Visual voicemail
• 75 sent text messages

Whoopdie friggin’ shit. Oh, do you like having call display? Well then you can pay $15 more for the “Value Pack” of “Wireless Essentials”. The first part assumes you’re a complete moron and need to look up “value” in the dictionary. The second part just points out the fact that these were features that should come standard with your plan anyway, hence “Essentials”. Let’s be honest, right now you wish you were a stakeholder in Rogers. It’s brilliant! After all we really don’t have much of a choice, do we? It’s not as if we can take our iPhone elsewhere and get a better deal. We’re all held at the mercy of our greedy cellphone carriers.

There is a petition you can sign, and while I’m sure it won’t make a difference it might feel better to get some things off your chest, knowing that once they reach 10,000 messages they’re going to print them out and send them to Rogers (sadly a huge waste of paper since Rogers execs will be too busy rolling around in money to notice a few extra white bits of paper in the pile).

While I’ve only ever been a lukewarm fan of the music of Nine Inch Nails, I have a tremendous amount of respect for Trent Reznor and his business model. Today he announced the release of his new album with the following note attached:

“thank you for your continued and loyal support over the years - this one’s on me.”

Not only is the album completely free, but it is being released in a variety of formats (including lossless torrent downloads) under the Creative Commons “attribution non-commercial share-alike” license. From the site: “we encourage you to remix it, share it with your friends, post it on your blog, play it on your podcast, give it to strangers, etc.”

And for people like me who devour the NIN album art, a printable PDF of the cover art, the track listings and the individual track artwork is available for download.

On an interesting and related note, Metallica (who previously sued people for copyright infringement and embarked on a crusade to shut down Napster) is considering following NIN and Radiohead in releasing their tracks for free over the internet. Also of note, I think Lars Ulrich is King Douchebag of the Universe.

Seriously though, no one even reads this thing. So it’s not like I’m letting anyone down!