Category: Random Thoughts

The general category for posts on this blog.

Cable TV & Me

Random Thoughts

If you frequent my blog, you may have read about my war with Comcast.  The end result of everything is that I built my father a PVR using digital tuners, and he’s able to record six programs at a time on the channels broadcast in the clear (essentially 2 thru 78 plus a handful of other random channels, plus the HD versions of all the local channels), while I, not able to afford to replace my PVR, canceled cable TV in favor of various streaming sources.  With Hulu, network websites, Netflix, and the occasional torrent, I can watch pretty much every show I care to watch.  Yeah, it is always a day late, but I was recording and watching most of them a day late anyway.

The main reason behind this decision wasn’t just to save the $60 a month that cable TV cost me, although that is nice, but mostly in that cable TV isn’t serving me properly as a consumer.  To me, the single most important thing is to be able to watch the shows on my schedule.  Since networks insist on putting good shows on opposite each other, and I don’t want to not watch good shows, recording shows has always been something I needed to do.  And while recording shows for later viewing meant I could fast forward through commercials, that was always a side effect and never the point.  Time shifting was the point.  Right now, if for that same $60 a month, Comcast were to offer me the ability to watch any program at any time, even if I was forced to watch the commercials and couldn’t skip them, I’d do it.

On Demand programming is where the future is, and networks need to catch up.  And charging me $3 or $5 per episode in addition to my cable bill just to watch it without commercials isn’t the answer.  Leave the commercials in and let me watch it for free, just like when it is broadcast, but on my own schedule.

I want to watch your shows.  I even want to watch your commercials (they help me discover more shows and sometimes even products to buy).  But I just can’t do it on your schedule.

Either the networks need to jump on On Demand, or the cable companies need to invent the 10 tuner DVR that works with ALL their channels  so people can create their own On Demand.

Fitness Gaming

Random Thoughts

One of the hardest things for me about getting fit is just keeping at it.  Over the last year I forced myself into the habit of exercising every day, my push-ups and sit-ups plan has worked fairly well, but I know I need to incorporate more exercises in order to work the whole body and not leave things out.  Back when I bought a Wii, I was excited about Wii Sports and the coming Wii Fit.  Wii Fit turned out to be a disappointment because you couldn’t build a real workout, you had to do everything one exercise at a time and the constant stopping and starting was annoying.  That single feature is why I’ve pre-ordered and am eagerly awaiting Wii Fit Plus.

But as much as I like it, I do have to admit the Balance Board is kinda retarded.  I suppose that is why I saw Your Shape with its camera and was immediately intrigued.

I am tempted, but really want to see some honest reviews of the product before I buy in.  An exercise game without a board or hand held controllers would be awesome if it works.

A World Where That Can Happen

Random Thoughts

September 11th, 2001 was a tragic day for a great many people.  Myself, being unemployed at the time, I spent the entire day in front of the TV and talking to friends over the Internet.  For some random reason that morning, I’d turned on the TV and it was on CNN.  I think there had been some special news report or something I’d been watching before bed the night before.  I was actually watching when the first reports of something hitting the World Trade Center came in, and I stayed there all day.  I don’t think I even took a break for food until dinner that night.

As tragic as that day was, however, it was the next day, September 12th, when everything sunk in, when the ripples of the event started to be felt, when the world became a different place than it had been just two days before.  Terrorism, of course, was not new.  People had been dealing with attacks like that, though not in the same scope, for a very long time.  Suicide bombers in cafés and other public places were old hat in some parts of the world.  Even hijackings and blowing up planes was something that had, to some degree, become accepted as a possibility.  The largest ripple coming from the September 11th attack was simply that we now lived in a world where that could happen.  A world where someone can fly a plane into a building, not on accident, not a small plane as a personal act of suicide, but a large passenger flight turned in to a weapon that can bring down a building and kill thousands.  On September 10th, it was unthinkable by most people.  On the 11th, it happened.  On the 12th, it was added to the list of possibilities, or if it had already been there, its rank on the list of probabilities rose.  It went from being some 1-in-a-million things to an event that happened, and now proven effective an event that would be planned again.

