Charter

The other day I got a call from an unfriendly Charter "security specialist" that was trying to inform me my bandwidth was being stolen. Evidently in the last month I had used 10x their unadvertised limit for my internet service. I told them that there was no way that someone else was using my bandwidth but that it was likely me from online backups, watching HD movies and the like. I told them I didn't know about any limits and they pointed me to some fine print in their "Acceptable Use Policy" which had been updated long after I first signed up for internet with them. When you sign up for plans or switch plans they never mention the limit, in fact you have to go looking for this policy to find it as its never sent to you or mentioned during sign up. Don't believe me? Go look at their plans on the site. The plans mention the speeds but not the usage limits. Charter isn't alone in this practice. They told me if I continued that usage they'd cancel my service. I asked them what options I had and they went through the plans.

For their "Max" package, which has 25Mb download speed and 3Mb upload speed the limit is 250GB/month combined transfer limit. This plan costs $55/month. If you start downloading at the max speed you use up your entire monthly allocation in 22 hours. Yes, for $55, you get less than a day of that advertised speed. If you only upload then it will take you 7 days to use up your limit.

After talking to them they offered to sell me their "ultra" package. Thats 60Mb download, 5Mb upload and a combined limit of 500GB/month. For this price of $100/month you use up your allowed limit within 18 hours at full speed. If you only upload then it will take you 9 days to use up your limit.  What a deal.

The limits sound ok when you put them in terms of HD movis.  HD movies (according to the charter rep) are 8GB in size, and SD movies are 2GB. So I could watch 31HD movies a month with the "max" plan. But when you work in online backup then things go crazy. They suggested rather than watching HD movies I should watch SD on my HDTV and to try to limit my use of the HBO Go that they have been advertising since that uses bandwidth too. And that online backup program (Jungledisk, Carbonite, Mozy, etc) should be turned off because my $64 1TB drive will take too much bandwidth to back up online.

In other words, they advertise great speeds but you can't really use what they sell you.

Since they're a monopoly and there are literally no other providers where I live, I ended up switching to Charter Business. There for $129/month I get 25Mb download 3Mb up but there are no limits. So I can actually use every bit of the speed i've been sold for the entire month and actually do the things they advertise that you can use your internet for. This industry needs change.

Is your cell phone the mark of the beast?

Watching my 12 year old daughter exchange over 10,000 text messages a month:

I started thinking about the role of the cell phone in our culture. Its how we communicate. Whether its the old phone call approach (look at her minutes used though), or TXT messages, facebook, twitter etc its always with us. Whether or not we have GPS features enabled on the phone the phone can be triangulated by the cell phone towers which is a feature companies like Apple and others have used for better maps/GPS/navigation support. So you can be tracked unless you turn it off. 

In the last year or so an increasing number of companies have begun working on the ability to make payments with your cell phone. You can already do this in a very limited manner at some places like Starbucks. There are speculations that Apple's upcoming iPhone 5 will have this ability (my bet is that it wont make the cut since its more like an iPhone 4gs than a true iPhone 5). Either way the day is coming. And from a commercial point of view it makes a ton of sense. Kids get cell phones LONG before they get credit cards. Turn that cell phone into a payment device and you've just created a whole new class of payers.

But, I have to ask, is the cell phone the mark of the beast? 

From the Christian Bible, Revelation 13:16-17:

The second beast forces all people—important and unimportant, rich and poor, free and slaves—to be marked on their right hands or on their foreheads, so that no one may buy or sell unless he has the mark, which is the beast's name or the number of its name.

Most people are right handed. They have this cell phone thing in their hand or attached to their head (bluetooth headsets etc). You may someday not be able to buy or sell without it and you can be identified at all times by it. 

Am I crazy? Either way where things are going is a bit frightening.

The way not to handle a mistake

So the other day I got an email from our state Representative, Jennifer Callahan and then 3 message recalls:

Callahan, Jennifer - Rep. (HOU) would like to recall the message, "Newsletter".

