shooshee

It hasn’t been that long since things digressed via email like they did in subject:  field trip. This is an email conversation that’s been going on in the office today. It’s not Friday, but it IS the short week before a 3-day weekend. Names have been changed to protect the “innocent”…

j1: Hey Everyone -
I am going to be in and out of meetings and the office this afternoon.  There is supposed to be a carpet guy stopping by our office this afternoon.  If I am not here, can someone please instruct him to get the information he needs on the following tasks in order to send S an estimate:

• key him into the space next door and have him measure the new Das Iglu space only (no other floor in there).
• show him the current jagged edge on the carpet in the old Das Iglu near J’s desk and ask him to consider an option to put a rubber edge along the entrance to protect it and make it look better.
• ask him to give us a quote to patch the 3 small squares of carpet missing in the old Das Iglu (where the posts use to be).  Tell him we don’t need anything fancy there, just want it to not have the holes.

Thanks.

j2: Got it, Shag carpeting everywhere.

m1: White shag carpeting, specifically. And instruct the wall guy we want the “off brown oak-like pattern” fake-wood paneling on the walls.

j3: and maybe a gold marbled mirror on the ceiling?

m2: Tony Montana would be proud.

j4: I want bean bags and lots of other pillows.

j3: and a rain lamp – can we get a rain lamp? those were soooo groovy. (reference photo for those who don’t remember: http://www.flickr.com/photos/emkeller/2210947570/)

s: How could such a thing ever go out of style? That and velvet paintings. Classic.

p2: i don’t know why j3, but i thought you meant one of these: http://www.moving-waterfall-pictures.com/moving_waterfall_pictures if you’re feeling daring, you can check out the religious or romantic pictures (sfw)..i think

j3: Wow. I know I’ve been single for a while, but THAT’S what romance looks like? (the one at the bottom)

j5: That’s what I got my wife for our anniversary!

k: YIKES! I think I’ll be staying single for-ev-ah!

p2: are you saying that’s not any good? that eagle flying up there?…i think that’s icing on the cake~

m2: I love the one with the white tiger superimposed… a very tranquil scene.

v: Click the “Romantic Pictures” link at the left… FABIO !!!

a: while we’re at it, what about a sauna? ’cause it’s just not humid enough outside…

k: And plastic coverings over the IKEA couches and the lamps. While we’re at it, we need some baskets of fake ivy for the ledge above L’s desk.

m1: How do you say “The Classiest Frickin’ Conference Room in the Western Hemisphere” in German? Because that’s what it’s starting to sound like we need to name the space across the hall.

p1: Geile Zeitlose Bude!…. maybe  “Die Bude”?

j6: My Google Translate says “Die meisten protzigen Konferenzraum in der westlichen Hemisphäre”.  Your name is much shorter though!

p2: die booty… ftw

It’s been a while since things digressed via email like they did in subject: OOO – almost a year in fact, but this is just too good not to share. This is an email conversation that’s been going on in the office today. It’s Friday, the Friday before a 3-day weekend, so of course we’re all a little less than serious. Names have been changed to protect the “innocent”…

p1 (5.14.09): In an effort to stay ahead of the competition we have decided to take a field trip on Thursday the 21st . We will be researching what the future holds when it comes to gadgets, heavy machinery, guns, robots and air craft. We will be going to watch the premiere of Terminator: Salvation at the Alamo Drafthouse Lake Creek. we will pay for everything, just bring your notebooks.

We will have reserved prime seating for everyone that can go on that day. I know a few of you are out, but this day was the only day that works for most of us. We will be going to the 3:15pm show. We decided against riding together in a bus, since afterwards people can go home and the Alamo Lake creek is further north. Individuals can obviously ride together, we need to leave here no later than 2:15 sharp. Please adjust your schedules to be able to make this event. We will also try to have J. join us.

Let me know if you can come in order for me to finalize total seats reserved.
P. & J.

p2: woo hoo edumacational field trip!
i’m totally in!

after the field trip is when the real hilarity ensued…

v (5.22.09): Okay, so a few of you noticed that I actually took a notebook to yesterday’s Terminator field trip. So here are a few nuggets o’ knowledge that I noted from the dystopian destiny that awaits us all… (from a usability perspective, of course)

SPOILER ALERT – DO NOT READ PAST THIS POINT IF YOU HAVE ANY INTEREST IN SEEING THE FILM

1. In the future, a heart can be stopped with a single, well-placed punch from a cybernetic fist. It can also be restarted with several erratic punches from a fleshy man-fist. Electrical stimulation is optional. The heart is pretty much a toggle at this point.
2. Skynet will execute a 15-year plan to lure its two most feared opponents into a trap, but will fail to schedule enough Terminators to actually finish them off. On a factory floor where hundreds of the metallic minions are being assembled – the densest population at its disposal – only one weaponless, naked Terminator and one skeleton Terminator will be summoned into action. Skynet really, REALLY needs better ERP software to manage its available resources.
3. After decades of hype, nuclear weapons become sorta passé, just like the Y2K Bug or Avian Flu scare. A thermonuclear device can detonate in a hole a few hundred yards away, or several can go kablooey in the bowels of a military industrial complex, and they’ll inflict no more damage to you (or your optional aircraft) than the noisy neighbors on July 4th. This is why users click through our piddly warning dialogs without even a cursory glance.
4. Cute kids (and puppies) don’t die if you care about ticket sales. Sometimes the pleasing aesthetic IS more important than a useful or logical outcome.

j1: I twittered the only note I took… “well, a lot of stuff exploded.”

j2: Nice job V. I just wonder where they get fresh milk and medical supplies…

d: Also, (and I read this elsewhere) even though at skynet everything is inhuman (MOTOTERMINATOR!!!!), they still had a nice clean control room with fancy video screens. And a single chair. Cuz robots get tired standing on their feet all day—just like you and me!

j3: On a non-sarcastic note, it was pretty cool how the smaller robots are deployable from the larger.  Especially the motocycle terminators coming off of the Big guys legs.

m: I like the insights V. noted. I, for one, look forward to the day when users have enough processing power and RAM, that we can do away with menus, tabs and  buttons: we’ll simply present a nearly infinite web of information nodes, randomly assembled, which they can navigate by thought alone.

