By leelanau2010 ( March 19, 2010 at 8:43 pm) · Filed under Technology
I have spent the last 2 days with “on and off” Internet connections at my house. You know, I pay these people over $100 a month for service, AND I pay for upgraded service. I don’t have a problem paying higher costs for better service, the problem is, I’m NOT GETTING IT and it’s really starting to piss me off. So everyone here knows that I don’t have a life. I don’t spend my money going to bars, I don’t spend my money or my time “out on the town”. It’s just not my thing. I’m quite happy to sit at home in my recliner and watch TV or surf the Internet. It keeps my ADD at bay and it keeps me entertained. As a result of this, I volunteer to pay more for my technology because doing so is SUPPOSED to promise me a better experience. Faster speed, higher quality, fewer interruptions. That is SUCH BULLSHIT I can’t even begin to talk about it with any sort of civil tone. I pay for 16mbs download speeds, what am I consistency getting? 8mbs or less. I pay for high def television channels? What do I get? about half of them that work, the rest of them only showing up at about 420p which is normal definition.
You see, I’m not a fucking idiot like most people when it comes to technology. I know what I’m paying for and I know what I should be getting. I know, for example that my computer and my home network is FULLY able to handle the download speeds that I am paying for, in fact, it can handle download speeds 15 times faster than what is even available. Why do I know this? BECAUSE I’M A FUCKING GEEK AND I RESEARCH THINGS AND THEN SET THEM UP CORRECTLY!!!!! I also know that my HDTV is fully capable of receiving and displaying HDTV and movies and that the issues are NOT coming from a sloppy install job on my part. I do shit right because I get pissed when it doesn’t work AND I expect to get what I pay for.
So while I’m bitching, I’m pissed with Verison as well right now. I’m pissed that I live in the middle of the fucking city and I have AT BEST 1 bar of service and NO 3G connection on my fucking $300 smart phone! But yet, when I leave my house and walk 50 yards to the south, I have 2 bars, when I get in the car and drive to the gas station just 800 yards to the west, I have full connection and full 3G. WTF Verison, I don’t know whether to be pissed at you or pissed at the idiots who make the decisions up here about where to build cell phone towers.
The biggest issue I have is that if I lived ANYWHERE else (mainly in a city just a little bigger), I would have NONE of these issues. This area continues to refuse to invest in technology and they refuse to invest in the infrastructure to support it and I find that irritating as hell as a person who is part of the “connected” generation. This city will have to address these issues if they intend to stay competitive at all in the future.
OK, I’m done bitching. Have the weekend off and of course it’s supposed to rain all weekend. Going to try and get out with the dog to the beach and the cottage, I’ll take a few pics and post them if they turn out. Thanks for listening!
I don’t post much on here about climate change. It’s sort of a non-issue for me to write about. I’m of the belief that we are royally fucking up our planet in a multitude of ways and even IF (and that’s a big IF) there is contradictory science out there about human impact on the environment it is by and large a moot point. Humans have no right to simply ignore our impact on the planet and we have no right to continue our polluting ways of the past when there are very clear and easy ways to change our behavior for the better RIGHT NOW. I found the picture below on one of the many blogs I read and wanted to re-post it here for you to look at. Bottled water is such an easy commodity. Lets look for a minute at it from a business perspective. My company sells bottled water. You can buy a case of 24 bottles for $5.50 or you can buy an individual bottle for $1.29 each at the checkout. I have 2 profit options. If I sell a case of it, I make a couple dollars in profit (I’m being non-specific because I don’t need to be specific to make the point). I take that same case and break it into 24 individual bottles and sell them out of a cooler at the register. I’ve amplified my profit over 10 times! Now, rather than making $2.00 on a case, I’m making over $25.00 in profit selling them individually. This is BIG business folks. I pay next to nothing for a case of water and turn around and sell it to non-thinking consumers for a huge profit. So my point is this, BUSINESS drives the bottled water industry. If people were not willing to pay for bottled water, we wouldn’t sell it. It’s as simple as that. Keeping that in mind, I like my business but I also like my planet. How about re-filling your bottle with tap water the next time you get thirsty. I bought a case of bottled water in May this year and I’m still using and re-using the bottles. I’ve not purchased a bottle of water since… I don’t have to since I can get it out of the tap FOR FREE!
