Woot is running a great deal ($150) for an Asus 900. Not very powerful and runs Linux, but I would be very tempted if I thought I had a prayer of convincing Clancy that what we needed was another portable computing device.

With The Econoholic having chosen to go get himself married and unwired and unplugged and unblogging, posting on his blog slowed to a crawl. As such, I offered Sheila Tone the opportunity to start posting here and she has accepted. So starting next week, you will start to see some posts with a new authorname. So before you start wondering why Trumwill is married to some dude or talking about his kids, be sure to check the author’s name.

A lot of my friends are having kids and of course they talk about them a lot on Facebook. I think I am so used to pseudonyms – particularly when it comes to kids of bloggers who themselves are not pseudonymous – that it’s taken a few weeks to sink in that the three-steps-beyond-yuppie name referred to on Facebook is their actual name. Oh, dear…

I decided earlier this year that I am getting my parents wireless Internet for Christmas. Rather, I am giving them a wireless router and a laptop with which to use it. The laptop is a cheap one that I bought off eBay. I plan to be very clear about that when I give it to them. It’s a “starter laptop” to see if they end up using the wireless. If they do, then Dad can go out and buy a better one. Meanwhile, they’ll have a functional one.

It’s a risky gift because it’s not something that my parents have asked for and it’s not cheap by Truman gift-giving standards. Further, it’s one of those gifts that in order to really be worthwhile may require them spending as much (or more) money than I did. Now, the main reason I am getting the laptop is to sidestep the latter part. I don’t want to give them a wireless router and say “Okay, now go out and spend $500 to see this work!” But I can’t afford to spend $500 on the chance that they will like it. So instead I spent $200 on something that should suffice. Impossible to tell for sure because Mom’s computers have a tendency to slow down to a creeping halt for reasons I have not been able to put my finger on.

Anyway, so Clancy and I both brought our laptops to Shell Beach. The condos come with Internet and it’s good to stay connected. Dad commented, as I unfolded the laptop for the first time, about how he doesn’t like laptops. He doesn’t like the eraserhead or trackpad. He would all-around prefer to be at a desk. Of course, as he says this I get that sinking feeling that I am going to have to go back to the drawing board for Christmas. I hope beyond hope that as he uses my laptop over the week that he will at least get to see some of the convenience of a laptop and WiFi.

He did. A little too well, I’m afraid. It became extremely helpful to have Internet access on the trip to the point of nigh-indispensibility. About midweek he said that maybe he should give laptops a chance. Then, by the end of the week, he said that if Clancy and I ever decline to bring our laptops he may need to buy one just for Shell Beach.

So I’m crossing my fingers and hoping that he was just thinking aloud. Because he and I share in common a trait. Once we decide we’re going to do something, we do it immediately. He’s not likely to put off buying the thing until next summer. If he wants one for next summer, he’ll buy it next month. Sort of like how I bought his Christmas gift in March. So I’ll have to see if there’s anything I can do to talk him out of buying a laptop.

Of course, if he does end up getting a laptop, that must means that I will have another one hanging around the house. It’s a long story, but we have quite a few now. There is the one that Clancy had before we got married. It’s functional, if not useful. There’s the one I had at the time which broke down about a year ago. Each were replaced by laptops that we’re using now. Then when I bought Dad’s, I happened to win two bids at the same time and got two more laptops. Then, by shuffling some parts around, I got the laptop that died a year ago working again.

So between the two of us we have five laptops. Not counting Dad’s. It wouldn’t kill me to have a sixth. Clancy might, though.

Listening to Grey’s Anatomy while I work. The current plotline is that a previously straight character has begun to wonder if she is a lesbian (or, more likely bisexual), particularly in relation to another character that she’s close to.

I don’t really like Suzie-questions-her-sexuality for a number of reasons. First, because it’s just not interesting to me. For some reason, these plotlines always come across as overly transparent. There typically is no natural evolution for it. It’s like they flipped a gay-plot coin that came up “Yes!’ and then threw a dart onto a dartboard to decide which to assign it to. Actually, that latter part isn’t true; I will get to that in a minute. But the character either turns out to be gay or not and it typically doesn’t even matter because the character is on their way out anyway.