(To address D’s point, I’m really disappointed that the writers completely failed on the opportunity to do something interesting with the franchise: they could have used the command center scene to show us that Skynet is in truth a very primitive  AI, and that a human being is the entity actually responsible for Judgment Day and the resulting war…..)

d: Ahhhhhhhh! I see where you’re going, M…

It should have been a revival of The Wiz.

Stick with me here…

Marcus Wright is re-written to be a sort of futuristic killing machine Terminator-Dorothy character. Of course Diana Ross’ classic Dorothy would be played by Beyonce or Ciara or some other hot diva with a vowel at the end of their made-up name. And since we know that Christian Bale can sing (c.f. Newsies) John Conner could be the lion? Or maybe Toto? And they pick up Scarecrow and Tin-Man at the 7-11. Then the Flying-Terminator-Monkeys come and blow some shit up.

And then there’s some singing.

Later they’ll ease on down, ease on down the ro-oad to Skynet and Dorothy destroys the monitors of the control room (with the improbable chair). That’s when we discover a CG bulked-up naked Richard Pryor on the other side of the glass. They then have a bad-ass fight.

After the fight Dorothy gives her gigantic heart to John Conner. Huh? – I  guess he was the Lion after all. Then Dorothy dies (spoiler alert!)

I don’t know what happens after that but I’m no writer. Feel free to fill in the gaps, M. I need more coffee.

m: Best. Email (And Movie Pitch). EVER.

j4 (we have a lot of people with names that start with j): I agree with all the observations noted. The lack of character development, action scenes that defy the laws of physics, and the shallow attempt to infuse humanity into the script with a token kid (I really hate that).

But come on it’s Terminator. Do we really have the right to expect anything more than an action packed movie that is all entertainment and no substance. It’s just fun.

However, I would like to know where those guys got milk. Where are they hiding those cows?

What are they feeding the cows? You don’t see a lot of hay growing in the desert? Do terminators kill cows? Historically it’s a successful strategy, destroy your enemy’s food source and you destroy them. Wow, that alone punches a hole in the story ;-)

d: Come on J!!! It’s 2018! Everyone knows they’ve been injecting nano-cows directly into the bloodstream birth since 2014!

j1: but, but, but, what about the lactose-intolerants?!?!

m: guess you didn’t catch the goats they had penned up next to the gas station…   I think I also saw a selection of soft cheeses in the basement next to the carrots.

j4: What do nano-cows do to you. Does that mean that big burly dude made himself a pint of milk all by himself. Gross.

Oh, I got it. Maybe they’re using powdered milk left over from judgment day. Yeah, that has to be it.

v: That would be The Ter-moo-nator

15 April 2009 – In an article posted on msnbc.com, Alex Dudley (Vice President of Public Relations for Time Warner) announced that the Time Warner cable bandwidth caps would  “be modified, or even abandoned, if they meet too much hostility.”(1) Well I guess they met enough hostility from Time Warner/Road Runner customers in Austin, San Antonio, Greensboro, N.C., and Rochester, N.Y. – the cities identified as trial markets because the very next day there was a very different announcement…

16 April 2009 – Time Warner Cable Charts a New Course on Consumption Based Billing.

(New York, NY) — Time Warner Cable (NYSE:TWC) today announced it would alter plans to test Consumption Based Billing, shelving the trials while the customer education process continues.

While the “customer education process continues”? Oh please. The hostility Time Warner met was from customers who are educated. I don’t think that the educated customers are going to feel any less hostile reading the condescending statement above and another made by Time Warner Cable Chief Executive Officer Glenn Britt in the same press release, “It is clear from the public response over the last two weeks that there is a great deal of misunderstanding about our plans to roll out additional tests on consumption based billing.” I’m pretty sure *I* understand it.

Even though Time Warner announced they are shelving plans to roll out “consumption based billing,” I think Phillip Dampier of stopthecap.com put it best, “So this is our victory today. But the war is not won.”(2) With that in mind…

I’ve been tumbling a lot of this but wanted to consolidate in one space what I’ve learned in the past couple weeks about Time Warner Cable’s proposed bandwidth caps, which is a lot, so this is long. There are footnotes throughout to document the source.

I first took notice of this on April 1. I thought surely this was an April Fool’s Day joke (and a lame one at that) when I followed a few tweets(3) to Omar Gallaga’s Digital Savant blog on austin360.com and this post: TWC/Road Runner tiered Internet pricing coming to Austin/San Antonio. In that post he referred to an article in BusinessWeek in which the initial pricing proposals and bandwidth caps were announced. The bandwidth caps ranged from $29.95/month for the 5GB/month cap to $54.90 for the 40GB/month cap plus a “super tier” 100GB/month cap with undisclosed pricing. All plans would charge $1 per GB over the cap per month.

After this announcement, people started squawking. So Alex Dudley (the PR guy, you’ll see a few quotes from him) was quick to point out that in their test city 86% of customers were unaffected.(4) But this test city was Beaumont, Texas. No offense meant to the citizens of Beaumont, but it’s not exactly a hot-bed for technology. Omar Gallaga asked about Beaumont being a very different market and got this response from Dudley, “Internet usage is a lot like television viewing. It doesn’t vary from geographic area to geographic area.”(4) This should’ve been an early indication that TWC is NOT in touch with their customers.