It’s been a terribly long time since I’ve written about much on this blog. I’ve been having a hard time motivating myself to write lately about politics and other such nonsense. Marriage was lost in Maine by a slim margin and the “every thing but the name” (or marriage-lite) was approved in Washington. The tea-baggers have been actively tea-bagging and the House of Representatives actually passed a healthcare reform bill by a mere 5 votes only to be told moments later that the bill would be dead on arrival in the Senate. Obama’s in a quagmire and it appears that he can’t get anything done…or done right…and the liberals in power don’t have the balls to take a stand on anything. Politics as usual. On a happy note, Kalamazoo finally did the right thing and passed a non-discrimination ordinance protecting the GLBT community from employment, housing, and public accommodation discrimination. That was won by a large margin and finally gave those tight-wad conservatives in West Michigan something to think about. It was a small consolation prize for an otherwise grim election season…thank God it was an off year election and voter turnout was pathetic at best…well, it’s always pathetic in this country when fewer than 50% of the population even knows there are elections going on and even fewer know how to vote in the first place. Apathy runs this country.
I decided to spend tonight cleaning out my office. Filing, trashing, organizing….it’s a dam good thing my life is not very complicated. I seem to be a pack rat like my folks. I have lots of shit that just isn’t important to hang on to. I did look over some receipts from purchases this past year. I’ve spent a shit ton of money this year on toys. A few thousand dollars to be exact. New TV, an Apple TV box, a Droid phone, an X-box, a hard drive and other computer parts, Best Buy loves me so much that I’ve become a Silver Reward’s Zone member this year…and as a result I’ve received about $150 in gift cards from them for being such a loyal customer. Fucking pathetic. I will say that none of my purchases has been ill-thought out. Everything I have purchased has been a deliberate decision backed by research and time. I guess in some ways I’ve been living it up as a single guy now with a good income and a low cost of living. Luckily for me (and my wallet) everything I’ve purchased can be considered a long term investment. I won’t have to buy anything now for quite a long time…hopefully. And I still have money left over. Perhaps next year I will be able to save enough for a good down payment on a house of my own. Who knows.
I’ll leave you tonight with a great little ditty from You Tube.
Boy this blog has just not been a priority lately for me and I’m feeling a little guilty about it. My creative enthusiasm has been rather blocked lately. Work has been crazy this past month or so and it’s been consuming most of my free time. I’ve been struggling daily with a sick bunch of employees (from sniffles to flu) and I’m apparently the only one who doesn’t get sick. They keep telling me my time will come but I just don’t have time to get sick. In the course of my life, I have called in to work for being sick only once that I can remember and that was because I was in fact too sick to even get out of bed. My immune system must be fairly strong…or I simply understand better that if I don’t show up to work, I don’t get paid. I suspect that latter is my motivation for staying healthy.
I finally have a day off today, the sun is actually out (although not for long) and I’m trying hard to come up with a plan for the day. My house is a mess, Gavin the wonder dog is drooling to get outside and play, but my little home is in desperate need of some TLC and a deep clean. I don’t know if it’s the change in weather or not but I’ve got a fly problem at the moment. Something hatched somewhere and I’ve had to kill off a whole swarm of these creatures. I need to find out where they are coming from today because they are driving me NUTS! So, I think today I might try and go for a hike and take some pictures of the fall colors (which I’ve largely missed this year due to my work schedule) and then spend the rest of the day cleaning.