One of the tracks at Dragon*Con is called Apocalypse Rising.  It is a very odd track compared to many of the other fandom based tracks like Star Wars and Star Trek and the Whedon Universe because it lives in two worlds.  On one side you have zombies and an array of Sci-Fi movies and books, and people talk about their favorite “end of the world” and they wear Mad Max costumes and pretend to hunt zombies.  On the other side, you have panels with people who are well versed in the practical procedures of surviving disasters talking about the things you can do, the things you should do.  It is in the second half where discussions about the inevitability of larger events happen.  We talk about how the September 11th event was a shock to the United States and most of the world, and about how technology advances, and arms caches of fallen regimes make their way into the market, and how once upon a time people used to discuss about the remote possibility that a nuclear weapon or other massively destructive thing might one day be unleashed on a city in the US or the UK, and how events like sarin gas being released on a Tokyo subway and September 11th and more have turned that remote possibility into an eventuality, about how we’ve stopped talking about “if” something will happen but “when” it will happen.  And it all reminds me of a line from Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club, “On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.”

Somber thoughts for a sunny Saturday, I know, but I can’t help it.  Its on my mind and it had to come out somewhere.  On a brighter note, I’m alive, I’m in love, and while I may not have everything that I want, I want everything that I have, and that’s a pretty nice place to be.

It has been eight years since that day, and other lengths of time from other tragic days.  To those that we’ve lost, I wish them rest.  To those they’ve left behind, I wish them restoration.  And hopefully “when” will be a very long way off.

Fight Zombies Mathematically

Random Thoughts

It seems that some students and a teacher or two got together and wrote a book about infectious disease modelling.  Of particular interest is chapter 4, entitled: When Zombies Attack!: Mathematical Modelling of and Outbreak of Zombie Infection.

You can purchase the book, and I probably would if I had an extra $90 just laying around.  Or if you want you can read the relevant chapter here.  But to boil it down, when looking at models of containment, cure and control, the best way to handle a zombie outbreak…

Aim for the head.

The Walking Dead comes to AMC?

Random Thoughts

Its not a done deal yet, apparently, but it is close.  And considering the bang up job that AMC is doing with Mad Men (it being one of the best shows on television), hearing that they, with Frank Darabont at the helm, will be bringing The Walking Dead to the small screen is just awesome.

The full article from Variety is here.

From the moment I first read The Walking Dead I always felt it would make for good TV, that making a movie of it would actually hurt the overall impact of the story and make it “just another zombie movie”.  But TV would allow it to tell longer, more complex stories, and yet able to have each episode tackle a complete story of its own as the people try to make their way.

I’m very excited.

Makers versus Managers

Random Thoughts

I read this yesterday, and I can’t gush about it enough.  Paul Graham has managed to perfectly nail down exactly the problem that exists between the people who create (programmers, writers, etc) and the people who manage them.

Ultimately, this illustrates the best way to be a good Project Manager.  As a PM, your job is to be the conduit between the development team and the rest of the world.  You meet with your team on their schedule, leaving them large chunks of time to do the creating, and you meet with the other managers on their schedule.  If you have to do a meeting between the developers and the managers, you have to schedule it out a few days and either make it the first or last thing of a day (first is better, putting it at the “end of the day” can mean disaster to the developers who might be hitting a creative stride at 4 p.m. when you want to have your meeting).  I hear that good book editors work the same way, checking in on the writer when its needed for progress reports but not scheduling daily meetings to try to “keep them on task”.

Sadly, most Project Managers I’ve worked with over the years end up becoming just another manager, scheduling meetings with the dev team on a manager’s schedule and getting upset that the dev team’s productivity is dropping, resulting in more meetings and less productivity.

I really hope this article gets around and people take it to heart, because it really is true, and it would really solve a lot of problems.