Just a few days after Dudley tried to say there was no difference between Beaumont and Austin, TWC spokesman Jeff Simmermon said, “Austin is a passionate and tech-savvy city, and the spirit that we’re approaching this (metered broadband) test with is that if it’s going to work, it has to work in a tech-savvy market where the use patterns are different.”(5) On that same day, Landel Hobbs (Chief Operating Officer, Time Warner Cable) conceded in an announcement, “We have heard customer feedback, and understand that a 40 GB tier seems low to heavy Internet users.”(6) Ya think?

On April 9, Time Warner Cable announced revised billing tiers(7) that were adjusted from the initially proposed 5GB/month for $30 and 40GB/month for $55.  When you did the math on the original plans, the originally proposed base rate of 5GB/month at $30 came out to an outrageous $6 per GB per month. The restructured plans are somewhat better, depending on your plan. Price per GB/month is based on only using up to your cap at that level:

• Road Runner “Super Lite” – $15 per month ($15 GB/month)
  768Kbps, 1GB cap, $2 per GB per month overage charge
• Road Runner Lite* – $20 per month ($2 GB/month)
  768Kbps, 10GB cap, $1 per GB per month overage charge
• Road Runner Basic* – $35 per month ($1.75 GB/month)
  3 Mbps, 20GB cap, $1 per GB per month overage charge
• Road Runner Standard* – $40 per month ($1 GB/month)
  7Mbps, 40GB cap, $1 per GB per month overage charge
• Road Runner Turbo* – $55 per month ($0.92 GB/month)
  15Mbps, 60GB cap, $1 per GB per month overage charge
• Road Runner Turbo 100GB (”Super Tier”) – $75 per month ($0.75 GB/month)
  10Mbps,  100 GB cap, $1 per GB per month overage charge, overage charges capped at $75
• DOCSIS 3.0 (to be launched in trial markets) – $99 per month
  50Mbps, cap not listed, overage charges not listed

* Lite, Basic, Standard and Turbo are approximate monthly rates that vary based on your “bundle” pricing and the exact monthly rates are a little difficult to find on the Time Warner Cable | CentralTX website.

According to Ars Technica, this does not compare to competitors’ plans in other markets. If you assume 400GB per month, because these other plans currently do not have caps, AT&T’s 6Mbps DSL is $0.09 GB/month, Verizon’s 10Mbps FIOS (fibre-optic) is $0.11 GB/month and Verizon’s super fast 50Mbps FIOS is only $0.36 GB/month.(8)

Also mentioned by Ars Technica is Comcast, who does have a cap (but a much more reasonable 250GB/month cap and they don’t charge overage fees), they are only at $0.17 GB/month.(8) Hrmm… Based on that lets do some more math (because math is fun and the numbers are revealing). Comcast does not currently offer service (that I know of) in the Austin area, but let’s assume that you would use that 250GB in a month. Let’s also assume that the only plan that has an overage cap is the “Super Tier” because that’s the only one that specifically says it will have an overage charge cap of $75.(7) What would that cost per GB on TWC’s new plans?

• Road Runner “Super Lite” – 250GB would cost you $513 ($2.05 per GB)
• Road Runner Lite* – 250GB would cost you $260 ($1.04 per GB)
• Road Runner Basic* – 250GB would cost you $265 ($1.06 per GB)
• Road Runner Standard* – 250GB would cost you $250 ($1.00 per GB)
• Road Runner Turbo* – 250GB would cost you $245 ($0.98 per GB)
• Road Runner Turbo 100 GB (”Super Tier”) – 250GB would cost you $150 ($0.60 per GB)

Even with the $75 overage charge cap at the “Super Tier” level, TWC is $0.43 higher per GB per month than Comcast. Ouch.

What would that 250GB cost you with an actual competitor that is in some (but not nearly all) parts of Austin(9) – Grande Communications.(10)

• GForce Basic – 250GB would cost you $20 ( $0.08 per GB)
  384Kbps, no cap
• GForce 1.5 – 250GB would cost you $30 ($0.12 per GB)
  1.5Mbps, no cap
• GForce 8.0 – 250GB would cost you $40 ($0.16  per GB)
  8Mbps, no cap
• GForce 12.0 – 250GB would cost you $50 ($0.20 per GB)
  12Mbps, no cap

I’d love to go to Grande’s service. I’ve heard great things about it and the price is very reasonable, but they do not offer service where I live in Austin. And that’s a big part of the problem, many areas of Austin are limited to only TWC service. So what about DSL? “Compared to the performance of cable Internet service, DSL speed has historically been slower.”(11) I have experienced that to be true. We do not have apples-to-apples competition in large chunks of the city and no competition = monopoly. Although Alex Dudley (Vice President of Public Relations for Time Warner) doesn’t see it that way apparently, “just because our product is better than the alternatives doesn’t mean we’re a monopoly.”(12) It would seem, to the average Joe (or Jill as the case may be) that Time Warner has found a way to charge more simply because they can.

If it’s not just because they can, then what is the reasoning behind consumption based billing? One reason TWC gives is that it’s not fair to customers. Landel Hobbs: “Our current pricing plans require all users to pay the same amount, whether they check email once a month or download six movies a day. As the amount of usage has dramatically diverged among users, this is becoming inherently unfair and not the way most consumers want to pay for goods they consume. When you go to lunch with a friend, do you split the bill in half if he gets the steak and you have a salad?”(6) To which Omar Gallaga replies, “If someone is using Road Runner to check e-mail once a month, they’re paying too much for broadband, no matter what tier they’re on. Might I suggest a nice dial-up plan or a public library terminal?”(13) Agreed.