Good news is on the horizon though for me in regards to my finances. I’ve decided to go CABLE FREE and I’m in the process of getting myself set up to return my cable box and cancel my over priced subscription services to cable TV. I have successfully hooked up a computer to my big screen TV and I am now able to watch all of the shows that I would normally watch on TV for free via multiple web sites that stream television shows for free. One such site is Hulu.com and it is fast becoming a worthy alternative to paid TV service. Granted, nothing there can be seen live (all the shows I watch are available one day later than the day they air on TV networks) but I’m OK with that since 99% of the time, I am not around to watch live TV anyhow. The only aspect of going Cable Free that I am going to miss is the High-Def aspect. Everything on the Internet is in good quality but it’s not truly a High-Definition experience. That’s OK though, I’ll just save that for my movies where it actually matters. The most exciting thing about doing this is that it will save me over $100 a month which is a tremendous savings considering that at best, the value I got out of my cable subscription was worth at best about $20.
I’ve been pretty impressed with myself in regards to my finances. I’ve been able to find ways to cut costs this year by being creative and as a result, I’ve been able to spend my extra money on things that actually have meaning to me, like electronics and other fun toys. I’ll be the first to admit that my expenses have not gone down at all but I have managed to re-prioritize my spending habits to better suit my lifestyle. The next goal for me is to re-evaluate my credit reports and finally start to repair the damage I did to it years ago when I was young and stupid with my money. Fortunately, I’ve had several years now of positive impact on my credit score, nearly every dumb thing I did in my early 20’s has dropped off my report, and I’ve been able to stay on track with debts and bills for several years now. All of this is in an effort to eventually purchase a home at a good rate. I’m most proud of the fact that I’ve not had a credit card now in several years and I have no intentions of trying to get one in the near future. Credit cards are simply bad for me. They work for some people but they don’t for me and I’m OK with that. If I don’t have cash, I don’t spend money and right now, that is an appropriate rule for me.
Hopefully I’ll write a bit more in the coming days and weeks. Just about a month now until Black Friday and things are going to be crazy at work leading up to that. I have 2 more vacation days that I have to take before December 5 (or I lose them) and I’m thinking I might take a couple of day trips around the area to take pictures in places I’ve not been before. We’ll see, most of that will depend on the weather which has not been very good lately. Well, off now to motivate myself to take a hike.
Today was certainly eventful. Previously I’ve mentioned that I thought perhaps I had a rabbit living under my house. Today that was confirmed. I called a pest control service and had them out to the condo today to investigate. What he pulled out from under the house could only be described as intensely disgusting! Mostly decomposed and nearly unrecognizable except for the legs was a pretty good size rabbit that must have died under the house a while ago. This was the first rabbit in 30 years that this guy who treated my condo had ever pulled out, he said it was somewhat unusual to find a rabbit that had actually made the effort to burrow into the foundation of the house. It was not however where I thought it would be, it had died on the opposite side of the house from where it got in. Lucky for me, the hole is now fixed, the animal is gone, and mice traps have been set just to make sure no further issues come up. Gavin was quite curious about the wrapped up carcass that came out of the crawlspace but he contained himself. I also had the unit sprayed to eliminate ants and other bugs. One of the perks of being in a rental situation is that none of it cost me a dime. These sorts of things are one of the reasons I’ve put off buying a house. It’s nice to not have to worry about that sort of maintenance expense.