Admission of Fault

Random Thoughts

Recently, I’ve gone to “war” with Comcast.  This year marked the final turnover to digital and the end of analog broadcast.  For the past 18 months, I had kept in contact with Comcast about the effect this would have on my analog cable.  See, the basic cable – channels 2 thru 78 – are all I really watch, so that’s all we have, and you don’t need set top boxes for that, which allowed me to build Medusa, my 6-tuner PVR running Snapstream’s software.  I admit I watch a lot of TV, but the main problem is that quite often even if I only watch three or four shows on a single night, they’ll always air at the same time.  Years ago I managed this by having four VCRs, but times have changed and I upgraded.  In any event, Comcast assured me that nothing would change, my analog devices would continue to work just fine.  On many occasions over this time period, I inquired about the future of analog service, and every single time I was assured that Comcast had no plans to end analog service for the cable package of channels 2 thru 78.

So, one day there was a problem with my cable.  It seemed I was only getting channels 2 thru 29 or 30, everything above that was gone.  I called in to Comcast customer service and asked what was going on.  They explained it was an outage, and regular service would return soon.  Seeing as I already had them on the phone, I again inquired about the future of analog services.  I asked if this division of 2 thru 30 and 31 thru 78 was a precursor to them moving 31 thru 78 to digital only.  I was assured that there were no changes planned.  None.  Channels 2 thru 78 would continue to be available for all analog users.

In the meantime, over the past couple of years, I have watched with anticipation the development of digital tuner cards for PCs.  At first the support was iffy, but now pretty much all software supports them, and given a good enough PC they’ll even watch and record HD channels broadcast “in the clear”, like your local network affiliates.  I’ve been budgeting my money in plans to upgrade my PVR so that I could take advantage of digital, but its not exactly cheap to do, and besides, I still had time.

Imagine my surprise when, the day after the outage above and being assured that analog was not going to change, I received a letter in the mail explaining that channels 31 thru 78 were being moved to digital only on August 11th of this year.  That couldn’t be right since just the day before I was told it wouldn’t change, and mailings like this take weeks to plan out.  So I called customer service again, and with letter in hand was told again that there was no planned change for analog service, channels 2 thru 78 would continue to be available.  But a quick search of the Internet found several locations, including Comcast’s own website, telling people about the future and channels being moved off analog.

Now, here we come to the “war”.  See, I’m not actually upset by the digital switch.  I expected it would come eventually, hence why I’ve been planning to upgrade my PC… next year, when my budget can afford it.  And I completely understand and even agree with the need for change: when you move analog to digital it takes far less bandwidth and allows you to have more channels and services.  My problem is that I was lied to.  As far as I can see, one of two things had happened.

  1. Failure of Management: The customer service group was not properly trained or informed about the August 11th channel moves to digital, and therefore the reps I spoke to were telling me what they believed to be true.
  2. Failure of Employee: The customer service reps, not wanting to deal with a possibly irate customer, chose to not inform me of the digital change, on which they had been fully informed and trained.

There is no other possibility.  Either the reps lied to me, or the reps were not properly trained.

I decided, for the first time in my life, to actually write a complaint to the Better Business Bureau.  I wrote in detail about my 18 months of contact and the day of the outage and the mailer I received.  I even wrote that I understood why the change was being made and that Comcast had every right to do so, but that I was lied to through one of the reasons above and I would like something done about it.

Since writing this complaint, the case has gone back and forth between Comcast and myself.  I have been called on several occasions and emailed a number of times.  Every time they contact me, I get a spiel about how there were two digital changes (the government mandated change and the Comcast channel moves) and this lead to confusion (despite my most recent calls being AFTER the government mandated change), and that I can continue getting all my channels by simply getting a set top box, which they will provide, or replace my analog tuners with digital tuners, which I will have to do myself.  Every time, I report the resolution as unsatisfactory because there is only one thing I want: Admission of fault.

I want someone from Comcast to call me and tell me the staff was improperly trained, or tell me that reps have been found lying to customers to avoid confrontation.  I want Comcast to admit that the failure existed on their end, in their processes or with their people, and to apologize for it having happened.  I want someone to say they are sorry and that the customer service department should have informed me of the impending channel moves on all calls made after some date.  This is the one thing I have not heard from Comcast.  And I probably never will.

It is not just them, of course, its systemic.  Companies do everything in their power to never admit fault.  Well, I’m tired of it, and this time, in my only piddling and puny way, I’m fighting back.  this case through the BBB will never be resolved until someone from Comcast admits fault.

