(Only a few will find this funny or even understand, but oh well)
I’ve had to charge the battery for my Canon PowerShot S410 twice in the last 2 days. Leaving it plugged into the computer for several hours while you entertain a baby drains the battery pretty fast. I think that nearly doubles the number of charges since I bought it, 1 1/2 years ago.
Josh Marshall at TPM has a post about a WP article on “network neutrality“. Go read it.
Done? Alright, now imagine that you dial the 1-800 number of your favorite mail order clothing company and it takes 400 rings before it connects. You give up long before that, grab the competitors catalog off the end table and call their 1-800 number. It connects without a full ring. Wow, the competitor must have much better service, right? Nope, they just paid your phone company a fee to be considered the “perferred” vendor over the other. (I know this isn’t feasible in how the phone system really works, but the analogy sounds good.)
This is essentially what the backbone Internet providers are proposing as a new revenue source, charging bigger customers for “preferred” status. The backbone providers claim that they don’t get any more money for higher bandwidth customers. If that’s true, the providers need to fix their funding model and charging structure, not start looking for new ways to suck more money from successful companies that happen to have large piles of market capitalization whose entire business models rely on quick site response times.
Or, swing all the way to the market forces side of the argument and say this is a cost of doing business and a free market economy establishing appropriate charges.
Just like Jim says, Hefty is still in the tourney in Aruba.
Go Hefty.
Update: Hefty won money, out in 84th place.
The site has been upgraded to WP 2.0, SpamKarma 2.1beta4 and the newest SKStats.
(Mostly so that this tidbit of knowledge ends up in google)
In case you are stuck in an environment that still needs JRE 1.3.1_02, don’t try to install J2SE Runtime Environment 1.5.0_06-b05, it apparently destroys the ability to load 1.3.1_02.
It was -4F when I got up this morning. But, it was -45F in West Yellowstone, MT. I bet it was colder than that where this picture was taken.
I didn’t think this would ever pass, but the Urbana City Council has committed to reducing Lincoln Ave to 3 lanes. I’d assume this is only from Florida Ave to University, but who knows.
This brings up a recurring argument I’ve had with some people at work who don’t think that changing lane counts and stoplight designs discourages people from using Green St now. They say that all these changes do is increase traffic delays in the altered areas. I’m starting to think that without more aggressive commuter education, changes to Lincoln Ave will prove that they are right, I’m wrong and drivers/commuters in Champaign are too stupid to learn a new way home.
Anyone who commutes daily on First St should have figured out by now that you shouldn’t even try to turn left onto Green on the way home. Go another block north, use the left turn lane and light onto Springfield and save yourself 10 minutes of trying to find a gap in the southbound traffic. But everyday on my way home, there’s a line of 20 cars trying to turn left onto Green, most of whom are just going over to Neil to go north.
I understand there are probably college students with cars that don’t know another way to North Prospect, but surely us long time residents of Champaign-Urbana and the surrounding areas can learn a new way home when we begin to notice that our commutes have gotten longer and longer….
Yep, it really has been 2 years. Still not neglected.
Happy Thanksgiving to everyone, remember not to eat too much and make sure you have some cranberry sauce, it’s the best thing on the table. Well, other than my mom’s Sweet Potato Casserole, that is.
Those dining service mugs just never die!
