We arrived in Rome on a red-eye flight from Toronto with Air Canada. Aside from the usual chaotic boarding process at Pearson, the flight was quite good. I personally found the 9-hour flight literally flew by.
We met our airport transfer to the Eurostars Roma Aeterna Hotel. He was a nice gentleman (WeChat: 张巍.罗马) from Tianjin and had been living in Rome for more than a decade. We were lucky and were able to check into our hotel room early.
We then proceeded to our prearranged Vatican City tour. The tour was rescheduled at the last minute due to a change in the Vatican schedule. Not being able to cancel, we decided to do the 3 p.m. tour; otherwise, we would be forced to forfeit our tickets. You can imagine that we were really tired.
The tour was excellent. Our guide, Peter, aptly named while visiting St. Peter’s Cathedral, was super knowledgeable. I enjoyed the tour even in my zombie state.
After the two-hour tour, we wanted to take a taxi or Uber back. This was a total fail. The average wait time quickly turned from 10 minutes to 30 minutes. We decided to walk the 6km instead.
We made it on time for dinner back at the hotel’s restaurant and called it an early night.
The next day, we caught up on our sleep and headed out late afternoon towards the Trevi Fountain and the Spanish Steps. I have never seen so many tourists in my life packed into such close quarters. Honestly, I cannot appreciate the sites, and this visit has confirmed my firm belief that the best way to experience Rome is with the 4K HDR OLED TV in the comfort of one’s home. By the way, touching a piece of natural marble in Rome is no different than anywhere else on the planet. They are all millions of years old.
The day after, we did the Colosseum tour. This was also a bit underwhelming for me. Again, I got more out of a documentary than being physically there. I am sure it is just me.
Overall, I felt Rome to be a good place to visit if you are a history buff or a devout Catholic. For me, we checked our box, but I can do without the graffiti, the trash, and the constant fear of being pickpocketed. Also, the best way to get around Rome is on foot, so if you have problems walking, then it may be a challenge getting around.
Below are the videos that we collected over the three days.
Last month one of my SolarEdge inverters stopped generating power. I called New Dawn Energy and they had SolarEdge to remotely diagnosed the system. It turned out this time, it will take more than a simple firmware update. A replacement is approved through their RMA process. This all happened on August the 22nd.
This is the second replacement in three years of operations. SolarEdge really needs to improve their quality process.
Today, the unit finally got replaced after 25 days. During this time 50% of my total solar power was dormant. For something that you think should be part of utility, this is certainly a very long lead time for replacing something that I think would be pretty critical if I was off-grid. Glad I was not!
For those who want a visual chart to see where our tax brackets lie, I took the time to have ChatGPT AI generate a python program that created the following chart:
Check out the marginal tax rates for 2025. (click to enlarge)
Salaries with significant tax rate jumps:
$13,000: 15.0% → 20.1% (+5.1%)
$64,000: 20.0% → 24.1% (+4.1%)
$72,000: 24.1% → 29.6% (+5.5%)
$94,000: 29.7% → 31.5% (+1.8%)
$110,000: 31.5% → 34.8% (+3.3%)
$116,000: 34.8% → 37.9% (+3.1%)
$128,000: 37.9% → 43.4% (+5.5%)
$163,000: 43.4% → 45.0% (+1.6%)
$189,000: 45.0% → 48.0% (+3.0%)
$233,000: 48.0% → 49.5% (+1.6%)
$263,000: 49.5% → 53.5% (+4.0%)
This has been quite helpful in our tax planning. I hope you will find some utility with this.
TelMax started to roll out their fiber infrastructure in my neighborhood during the summer. Last month, a sales team knocked on my door and asked whether I was interested in switching. I told them I was, and it was the symmetrical 2Gbps speed that caught my attention. I also shared my concerns:
The ability to establish bridge mode with an external IP address;
I have interlock bricks on the side of the house, so I wanted to ensure the installation was clean and neat with the interlocks;
I have the flexibility to where I terminate the fibre cable in my basement;
The sales person told me all of my issues will be addressed to my full satisfaction. I inquire how long will it take for the installation process? They told me it should be up and running within 30 minutes.
I took the plunge decided to sign up on the last week of August, and got an appointment for September 8th (today) for installation. The appointment is suppose to be today from 8am to 12pm, see the email below:
Email from TelMax from the day before.
The installer came at 11:49am and told me that the installation is broken into two parts. He is just the first part, which is to install a fibre cable from the side of the house and into the house where I would like the modem and WiFi units to be. Since I didn’t care for the Eero units, I left them in the box and instructed the installer where he can place the Adtran modem. This part of the installation was fairly painless. Overall I think the installer was courteous and did a pretty good job running the wire in my basement.