To that point, while I was trying to find out the Lite, Standard, etc. pricing, I went to the Time Warner Cable | CentralTX website and went through the process of signing up as a new, rather than existing, customer. Road Runner Lite, the lowest tier, was not offered to me. There was no way to select it as an option. Road Runner Basic was the lowest tier choice option made available to me as a (potential) new customer. So at that same steak and salad lunch, was I only offered a baked potato?

And also to that point, why aren’t they extending this “fairness” to their cable tv offering? I watch a small fraction of the channels they provide, but TWC makes me pay for 300+ channels just to get the 10 or so I want.

Another justification for Time Warner’s proposed consumption based billing is that they need to cover the costs associated with increased bandwidth usage which they point out “is increasing by about 40% a year.”(14) (If that’s true, aren’t we going to hit their bandwidth caps pretty fast?) Okay, so there are costs involved in providing high-speed internet access. Do these costs justify the significant cost increase associated with the bandwidth caps?

According to Ryan Singel at Wired: “A close look at Time Warner Cable’s books shows no significant link between its high-speed data costs and network usage. For 2008, the most recent period available, Time Warner Cable reported that its high-speed data costs actually declined by 12 percent to $146 million. Meanwhile subscribers increased by more than 10 percent to 8.4 million, and high-speed data revenues climbed to more than $4 billion.”(15) And Ars Technica notes, “the dirty secret of these DOCSIS 3.0 rollouts is that they’re cheap.”(8) How cheap? A New York Times article covers the numbers. The fastest consumer cable broadband service in the world is 160Mbps offered by J:Com in Japan. J:Com had to invest, get this, $20 per home to upgrade the network.(16) Even if this is conservative, according to several vendors, “most systems can be upgraded for no more than about $100 per home, including a new modem.”(16) So at less than $10 per month per home, the cost of upgrading cable internet service could be covered in 1 year. Interesting…

“Heavy Internet users” (the steak people) seems to go hand-in-hand with “BitTorrent users” suggesting that people who use BitTorrent(17) are using it to share illegal downloads and pirated software. Um, no. Here’s one example: legal, free songs featuring music from South by Southwest (which I don’t have to tell you is a huge part of Austin every March) were distributed in torrents. And if I’m not mistaken (which I might be, because I’m not quite this much of a geek) legal open-source updates for Linux are distributed in torrents.

Even if you don’t use BitTorrents frequently, even if you are an above-board, totally legal, nothing shady internet user, the original standard 5GB a month plan is an extremely low number. And quite frankly, 40GB isn’t a whole lot better. Network Performance Daily posted a really great run down of some other file size examples and what they would cost you. One HD movie download is 7GB, to put it in a bit of perspective. Buh-bye streaming Netflix on that plan.

I’d be in the “heavy internet user category” by TWC standards and all of my usage is pretty normal and definitely legal. I’m a designer and when I need to work from home (when my kid is sick or for whatever reason) the file sizes I am moving a quite large. I enjoy photography and upload to flickr as well as sharing photos with my family who lives in another city. I stream public radio. I watch videos on Vimeo or YouTube or Hulu.

Yes, Hulu. Remember last year when NBC affiliate KXAN and its corporate owner LIN TV got into a dispute with Time Warner Cable?(18) When LIN pulled the KXAN signal, Time Warner ran “how-to” videos on that channel slot showing you how to hook your laptop up to the TV to watch NBC shows that we were missing.

We can’t blame Time Warner for showing us that online content existed. With products like boxee and Apple TV (and a whole slew of others), paying for cable tv service is becoming less and less attractive when there is so much content available online for free. “GigaOM astutely notes that $150/month for unlimited internet is the exact amount Time Warner would need to pull in to make the same amount of money if you killed the cable box and switched to watching all of your video online—as we’ve long crowed that much of this is about their fear of internet video.”(19) So it shouldn’t shock you to learn that on the same day all the bandwidth cap crap broke, Time Warner Cable Chief Operating Officer Landel Hobbs said, “Viewers should see the same commercials during television shows on the Web as they do on traditional TV.”(20)

Aside from all of this there are social implications that I hadn’t really considered and regretfully have not researched enough yet. But I did read this:

Lauren Rich Fine, research director for ContentNext Media, called consumption-based broadband billing “a huge step backwards.” She added, “Inner-city youth’s ability to go online is the best way to give them broad access societally. Consumption-based models will end up being a bigger burden on less affluent people.”(21)

I’ve learned a lot. And I’m sure there’s more to learn. Through it all I’ve found Omar Gallaga to be an excellent reporter, giving very thorough coverage on his blog Digital Savant. I am also pleased with the coverage at Stop the Cap! While biased, it has covered the issue in all of the trial cities. I’d bookmark both of those or add them to your rss feed reader. Below is a list of other articles I tumbled. And below that are all the footnotes.

I hope that you’ve found this summary useful and informative. I probably could have gone into even more depth on much of this but it’s already a mile long. If TWC decides to take consumption based billing back off the shelf, I’ll post anything new that I learn and give you plenty of people to contact, including local government representatives.

My trust in Time Warner Cable is blown. I’m cynical enough to think that “shelving the plan” just means not talking about it and that they’re moving forward with their plans anyway. If that’s the case, I expect this to all come back to life in October of this year when the capping was/is supposed to kick in or January of next year when the overage charge billing would begin.

