what

My original post is here: http://community.livejournal.com/toronto/8577866.html
tldr: I joined Extreme Fitness, heard millions of bad things about them from everybody, saw they have an F rating on the BBB, and consulted with the community. The replies made up my mind to cancel, and I did so the day after that post.

The manager swore up and down I would get my refund within 15 days (the cancellation paper corroborated this). It's now been closer to 3 weeks, and of course I've received nothing. I phoned to inquire about it, and after first insisting they had no record of me, the guy told me it was probably because I had paid it all upfront. (Really? Why would this delay my refund, and if it actually did, why wouldn't they tell me that upfront?) Anyway, he offered no help at all and told me to call back next week.

I had such a terrible feeling about this, and now all of my fears are coming true. That's $300 on my credit card that I can't afford interest on, and feel I shouldn't have to pay interest at all, because I was PROMISED that refund, and am legally entitled to it.

I have no idea who to go to about this, but I know a lottt of people have had trouble with this company. Where do I go? Who do I talk to? I really don't want them to get away with this, it's complete bs.

Edit: Okay, here's another fun part. When I cancelled, they issued me some paperwork, which I didn't really bother to look over at the time because I was so relieved. When I got home, I noticed it said the refund amount was what I had paid WITHOUT TAX (so about $40 short of what I actually paid). I called to ask about this and the manager very convincingly assured me they would refund the tax as well. I realize now this is bs, and am kicking myself for not pushing the issue further. So basically, if I try to resolve this through Visa, the only paperwork I have states I'm owed an amount $40 less from what I actually am. And I know, it's only $40, but at this point it's largely about principle. Is there anybody else I can contact regarding these sort of unethical business practices?

Hi guys.

Is it legal to rollerskate or rollerblade in downtown Toronto (on the sidewalk, in parks)?

Do you know of any preferred roller locations in downtown? Indoor or outdoor is great.

I looked at the tags & found nothing.

Hi guys, I have some nice glasses frames and want to get them fitted with my perscription lens with these guys: http://www.opticcreations.com/locations.html

They're pretty cheap - has anyone had any experiences with them?

Hi folks,

I need a t-shirt made with my logo on it within one day. Any suggestions downtown? As close to TTC as possible would be ideal.

Thanks for your help!

Ok, this community has come through for me every time I've had a question in the past, but this time I present a real challenge: a friend of mine is celebrating their birthday this Sunday, the 10th. I need suggestions for interesting things to do, but this is a very difficult task because of all the restrictions involved. It can't be a lounge, because the person does not drink alcohol. It can't be an outdoor activity because of the cold. No bars or strip clubs. They aren't really into the club idea because it's not special. There aren't any interesting shows or concerts that night. Can you guys think of anything cool to do on Sunday, both during the day and the evening? I've been trying to think outside the box, and so far haven't really come up with anything. Please help!

I am looking to buy a January 2010 Metropass. Mine STUPIDLY slipped out of my pocket on Tuesday, must have been in the Dundas streetcar headed east. I cannot afford to eat if i pay ttc by tokens/ cash this month...

I've searched craigslist, asked my friends, nothing. There must be someone out there who can afford to part with theirs this month...

I would greatly appreciate it if anybody has any leads. Come on Toronto!


Thank you.


Jiuna

It's been a momentous 12 months here at LiveJournal. We crossed a capital T at Ten years young. And, like most precocious pubescents, we celebrated turning double digits by publishing our first book! Needless to say, we've experienced some major changes, both inside and out. Before we recap, we'd like to thank you for bearing with us as we've struggled through ungainly growth spurts, identity pangs, and, yes, the occasional blemish. We hope you'll continue to stand by us: We're gaining wisdom with maturity.

Stuff you liked

• Back in February, we placed a call for entries for our ten-year anniversary anthology in lj_turns10. In December (less than a year later!), we officially announced the publication of Live Journal: The First Decade. Featuring an inspired collection of writing, photographs, and artwork from the pages of LiveJournal history, the book has been selected by Blurb.com as a top staff pick! We are proud to have played host to so much talent over the years, and we thank our contributors for sharing their extraordinary work.
• We all love quirky surprises, but not when it comes to managing our account settings. This year we streamlined settings into one central account management area. No more pouring through FAQs to figure out how to control privacy settings, modify notifications, adjust mobile settings, or update contact information!
• Being users ourselves, we realize our own mothers couldn't find us on LiveJournal based on our usernames and userpics alone (*heaves heavy sigh of relief*). But since there are times when we actually want to be found, we created a search tool--Find Your Friends--to help locate people by email address (it's in the Friends drop-down menu).
• Spam counter-attack: The war against vicious malware and spambots reigns eternal, but we've been making serious inroads to ensure your online security. We've established new protocols, such as requiring email address validations. We've grown more savvy about ferreting out suspicious behavior. We've added features, like whitelisting, to help you protect your communities. Our valiant (i.e., overworked) spam avengers (a/k/a the LiveJournal ops team) are standing on red alert so you can sleep safely at night.
• After an intensive beta, we launched My Guests at the end of the year, which lets you see who's been hanging around your journal. A number of you have even discovered secret admirers (not all of whom are creepy)!
• Last, but by no means least, we want to thank our volunteers for providing invaluable support and feedback. Their Herculean efforts enable us to answer your questions more efficiently, identify spammers, reduce abuse, and deliver better features (through tireless testing). On behalf of the staff and the larger LiveJournal community, we are truly grateful for their diligence, intelligence, loyalty, and passion.