I wrote back that it seemed like they were having a rough time and wished them a better day. Their response:

Dear Rob:
I am terribly sorry for the messages on Friday.  Unfortunately, a young gentleman working in my office who is developmentally challenged made an error in sending out the original email entitled Newsletter.  I apologize for the inconvenient messages and recall attempts he subsequently made.  He tried to resolve the error on his own before asking for assistance.  You have my deepest apologies on his behalf.  In closing, I hope you are well and thank you for your patience and understanding. --Sincerely, Representative Callahan

Is it me or is blaming someone working for you, who may or may not be "developmentally challenged" the wrong way to handle this? It certainly didn't make me think better of our representative. Perhaps they thought mentioning that they had a "developmentally challenged" person working in their office would raise my opinion? Either way, if you hire people and they work for you, you have to take responsibility for their actions. Thats leadership.

How about:

Dear Rob:
I am terribly sorry for the messages on Friday.  

Sometimes less is more.

Work blog

For those (few!) that follow me ramblings here, I have some posts on our blog at work. You can catch them here: http://www.nasuni.com/news/nasuni-blog/. You'll see a lot of my interests (and pain) carry over from work to life. 

A guy I worked with early in my career said there was no work/life balance, it was all just life. Looking back I have to agree with him. You fit everything into the time you have and do the best with it. Its a constant juggle.

Been quiet, what have I been up to?

Hi everyone, i've been quiet over the last several months as work was crazy. I don't talk about work much except where it things from there relate to the Mac etc. But if you're interested, check out www.nasuni.com.

Needless to say, there's lots of Mac, Python, backups, storage and other fun things going on with a killer group of people.

Where'd I go?

Sorry folks, things got crazy all over. No, they're not less crazy yet, but there's a bit of light at the end of the tunnel. Its been fun though. Anyway, i'll try to catch up on some pending blog entries. Thanks for sticking with me!

I was at an airport recently for a delayed flight and on the laptop. The thing started cooking my lap. I looked and saw that spotlight was busy indexing my hard drive while I was on battery. This seems like a simple, "if on battery dont update spotlight" decision. Battery life is precious enough, to waste it for spotlight seems like a poor decision. Its a wonder some poor decisions like this last for so long in software.

Side track - The Mace

A side track from my ramblings on IT setup. Why is this blog called "The Mace's Musings"? What/Who is "The Mace"?

This goes back to high school in the days where the internet barely existed and computer bulletin board systems (BBS) were the gathering spots of the geeks like me. Basically they were computers with modems attached to phone lines that one person at a time could call from their computer to that BBS and post their comments/download stuff and log off for the next person. Some more advanced ones had multiple lines but that was pretty rare in the early days. Back then they were places to chat with people, but more often than not they were used to distribute "Warez" or software. For the most part, in those days, there wasnt much freeware/shareware and the bulk of software getting downloaded was commercial/stolen. Those were the days of 300 baud apple cat modems (with a later huge upgrade to 1200 baud) and software applications that fit on a floppy. Still downloads took forever and new file transfer protocols like xmodem and zmodem were being pushed to help speed things up and recover from broken connections etc. There was a huge culture around all of this and it was mostly an Apple II/Apple Cat world.

Anyway, I started with my Apple II and a modem and started dialing into the BBS's. Back then everyone used a handle so nobody knew who really was downloading the software etc. The handle was your bulletin board identity and people and groups like the Legion of Doom had them and became well known in the community. 

I was in my basement one day with a good friend and we both were getting started in the community and figured we needed handles. He was into comic books, especially "Thor" and picked Odin, a Nordic god associated with war. We both liked the war and fantasy games like Wizardry. My choice was a weapon, a mace, personified to The Mace. The choice was both due to the weapon(ness) of it as well as an indirect reference to my last name.

From there I used this new handle and visited many BBS's across the country and eventually ran my own, starting with a single one and eventually franchising out to multiple states and I became fairly well known for a while. I dropped off the grid when I turned 17 and decided to follow a more legal path in life. I heavily modified some base BBS software to give my own stuff its own unique feel and draw and this was the beginning of any real programming with a purpose for me.

So thats where The Mace came from. 

As an amusing aside, about 20 years after I picked "The Mace", I was chatting with someone who worked for me at work many states away from where I grew up and we were talking about the early days in computers. We eventually got around to BBS's and he found out I was "The Mace". He had frequented my system and knew who "The Mace" was. Small world.

Those formative years in remote connections, tunneling through AT&T's computers, hacking/crack systems, distributed work, and programming have shown their influence on me for the last 20 years. While i'm not proud of some of it, I wouldn't be who I am without it.