In the meantime, if you are a Time Warner customer, I encourage you to let them know how you feel. You can email realideas@twcable.com (as long as they keep that email address available). Or on twitter:  @jeffTWC (Jeff Simmermon, Director of Digital Communication, Time Warner Cable), @AlexTWC (Alex Dudley, Vice President, Public Relations, Time Warner Cable),  @MsmarTWC (Mariam Asmar, PR Coordinator Time Warner Cable) and @melissatwc_tx (Melissa Sorola, Regional Director of Communications, Time Warner Cable – Texas)

Other articles and blog posts that I read:

• Time Warner Cable Road Runner Bandwidth Cap Petition
• Burnt Orange Report::: The Grassroots Consumer Response to Time Warner Bandwidth Capping
• Time Warner Cable capping: gigabytes of fallout | Digital Savant
• stopTWC!
• DROP!TimeWarnerCable
• Burnt Orange Report Summary
• slashdot comment – why the utility metaphor doesn’t work
• another crap long twitter response from TWC
• Network Performance Daily interview with Alex Dudley, VP of Public Relations, TWC
• Mayoral Candidates weigh in: Lee Leffingwell and Brewster McCracken
• ars technica: Time Warner rationale for bandwidth caps doesn’t add up
• Austinist: Time Warner’s Tiered Pricing Plan SIngled Out Austin
• Daily Kos: Time Warner Strikes Back
• Stop the Cap! · Breaking News: Alex Dudley From Time Warner Claims Earthlink Customers Will Be Capped
• How to Meter Your Internet Usage – Features by PC Magazine
• The price-gouging premiums of Time Warner Cable’s data caps – Ars Technica
• There’s No Data To Prove Metered Billing Is Necessary – Journalists start crunching numbers, call Time Warner plan ‘obscene’ – dslreports.com
• Time Warner Ponders 100GB Cap, Twitters Its Critics – News and Analysis by PC Magazine
• Politicians Start War Against Time Warner Cable Internet Caps (TWC)
• DVICE: Time Warner broadband usage caps spreading, consumers revolt!
• Time Warner Cable Profits Will Grow With Broadband Caps – Bits Blog – NYTimes.com
• Time Warner Cable Earnings Refute Bandwidth Cap Economics | Epicenter from Wired.com
• Gizmodo – How Much Time Warner’s Broadband Caps Will Screw You – Broadband caps
• Gizmodo – Time Warner Delays Bandwidth Cap Pricing Tests in Texas After Customer Complaints – Broadband caps
• Internet providers want to meter usage – Tech and gadgets- msnbc.com
• Stop the Cap! · We Won! (For Now) Time Warner Killing Usage Caps “In All Markets” – But TW Press Statements Suggest They Are Still Out Of Touch
• Time Warner Cable Charts a New Course on Consumption Based Billing
• Update: Time Warner Cable Backs Off Metered Broadband Everywhere – gigaom
• Gizmodo – Outrage Prompts Time Warner To Drop Tiered Pricing Until We Can Be Educated – Time Warner Cable
• Time Warner Cable scraps tiered Internet billing for now | Statesman Business Blog
• Time Warner shelves tiered-billing trial for Austin
• Stop the Cap! · 360 Degrees: A Diary of the Last 24 Hours

1. source: msnbc.com – Internet providers want to meter usage [↩]
2. source: Stop the Cap! · We Won! (For Now) Time Warner Killing Usage Caps “In All Markets” – But TW Press Statements Suggest They Are Still Out Of Touch [↩]
3. note: tweets are 140 character or less posts on twitter.com [↩]
4. source: Digital Savant – TWC/Road Runner tiered Internet pricing coming to Austin/San Antonio [↩] [↩]
5. source: gigaom – Time Warner Cable Says It Singled Out Austin’s Geeks [↩]
6. source: Statement From Time Warner Cable’s Chief Operations Officer on Tiered Broadband Trials [↩] [↩]
7. source: Statement from Landel Hobbs, Chief Operating Officer, Time Warner Cable RE: Consumption based billing trials [↩] [↩]
8. source: Ars Technica -The price-gouging premiums of Time Warner’s data caps [↩] [↩] [↩]
9. note: Grande Communications does not provide service where I live [↩]
10. source: Grande Communications – Internet Service Plans [↩]
11. source: About.com – DSL Speed – How Fast is DSL Internet Service? [↩]
12. source: AlexTWC on Twitter [↩]
13. source: Two from Time Warner talk more bandwidth cap details | Digital Savant [↩]
14. source: Consumption Based Billing | Time Warner Cable | Corporate [↩]
15. source: Wired – Time Warner Cable Earnings Refute Bandwidth Cap Economics [↩]
16. source: New York Times – World’s Fastest Broadband at $20 per home [↩] [↩]
17. note: in case you’re not familiar with BitTorrent read this: What Is BitTorrent? | BitTorrent [↩]
18. source: Viewers take sides in cable vs. KXAN [↩]
19. source: Gizmodo – How Much Time Warner’s Broadband Caps Will Screw You – Broadband caps [↩]
20. source: Time Warner Cable COO: Ads Should Match For Shows On TV, Web – FOXBusiness.com [↩]
21. source: Internet providers want to meter usage – Tech and gadgets- msnbc.com [↩]

… or more specifically, what’s in your google reader?

I *heart* google reader. I do. Wait, you don’t know what the google reader is? According to wikipedia, “Google Reader is a Web-based aggregator, capable of reading Atom and RSS feeds online or offline.” So essentially, all the posts from all the blogs I want to read are pulled into one place as soon as they are posted.

It’s probably been a meme (like the 25 Things I really(?) wanted to know about you) on facebook (I wouldn’t know, I still refuse to create a facebook account) or maybe it hasn’t. Either way, I thought you might enjoy some of the feeds that are in my google reader, especially if you hadn’t seen them before. And perhaps you might have a few of your own to suggest.