You got your fix

• We recently debugged a number of the oustanding issues with the rich text editor so your entries look great regardless of whether you know html. You can read more about text editors here.
• In response to user demand, we brought back international voice posting. For more info on voice posting, read here.
• At long last, we revived TxtLJ with Verizon. For more info on TxtLJ, check out the FAQ.

Paid features you enjoyed

• In December, we introduced My Stats, which provides detailed data on who's been viewing your entries as well as statistics on commenting, RSS requests, friending history, and more. Despite a few early glitches, the response has been extremely favorable.
• This year, we launched and improved Notes (i.e., the feature formerly known as Alias), which lets you add private comments on friends and commenters (it's in the Profile drop-down menu). This way you won't be caught red-faced when you strain to remember details about that wonderful LiveJournal friend who sent you a birthday vGift. For more info, read the FAQ.
• When we first announced View friends pages by date, we thought it would be a quiet, minor enhancement. The rave reaction floored us, which made us all very happy. We gave it a fine tuning in February of 2009, so it's even better!
• How embarrassing! It appears pingbacks have gone back to the shop for service. We’ll keep you posted. We didn't know just much you liked pingbacks until it went in for service. It's back and, judging by your irritation when it wasn't available, this is good news. FYI, pingbacks send instant notifications (via screened comments) whenever someone links to one of your entries on LiveJournal. For more info, read this entry in paidmembers or check out the FAQ.

Mixed reviews

• The search is still on. Some of you have reported getting more comprehensive results for keyword searches using the new Yandex search engine and like the ability to search within content categories (like entries or comments). Others have not been satisfied with the relevancy of search results. Please be patient. We're still tweaking this product.
• This past December, we wanted to try out a new holiday promotion. Given the crap economy, we decided to offer our Paid/Permanent users a stack of $10 coupons to send to Basic/Plus users for paid account upgrades. We hoped you would like it. And some of you did, but many were disappointed that we didn't offer Give More as well. We want to thank you so much for letting us know. Your input will help us plan better in the future. Just FYI, Paid/Permanent users can continue to send out coupons through January 15th. Coupons can be redeemed through January 31, 2010.
• We were pretty excited about Your Journal Your Money, which allows Paid/Permanent users to earn extra cash by displaying Google ads to Basic/Plus and logged out users. A number of you tried it. Some of you really like it. Others, not so much. (Just FYI, Paid/Permanent users who do not participate in this program will not view ads on journals. Participants will see ads on their own journal, but won't see them on other journals unless they specifically opt in.) For additional details, visit here.
• We relaunched m.livejournal.com, our mobile app. While it offers a nicer UI and enhanced functionality, some of you think we can do better on load times. Like most of us, it's a work in progress. You can customize your mobile settings here. For more info, please read the FAQ.

Missing Inaction

• We shudder to bring up the neon purple elephant squatting on our heads, but, yes, we didn't give you those a la carte userpics. We've been making radical improvements to our backend in order to support them. But no excuses. We know you want them. We cringe every time you mention them. We're sorry we dropped the ball on this, and we promise to do our best to get them to you in 2010.

Stumbling points

• Back in early August, we experienced outages related to a series of DDoS attacks. We are proud to report that we were down a total of one hour over the course of a few days. We thank our heroic ops guys for getting us up sooner and more consistently than any of our less fortunate social networking friends. We apologize for leaving you temporarily stranded.
• A couple of months back, we offered a free, unrestricted vGift, which induced a snowflake cookie avalanche. This resulted in backed up/delayed notifications, which, in turn, led us to reboot systems, rendering scrapbooks unavailable. It took a while to shovel free. Apologies for the inconvenience. We learned a valuable lesson that should keep us calamity-free in the future (fingers crossed while knocking on wood).
• That darn Best Buy ad. First off, we're sorry about the audio auto-play (we got it turned off as quickly as possible). While it's true that we'll continue to show this type of ad to accounts that normally see them (never to Paid/Permanent accounts), we'll make sure the sound defaults to off moving forward. We promise to do our very best to keep ads to a minimum on LiveJournal, while keeping a roof over Frank's head.

Full steam ahead!