After the second party connected the fibre cable to the curb.
The second part of the installation came around 2 hours later. They installed a flexible, orange conduit that contains a fibre cable from the curb to the side of the house. I told him that I have interlock bricks by the side of the house, and then to my surprise he said that they don’t handle the interlocks. Another party will come later to fix the interlock.
Once again we are in a waiting mode with a safety hazard on my interlock. There is again no expectations set, no scheduling, no appointments. We are now with more anxious waiting. I guess that is how it goes.
Where we are now as of 5:26pm:
Wait for the interlock guys to come;
The modem still shows a red LED so not yet connected;
Feeling a little anxious because the promised of 30 minutes has turned into a drip by drip installation experience by different parties providing services for TelMax but not really from TelMax;
TelMax is a typical case of over promise and under deliver. For a new service being introduced to a new neighbourhood, its opportunity to shine has been turned into mixed feelings of anxiety and customer service uncertainties. This is NOT how you should roll out a brand new service in my opinion.
Update September 8, 5:30-6:00pm:
I logged into the TelMax site and logged in. I contacted their customer support via email and indicated my current status. There was no ticket generated, so we will see what happened.
The process is still fluid, and I will update this as the installation process continues.
Update September 8, 6:11pm:
Someone called me from TelMax provisioning team (not their customer support team) and wanted to know the status of the modem. I told him the optical LED on the modem is still red and he confirmed that there is still a line integrity issue.
This call was not the result of my previous support email that I sent. I also took the opportunity to let him know about the outstanding interlock brick issue, and he told me that is a separate team.
Net-net, they will have to send someone out tomorrow to check the line. I am lucky to be working from home otherwise not sure how other customers can deal with this fluid situation.
Update September 9, 11:49am:
Called TelMax customer support at 1-844-483-5629 spoke to a wonderful lady and told her of my situation and inquired about what is the next step, since I have no visibility on when this will be resolved. She told me that she coordinated with dispatch and that someone, named Bill, will be coming between 4pm to 8pm this evening.
Update September 9, 5:09pm:
I received a text message from 1-289-212-4413 at 5:09pm.
Once again another let down. I freed my evening in preparation for the visit, to learn from the above text message that it is now moved to tomorrow morning, which I am only partially available. Perhaps I am not being patient enough, but I am beginning to feel from frustrated to annoyance.
Update September 10, 1:16pm:
A technical service guy came near noon. His name is Carlo, and he was the first person who I felt really know what he’s doing. Kudos to both Carlo and Peter in identifying the cabling issue and completed the provisioning. Now we are up and running. Problem solved!
Update September 12, 11:56am:
TelMax sent an email to me indicating that the installation process is completed, which is largely true since I am now using their Internet service. However the interlock bricks and the exposed fibre cable is still an outstanding issue. I just sent an email to their support for follow up. So far, no responses.
Update September 16, 6:33pm
This morning at around 8am I called customer support to enquire about the interlock bricks, because the wire is still exposed and it has been more than a week since initial engagement for the deployment. The customer service rep was trying to be helpful but the net-net result is that he listened and took notes. We ended the call with him promising me that someone will call me today to follow up.
We are now in the evening, and no one has called. I also took the opportunity to reach out to the original sales staff, who to their credit is trying to help me out. So with another day gone, the orange wire is still a safety hazard on my pathway. I still do not have an idea of when this will be resolved.
Update September 16, 6:47pm
After venting out my frustration by writing the previous update, I finally decided to just contact my landscaping contractor who originally did my interlock and get it fixed. They got back to me immediately with a timeframe of either Friday or Monday. It is wonderful to deal with professionals. No fuss no muss. No customer support that never gets back to you. I felt like a load off my shoulders.
Yes this is additional cost but I rather pay to get a good night sleep and lower blood pressure.
Update September 17, 5:06pm
About an hour ago DHM, a wonderful interlock contractor showed up and told me that TelMax asked them to come and fix up my interlock. They did excellent work, and the line is finally suppose to be where it is, below the ground and underneath the bricks.
The person from DHM were great guys, and I thanked them profusely. Their workmanship was topped notch!
So all in all it took 9 days from September 8th until now. We can finally claim that the deployment is completed and the service is working normally. Given the multi-party or contractors involved for the deployment, I personally think TelMax could have made things easier and put my mind at ease by keeping me the customer fully informed of the status. They failed in the coordination, and turned what could have been a wonderful experience into one filled with anxiety and frustration. I hope they learn from this will treat future deployment with proper communication.