I’ve tried to organize this list into a few different categories and within those categories, the organization is purely alphabetical – the way it appears in my reader. The descriptions are in most cases pulled directly from the website. This list does NOT include some of the more personal blogs that I read or some of the feeds that I need to remove because they’re going a little stale.

austin local

• Austinist
  “Austinist is a news and culture website about Austin, Texas. We publish Monday through Friday, and also maintain a guide to local arts and entertainment events that we call the Weekly IST List.”
• east austinite
  “the sights and sounds of east austin.”
• KUT News
  The blog for the Austin local NPR affiliate KUT.
• statesman.com
  The local newspaper – Austin American Statesman “Austin news, weather, Longhorns, business”
• SXSW Baby!
  I’ve been reading this one since the beginning in 2000. “SXSW Baby! is an informal, unofficial weblog for participants in — or those considering it — South by Southwest, an annual new media, film and music conference and festival held in Austin, Texas.”
• SXSW Interactive News
  Official news about South by Southwest Interactive (the geeky portion of the SXSW conference that I care the most about.)
• Texas Music Matters
  The blog for the Texas Music Matters segment on the Austin local NPR affiliate KUT.
• The Arthouse Blog
  “The mission of Arthouse is to promote the growth and appreciation of contemporary art and artists in Texas. Through its exhibitions and programs in Austin and statewide, Arthouse helps nurture artists’ careers and deepen public understanding of contemporary art.”
• The Blotter
  “What’s on The Blotter? Police press releases, public safety updates, traffic updates and general breaking news.” part of statesman.com

girly stuff – health, fashion, shopping…

• BarkingDogShoes
  Started by a woman with rheumatoid arthritis… “My goal with BarkingDogShoes.com is to help women find a shoe that not only looks good but feels good.”
• Chronic Babe
  “For Babes, who just happen to have chronic illness – ChronicBabe.com is an Online Community for Younger Women with Chronic Health Issues.”
• She Saves
  “She Saves features deals and coupons that might interest women, including clothing and shoes, home decor, baby and children items, weddings, gifts, and more.” Hasn’t been updated for a little while though…

creative, technology, design, semi-work-related, geeky stuff (admittedly this is a very broad “category” and you’re probably familiar with many of these)

• BoingBoing
  “A directory of wonderful things.”
• Core77
  “industrial design magazine + resource”
• CRAFT Magazine
  “Celebrating the DIY spirit, CRAFT’s goal is to unite, inspire, inform and entertain a growing community of highly imaginative and resourceful people who are transforming traditional art and crafts with unconventional, unexpected and even renegade techniques, materials and tools; people who undertake amazing crafting projects in their homes and communities … coined “The Martha Stewart For Geeks” by Newsweek’s Stephen Levy.”
• Gizmodo
  “Gizmodo, the Gadget Guide”
• i love typography
  “iLT was born from a desire to bring the subject of Typography to the masses. All too often, articles on typography are rather bland and, although informative, do little to elicit feelings of wow. So, iLT is designed to inspire its readers, to make people more aware of the typography that’s around them.”
• Lifehacker
  “tips and downloads for getting things done”
• Likecool.com
  “Coolest Gadget Magazine”
• MAKE Magazine
  “MAKE Magazine brings the do-it-yourself mindset to all the technology in your life. MAKE is loaded with exciting projects that help you make the most of your technology at home and away from home. We celebrate your right to tweak, hack, and bend any technology to your own will.”
• mental_floss
  “Where Knowledge Junkies Get Their Fix”
• NOTCOT
  “ideas + aesthetics + amusement”

humor (twisted, more schadenfreude type humor, but it makes me giggle)

• Cake Wrecks
  “When professional cakes go horribly, hilariously wrong.”
• FAIL Blog
  “Pictures and Videos of Owned, Pwnd and Fail Moments”
• stockery
  “with the unfortunate invention of cheap stock photo sites has come a new wave of photographic mockery. this blog is my ode to the worst of the worst stock images i have come across in my daily searches.”

cars, automotive (this category is getting added on to, for now – here’s my fave)

• Jalopnik
  “Obsessed With The Cult Of Cars”

music (there’s not much I follow here because there’s just too much to follow)

• Pitchfork
  “home of the gratuitously in-depth record review.”

illustration, photography, art & urban art

• DRAWN!
  “The illustration and cartooning blog”
• FFFFOUND
  the tumblr blog of ffffound.com’s image bookmarking
• Flickr Blog
  “The companion blog to Flickr, almost certainly the best online photo management and sharing application in the world.”
• Street Anatomy
  “medicine + art + design – Street Anatomy, created by Vanessa Ruiz, obsessively covers the use of human anatomy in medicine, art, and design.”
• The Big Picture
  “The Big Picture is a photo blog for the Boston Globe/boston.com … The Big Picture is intended to highlight high-quality, amazing imagery – with a focus on current events, lesser-known stories and, well, just about anything that comes across the wire that looks really interesting.”
• Urban Prankster
  “Urban Prankster covers pranks, hacks, participatory art, flash mobs, and other creative endeavors that take place in public places in cities across the world.”
• Wooster Collective
  “A celebration of Street Art – The Wooster Collective was founded in 2001. This site is dedicated to showcasing and celebrating ephemeral art placed on streets in cities around the world.”

I hope you enjoyed this. Did you find something you hadn’t seen before? Is there a feed I should add to my reader?

and fyi, the cool stuff I find in all my feeds generally get tumbled at shooshee.tumblr.com.

I’ve locked down a good chunk of the archives on a post-by-post basis while I do some structural and organizational changes around here. It’s a clunky way to do it, but the fastest way to do it for now. If you really feel the need to read any of those protected archive posts – just ask and I’ll give you the password(s).

So I’ve started really investigating ways to restrict access that are both easy on me and easy on those I want to grant access to. In case any of you want to do something similar – like maybe separate access to public and private or work and life posts, here are some of the things I’ve found so far that I will be taking a deeper look at. (yes, I realize I’ve ended a couple few sentences with prepositions so far in this post, and frankly my dear, I don’t give a damn.)