What I said before about the dart board, that’s not true because they generally choose characters that they can’t find other ways to make interesting. Either the character was brought in as eye-candy and little character development had occurred or the character was bought in by happenstance and the writers ran out of material. In the case of Grey’s Anatomy, it’s the latter. And of course because these characters are atypical (in their own way), I particularly liked them over the ones that they decided “Hey, we’re going to make this cute-quirky-insecure girl and this other ambitious-cold girl and the character gets cast a particular way. In short, these two characters were my favorite female ones on the show. It’s not even close. So naturally one is questioning her sexuality vis-a-vis the other (who seems non-committal on her sexuality).

I wonder if that’s the main reason that I don’t like Lesbian plots. They so frequently involve my favorite characters. I like the characters that don’t stand out in a typecast way. I like a certain take-chargedness and emotional ruggedness that writers may often look at and say “Hey, she would make a good lesbian). I like outcast characters and lesbianism is always a good excuse for otherness or emotional standoffishness. And I like odballs I think harkening back to the days when I thought anybody that wasn’t an oddball wouldn’t have anything to do with me (something I have come to call “The Luna Lovegood Appeal”)

Then again, this sort of transcends cop-out TV show writing. More than a couple of celebrities I’ve taken a liking to in a vaguely-attraction-related-way and turned out to be lesbians (and linked). I had a very early crush on Ellen DeGeneres from her days on “Open House” and was immediately taken by Melissa Etheridge. And don’t get me started on the magnificent Sara Gilbert. So maybe I can’t fault the writers at all. Maybe I’m just a wrong-gendered lesbian.

As readers of Hit Coffee know, I toy around with Linux from time to time. I keep running into walls that prevent me from making the transition that I long to make, but I keep hoping that the next version of Linux that comes out will be the one that lets me cross that particular bridge. And one of these days, Lucy will not pull the football out from under me…

I think that Microsoft’s monopoly over the OS market was, once upon a time, a very useful thing. I’ll get into this more later, but for consumer computers to really take off, people needed to have a standard. It would have taken things in the United States considerably longer to develop of there were three or four OSes that software developers had to port to.

However, now that the progress has been made, I have come to see Microsoft’s domination of the market as being somewhat counterproductive. I would prefer they receive some real competition to encourage them to actually make a better OS. I was quite happy at the shellacking they got with Vista. Seven is supposed to be better, but they’ve been dropping the ball for so long we’re grading on a curve.

So I’m not the biggest fan of Microsoft or of Windows. Though I use their product, I want to be a Linux user. I doubt I ever will be, but I remain ever hopeful.

But while I don’t necessarily like being a Windows person and would like to but can’t be a Linux person, one thing I will never be is an Apple person.

I think that the so-called “Apple Tax” is overblown if not non-existent when you compare like computers. Offering a better, more expensive product does not a tax make. I also do not believe that most Apple users purchase Apple’s products just to be cool. I’ve heard too many testimonials from people whose opinions I respect about the superiority of their product. Not enough to believe that it’s absolutely superior, but enough to believe that it is that way in the eyes of many.

Though I’ve never used one, I am more inclined than not to believe that the iPhone is the best device in its market. That they were able to enter the market and just dominate the US contingent of it so quickly, making non-Mac users fall in love with it along the way, impresses me a great deal. Though I will not get an iPhone, that doesn’t stop me from being very impressed by it.

And because of this, as well as a superior marketing aparatus, they’re had enormous crossover success into people that are not generally Apple users. They’re coming to dominate the mobile market the same way that Microsoft does the desktop market.

And the thought horrifies me.

I don’t just consider it a good thing that Microsoft won the OS wars of the 90s because somebody had to win. I definitely don’t consider it a good thing because they had the best OS (I don’t believe they did). I am glad that they won because they were the ones that were not hardware-specific. The Mac OS of the time had to be run on Apple or licensed clones. Amiga Workbench had to be run on Amiga computers or licensed clones. OS/2 wasn’t hardware specific as far as I know, but it was owned by IBM and were not as independent as Microsoft.