As for my personal resolution for Comcast’s change of service, since my budget will not allow for rebuilding my PC (not only do I need new tuners, since the best ones are PCI Express and my PC is old enough to only have PCI, I have to get a new motherboard, processor, memory, video card, etc… the hard drive is IDE, not SATA… in fact the only thing I can keep is the case), and with budget being the main concern in this economy, I’ll be canceling my cable TV service.  Thanks to Hulu and individual network web pages, everything I want to watch is online anyway.  In the end, Comcast’s refusal to admit fault is probably going to wind up saving me over $50 a month.

Ring The Bell

Random Thoughts

I own a house.  This house has a front door.  Just to the right of the door there is a button.  If you were to come to the front door of my house and push the button a magical thing occurs: inside the house, a bell rings and lets everyone inside know that the button next to the front door has been pushed, indicating that a person standing at that front door would like to speak with someone inside the house.

If you were to approach that same door and instead of ringing the bell you were to just knock on the door, due to the nature of acoustics and the properties of sound waves, if there is not a person standing in the foyer or in the living room, the possibility is quite high that they will not hear the knock.  This is the purpose of the bell.  This electronic device, this button, is connected to speakers in a couple of places in the house, arranged in just such a way that a person anywhere in the house will hear it.

So, when I order a pizza, I expect the pizza delivery person to come to the door and push the button.  He has my pizza, and I’m fairly certain he would like money in exchange for it, and the best way to facilitate that transaction would be to push the button and notify someone inside the house that he has arrived.  And yet, every single pizza delivery person from every single pizza place that will deliver here approaches the door with pizza in hand… and knocks.  Being that I spend so little time in the foyer and the living room, and instead can often be found watching TV in the media room, or on the computer, or possibly even in the room with the workout equipment, I cannot hear the knock.  Now this, in and of itself, wouldn’t be too remarkable.  He knocks, he waits, perhaps he knocks again, he waits, then perhaps he gets impatient and rings the bell.  Not the optimum path, but acceptable.  However, this is not what happens.  Instead, he knocks, he waits, he knocks again, he waits… then he gets out his cell phone and calls the phone number associated with the order.

The package delivery men are worse.  They simply knock, drop the package on the doorstep and run away.  So, not only have they not notified me of their presense, they have also left potentially expensive goods unattended at my front door.  My house, in addition to having a front door and a door bell, has a garage.  I park there, and being as my car is there, when I come and go from the house it is very rarely through the front door.  Due to this, packages have sometimes sat on my doorstep for a day or two, especially when said package comes through the USPS and I was not given a tracking number by which to follow the progress of the shipment online.

At first, I thought this might be because people could not see the button.  But I checked, it lights up.  Even in the darkest night, the button is visible.  But perhaps its harder to see during the day.  No.  I checked that too, and the button is raised and clearly distinguishable from the surroundings.  Perhaps I need to place a sign on my door that says, “Please ring the bell.”  But part of me worries that a sign like really says, “I absolutely cannot hear people making noise at my front door, so please, break in.”  Not that I’m horribly worried about people breaking in.  We live in a nice neighborhood, and I don’t have a whole lot worth stealing.  No cash, no jewels.  Just electronics, and most of those are heavy or locked down in some way, and I just don’t envision a thief hauling my whole desk out the front door just to get my PC.

All in all, I just don’t understand why people do not ring the bell.  It exists for that purpose.  If I didn’t want people to push the button and ring the bell, I’d remove the button.

Are You Ready for the Cloud?

Random Thoughts

If you listen to the pundits of social media and other new frontiers, and especially if you listen to Google, the future is the Internet.  The future is Cloud Computing.  This isn’t a new idea, of course, but just the latest iteration on one branch of computer advancement.  In the beginning, computers were expensive, and big.  Because of that, there developed two schools of thought:

  1. Work on making computers cheaper and smaller so everyone could have them.
  2. Leave the real computer giant and expensive, but find a way for people to cheaply access them.