In other news, I turned 35 on Monday and have been feeling rather old lately. I’ve been working nearly non-stop and my body has been paying the price. Needless to say, writing in my blog here has not been a top priority. I did manage to buy myself a birthday present though and it just proves that I’m a big geek. About 3 years ago I purchased a rather expensive computer from Best Buy and the motherboard blew up not less than 6 months after I purchased it. Considering the tweaking that I do to my computers, it was just cheaper and much less of a hassle for me at the time to purchase another computer rather than to fix my broken one. I’ve been toying with the idea lately of getting rid of cable television and the way for me to do that without loosing access to the few shows that I do watch was to try and hook up a computer media center to my television. With the purchase this past year of a big screen LCD TV, and with a new motherboard installed and actually working correctly in my old computer, my journey to being cable free is nearly complete. I decided initially to install a different type of operating system called Linux. For those of you not up with things in the tech world, this is the operating system that is used primarily in the geek world. It’s open source, completely free, and I’m finding out a bit difficult to figure out how to use. It does not communicate easily with my windows network so I’ve been learning how to speak geek again for the past few days. Once I get it set up properly, I’ll be able to share files with my windows machine and I’ll be able to use my TV computer to watch all my favorite TV shows in Hi-Def for free over the Internet. I’ll provide a progress report as I get things set up. Yes, I know it’s boring but it will be interesting to look back in a few years on this and congratulate myself for being a complete geek.
Well, after a good week now of having a visual editor on my blog that was missing major components, It’s finally been fixed and I can now edit my posts without going crazy. It seems though that when one thing starts working again, another thing breaks. My Apple TV is not working correctly, actually the Apple TV is fine, it’s some of the software that is running on it that is currently broken. Again, nothing I can do about it until they release a patch for the software and who knows when that will be. Technology sucks sometimes.
I’m finally off for the weekend! This is my first weekend off now in nearly a month and it looks like the weather might cooperate a little bit. Sunday is the fist day of summer (and Father’s Day) and we are still only in the 70’s up here most of the time if not colder. We’ve had no really hot days yet this summer. I’m going to be headed out to the lake Sunday for sure but maybe Saturday too. I’ll have to see how late I end up sleeping and what the weather looks like when I get up.
Now that the blog is finally fixed, I’ll get back into writing again here soon. My schedule is finally calming down a little bit too so maybe I won’t be so dam tired. I’m starting to count the days to my vacation in July. I’ll be headed to Grand Rapids, Chicago, and Indianapolis over a period of about 6 days. It should be fun. I’m really looking forward to Chicago since it’s been forever and a day since I’ve been there. I’ll be staying with some old friends who came to seem me this past summer up here. Now I just need to watch my spending over the next month so I can have a little spending money.
Not much else to post right now. I’ll leave you with this picture I found on one of the blogs I read. June is Gay Pride month. This year is also the 40th anniversary of the Stonewall Riots which is considered to be the starting point for the gay rights movement. Lots going on right now in politics, too bad I’m just too tired to write about it right now. More later.
I’ve not weighed in too much on this topic but with the news below I figured I’d put in my two cents.
DSLReports that Cablevision will be offering subscribers 101-Mbps download service, a new US record. That’s fast enough to download an HD movie in less than 10 minutes. The package, known as “Ultra,” will launch on May 11 and will cost $99.95 a month. Upload speed is 15 Mbps and there are no monthly limits. Cablevision is also doubling the speed of its Wi-Fi service, which is available free to subscribers using hotspots across the Northeast.
OK, for those of you who think your 3-5Mbps download speed on Comcast or Charter (or any other high speed Internet provider in Michigan) is fast, you might want to think again. The cable companies want you to think it’s fast. The fact is, the United States lags significantly behind in broadband deployment NOT because cable companies don’t have the means to provide it, but because they refuse to make the investment and they don’t want to take away revenue they get from advertisements on cable TV. When it comes to high speed Internet, the United States ranks at the bottom worldwide for both speed and coverage. Even poor and developing countries offer faster service over a wider area than the US does. Cablevision has finally seen the light and deployed a world competitive broadband package with super fast download speeds for the same price I am paying right now for what I would consider to be pretty shitty service using old and outdated cable lines on a network that caps my speed at 5Mbps download. I could pay more for 10Mbps service but that would be another $40 a month for really not much better speeds. Not even remotely worth considering.
