the tindog coffeehouse

Om Malik has taken issue with ISPs (and the FCC) over the emerging trend of metered broadband Internet access.  Currently, most cable Internet and DSL accounts allow for unlimited usage, but ISPs such as AT&T and Comcast are hoping to place a monthly usage limit in the plans, gouging charging customers for any overages (similar to most cell phone plans).

He states:

While 5 GB [the limit imposed by New York ISP Frontier] looks pretty sizable – Comcast claims that their average broadband subscriber only uses 2 GB per month – in reality, it’s nothing. It’s essentially two movies in HD. Once you go over the limit, the meter ticks over faster than a San Francisco taxicab. That would limit the amount of Internet a consumer can use on a daily basis, thereby limiting the amount of time people spend on Facebook, MySpace, Microsoft, Google, Yahoo or any one of numerous services.

The situation would be no different than the early days of dial-up, when the pain of dialing up prevented us from being always on the network. When broadband came along, things changed, for usage of services like Google skyrocketed, Skype came along and YouTube became part of our lives.

One of the problems with metered Internet access, as Malik touches on, is that most consumers have no idea how many bytes they push and pull across the Internet tubes in any given month.  Is 5 GB a lot?  Doesn’t sound like it.  Heck, I don’t even know what I use.

So I’ve decided to run a little experiment.

For the month of August, I’m going to run DU Meter on my home computer to measure how much bandwidth I consume.

I don’t download torrents or movies and don’t download all that much music, but I do use streaming audio and video fairly frequently.  I also remotely connect to my computer on a regular occasion.  So on a 1 to 10 scale, with 10 being a very high usage (downloading torrents, HD movies, etc.), I would probably rate myself around a 6.5 or 7; high but not excessive.

Of course, there are other computers on my home network, so this won’t give me a grand total for my account.  But it should be a good barometer for overall usage.

I’ll report the results at the end of the month.

For the past couple of weeks, my eyes have been twitching like crazy.  Mainly my left eye, but my right one has been twitching some also.  (Thankfully, not both at the same time.)

Per EyeDoctorGuide.com, causes include:

• Corneal irritation or injury
• Stress
• Lack of sleep
• Fatigue
• Prolonged staring or eye strain
• Neurological disorders
• Possibly hereditary

Well, that doesn’t really help a whole lot.  Corneal irritation?  Probably not, but my eyes have been really dry and irritated lately due to allergies and air conditioning, and wearing my glasses instead of contacts hasn’t really helped.  Stress?  Yep.  Got plenty of that.  Lack of sleep and fatigue?  I’m exhausted.  Prolonged staring or eye strain?  I sit at a computer all day, so yeah.  Neurological disorders?  At this point, I wouldn’t rule it out.  Heredity?  Well, probably not, but who knows.

I’ve also seen some sites that say it can be caused by a vitamin deficiency (magnesium and potassium).  That seems plausible too.

So I guess I just need to eat a banana and go to bed.  Sounds like a plan to me.

FOUND is an online collection of random lists, notes, and photos that people find and submit. Sometimes they’re funny, sometimes they’re sad, but usually they’re just weirdly amusing.

Like this one:

things to accomplish in my career

- create my own computer.
- build a laptop
- create my own graphics card.
- create my own video game
- create my own computer company
- or work for Alienware
- have a huge house
- live with only my friends

Well, if you’re gonna dream, dream big.

It’s time once again for the Discovery Channel’s annual Shark Week.

Really?  Again?

I love the Discovery Channel, but seriously, how much more do we need to learn about sharks?  I vote for rotating out different animals.  Elephant Week?  Cool.  Bat Week?  Sure.  Dung Beetle Week?  Maybe not, but they could time it to run during election years.

Overall, I really like the new Facebook design.  BUT… I can’t seem to get past a few issues with it.

Here are my frustrations so far:

• On the Wall tab you can edit what is displayed under your profile picture.  By default, your networks, relationship status, and birthday are displayed (at least on my profile).  You can select the pencil in the corner of the box and check boxes to also display your hometown, political views, religious views, and website.  Fine.  But the problem is, the boxes don’t actually check, so there’s no way to uncheck them.  Verdict: Bug.

  Update: This is working now on my profile, though still a little buggy.  You sometimes have to reload the page for the changes to take effect.

• The Boxes tab is Facebook’s new dumping ground for all the various applications that people add to their profile.  I like the idea, however when I view any other friend’s profile, I don’t see the Boxes tab.  I only see it on my own profile.  Verdict: Bug (hopefully).

  Update: This is working now as users move over to the new version.  (You can’t see the Boxes tab of a person if they’re still on the old version.)

• The Info tab contains all the person’s information (obviously).  The layout of the tab is Basic Information, Personal Information, Contact Information, Education and Work, Groups, and Pages.  You can easily edit each of these catagories, but you can’t reorder them.  For example, Contact Information should really go above Personal Information (as it was in the old layout).  That just makes sense.  I mean, in a resume, you wouldn’t put your contact information halfway down the page; you would put it at the top.  It doesn’t seem like it would be that difficult to build in that functionality.  Verdict: Incomplete “feature”.