Most of these WP plugins came from a really comprehensive list of restriction plugins on wordpress.org and a few were also recommended to me via email (thank you).

Angusman’s Authenticated WordPress Plugin – “Allows you to make your content accessible only to registered and logged in users.”

Category Access – “Restrict (protect) categories on a user-by-user basis. Useful for restricting Categories seen when writing a post.”

Category Visibility – “Adds a new admin menu for setting category visibility settings for the front page, searches, feeds and archives.”

Demo Mode – “Puts your blog into a demo or maintenance mode except for authenticated users.”

Disclose-Secret – “Only shows WordPress content to other users if they meet certain access criteria.” Note: the documentation has been translated into English, but some of the translation is a little rough.

Page Restriction – “Lets you hide specific pages from unregistered users.”

Post Levels – “The Post-Levels plugin allows you to set a numeric “level” to each of your users, and then author posts that are only visible by users above that level.”

Role Scoper – “Control reading and editing access by defining role requirements and assignments by page, post or category. Can assign roles by user, WP Role group or custom-defined group. Ridiculous feature set threatens to crush author but is very actively maintained and forum-supported. For WP 2.2 to 2.6.”

Simply Exclude – “Provides an interface to selectively exclude/include categories, tags and page from the 4 actions used by WordPress. isfront, isarchive, issearch, isfeed.”

WP-Members – “By default, WordPress allows all content to be “open” and viewable by anyone and allows the site owner to restrict specific content if desired by setting a password for the post. WP-Members operates with the reverse assumption. It restricts all content by default and allows the site owner to “unblock” content as desired.”

WP-Password – “The other day I got asked if there was a way to password protect a WP blog where the author didn’t have access to .htaccess, didn’t want to create users, send/remind them of their passwords, or manage post security levels. “I just wanna password protect the damn thing. Is that so hard?” Well, at the time, yes. It was. But not anymore!”

And last, but not least, I also found a discussion on client login ideas that may also address some of the same concerns.

I hope this helps you all. If you have any suggestions, feedback, etc. Feel free to comment – but know that as always, your comments will be moderated.

it started like this in an email we got on June 13:

Hey Everyone -

So we have done bowling events, Round Rock Express baseball game events, cooking class events, etc., but this one sounds really fun.

On Thursday June 26th we are going to have a company wine tasting tour (employees only).  We will tour 2 wineries outside of Austin and then hit historic Luckenbach, TX.  We will have coach bus come pick up all of us here at the office at 10:30 that morning.  We have a driver (obviously) and then two people (one I have used before named Mitch who is a chef at Eddie V’s) who will educate us about wines as we drive to and from the wineries.  He will pair us up on the coach with wines that match well with specific foods.  Educational and fun. We will also have lunch at a restaurant in Johnson City.  We will end up back here at the office by 6pm.  Hopefully those of you that plan to partake in much of the wine tasting can have significant others be here at 6pm to pick you up and drive you home.  Otherwise, the company will pay for some cabs. There will be non-alcoholic wine and other beverages on the coach as well throughout the day.

I have done this before with a group of 10 and it was a blast. We will provide more information and an evite to get official confirmations from each of you.  The idea was that people come in around 9am that morning, answer any emails or other logistics, we have a quick company meeting at 10am and then we hit the road for the tour…

and the meeting maker that we got on June 13 said this…

Subject: Wine Tasting Tour
Location: Hill Country, TX
When: Thursday, June 26, 2008 10:30 AM-6:00 PM (GMT-06:00) Central Time (US & Canada).

Please be on the bus by 10:15 am as it needs to leave by 10:30 am.

We will be touring Texas Hills Vineyard first, having lunch at the Silver K Café, and then touring Becker Vineyards.  We will end the day with music in Luckenbach, which I hear is very much like Gruene without the additional shops (basically a VERY small historical town).

So yeah, tomorrow we’ll be wine touring all day long instead of working. I’ll be taking my new camera and hope to stay sober enough to get some great shots of the Texas Hill Country. Jealous?

UPDATE:
Here are some of the wines we tasted while on the Texas Grape & Green Tour:

White
2006 Messina Hof Gewürztraminer (pdf)
Fall Creek Vineyards Sauvignon Blanc

Red

2006 Peregrine Hill Pinot Noir
2006 Sister Creek Vineyards Cabernet Sauvignon – 3 blend
(50% Cabernet – 30% Cab Franc – 20% Merlot)

Dessert
2007 Flat Creek Estates Muscato Di Arancia
Cellar Select Lanno Estacado Texas Port
2004 Messina Hof Tawny Texas Port (pdf)

oh and photos are on flickr although some are only available to friends and family.

This is just too good not to share. This is an email conversation that’s been going on in the office today. It’s Friday, so of course we’re all a little less than serious. Names have been changed to protect the “innocent”…

subject: OOO – 3:30pm today (and a quick blurb about Oslo)

p1: Norway time is creeping up on me…. Will head out today at 3:30pm.

j1: Ditto for me. As to the trip outside of work, it was fun. We saw the city, got well acquainted with planes, trains and automobiles and learned that any beer under $15 here in the US is a bargain. Oslo is one expensive city. We have some fun Norwegian treats for a happy hour early next week.

m: What with the hop shortage of 2008 and rising fuel costs, there might not be too many beers under $15 here in the US for much longer… Luckily, even if beer fails us, scotch and bourbon are both inelastic goods. Have a great weekend, looking fwd to Norwegian happy hour.

l: I also remember an agave shortage that spawned White wine margaritas throughout NYC one year. Such a sad year.

d: I propose a First World Relief Fund. So our grandchildren won’t have to endure pan-tragic epi-travesties such as these!

m: I would like to subscribe to your newsletter and donate to your charity, but I just took out a 2nd mortgage so I could stock up on IPAs, tequila and can/bottle openers: the family will be well-prepared for the upcoming Peak Beverage crisis!

p2: i’ll contribute once there’s a catchy tune and marketing campaign that costs more than the fund actually brings in ~ we can make a difference!

d: Oh man… We don’t have the theme song ready yet. But we’re working on getting some real generous down-to-earth heavy-hitters like Mariah Carey, Kid Rock, and John Oates to kick off the song. It’s gonna be called “Yo, Can You Top This Off For Me (For The Childrens)”. I’m really excited about it.