Broadband as a medium that consumers actually use is headed in the direction of what Cablevision is now providing but it’s going to be a VERY long time before the rest of the cable companies follow suit. It’s going to be up to private investors to push things along or it will be up to the government to make it happen. I’m sort of an unwilling fan of the later option. My own feeling is that I would rather not have the government involved in Broadband deployment because there are just too many places the government can and will stick it’s ugly-ass nose but if that is what it takes to force cable companies to get their shit together and get the ball rolling than I am willing to put up with it for a while.
Next time you are on the phone arguing with your cable company about their piss poor service and lack of options, make sure you mention Cablevision and the 101Mbps speeds they are offering…do this especially when the cable company tells you they can’t fix your piss poor connection speed because the cable lines are just too old. FUCKING UPDATE THEM you pathetic dip shits! It just amazes me that cable companies can steal $125 a month from me and MILLIONS of other people and at the same time just sit on their hands and completely ignore their infrastructure deficiencies. Someone is getting VERY rich. WORK ON IT…especially CHARTER CABLE IN TRAVERSE CITY, MI.
A friend of mine at work sent me this video the other day. I thought I would post it here for the conspiracy theorists among us and the scientists. You tell me: Conceivable? Be careful, if you don’t stop and think about what you already know, you might be convinced.
I’m constantly amazed at the new things I find on the web these days. I keep thinking back to 1993 in my freshman year at collage. That year, I got to work and study in a huge computer lab with what was then, very current technology. The Internet was just a baby. Recently invented of course by Al Gore (hahaha). I was able to get on line in the labs and use Gopher to find various things that might help me out in my studies. How primitive. Then, later that year, we saw the first web browser that used HTML to offer graphics and such. That browser (Mosaic) later turned into Netscape which then evolved the Internet even further. I used to spend hours in the lab ignoring my schoolwork just surfing the Internet. Then I would go home and pay nearly $400 a month for AOL who charged for Internet access at 14.4Kbs speed BY THE MINUTE (so I could complete the schoolwork I neglected in the lab). Anyhow, to this day, I’m always surfing and finding new things, constantly amazed by new technology. Of course now I have an unlimited 5Mbs connection for a tiny fraction of the cost.
Oh how I wish this web site had been around when I was attempting to draft musical compositions (something I suck at). I hated learning the proper (traditional) styles of composition. My professors hated my handwriting, not to mention my flat out refusal to avoid perfect traveling octaves in my assignments (among other composition faux-pas). I’ll readily admit that I’m not a composer and I do indeed get why understanding the rules are important (it’s like proper grammar). To me, music composition was ALWAYS first about how it sounded to ME the composer. I had enough experience in classical, choral, and to an extent Jazz music to know what sounded good and what didn’t. If it worked for what I was composing and it happened to break a rule, big fucking deal. My professors saw things differently. I learned a great deal being ridiculed by my composition professors and then given handshakes from my peers after class for doing my own thing and ticking off the prof. No really, I don’t fault them for their insistence that I learn how to do things correctly. It was for a grade after all, once I was out of their class I could do whatever I wanted…and I did. Anyhow, for you composers out there, check out this web site. If you are still writing in long form (and not using a computer), this might save you a little money. Looking back, I think if I were in school today in a composition class, professors might treat my anti-rule attitude in regards to composition a little differently considering the evolution of music. I think my profs were a little put off by me too since they realized that I still saw myself (and was being treated by my peers) as a big fish in a little pond. My background, stubbornness, and the talent I was willing to express forced them to constantly try to keep my ego in check and that was a lot of work for a few of them. They knew better than I did, if only I had allowed that to sink in a little further.
So on the same technology lines, I was thinking the other day as I added more friends on Facebook from high school, that my class was the last one in 1991 (my Sophomore year) to officially learn to type using a typewriter. The following year, Christian Hell High installed a new computer lab and from that point on, kids learned using computers. It’s crazy to think that in under 20 years, we’ve advanced so much that nearly everything I grew up with (except for Tinker Toys) is obsolete. It puts into perspective a little what my parents must think about some of the tech toys I show them.
Well, it’s off to bed now. 5am arrives far too early.