Gina Trapani at Lifehacker has called into question many of the numerous productivity studies floating around that show we are burdened by “information overload”, our productivity siphoned off by the endless flood of email and the tendency to multitask.

The longer I do this, the more I suspect that a good part of the “information overload” story is a myth cooked up by folks who don’t know how to use the internet well in order to demonize something they don’t understand. I get more done via email and surfing the web than my parents ever did using phones and libraries, even when I’m having a bad day and switch to my email application the moment I see a new message notification.

Clay Shirky would probably agree.  He wrote a book called Here Comes Everybody and states that we are simply dealing with what he calls a “cognitive surplus”.  Shirky’s reasoning in this: Once World War II was over, we suddenly had a surplus of time on our hands with no idea of how to use it effectively.  That surplus, he argues, was eaten up for many years through mindless consumption of television shows.  Only now are we beginning to figure out how to effectively use it.  By producing and sharing information through things such as Wikipedia, blogs, etc., we are using up some of that extra time and energy and in return creating new things.

So which is it?  Do we have a “cognitive surplus” or are we suffering from “information overload” (which could be defined as a “cognitive deficit”)?  I would say it’s a little of both.

Looking at it with an historical perspective, it’s easy to see we’re in the midst of a technological revolution on the magnitude of (and most likely greater than) the Industrial Revolution that occurred in Britain and America in the 1800s.  Any time you go through such a drastic transformation, it affects all aspects of society.  And those changes can cause a tremendous amount of distress and anxiety as people struggle to adjust, hence a feeling of “overload”.

At the same time, we now have both the motivation to use our excess time and energy for creating new things and the tools with which to do so, leading to what Jonathan Zittrain calls “generativity”.

Now, this is just wrong.

The Fox 5 news anchors in Las Vegas have had fake McDonald’s iced coffees in front of them for two weeks as product placement.

Fake coffee on the real news, two plastic cups permanently filled with some kind of bogus drink. The anchors aren’t even supposed to acknowledge them, McDonald’s reps explain.

In related news, those smiles aren’t genuine either.

Cory Doctorow has a great review over on BoingBoing of the new book The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It by Jonathan Zittrain.  I haven’t read the book, but it sounds interesting.

Overall, it’s a positive review, but one area where Doctorow disagrees with the author is on the subject of “generativity”, the ability to take an existing technology and use it in ways the creator never intended.  Zittrain argues that this generativity allows people with bad intentions (hackers, spyware vendors, etc.) to leverage the Internet for malicious purposes, leading to increased regulation that threaten the good benefits that the Internet offers.  Doctorow disagrees with this line of reasoning.

He writes:

Here’s where I started to get a little frustrated. I agree that the legislative backlash is here — it’s impossible to miss — but I disagree that it’s being driven by identity thieves and spyware vendors. I think it’s being driven by the same authoritarian urge that gave rise to all the other spying and control laws that have been passed for centuries.

I completely agree here.  The “Draconian laws” (Doctorow’s words) coming down against consumers are not the result of security threats; they’re often the result of lobbying from organizations such as the RIAA, MPAA, telcos, and cable companies.  They also tend to coincide with elections (for some odd reason).

Conversely, real security threats tend to be dealt with by the free market (operating system updates, Internet browser updates, antivirus and other security products, etc.).  Far from relying on Congress to deal with technological threats through such laughable efforts as the CAN-SPAM Act, hardware and software vendors and service providers are typically the ones who have stepped in to provide real solutions.

Again, I haven’t read the book yet, so I can’t comment it on it directly, but with any book of this nature, it’s always important to take it with a grain of salt.

While everyone else was seeing The Dark Knight in theaters this weekend, we opted to stay home and watch a DVD instead: Michael Collins, the 1996 biopic of the Irish revolutionary leader starring Liam Neeson.

As I was thinking about the movie later, it occurred to me that you can draw some parallels between Collins and the caped crusader.

1. Both Michael Collins and Bruce Wayne seemed to live double lives.  While Bruce Wayne was a millionaire playboy by day and a brooding superhero by night, Collins was both an elected statesman and an ideological revolutionary.  From 1919 to his death in 1922, he was both a minister in the new Irish government and military leader, leading a war for independence from Britain and then fighting a civil war in 1922.
2. Both Collins and Bruce Wayne lost parents at an early age.  Collins’ father died when he was six years old.
3. Like Batman, Collins used vigilante tactics to impose his idea of justice, training the Irish Republican Army to use guerrilla warfare tactics against the British during the Anglo-Irish War and forming a special assassination squad known as the Twelve Apostles.  From Military History Online:
   

   The 12 Apostles were very effective with their jobs and they eradicated almost all of the British Intelligence system known as the ‘G’ division in Ireland. Collins was very careful when it came to killing these ‘G’ men and he virtually paralyzed the service. He followed the movements, examined their garbage for information and had duplicate keys made to their houses. Collins thought of every move and even thought of the public’s reaction to their deaths so he would time when their murders would take place. No detail escaped this man.