And marketing-wise, we just have the logo. I think it sums up our point of view quite nicely.

s: Just to note: if you’re unable to procure those specific celebrities, I think this group of Japanese celebrity impersonators will do in a pinch: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=36w-CyqCO1A&feature=related

d: Wow. Although I was much more fascinated by the folks impersonating an excited audience! Good stuff.
PS – OOO is the new NWR. Please update your mail filters accordingly.

p2: pfftt… that jerk bono too good for us huh?

d: There’s always someone who just can’t see the big picture.

l: Oh boy. This is going to sting, but Bono and Kid Rock have joined up with my alternative cause. I have organic tshirts under my desk for only $18 dollars, the price of a beer in Oslo.

d: Well who needs you and your more-clever foundation! I’ve still got John Oates on my side!!! And my shirts are free-range hemp!

j2: You’ve left out someone very crucial to your success:

d: who’s that?

and then the side-bar IM discussion…

d: when i was doing a google image search for the $100 for my foundation logo, the first one ended up being a fill-screen goatse. You’re welcome, R.

me: oh dear. I am crying over that one.

d: so was i.

d: then i was trying to make a SFW goatse joke about that oprah pic but couldn’t come up with one. can you believe it?

me: oh lawdy – that might’ve been retinally damaging

d: oh god, no! i was just going to use words!

me: oh thank goodness

d: i was IM’ing s. and told her that i think i went too far by dissing oprah. that’ll turn any room against you.

Since considering, I’ve been doing a little more research, and found…

WordPress 2.5 released.
and BlueHost is no bueno.

on tumbling…
I’ve pretty much decided that I am far too verbose to rely entirely on a tumblelog for the meat of everything. I’ve been playing a bit with tumblr – mainly just seeing how it handles RSS feeds. And well, it handles them but things do get out of order when it pulls in a big feed dump hourly. I DO like that I can email a quick thought to the blog – with the plan that I am on for my iphone, email is way cheaper than sms.

Either way, I’m pretty sure that it will make sense to have a tumbled portion – I am trying to decide what bits would be best tumbled in whatever I end up building. I may play with tumblr a bit more and just embed it (since it’s already hosted) or better yet, I may play with chyrp for the tumblelog portion. I’ve heard okay things about it so far from other people that have been playing.

chyrp feedback I received: “I’ve been *this* close to embracing it, but have yet to do much with it. The functionality and add ons are fantastic, but the development community is fairly small. That, and it isn’t quite as flexible as I’d like it to be design wise. Figuring out where to put my templates and CSS code isn’t at all intuitive. Then again, that might be because I’ve spent so much time with Movable Type. Still, I’m planning to mess with it a bit more and might relaunch my site with it. At the very least, it’s worth playing with.”

on micro-blogging…
Yep, I’ll more than likely stick with twitter. I was reluctant to adopt it for a long time, because it just seemed silly, at best. 140 characters to talk about the cheese sandwich I had between longer blog posts about cheese sandwiches? Wha? It proved more useful than dodgeball during sxsw and certainly less annoying. Pre- and post-sxsw, it has been nice to keep up with the little nuances of my friend’s lives. Still don’t get twitter? Watch Twitter in Plain English.

reminders about comments…
On vox, there are some “barriers to entry” – people who don’t have a vox account generally don’t comment. Way back when I did blog, I remember what an annoyance comment spam was. It’s gotten better – well the tools have gotten better for filtering/moderating, but I’ll certainly moderate. I’m all for free speech, but my webspace is not necessarily your webspace for having that voice. It’s sad but true that not everyone will follow the Blogger’s Code of Conduct. There will always be trolls. There will always be assholes that are assholes just for the sake of being an asshole or because it’s so easy to hide behind anonymity. I have to delete comments frequently on flickr. Although, disemvoweling is an interesting method, just one that boingboing deals with moderation.

on content management…
I’ve been looking through the list of free and open source cms software and it can be a tad overwhelming. There are so many now. But I am really leaning towards this latest release of WordPress – WordPress 2.5 – for many reasons including the “comfort zone” aspect. It’s familiar and there is a strong community around it so help is a click away. I want control over things, but I don’t want to eff with it so much that it gets in the way of the creative process. After all, any new web presence I create right now is geared towards being a digital sandbox and not an electronic resume.

on hosting…
So narrowing it down to wp, I can take a more targeted look at hosting providers. Just yesterday someone told me to look into BlueHost’s censorship. Wow. And yes, right there in the TOS for BlueHost (aka Hostmonster and Fastdomain) the third bullet point down states: “Foul language and profanity in the site content, and in the domain name are prohibited.” Fuck that, I say. I do enjoy dropping the f-bomb and don’t want my site to be shut down if I choose to do so.

I don’t want to research this to death really. I’ve heard not so good stuff about DreamHost and I’ve also heard that some people are really happy with it. Right now though, with a wordpress 2.5 auto-installer, 1TB of disk space and 10TB bandwidth for $7.95 a month with a 12 month pre-pay? I’m leaning almost to the point of falling over towards DreamHost right now. But AN Hosting has a pretty tempting deal as well. And so does HostICan… Unless you can point me to another better deal dear readers.

So now that I am nearer to making decisions, I need to get off my ass and do something about it. We’ll see how long that takes…