hi clear, bye clear

A few months ago, I had to cancel my home internet service with Time Warner. It turns out, TWC was executing a telemarketing campaign with some severely broken equipment. This meant random calls to my cellphone that never left a message and in the off chance I did manage to answer I was promptly hung up on. TWC left no way to get in touch with anybody who might be responsible for the calls, and letters I wrote asking them to stop went unanswered, so after two weeks I finally told them to cancel service.

To replace home connectivity, I went out and snagged a 4G wireless modem from Clear. The prospect of 6MB that I could take on the road with me for less than TWC was charging me sounded like a good deal, and for the past 3 months it's been everything I'd hoped for. Less downtime, and waaaaay less harrassing phone calls.

However, earlier this month (last Friday in fact), Clear instituted some mechanism that attempts to rate limit users who pass an unspecified bandwidth usage threshold. If you trip their bandwidth-hog alarm, your connection drops from 6Mb to 0.25Mb download speeds, and this makes doing pretty much anything relatively impossible... the speed is basically bumped below the throughput of a dialup modem from 1999. It is impossible to watch Netflix movies uninterrupted, and it's introduced some real problems when I try to play games or use VoIP services.

The intent is pretty obvious. Rather than scale up their bandwidth to accomodate a large influx of customers, they have chosen to ration out access. They were clearly assuming people would only be using the service to check email or maybe listen to a few mp3's... fools burning 30 hours a week on movies and video games will quite easily wreck that business model. The problem is that rather than cap me at the speed I've paid for, they serve up more than I paid for (12Mb) until I hit this limit, and then slap on a draconian limit to punish me for the amount of traffic I've pushed. From my point of view, I have very little to show for it since most of the bandwidth is from dynamic services (ie, Netflix and WoW) rather than from downloading files.

It's basically akin to flipping on the TV to discover that the cable company is only going to let you watch public access channels and CSPAN because you've spent entirely too much time watching HBO this month.

This is a total deal breaker for me. I don't really care about throughput so long as it's greater than 1Mb. I'd be happy taking a price break and using the slower service to having my provider suddenly and without any warning yank my leash for violating rules I don't understand and have no way of monitoring. Unfortunately for Clear, the faster (and cheaper) solution is to just cancel the account and install DSL service rather than give them "a month" to iron out the bugs in their rate limiting ubersystem.

the science of chords

So I just got finished watching "It Might Get Loud" (trailer below) on Netflix's Watch Instantly deal. It was interesting to see representatives of 3 different generations of rock talking about what motivated them, what their journey to where they are was like, how they view the craft of making music, and hints at some of the tricks they use.



The guy I was most interested in hearing from was "The Edge".

bsg: the plan

Just got finished watching BSG: The Plan. Pretty good. Ties up some loose ends from the series, offers up the Tricia Helfer Variety Pack (my vote's for trashy brunette), and introduces a new minor character for one of the subplots. Lots of the show splices in footage from the series in with new scenes, so it's kind of a retrospective as well. The 2's (Simon) get a more prominent role, and Leeoben is still pretty freaky but a lot less spooky once his story is revealed.

Also, Dean Stockwell is either an exceptionally evil man or a bad ass actor, and that's all I'm going to say about that.

This is definitely worth checking out if you're a BSG freak like me.

a dog with two bones

Quit WoW (again.. for real this time!!) and was punished by The Fates to find the car alarm on the Purple Rain limited edition F-150 going off. Turns out that the truck had been neglected too long, battery was draining, and the alarm's fail safe had kicked off. Only way to shut it off was disco the battery, so I did that and have left it sitting all week (along with the flat tire). Neighbors tattled before I could get it squared away, and thus paperwork was created in the office and I was given 10 days to make the truck purty again.

I'm half tempted to prop it up on cinder blocks and take the tires off 9 days at a time for the rest of the lease just to be a pain, now.

Any rate.

Finally got a chance to get a new battery in there and get the tire pumped up with a fix-a-flat enough to get it down to the shop for new tires. I might be imagining things, but it seems to be riding like a new truck (well, aside from the worrisome rattle when you accelerate, but the grease monkeys will be taking a look at that on Monday).

I know I don't need 2 vehicles, but after getting the Purple People Eater roadworthy again, I have to say I like driving both of 'em. :(

super bowl was good for a change

I will admit it. I haven't tracked NFL (or even 'merican football in general) since... forever. I had trouble watching games without trying to dissect defenses and predict plays, thinking about how I'd handle blocking in certain situations, etc. End result is that I've kind of not paid attention to anything but the big games.

Which has been a problem because the big games in the NFL usually suck. One team will run out of go-juice in the second half from either being demoralized or maybe from getting tuckered out by pre-game partying after 4 months of intense practices. Either way, result was basically a blow out.

Not this year, though. This year the game was much better than the commercials. It was an all-out fight all the way up until the last 5 seconds of the game. Both the Steelers and the Cardinals had several opportunities to lose the game to self-pity, and instead of collapsing both teams just strapped it on and got back down to business. It was an amazing contest of not only athleticism but sheer willpower and raw determination that I haven't seen at the professional level in quite a while.

Awesome job, guys.