Whatever Microsoft’s sins as far as anti-competitiveness, the fact that they were not a desktop manufacturer and did not have a dog in that hunt was a real boon to computer users.

But mostly, when it comes to a desire to control the user, Microsft has nothing on Apple. Apple’s insistence on controlling the hardware may lead to a better user experience (less driver issues, for one thing), but it also limits user flexibility when it comes to swapping out parts and building your own machine. And it allows them to do things like run up prices with more expensive hardware. They don’t have to make a cheap Mac cause they know that nobody else is. They can have the customers they want and only the customers they want.

In the Mobile OS market, things are generally more restrictive by necessity. It’s harder to just install an OS and some drivers the same way that you can for a computer. So different devices are meant for different OSes. Arrangements differ in the mobile OS world, where on one hand you have open-source options like Symbian and Android, in the middle you have Windows Mobile which is closed-source but comes on a wide variety of devices, and then you have Apple, who only release the OS on their own product.

That itself wouldn’t be so much of a problem (there was only one Android device for a while), but Apple has such a top-down, integrated approach that they insist on retaining a lot of control over, well, everything. They decide who your cell provider can be. They decide what applications you can install. If Microsoft were to declare that they’re just not going to allow the installation of certain software (for whatever reasons they decide), it would be considered exhibit-A in what is wrong with Microsoft and yet another example of their abuse of power.

For too long, Apple users have given Apple the benefit of the doubt. Any and all cellular problems are attributed to AT&T to the point that the only people I hear complaining about AT&T are iPhone users. Nobody held a gun to Apple’s head and forced them to sign an exclusive deal with AT&T. If AT&T didn’t fulfill its end of the bargain, then Apple has wilfully chose to do little or nothing about it. There is the assumption of some that Apple only puts limits on users as far as hardware devices and software installation so that they can guarantee a better product and superior user experience. Sometimes that’s what they’re doing, but sometimes it’s not.

The thing about Apple is that it is a corporation. It exists to make money. Sometimes this means doing so by providing an outstanding product or service. Sometimes it means doing something at the user’s expense. But at the end of the day, Apple is not a benevolent entity. Neither is Microsoft, of course, but at least Microsoft users don’t pretend otherwise.

So below are some GoogleEarth images of various places that I’ve been. It was kind of fun to compile, though a big time-consuming. Some of the pictures may not be up terribly long. The images they had for Deseret were really bad. Which is odd because I don’t think that they used to be that bad. Anyway, if you’re interested, click below: (more…)

I hate the feature on “secure” websites where you have to answer some question about yourself to get in. The reliability of this method is somewhat in doubt. I could, for instance, answer just about any question about my wife, my best friend, and a handful of other people off the top of my head. I could look up or find out what I don’t know. But that’s not the problem.

The problem is that I never actually know the answer to any of the questions! Almost every question they ask is complicated by some factor or another.

What was my first pet’s name? Well, it depends. Are we counting the fish or are we talking about real pets. All of our fish were named Fred and as they kept dying they had numbers appended to them. Fred Four was the first one I think was “mine”, though I treated Freds one through three as mine, too. And though we called him Fred Four (or “Fred 4”, we also called him Fred the Fourth or Fred the 4th or Fred, IV. So how would I have spelled it when I first asked the question? Then there was Roscoe, our dog, who was the first real pet. So the answer to that question depends on what I’m thinking when you ask it. This one is the second easiest, though, since I seem to gravitate towards Roscoe the one and only.

What is my mother’s middle name? I am actually only half-sure of the answer, legally speaking. Her birth name was Susan Carroll Hertzog. But the “t” is never pronounced and I forget that it’s even there. Further, she grew up going by Carroll and I think that when she got married she dropped Susan, but she still uses the name Susan Carroll Truman, Carroll Hertzog Truman, and Susan Carroll Hertzog Truman. I prefer it when they ask what her maiden name is, which I guess they don’t do more often since the concept of married and maiden names is less common than it once was. Though even then, I have to ask myself “Did I remember to put the “t” in there?”