As we plunge headfirst into the next decade, we want to take a moment to look back and thank all of our employees, both past and present, who have worked so hard to create our unique and magical universe. We couldn't have made it this far without you: Your contributions brighten our path everyday. We also want to extend our heartfelt appreciation to each and every one of you. Whether you've been around for ten days or ten years, your humor, intelligence, talent, and creativity are what makes this the most vibrant global community on the Internet (the best place on the Web, in our humble opinion). Here's hoping that 2010 will be the greatest year yet! We thank you for joining us as we embark upon another glorious decade of LiveJournal history!

I am desperately (term used loosely) trying to find the red Vancouver 2010 mitts but have come up short. I've searched numerous Bay stores but they all say they were sold out eons ago.

Would anyone know where I would be able to find a pair in the GTA? I don't want to resort to eBay or buying online.

Thanks!

dearest font of knowledge:
I know this isn't super Toronto-specific, but it is a fairly specific question I can't seem to find answers for so far. We're currently subletting one of the rooms we have in our townhouse, and our subletter has asked for rent receipts, which I'll be giving her (since she pays her rent to me directly, and I pay the townhouse corporation). The question is, when I'm claiming rent on my taxes, do I fill out something for income rec'd from the subletter, as well as what I pay rent for?

I have done some google-fu ing to no avail, I'm anxious to know how we do this in Toronto. :-)

Thanks in advance for your help!!

Hello there! Unfortunately my ex-voice coach back in Ottawa finds the commute here just a little long, haha...so can anyone recommend me a person/place I can go for voice lessons (singing)?

I'm looking for a place to go that has similar benefits as I had in Ottawa...workshops beyond the lessons, performance opportunities, etc. I've done some googling and found some, but I'd love input from people here if you know of somewhere really great.

Bonus points if it's close to Yonge and Davisville, or Union station.

I'm trying to get an idea of how long it would take to travel from the Markham/Ellesmere area of Scarborough to Langstaff/Dufferin in Vaughn (and back) during rush hour.

I checked Mapquest and they're advising 401 west to the 404, north to Highway 7 then west to Langstaff with a time of 25 minutes - does anyone travel this route that might be able to give me an idea of how long it actually takes? (or alternate routes other than the 407)

As always, thanks in advance for any assistance offered.

so urban outfitters stinks and they don't have 110 film. halp!

do i seriously need to order online?!

Here is an article from National Review about the all-too-revealing reaction of the Damned to Brit Hume's rather mild on air comment asking Tiger Wood, who betrayed his wife and family, to seek redemption in Christ. I reprint the whole thing without further comment.

http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=M2EyZDc1ODc4ZmEzNTk2YzM1NzI0OTJlOTFkZGViZGQ=

Hume’s Gentle Witness
We should welcome honest talk about faith.

By Peter Wehner

Brit Hume’s comments on Fox News Sunday — “I don’t think that [Buddhism] offers the kind of forgiveness and redemption that is offered by the Christian faith,” and, “My message to Tiger [Woods] would be: Tiger, turn to the Christian faith, and you can make a total recovery and be a great example to the world” — have unleashed a torrent of criticism from the Left, including the various circus acts over at MSNBC and the Washington Post’s Tom Shales.

Shales’s criticisms in particular are manifestations of a mind that is enraged and slightly unhinged; they are ad hominem and, in some respects, unserious. But there are two lines of argument worth examining as they relate to what Hume said. The first is that he “dissed” all Buddhists; the second is that urging Woods to turn to the Christian faith is inappropriate, offensive, and out of line. Let’s examine both claims in turn.

( Read more... )

Hello again people,

I need to have some official documents translated and notarized, and am wondering if anybody could point me in the right direction. I've e-mailed Costi Language Services, but so far have only received word that they'd get back to me within 1 business day - and this was some days ago. I've also contacted translationservices.ca but have yet to hear from them.

If anybody knows of a good translation services office in Toronto, or has had unpleasant experiences with one, please let me know. Thank you!

People, who experience low back pain due to prolonged sitting in front of the computer. Can you recommend any good back support? Putting aside Shoppers Drug Mart, are there any good places with selection of these things?

Yes? Hi! We were looking for the winter boots in the Toronto stores that have the velcro close ups and not the zippers, the strings or the pokemon. Did someone see them anywhere? Sometimes the duck tape gets to expensive with all the salt that takes away the sticky.

I've just started watching Glee and am in love with Emma Pillsbury's wardrobe, specifically the sweater clips that she wears.

So.. where in Toronto can I find sweater clips?

For those who don't know what I'm talking about - http://static.tvfanatic.com/images/gallery/emma-pillsbury-picture.jpg I believe that the wardrobes in Mad Men feature them as well...

I'm not looking for anything identical to what she has, just sweater clips in general.

I drive, I work in Toronto and live in Mississauga, I don't care where they are :)

TIA!