I want to put in a special thanks to Khushboo Mistry, who really helped me in coordinating and navigating within the TelMax team to finally get this done. As a person on the Sales team, this was not part of her job. She really did above and beyond for me. For this, I really thank her for it.
So in conclusion, here is my assessment:
A – for Internet service;
A – for professionalism of all staff involved; from sales, technicians, and to the DHM the contractor who fixed my interlocks;
F – for communication and customer support department; mainly for unpredictable planning and scheduling; non-existent feedback loop; and no commitment and expectation setting;
It is unfortunate to have one part of the organization to spoil the experience. I wish they will fix their customer support and scheduling process. It is people like Khushboo who will make TelMax a great company, and not the poor organized deployment and installation process that someone else in the company came up with.
In a previous post, I talked about upgrading to the UDMPro Max. This was in preparation for upgrading a series of new switches in the house. Effectively bringing our networking speed from 1Gbps to 10Gbps or 2.5Gbps for most of the house devices. Some home automation devices, TV’s, and other media devices will remain at 1Gbps, since this is plenty for what they need.
Another major reason for upgrading the switching speeds is to prepare for WiFi 7 upgrade. Most of the access points supporting WiFi 7 now require at least a 2.5Gbps wired connection in order to take advantage of the full WiFi speed improvements.
Below is my updated networking landscape for now.
Current networking landscape after several switch upgrades.
New hardware:
1 x UDMPro Max
1 x USW Pro XG 10 PoE
1 x USW Pro XG 8 PoE
2 x USW Flex 2.5G 8 PoE
Old hardware (kept as cold standby):
1 x UDMPro
1 x US 24 250W
1 x USW 60W
The last major upgrade was performed about 4 years ago, as outlined by this post. We also installed fibre about 5 years ago and we talked about it on this post, when we added the USW Pro 24 PoE switch with SFP slots.
I won’t get into the specifications, other than to say the Max offers more speeds and feeds.
I wanted to document the migration process, because for me it was not trivial. The Max came with outdated firmware. The backup and restore options were not visible with a user that had “Super Admin” role. They are only available with the “Owner” role. This took me sometime to figure out.
Step 1: Login into the old UDM Pro with the Unifi owner account. This is usually the account that contains the Two Factor Authentication;
Step 2: Perform a download of all the applications and their respective settings. This should result in unified_os_backup_*.unifi file;
Perform a backup on the old UDM PRO
Step 3: If you are using Protect (Unifi Security Application), and want to reuse the old hard drive, the migration process will not migrate the videos, so be prepare to backup the contents on a separate machine and reformat the hard drive, or just buy new hard drives;
Step 4: I powered down the old UDM Pro, because I need the WAN connection to be connected to the new UDM Pro Max. At this point, you will lose Internet connectivity for most of your household devices;
Step 5: I physically installed the UDM Pro Max, and connected the WAN, and connected my laptop with the unifi backup file that we got in Step 2. Note that I did not connect the rest of my network at this point. Also the entire restoration process requires Internet connectivity so don’t try to restore it without Internet. I learned this the hard way, resulting in several resets;
Step 6: I had to upgrade the UDM Pro Max because it came with old firmware and it will not restore with the old firmware. This was super frustrating because it elongated the down time for your household;
Step 7: Before I perform the restore, I powered down the Max and installed my old hard drive from the old Pro. After restarting the Max, I then reformat the hard drive with the Protect App;
Upload the previously downloaded backup file and do a restore
Step 8: I then proceed to restore from the backup file that I previously copied on to my laptop. This took about 10 to 15 minutes;
The dialog is pretty cryptic, so be sure to click on the upload link and ignore the No Backups Found message.
Step 9: Once the system is up, I attached all the networking devices to the new Max and waited to ensure that all the Unifi devices are recognized by the new Max;
Step 10: I did one final reboot just to be sure that everything is okay;
So far so good. We did find a couple of issues. Rogers, my ISP provisioned a new WAN IP so I had to update my DNS entries. The VPN server configurations had to be updated with the new WAN IP.
I am going to let the Max run for a few days, and then perform a factory reset with the old Pro. We will then use the Pro as a Shadow (Hot Standby) Gateway for potential fail-over.
Recently, a friend of a friend fell victim to SIM Swap Fraud. This type of fraud occurs when the perpetrator uses social engineering techniques to convince your phone company, the mobile provider, to re-provision your SIM or replace it and send the new one to the perpetrator. This renders your current SIM inoperable on the cellular network, and it may take time for you to discover this, since we spend most of our time connected via Wi-Fi.
