Information Echo

Both me and my wife have been with the same automotive (and home) insurance company for approximately 10 years.

They’ve served us well for what little they actually do from a customer-service standpoint. Really, it’s insurance, and in most peoples books the less often you have to speak to them, the better.

In those 10 years my wife has had one at fault accident (last fall) and I had one myself - in 2003.

Both were fender benders for the most part - no injuries in either, and in my case, not even any damage to my own vehicle and minimal damage to the other.

The last at fault I had before that was nearly 15 years previous, with something similar for my wife.

Coupled with no speeding tickets or other major red-flags for either of us in the past 6 or 8 years I thought that despite the at-faults we were still moderately good drivers with records that although aren’t entirely enviable, are certainly not “scary” either.

To the companies credit, both of our claims were handled well from their end, but considering the scary reality of auto insurance rates in the province of Ontario I’d expect nothing less.

So it was with disgust today that I received a call from Belair informing me that they were not going to renew us come the end of July - primarilly because of the 2 at fault accidents.

Ugh. Today marks the beginning of the search for a new insurance company for all of our insurable properties. I’m not looking forward to the whole experience, nor the new rates that are likely to result.

Its no wonder so many people are cynical of the insurance industry. You can pay into it for decades, but if you ever need to actually reasonably *use* the service you’re paying for, suddenly they treat you like garbage.

I gues that if there’s one positive thing its that they gave me 4 weeks notice.

*sigh*

We headed out with our new trailer on Saturday for Cedar Park resort, not far north of the Oshawa area.

This was a good test run of the new setup - not so close that there was no open-road time to see how the van hauled the trailer, but close enough that if there was any glitches, they weren’t going to be a big issue or a show-stopper.

I was pleasantly surprised how the van hauled the trailer - its basically at the maximum capacity, but as long as your not in a rush (a bad idea anytime your towing anything regardless) it did just fine. It will work it hard on the hills though - one of the reasons I’m looking to add a little more instrumentation to our van to ensure that towing remains enjoyable, not a lesson in frustration as we sit on the side of the highway with mechanical issues.

The electric brake controller that I was given by a family member left something to be desired, however. No matter how much tweaking of the controllers settings that I tried it seemed like the trailer was providing too little braking - enough to stop safely, but not enough that I’d be comfortable with it in an emergency situation.

When I cranked up the power on the controller it went from “Not quite enough” to “Holy shit” in an instant - the trailer tires would go almost instantaneously to near lockup. Yeah, we were stopping in a big hurry, but it’s not a comfortable way to do it.

I’m going to have to play with it some more and see if it just needs more setup, or if the actual controller unit has a physical problem. Since the controller is about 10 years old it could just be malfunctioning and we may need to replace it with a new unit.

Otherwise the trip was a lot of fun, and provided some oh-so-needed relaxation.

We may have to rearrange the bed assignments as I found the front bed somewhat uncomfortable. One of the rear beds has a real mattress and may be more comfortable, although my son is already fussing about potentially loosing “His” bed already.

For a first test run, I’ll call it a success.

Reason #1 that I don’t hang out in Usenet much anymore are assholes like I experienced tonight.

I made this post to rec.outdoors.rv-travel earlier tonight:

We’re going to be setting out on some significant (+1500 Kilometers) trips with out trailer this year and I’m looking for the simplest method to add a transmission temperature guage.

We’re towing the maximum rated capacity on our Montana van and I want to keep a close eye on the transmission when we’re in hilly areas. We have a good cooler installed but it does work pretty hard on the hills.

Years ago I did a tranny temp guage on a previous tow vehicle and it was a total PITA to install. Is there an easier way now?

To which “Lon” responds:

Sure there’s an easier way. You could always buy a tow vehicle that’s up to the task.

…years ago I used to hangout in a variety of RV related usenet forums (amongst many others) and I experienced assholes like this back then as well.

Unfortunately in the RV scene there are a select few who consider anything less then a massive dually pickup truck with a 400HP diesel engine insufficient to tow anything short of an empty 4X6 box trailer.

I’ll be the first to admit that a minivan (especially one like we own) isn’t the ideal tow vehicle…but I subsequently (and not so elegantly) reminded “Lon” that I’m towing within capacity, and since we’re not the sort of RV owners who are constantly towing and pulling through mountains and the such, our current tow vehicle will work just fine, thank you very much.

My question regarding a transmission temperature gauge is simply to provide me, the driver, more information and to allow me to be proactive, ensuring on any long hills climbs we don’t overdo it.

So I dipped a tow back into usenet this evening, and immediately a tool like this comes out of the woodwork and reminds me exactly why I left to begin with.

Thanks “Lon”, I appreciate your reply, and to you I bestow a brand new category here at my blog - “Idiocy”.

I’m not known for being the type of person who can effectively relax using traditional methods - You’ll never find me curled up in a lounge chair reading a book, or having a cat-nap in the afternoon - I tend to always be on the move, or at least doing something while I’m sitting.

I do have things I do that are relaxing to me personally - I can sit in front of a computer for an hour or three doing something I enjoy and the stress bleeds away - mowing the lawn, puttering with my RC goodies, or just sitting out in front of our house talking to a neighbor works for me whereas others may consider some of those same things ineffective.

I need to keep my stress levels manageable otherwise it negatively effects me at work, and given what I do for a living, that’s a bad thing for not only me, but those around me. Suffice to say that my mind not being on my job could have disastrous results.

All that aside, my stress management in the last few weeks has been absolutely terrible, and I’m stressed to the point where insomnia and chronic headaches are now becoming an issue for me.

This is very unusual since despite not being able to relax in the traditional fashion, I do tend to be a fairly calm and relaxed person overall.

Being stressed out right now shouldn’t be surprising given all that’s happened recently, but it sucks, and I’m hoping that the indications that life is about to return to some semblance of normal hold true.

If you run a website for which you must register an account to fully utilize some features, it would be helpfull if you made the registration process straightforward.

The website that my wife originally found our new travel trailer advertised on required registration before you were able to email someone regarding their ad.

There was a phone number listed on the ad as well, but since we initially had difficulties contacting the seller, we wanted to email them as well. We really wanted this trailer and didn’t want to be beat out by someone else who managed to contact the seller before us.

So, I had to register an account to email them…that should be easy.

However, when I tried to register on the site I was presented with a generic “There has been a problem with your registration” error message….repeatedly.

Initially I thought I was typing in the (very simple plain text) CAPTCHA wrong, or that my username wasn’t acceptable….but eventually I was completely stumped. I tried everything I could think of to make it work, but no matter what I did, I received this error message over and over again.

I emailed the webmaster/admin and basically said “Your registration system appears to be broken”.

I received a rather terse response stating “Our registration system is working fine”.

We exchanged a few emails during which I assured him that at least for me it *was* broken. Eventually I was asked what my email address was, which I provided.

His last email basically said “We don’t accept Gmail addresses as that service is one of the primary services used by spammers. Use a different email address”.

Hmmm.

My response was this:

“It may be helpful if your site stated this during the registation process versus simply generating a generic error message which leaves the user guessing.

Its unfortunate that you’ve chosen to ban a complete email service (especially Gmail!) instead of instituting something like a stronger CAPTCHA to avoid spambots.

Anyhow, just my $0.02 - I contacted the person I was trying to get ahold of by phone instead….”

Yeah, I would have used a different email address if I had known what the problem was to begin with.

That said, I think that totally killing an entire email service such as Gmail (and I suspect he’s done the same for Hotmail, etc) seems like a bandaid solution to a problem that could be fixed easily via an alternate method, and wouldn’t alienate thousands (or more) of potential members in the process.