Category: Daily Life

A specific example of broadband frustration in North Carolina

~ m ~ 3 Comments

Governor Perdue,

My newly-purchased house is 700′ from the road where Time Warner’s cable runs. Because they have a virtual monopoly, they want me to pay $3250 to run cable to my house before they will ALLOW me to pay for service on top of that.

I would like to express my outrage that you did not veto the recent bill that restricts municipalities’ ability to develop broadband solutions. It is abominable that you vocalized your disapproval of the bill but did not find the backbone to veto it. Many of us contacted you with our concerns but were not heard. Special interests have taken further root as a result, and our state will pay the price and lose further technological footing. I am now directly, severely impacted – along with many others. The Time Warner rep claimed that they are getting many people to actually pay these kind of extortionist fees to fund the build out of their own network – further increasing their monopoly.

Broadband service is of such fundamental importance to our communities that we must find a way to do better. Not vetoing the municipality restriction bill was a major step backwards for us all. I hope you can find a way to move us forward again.

I’ll be posting this to my blog, facebook, etc. and getting the word out wherever and whenever possible.

Thanks for listening,
Michael

Addendum: Yes I am using Time Warner services to host this blog. Yes they have provided me with great service for 11 years. But some corollary of Murphy’s Law applies to broadband access. It should be getting better and cheaper at a faster rate than their monopoly allows.

Would I be writing this if I happened to get an easy service hookup? Probably not. But I did send a previous note to the Governor when I heard about the ridiculous bill.

The bottom line is that broadband internet access is too fundamental a need of the people to be left to a few corporations and a bought-off government. Just like with other basic utilities, the people’s government should ensure that everything is in place, including free market competition as well as government oversight, to provide the people with the best-possible service over shared resources like easements and lines. Municipal broadband, where the people come together to create something good, is an excellent means to that end.

9.5 Beastie Boys: Make Some Noise

~ m ~ 2 Comments

Yes I am a Beastie Boys fanboy. As Johnny Cash said so well, “until you know my shame you really don’t know me”. I grew up on New Jersey playgrounds, cursing (not “cussing”, that’s what rednecks in FL did) my head off since I was ten. To me, my brother’s actual name was jerk-off. I just didn’t know any better. I hit punk right on the mark around the age of 12 – I remember my dad walking into my room and hearing someone on my favorite NY radio station say something rude and what in the world was I listening to and me replying “I don’t listen to the words, just the music”. New wave was next and swept us all up, smashing molds and bringing sweet melodies and new sonic fabrics. And then came hip hop in the form of Run DMC and Beastie Boys and Public Enemy, and it was loud and strong, and continued to rip the fabric of everything that came before it – literally in this case. The industrial music of Ministry and Meat Beat Manifesto was the last great one for me. From then on, everything else was just recycling – Grunge, Shoegaze, LoFi, whatever – I’d heard it all before.

I guess this is the definition of being old. I have become one of those “classic rock” fanatics that I never understood during my youth. But when we were young, each of those early changes meant something to us, ripping off the lid on something brand new and knocking us to the floor, winded.

And I could feel my roots when I turned up the Beastie Boys. They are smart-ass New Yorkers with ADD. Like FAMILY. :P

If your sophomoric sense of humor remains intact, you may continue to enjoy their craft. This album went through extra refinement (due to MCA’s cancer battle, keep on good man) like a fine wine. Peace out to life-lovin’ cancer-fightin’ vegan-tryin’ Yauch, who directed this joint… WARNING: EXPLICIT CONTENT, this is not for women or children or anyone else with any sense or maturity whatsoever. Self-parody at its finest. And check the crew they brought for this one, stellar.