4. Also like Batman, Collins’ identity remained a mystery to his enemies.  Although the British crown well knew his name, they had no idea what he looked like until he arrived in London in 1921 to help negotiate a treaty with the British.  Wikipedia states:
   

   In 1920, the British offered a bounty of £10,000 for information leading to the capture or death of Michael Collins. His fame had so transcended the IRA movement that he was nicknamed “The Big Fellow”. Irish author Frank O’Connor, who participated in the Irish Civil War, gave a different account of the nickname. He said that it began as an ironic, even scornful, reference to Collins’ efforts to be taken seriously by others, seen as bordering on self-importance.

5. Though imperfect, both Bruce Wayne and Michael Collins were patriots who ultimately strived to do what they thought was best.  Always the Irish nationalist, Collins “envisioned Ireland as a country which would be united, and have some international power, and most of all [be] a free state. He said there would be no distinction in the Irish nation [such that] ‘it will be our aim to weld our people nationally together who have, hitherto been divided into political and social and economic outlook.’ In turn, the people will have held the key to their independence, economic well being and greatness.” (Military History Online)

While it might be a stretch to compare Michael Collins too closely to a comic book superhero, there’s no question he remains a real hero to many Irish people today.

Economics, at its heart, is the study of how people make choices when dealing with scarce resources, and no where is that more evident than at Chuck E. Cheese’s.

We promised Megan that we would take her to the pizza playground when she learned to ride her bike.  She picked it up quickly on Monday night, so last night we held up our end of the deal.

We divided the tokens equally between her and Erin and let them pick which games they wanted to play.  But we tried to explain that if you play the games which pay out in tickets, you’ll be able to be able to buy stuff at the counter later.  They eventually came around and they ended up with a total of about 100 tickets.

With each girl having 50 tickets to spend, the choices of course were very limited.  Megan chose a rubber snake (20 tickets), a plastic frog (10 tickets), and a flower-shaped yo-yo (20 tickets).  Erin chose a pack of candy (40 tickets) and a barrette (10 tickets).

At the end, even though each girl was able to choose their own prizes, neither was completely happy.  Erin was mad because Megan got three things and she only got two, and Megan was unhappy that Erin got candy and she didn’t.

And those, my friends, are what we call opportunity costs.

There’s some debate around the Interwebs about whether John McCain’s computer illiteracy makes him a less qualified presidential candidate.  (The liberal blogs and tech blogs seem to think it does.  No surprises there.)

Andrew Romano at Newsweek doesn’t think it matters:

For one thing, McCain’s computer illiteracy doesn’t reflect a lack of curiosity–it reflects a lack of necessity. Over the past 10 years, most adult Americans have encountered and explored computers primarily in the workplace, where the ability to communicate and find information on the Internet has gradually become a required skill. But McCain’s job in the U.S. Senate–where all communication and information has to be filtered through staffers–has actually made fluency more difficult to achieve (or at least less necessary). When aides are responding to your messages and briefing you on every imaginable subject, the incentive to get online sort of disappears.

Secondly, even if McCain had spent some time surfing the Web over the last decade, it’s highly unlikely that he would’ve amassed enough technological expertise to single-handedly craft appropriate public policy responses to the “upheavals” mentioned above.

When Bill Clinton was running for President in 1992, Republicans chastised him over his lack of military experience, arguing that someone who had never served in the military was unqualified to serve as Commander-in-Chief.  Democrats, of course, disagreed.

It seems like this is essentially the same argument.  Can someone who has little to no experience with technology be qualified to lead one of the most technologically advanced countries in the world?  According to the logic of the Democrats of the ’90s, he can.

I agree to an extent.  No, it doesn’t really matter for the reasons mentioned in the Newsweek column above.  Plus, out of all the various issues we’re facing right now, tech issues are probably not at the top of the list.  Still, this sort of thing just helps to reinforce the characterization that McCain is too old and out of touch to be President, which certainly doesn’t help his campaign.

Personally, I’d be more concerned with his inexperience in economics than in technology.

Well, I finally got the vacation I had been longing for.  I took four days off work plus the weekend, which wasn’t nearly enough, but it was greatly appreciated.

We didn’t go anywhere, which I think is why it was so relaxing.  Instead, we stayed home and enjoyed spending time together as a family.  I caught up on some writing, Christy and I went to Six Flags one evening, and we hung out at the pool a little.

To cap it off last night, we went outside with Megan and helped her learn to ride her bike.  Previously, she had only ridden unassisted for maybe 5 or 6 feet.  But it finally clicked with her last night and within an hour of being out there, she was doing laps around the street, able to start and stop on her own.  It made me so proud to see the look of accomplishment on her face!

I’m back to work today, though.  Oh, well…  At least I’ll be home soon.