XM Radio

The concept, advertising free radio you can receive anywhere with high quality, was good. The execution has not been. In multiple cars by multiple providers i've seen poor XM radio reception. And when digital radio doesnt come in it goes out completely, not just fuzzy, but gone. This is on main roads (route 495) in Massachusetts so this isn't an edge case. Its not under a bridge, in a tunnel, its on open highway. 

Then look at stations like XM station 11 (Sirius 61), its full of advertising. Why am I paying to be delivered ads? Oh because SOME of the stations don't do ads. I see.

And now the ultimate insult, they're raising their prices. 

Don't get me wrong, XM has entertained me for my 2+ hour commute for the last few years, but when the 1 year subscription I paid for runs out in May i'm not renewing. While Pandora Radio finally caved in to ads at least its a free service. 

I'm thinking iPhone 3G with a audio out cable and Pandora and i've got my replacement for XM better tuned to what I want to hear. If I want ad-free I buy songs online at $1 each and play the playlist. At the rate I buy songs its cheaper than XM.

Another broken business model. 

Home phones and cell phones

Yet another underground wire failure on the phone line to the barn
made me look into a better solution for a phone line out there. My
barn is 600+ feet away from the house and there are lots of walls in
between. When we moved in there was a phone line buried going to the
barn which worked for a while. After a few years it shorted out. They
used basic inside phone cord to run it through some pipes in the
ground. When we split the electric service I had some real phone line
buried and that worked for 5 years but now its shorting out again. I
can go try to chase it down but its buried and i'm not digging up my
property again.

I researched the latest DECT 6.0 cordless phones but they still dont
have super range of the nature i'm looking for. Ultimately I decided
to add another cell phone to my wife's cell plan. I got a contractor
type phone (water/weather proof) for free and increased the bill by
$10/month and now we have a barn phone that works everywhere we could
need it and no range issues.

So now that I have 3 cell phones (myself, wife and barn) and a kid
soon to have her own, what am I paying $45/month for a home phone for?
I looked into that, and here are a few reasons:

1) 911 service - cell phone 911 calls don't pinpoint you or get quite
the same response time that home phones do.
2) Everyone knows our home number which is also considered our
business phone number. Its also easy to remember (yes we could port it
somewhere else)
3) If we take our cells away from the house and something happens are
we going to trust that the people left have a cell phone? There's now
one in the barn but perhaps not the house
4) Who knows how much that kid will talk on the phone once she
discovers it?

For now i'm keeping it although it seems kind of silly.

Cayman

Finally got around to putting my Cayman pictures online from earlier this year

Where have I been?

Sorry folks, life caught up on me. Currently im 30,000+ feet in the
air fighting a nasty stomach bug on my way home from CA again on my
MacBook Air. For the record, the battery life is fine for me for these
trips. Even in the office yesterday, I never charged it or plugged it
in and used it for notes, spreadsheets etc all day long (but not
constantly).

Just finished a book recommended by a friend, The Daemon by Leinad
Zeraus (an assumed name chosen for its hit raking in Google from what
i've heard). It was a great book and a good fit for my interests and
background (although a little more violent than I expected). If you're
a hacker type, computer gamer or just into the whole digital age, I
recommend it.

Anyway I have a backlog of a few things I want to comment on so
they'll be coming shortly.

p.s. for the record, crossing the country and back in 3 days with a
stomach bug that requires you to find a restroom every 2 hours is not
a pleasant experience. Someday i'll eat again.

Some background

Since i'm often commenting on Macs and iPhones I figured it may be time for some background.

Beware that this plus the next are long reading. If anyone is watching, get yourself a drink and a snack before starting to read this one...

My first exposure to a computer was the original Apple back in the late 70's in England. From there I owned various models of Apple II computers in the 80s and did a lot of hacking on them with BIOS changes and some programming. At work I used the Apple Lisa computer which was a $10,000 machine at the time and the large company I worked for had a grand total of 2 and didn't know what to do with them. They weren't useful for much at the time. When the original Mac 128 came out, I bought it and still own it. It has the signatures on the inside of the case from all the original development team which is very cool to me. I made several hardware and software modifications to it over time. Through my early career I owned macs (as well as a few other things like the Amiga), the last of which was a decked out Power Machintosh 6100.

In the mid-90's I worked at a company that provided Wintel based machines for home use for free (early days of the work at home concept & they also included frame relay connections). By that time my Power Mac was aging fast and Apple had a poor roadmap for the future. I jumped ship, sold the Power Mac for $4,000 and spent the next decade on WinTel.