Where were you born? There are a number of variations to this question, all of which are beset with problems. Assuming that we’re not going to say “a hospital” (though that couple be the simplest answer… though did I put the “a ” in there or not? If they ask what hospital, did I put the name of the hospital that it had at the time or the one that it has now? (It’s a well-known hospital). And spelling the name of the town? Forget about it. Was it “-burg” or “-berg” or “-burgh”? I can look up the answer, of course, but did I look it up at the time I filled out the question? The answer is usually “yes” but it always causes temporary stress as I fear of being locked out of my own bank account. If they asked what county, that I could tell them… though did I put the word “County” at the end of it or not? Who knows what the heck I was thinking at the time.

What street were you raised on? This is the only one with a pretty clear answer. For me. But a lot of people moved around a lot when they were young. So this is the one area where I had a clear advantage over other people.

-{This post was brought to you by the forgotten letter “T”}-

Comcast has rolled out faster Internet speeds (in one market) and they actually didn’t raise rates to do it! The people responded by… downgrading their service to save a buck. There has been some anger directed towards Comcast and others that they have failed to upgrade their networks. Well, in some markets at least (including my current market), they actually have been working to trot out faster services.

Part of me thinks it somewhat tragic that they (apparently) aren’t being rewarded for their efforts. The other part of me questions how much of this is their own doing. As ridiculously generous as their 250GB cap is, I can’t help but wonder if they’re making some people afraid to upgrade too fast. When I heard about the Zaulem Sound’s impending upgrade, I commented that this will allow people to reach their cap all that much sooner! A slight exaggeration since a 250GB cap is still out of reach for most people, but upgrading at least provides the illusion of yet another thing to worry about if they want to upgrade.

That brings me to one of the problems I had with the caps in the first place. Cell phone usage exploded right about the time people were getting enough minutes that they didn’t have to count minutes. Back before that point, people didn’t want to pay a monthly fee and then have to worry about going over and paying a substantial per-minute fee. The limits still exist, but it’s more than most people use. Of course, Comcast’s limits are also over what most people use, but people (including tech people like me) really don’t know how much bandwidth we use. Plus, the penalty for going over on Comcast isn’t paying extra, it’s losing service.

Of course, if Comcast (and other providers) are losing money on a certain class of customer, they have the right to establish whatever limits they see fit so long as they are transparent about it. I can’t help but wonder, however, if a better tactic would be to try to get these people to simply start paying more. The kinds of people that swap a lot of data are also the kinds of people that would consider signing up for Comcast’s Ultra and Extreme Plans. Yes, giving these people faster access could result in them swapping more files, but I’d have to think that there is a natural limit. And I think that imposing these limits and essentially telling them that their patronage is not welcome is a good way to make people wary about paying for faster access.

If subscribers both on the lightest and heaviest plans are similarly limited to 250GB, there is at least the perception that there is limited benefit in upgrading. That perception isn’t entirely rational since few users will even come close to reaching 205GB, but… what value is there in it? You can’t download more. There is still no guarantee that the connection will be faster when you need it to be (ie you’re still at the mercy of overall network speeds). Your connection won’t necessarily be any more reliable. The best advantage to higher caps are for people that intend to download large amounts of data. And those people aren’t welcome.

Time Warner, on the other hand, continues to pursue tiered pricing based on bandwidth. I still see the same problem here as with the old cell phones. You arguably want people to become more rather than less reliant on your product. That’s less likely to happen if people are having to monitor their usage closely. Time-Warner isn’t cutting off high-end users like Comcast, but they’re placing the usage on the tiers absurdly low.

Also worth mentioning, of course, are that both Comcast and Time-Warner are firstly cable companies and both have reasons to be concerned about streaming video cutting into their business. So if people become more broadband-reliant they might gain in one area but lose in another. The pool of potential customers in the US is also dwindling as so many have already made the transition. So if they’re going to be content to lose business as cable providers for the Internet, they’re going to have to make their money by either (a) focusing on the most profitable customers or (b) find ways to get more enthusiastic customers to be willing to pay for more.