Once the SIM is under the attacker’s control, that person can then scour popular social media, mail, and banking services and initiate a “password reset” or “forget password” process. Since they have your number, they can act as if they were you by intercepting SMS-based two-factor authentication, effectively stealing your online identity.
With the stolen identity, they can scan your emails to discover other sensitive items that may assist in further solidifying their access. For financial services, they can now log in as you and begin transferring your hard-earned funds out of your accounts, effectively stealing your money and assets.
We have all heard horror stories, such as those featured in TD Stories. However when someone that you know either directly or indirectly is affected, it really hits home, and you start asking how you can be further protected.
I have done some things in the past, such as giving out a secondary phone number managed by VOIP.ms, which was forwarded to my primary (hidden) cell phone number. However this ultimately proved ineffective, because there is just too much additional friction for services that really do require your actual mobile phone number, such as most financial services.
I have also created an account PIN with Koodo, my mobile network provider. This is a six-digit PIN that the service representative will authenticate before performing any account changes including a SIM re-provisioning or port to a different carrier. Note that this is different from the SIM PIN which just protects information on your SIM card.
After some research, I found that Koodo is now offering Port Fraud Protection. This morning I called Koodo and after about thirty minutes, I now have this protection on all of our phone numbers provided through Koodo. Your mobile provider may have a similar plan, and I highly encourage you to check it out and enrol if possible.
I also inquired about policies to prevent certain social engineering techniques while I was on the phone with the Koodo service rep. After our discussion, I can now summarize the current protection I have in place with Koodo.
I have a six-digit PIN on my service account. This means if anyone tries to impersonate me to change my account in any way, they will need to use my PIN. If they claim to have forgotten the PIN, they will need to provide a driver’s license or credit card information to validate. I am not comfortable with this, so I requested a special instruction to be added to my account. If a valid PIN is not provided, the service rep should instruct the caller (myself included) to visit the Koodo store to have the PIN reissue. This will ensure a face to face validation is performed with a proper photo ID check.
I also added the Koodo Port Fraud Protection, which essentially prevents anyone including the account owner (me) to “automatically and seamlessly” port my numbers. This will add some inconvenience if I want to port to another carrier in the future. I will have to call into Koodo and remove this protection first. It is just another step and barrier to anyone unauthorized trying to cause me harm, but for the sake of safety, I am willing to take on this minor inconvenience.
Even with all of this, the threat persists. We still rely on proper behaviour of Koodo employees who have the power to perform a SIM swap or provision. Unfortunately this is not within my control. Therefore, we still have to be diligent in reducing our threat surface. I would recommend the following:
Use a two-factor authentication scheme that is not tied to your phone number. It can be tied to your phone such as Passcodes or One-Time Passwords generated through a security application on your phone;
Reduce your withdraw limits and credit limits of your credit cards so that they are manageable in case they are lost;
If you are in a position to develop a personal relationship with your banker, then you should do so. They can alert you if they notice something strange is going on. They also add a personal touch by recognizing your voice and your behaviour in addition to the institutional security policies;
Good luck in reviewing your own circumstances and I hope you learn something here to strengthen your own SIM security and reduce the SIM Swap Fraud threat.
Note: Since my parents are on Virgin Plus, I thought I link to their policies as well.
Carol’s nephew and niece is visiting us from China. We thought it would be good to take them on a road trip across the HWY 401 stretch and a bit of Quebec.
Attached is our final itinerary, and a video to summarize each day’s events. To play the video, just click on the video link in the Day title. For example:
Click the video tag in the PDF document to play each day’s video.
Approximately three years ago we created a holding a company in Ontario, Canada for the purpose of managing certain real estate investments. After some considerations, we have determined that this holding company is no longer required, so about a month ago, we decided to dissolve this company.
When we sent out an email requesting the dissolution of the company, we received the following response:
The above is the email response from Ontario.ca
On the surface we thought this is excellent news, because we will be able to do this all online. However upon visiting Ontario.ca/BusinessRegistry we were immediately lost after the initial login.
It took many tries to discovered this successful navigation path, so I wanted to document this for other users and for myself in the future.
The menu options on the left is not very helpful (see below). The obvious one is Ontario business registry under Account help, but this only provides a false, old guide to a PDF form that you can download and fill-out but is discouraged and rarely used now. The correct selection is the mysterious Add a service item.
Once you are in the Add a service page, you can then select the Start now of the Ontario business registry process.
This will bring you to a different site, which you can use to select Make Changes, and then further down File Articles of Dissolution.
The entire experience feels like the website was put together by multiple contractors, and totally user unfriendly. Yet another government service experience.
