Antony’s Life Blog

Many people here in Vancouver keep asking me, why I don’t like living in Vancouver, Canada. They keep telling me that Vancouver is one of the best cities to live in the world. Where else can we have a good quality of life as in Vancouver? Where else can we see mountain surrounding with beautiful lakes? May be I am not a “normal” person because everybody seems to like living in Vancouver.

I keep asking myself this question, why I don’t like living in Vancouver. I’ll try to give five three reasons here. I know many of you, especially the ones who love Vancouver, will not agree with me.

1. The living cost is damn expensive. As an example, take a look at the Canadian housing price chart here. Vancouver housing price is twice more expensive than Toronto and 2.5 times more expensive than Montreal. Do people in Vancouver receive more salary than other Canadian cities? Check Canada Salary Wizard from CanadaVisa.com and you will find the answer.
2. It is a city for retirement. There is nothing wrong with this except that we cannot put a high expectation on our career, especially in the high-tech industry. There are only a few high-tech companies in Vancouver. This is a problem for me because I make my living from the high-tech industry.
3. Health system is bad. I am not sure whether this is a problem all across Canada or only in British Columbia. From my experience, the waiting time to see a doctor in Vancouver can take weeks or even months. Last time, I had a dermatofibroma and it took me 3 months to make an appointment for the surgery. Before that, I met 5 other doctors and none of them were able to cure my disease. No kidding… 5 doctors in Greater Vancouver area!
   Another problem is the concept of family doctor. Here, we can only see our family doctor. We cannot go to another doctor without recommendation from our family doctor. How about a new immigrant? It is getting interesting because most of the good doctors here do not accept new patients any more.

Why am I still staying in Vancouver now? When you have a family, you have a big responsibility. Believe me, relocation is not as easy as when you are single.

A couple of days, my wife’s cousin asked me about my web site. I told her that URL of my web site is the same as my complete name, which is http://www.antonypranata.com. Guess what, she typed the wrong URL, http://www.anthonypranata.com (with ‘h’), and was brought to a completely different web site.

If you visit the “fake” web site, you would see some paid links. They all use the keywords “stolen” from my original web site, such as S60 3rd Edition Software, Screenshot Symbian, etc.

Who is the guy who bought that domain name? I tried to search it on Whois.net, and got the following result:

Name:                        Admin -

Organization:                Maltuzi LLC

Email:                       admin@maltuzi.com
Address:                     800 West El Camino Real Suite 180

City, Province, Post Code:   Mountain View, California, 94040
Country:                     US
Phone:                       1.6508146730

What should I do to this guy? Call him/her?

My New Nokia N95, originally uploaded by Antony Pranata.

Finally… I got my Nokia N95…. it’s not a touch screen phone; but I’m very happy with it.