Having made a run at Facebook and Twitter, thus far Twitter has been something of a bust but Facebook has taken off like gangbusters. I can see why Mitch and Clancy took such a liking to it. Most of the people that came to mind that I wanted to add were handily available from my email contact list or as a friend of a friend. Those that weren’t (ex-girlfriend Julie, ex-roommates Dennis and Karl) don’t appear to be on the site at all. There was one other person that I was relatively sure would have a presence there that hadn’t popped up yet. It was, in fact, someone I’ve been trying to track down for a couple years now: Tracey Roberts.

Tracey is not someone that I’ve talked about a whole lot, but she played a pretty integral part of my life. Most particularly my romantic life. The first girl (of two) that ever destroyed me. I’ve been wanting to contact her for quite some time now. I’ve scanned through DMV records and googling, but all of this is made more complicated by the fact that her real name isn’t Tracey Roberts but is in fact one of the most common female names in existence within my generation. Googling her name is hopeless. Even trying to put in relevant details about her. All I’ve found through the DMV, voter registration, and zabasearch is her parents address.

So my assumption is that’s probably where she is. When I left Delosa six or so years ago, she lived with her folks. She was talking of moving to Canada with some guy that she met on the Internet. I would be surprised if that came to fruition, though it would explain what I’ve found (or been unable to find) if that’s the case.

Facebook, though, had apparently given me a lead to go on. The site lets you look for people based on not only on name, but also by alma mater. So I stuck in her name and Delosa Western University, the college I associate her with. Numerous people came up. The second looked promising. I took a closer look at the picture and the resemblance was striking. Was it her? I wasn’t sure. Facebook Tracey lived in Charlton, Tennassee. A lot of people move back and forth between Charlton and Colosse, so that wouldn’t be a big surprise, though I figured that if she left Colosse she would be leaving the south. She went to the appropriate university. Same color hair and eyes, though neither of those are uncommon (my wife has them). But something in her smile seemed very familiar. The more I looked at it, the more sure it seemed that I had finally found her. So I shot her an email: “Is this the same former Tracey Roberts of Camelot, Roosevelt High School, DWU, and UDC?”

I wasn’t sure if she would reply or what I would even say if she did. The main reason I was trying to track her down was to apologize. I won’t get precisely into the details of what I have to apologize for, but of the relatively short list of people I mistreated in my life, she is at the the top of it. She is one of only two people that I feel the need to go out of my way to say that I’m sorry. She hurt me badly and to say that I did not respond well was an understatement. I will probably get around to telling the story at some point, but maybe not. I wrote her a long letter a couple years back, but unfortunately it was on a thumb drive that got wiped and I haven’t had the time or energy to write it again. I was planning on writing it, sending it to her parents and asking them to forward it to her wherever she was. The main reason that I hadn’t done so was that I didn’t have a letter ready. And as of writing her the message on Facebook, I still don’t. But I needed to know if I needed to drop everything and write one. So I wanted in anticipation for Facebook Tracey’s confirmation.

Instead, I got a two word message back “No, sorry”.

I looked at the picture and I was dumbfounded. The more I had looked at it previously, the more sure I was that it was her. But I also wanted it to be her. If it was her, she had finally left Colosse as she had long wanted to do. If it was her, she’d lost a little bit of weight (something she was very self-conscious about). If it was her, she was married. If it was her, she had an adorable little girl. If it was her, she had finally escaped the darkness of her previous life and found the happiness that I’d formerly sneeringly (but more recently earnestly) wished upon her.

I’m not convinced that it isn’t her. The physical similarities, regardless of the picture, are too great for me to dismiss it. I’d honestly expected her to be less enthusiastic about my re-inserting myself in her life. I thought that I might not get a reply at all. Doesn’t seem like her to outright lie, though. And the timeline of the move to Charlton seem wrong somehow. I would like to know for sure if it isn’t her so that I can keep on looking. And I would like to know if it is her and if she genuinely doesn’t want to hear from me (or her old life) anymore.

As much as I would like to say my peace, I would respect those wishes. It’s the least I can do.