About 10 years later my wife wanted a web browser type notebook to use around the house. By that time i'd had my fill of WinTel world and Apple had some shiny new machines out and that included the new OSX. I bought her a PowerBook G4 12" which is a wonderful machine. She still uses it daily (it now has Leopard on it). Its been heavily abused and still runs strong with never a hardware failure. 

I spent most of my career in the SunOS/Solaris/Linux world and eventually ended up at a startup where I needed more than a Unix desktop as I was doing more managerial things but still hands on. So I needed Office apps, but I needed/wanted a Unix environment. I stole my wifes Powerbook and used it until work eventually bought me a 15" Powerbook G4 and then later a 15" MacBook Pro Core 2 which is what i'm currently using at the office.

Home has expanded beyond the PowerBook G4 12" (wife's portable) to include an iMac G5 17" (kids room), an iMac Core 2 Duo 20" (wife's office) and then my current pride-and-joy the dual processor, 8 core, Apple MacPro that I currently have 3.5TB of storage atttached to and 6GB of memory. Its the center of my "digital life."

Just about every machine i've ever owned has been taken apart in some way with non-supported memory upgrades, to disk upgrades (the 12" Powerbook was fun to take apart for a disk upgrade) to ROM upgrades. So far all i've done with the MacPro is add memory and disk but give it time...

Along the way I bought parts of old iPods off eBay and put one together (I wasn't sold enough on the need for music in my life to pay the current price of them) and eventually ended up buying several models, the last of which was the 5th generation iPod Video, 60GB.  I replaced various cards and drives in the iPods for myself and then later friends and family. 

I used various normal cell phones like the Razr and PDAs like the Sony Clie but always hated carrying multiple devices around. I hacked the Mac/Razr environment so I could bluetooth sync my contacts but could never get the calendar to go and managed to fry my Razr trying. I even resorted to trying the dreaded Blackberry 7000 series (aka Crack-berry) but I wasn't a huge fan of the interface and the thing that drove me away is that Blackberry has allowed companies to lock out features of the phone when you register the device with the company. Most companies i've worked for require me to buy the phone, so I think if I pay for the phone I should decide what can and cannot go on it (and yes, I get the security concerns driving the corporate behavior).

And then this year, the iPhone came out (waited in line for 2 hours for mine). So now I have my calendar, contacts and ipod and phone in one place. Then the mission became to have my whole life, work + home on the iPhone and thus the recent rash of blog entries (and frustration). And yes, like the other devices in my life, I hacked the iPhone with 3rd party apps, SSH access etc until Apple made that more painful and now with a SDK coming out and 1.1.3 coming out soon I'm trying to be patient.

So, with all that background you'll now know a bit of where i'm coming from on with my posts and focus on the Apple products. The last bit of the puzzle is that I work as an executive in the high tech industry with software and hardware (more software than hardware). Quality, performance, scalability, security and all those things are daily challenges that I think about at work and home. Having a horrible commute gives me lots of time to ponder content for these strange posts.

So if you're still with me, thanks for reading all this. If not, for some reason I felt I needed to brain dump (latent backup needs??) so there you go. Its way past my bed time, and perhaps yours too. 

'til next time.

Everyone needs to learn to swim sometime

a Mac Fan

In case you haven't guessed yet, i'm a Mac fan. I started using Apples back in 1980 with the original Apple II. My first view of a Mac was a Lisa when I worked at American Express Bank. I bought an original Mac 128 when they came out (still have it, signatures inside the case and all), and got a PowerMac when they came out around 1989 or so. Later on in my career I went over to the dark side when work started giving me free PC's at home. It saved on upgrades for many years and the Mac really wasnt a business machine to me at that point. After a dark 10 years I finally made it back to the Mac when my Unix/Linux work merged with my Management needs for Office apps. OSX was the perfect answer and i'm now using a work-provided PowerBook G4 15" which I love (although I like the format/size of my wifes PB G4 12" better...). One machine for home and work. Everything from playing World of Warcraft (Level 59 dwarf Paladin) to MS Office Apps, Virtual PC, Eclipse Java development etc.

Finally broke down

Ok, so I finally broke down and started a blog. Who knows if i'll stick with it.

Next steps, find a client that works well. Key features are local performance/access, OSX access (!), and offline support