Andrea and I bought the farm

~ m ~ 17 Comments

And it’s a beauty… more pics forthcoming… but for now I’m busy…

  • replacing the battery on my mothaflippin’ John Deere tractor
  • figuring out where the brake is on the tractor as a gorgeous, huge blacksnake decided to hide under it
  • watching a gaggle of geese… ON MY PROPATEE
  • knocking down a wall in the horse stalls to ready it for twice the number of horses…
  • just in time to have our three crazies show up, and the old girl Deba to show them the ropes
  • running for cover as the four horses of the apocalypse duke it out over who eats first – scary!
  • staring at the fence aisle at Tractor Supply for 2 hours trying to wrap my head around all the options
  • using said equipment to actually build a fence – successfully, with Richard’s help – around my 7 tractor “implnts” (implements)
  • basking in the beauty of it all as the sun goes down on some hard days’ work!

We’ll still be in shock for a little while longer, but pretty soon y’all better come on down and see us, ya hear!

Meet the best women soccer players on the planet

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These are the smartest players in the world. They will destroy you. Watching them move the ball is better than poetry.

And we hung out with them on Wednesday.

Literally. Even though the official roster for the United States Women’s National Soccer Team has just recently been announced, we were lucky enough to host a friendly with Japan at the Cary soccer park, right here in town – and we were 15 feet from the field! And after they shredded on the field for an hour and a half, they came over to hang out with their fans and sign autographs. The US Women’s National Soccer Team been doing this for decades. They are truly amazing people.

Don’t miss this year’s FIFA Women’s World Cup, starting in Germany on June 26th. 16 teams battle it out towards the final match on July 17.

Here’s Amy Rodriguez (who scored the first goal of the 2-0 victory) and Abby Wambach (my personal hero) signing Wren and Reiley’s jerseys. Holy crap.






Kramden Institute volunteer day

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How could I pass up a chance to build computers? What a perfect volunteering job this was for me. Progress Energy set everything up, organizing the event and giving us all t-shirts. They have a great program where they give full-time employees paid time off to volunteer a couple days a year.
The place was a kind of geek nirvana, reminded me of my brother’s storage space that I helped him organize. Bins of every possible computer component, with memory sorted by type, hard drives clearly marked if they had been properly wiped, etc.
The work is organized into four stages:

  • Triage
  • Cleanup
  • OS load
  • Final test

Triage seemed like the most fun so I jumped in there. Step 1: blast the dirty incoming PC’s! They have a compressor in the back that provides endless high-pressure blasts to eliminate dust buildup from case and cpu fans and everything else in the case. Then we stripped everything extraneous from the case – video cards, sata cables, etc. Then we stocked them with parts to bring each up to the standard configuration: 4 256-MB sticks of memory and a 40GB hard drive. Once BIOS posted, they provided an ISOLINUX variant boot CD that could run a host of tests. We ran quick memtest386 and hard drive tests, and used BIOS to set the correct date and time. After the paperwork was complete and the PC was labeled, we moved them over to the cleaning station!
Of course we ran into all the usual problems. I put in four separate pairs of DDR2 memory and they all posted bad. I was sure I had a bad motherboard or memory socket so I put the PC aside, only to get the same result from the next PC. I methodically tested each stick and found that one of each of the four pairs was bad. What are the odds! But it felt good to weed out all the rotten stuff. :> Larry, next to me, had a bad power supply that fried a CDROM drive, but he persisted until he got his BIOS post. It’s no fun if it’s not a challenge!
It was seriously so much fun that the time flew by and I was totally disappointed that we were done. They have open nights every Wednesday, I might just have to go back and give this another shot. :>

8.5 Rise Against: Endgame

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I didn’t think I could ever warm up to this kind of over-produced hard rock.

Even if it is labelled punk rock. PUNK?? What the… cmon this is NOT PUNK. This is fast-paced arena rock. It has NOTHING TO DO WITH PUNK ROCK. Thin Lizzy was writing this stuff years before the Clash existed.

But something about it caught my attention. Lyrical strenth. So i wikied the band. And discovered truth. Straight-edge vegan truth. Rockin! So I opened up and listened. And the lyrics don’t get any stronger. The videos are inspiring. And once I got that far, it became most excellent running music – I ran the hardest few miles of my life on this stuff yesterday.

So I guess I have to let it be lumped in with other dispensers of truth – like my favorites, Consolidated, who have spun into outer orbit. Oh yeah! Truth comes in many strange forms. :>