Out of the first branch, you got the home PC.  Out of the second branch, you got the mainframe and the terminal.  Lots of people like to think of mainframes as being a dead technology, because since everyone can have a PC on their desktop, who needs a giant computer that does everything?  Well, lots of companies still do.  Even with advanced in chip technologies, there are still some very large mainframes being sold, and people still connect to them with terminals, or at least terminal emulation on a PC or a thin client.  I worked for a number of years at Norfolk Southern, and putting PCs in a train yard out in the middle of nowhere was just begging for vandalization and theft… but, put a cheap thin client terminal that does nothing but connect to the network and the mainframe, theft goes way down.  Until I got into programming, I made a pretty good career out of working with 3270 and 5250 and all the things that went with it.

But Cloud Computing takes things a step beyond the old terminal/server paradigm.  It abstracts, and it makes the terminal more generic while connecting to many servers.  Think: web browsing.  If you are reading this, then your terminal (IE, Firefox, Chrome, Opera, etc) is connecting to my server.  Later, you might connect to Facebook’s server, or CNN’s, or any number of other servers out there.  The one thing that Cloud Computing wants to retain though, is the idea that nothing is stored on the terminal.  Google is a strong proponent of this.  With Gmail, and Bookmarks, and Docs, and Calendar, and many of their other products, they want to take all your files and all your work off your PC and put it on the web, where you can get at it with any terminal.  In fact, Google is going so far as to throw their hat into the ring, not just with their Chrome browser they put into beta last year, but with a full blown Operating System intended to be the window you see the Internet through.  Some people, after seeing the announcement of the Google OS, jumped right into the “Game On Microsoft” mindset, like Google was planning on trying to take down the big cheese.  But John Gruber wrote an excellent write up of putting the Google OS into context.  The fact is, all Google wants is to make a netbook style PC that boots quickly, connects (wirelessly) to the Internet, and gets you all of your apps and documents in the Cloud.

Personally, I’m fully behind the idea.  I have a laptop that I hate using.  The reason is because its battery lasts about 2 hours, however, every time I turn it on that’s easily 5 minutes, and it takes around 2 minutes to get out of hibernation (longer if I put it to sleep with a few applications open).  Its bulky, its hot, and if I’m away from a power source, I really only end up getting about an hour or so out of the battery if I’m using it in short spurts.  That kind of performance is why devices like the iPhone and blackberries have become popular, much longer battery life to be able to jot down notes or check emails on the go.  The only reason I have not yet gone down the mobile device route is that when I write I still prefer a full keyboard (or at least a compact keyboard like the ones you find on a notebook or netbook).  So a netbook that boots faster, runs cooler and utilizes the battery well is exactly what I am looking for.

But, as the title questions, am I ready to ditch my desktop for a workspace in the clouds?  I stopped saving bookmarks to my browser years ago, mostly because it was annoying to have a bookmark in IE but not Firefox, or at home but not at work, and most programs to sync them up were annoying to use.  I still use Outlook for email, but I’m just about ready to plunge into Gmail, especially since my webhost offers a deal where I can have all my domain email addresses be handled by Gmail.  Plus, it finally came out of Beta recently. (snicker)  I do use Google Docs for a few things, but I’m not totally sold on putting all my files out there, especially the ones I want to be sure that no one sees (get your mind out of the gutter, I mean design docs and other things I’m writing).  Recently, I’ve stopped playing most PC games in favor of web based titles, and with the exception of Free Realms and Battlefield Heroes, they’ll all run in any compliant browser.  Even so, I think I’d be perfectly happy having a desktop sit in the corner just for games while having a netbook for all my other tasks.

I might not be ready to sail among the clouds just yet, but I think I’ll get there soon enough… how about you?

You’ve got red on you.

Random Thoughts

News comes trickling out of Valve about Left4Dead 2.  First up is the addition of a cricket bat for full on Shaun of the Dead style zed killin’.

Cricket bat goes 'bonk!'
Cricket bat goes 'bonk!'

Also, it seems that Valve is looking in to linking the two games, Left 4 Dead and its sequel, through multi-player maps/campaigns.  I sure hope all this works in the 360 versions, because I’d love to essentially have the choice of eight characters when messing around with my friends instead of just four.