Spungen has written a post inspired by a comment that I made on Half Sigma about community colleges that left her with the impression that I didn’t think that I would be bothered by being surrounded by people of lower economic and social classes.

One of the constant themes of Spungen’s posts regarding money and class is that the worst parts about not having money is the inability to filter out lower-class people the way that they are automatically filtered out when you grow up in an environment with money and with the seeming impenetrability of the upper classes who are rather difficult to meet when you didn’t have the opportunity to go to the same schools that they did or work the same jobs that they do.

The second aspect of that, the impenetrability of the upper classes, is something that some people can relate to even if they come from more money than Spungen did. When a lot of us get out of college we are suddenly no longer surrounded by peers. One of my earliest jobs outside of college was in an office place where I was the only person under 35 working in the office throughout most of my tenure and I was the only unmarried person ineligible for AARP. Contrast that to my job at Falstaff in Deseret where I was surrounded by young and mostly unmarried people* and had one of the best social atmospheres I’d ever had at any job before or since.

Of course, that’s definitely not the same thing as Spungen’s complaint because I still had my college friends and roommates to lean on. I also had friends in the area dating back to high school. If I’d been more on-the-ball, I could have utilized those friends to make more. The issue for Spungen is that those opportunities were not available to her in the first place. She’d been at that point where I was only temporarily (at a couple jobs in Colosse) for most of her life. Plus, I had the first part. When I was working at Wildcat, I could go out and hang out at the warehouse if I wanted to or I could stay in. It was completely my call. But it at least gives me an idea of what she means and a place to start from when contemplating it.

In the course of the conversation that followed from Spungen’s post, Larry pointed out that the Internet changes this somewhat. Now there’s a way to meet people outside work and geographical boundaries.

I think that there’s an important distinction to make, though, between friendships that start on the Internet and move offline and those that start and end by way of the Internet. Those friendships that have always existed independent of geography rarely last as long as those friendships that you take offline. Part of it is that friendship bonds occur, in part, through common experiences. Having a common background helps, but it seems to me that friendships that occur without something concrete tend to dissipate over time once whatever bond you do have loosens. One of you gets out of the routine of visiting a particular message board or stops collecting whatever collectables you originally started talking about, your paths diverge even if your online friendship once went beyond that to a more personal level.

Where I would expect the Internet to be most useful are ones that may have started online, but eventually moved offline. That requires, among other things, geography. Once a friendship moves offline, it becomes like any other. The fact that you met via computers and cables becomes a biographical detail.

As most of you know, when I was in my late teens I joined a BBS that allowed me to talk to others through a computer. I made a lot of friends on Camelot BBS. I met a lot of those people offline at parties and whatnot. Some I became friends with independent of Camelot. Whether we became friends offline or not share no more than a little corrollation with how close we were online. It would start because we both happened to be free on the same weekend, they needed a ride somewhere, or something like that. More on that in a sec. Yet it’s those friendships that endured. It was through those people that I found my social networks. Those are the people that came to my wedding and I theirs. Those are the people that I talk about here in the present tense. Hubert, Kyle, and Tony were never my best friends on Camelot, but they’re among my best friends now.

That’s one of the downsides of the Internet compared to Camelot. Since calls were clearly marked long and shortdistance in the age before cell phones and VoIP, everybody that called was in the same town. When I was hanging out on the Internet as a single guy, I had to work to filter out-of-towners when it came to meeting girls or guys to boost my social life. In that sense, something like a BBS wouldn’t have helped Spungen back in her day because there was probably not a big BBSing scene where she’s from. Young people growing up there now can make friends all across the country, but not in ways that noticeably improve their social life.

Geography matters a great deal in these things. I remember my freshman year in college when Hubert and I were living in Lecter Hall and most of his friends were in Greenwood Hall. Despite the fact that they were his friends, they kept doing things without him. Not because they were trying to exclude him (he had not yet become nearly intolerable), but because they’d all be hanging around the dorm and they’d decide to do something spontaneously and he though he was a building away he was nonetheless excluded by default because he didn’t happen to be right there. On the other hand, I became friends with Web, Karl, John Fustle, and various other people at first because they were around a lot. They were sort of friends by osmosis. Some of those friendships endured, like Web and Hubert, but others have since become frequent acquaintances. Even with the latter people, though, the point is that we all had ample opportunity to get to know one another due primarily to proximity.

That’s one of the hardest parts for people that aren’t in proximity to people that they’re a good match for. Spungen was born with the sharp, inquisitive, and ambitious mind that was suited for the sort of nice suburb that she lives in now. She just didn’t grow up there and never had the kind of money to have the sort of proximity that she needed until much later in life. The Internet or BBSes could have helped her find those people that did live near her that shared her interests, but only to the extent that those people existed and that they had transportation to form their own network outside their school, as I did with my Camelot friends, or the opportunity to join an existing network.

Of course, even with that, she would still have the Hubert Problem. And she would have the problem that I had in junior high and at other select portions of my life, where she is stuck around people not of her own choosing that often don’t treat her (or one another) well and aren’t generally compatible even if they do. So while it would alleviate the overall problem, it certainly wouldn’t fix it even in the best of circumstances.

This all leaves me a little concerned for the future children that Clancy and I will have. We will be living in a small town. Most small towns are generally speaking undereducated and a lot of them contain a fair amount of poverty. Poverty won’t be a problem in the Truman household, but that may not matter as much as I would like. Clancy once did a brief stint in a small town in the rural northwest.

One of the things that stood out to me when I visited her there was how unusually “middle class” the town was for such a small place unconnected with any particular large places. There was a two-year college there, but it wasn’t a college town. Clancy and I have been looking closer at college towns than other places of comparable size so that, as I put it, I wouldn’t be the only person on the school board voting to teach evolution in science class. Keeping all of the above in mind, finding a town with a substantial educated population takes on more importance because of the effects that it might have on our kids.

* – Yes, I was married at the time, but I was a residency widower. So while I wasn’t in the dating market, I still needed friends moreso than the average married guy does. And they couldn’t be “couples” friends because the other part of my couple was always working.

Will posits the trouble of being middle management, beholden to company superiors and policy and yet also expected to interface with lower level employees and try to work out their concerns to keep the office running smoothly.

The contents of this post also tangentially relate to the Department I Don’t Work For.

I’m in a semi-middle management (in that I can reassign work to “level 1” and that more and more of my job responsibility is not taking care of every little thing myself, but seeing that whoever I assigned it to gets it done while I work on the Big Things) role now, and moving up shortly to what I will consider a fully middle-management position. My responsibilities have changed from “grunt work” to the occasional small thing (when we’re short staffed) with the rest of my time occupied by keeping abreast of policy issues, changes being done from above, and the ongoing changes in technology so that when people under my pay grade get confused, I can give them the info/training necessary to get their jobs done.

Part of this role, given that it’s at Southern Tech University, involves interfacing with the various faculty/staff and trying to meet their “needs” (or desires) while staying within policy. Only, since it is a government institution, we have the following policies we have to keep abreast of:
– Federal regulations (safety, security, privacy)
– State regulations (safety, security, privacy, information retention)
– Systemwide regulations
– College-level regulations
– Our own department mandate (we have a very specific charter on what we are allowed to spend money on, tied directly to the fact that it has to be either for student use or for educational in-classroom use, and other departments are always trying to find “loopholes” to get into our money).

Where this gets even hairier is that we are in the unenviable position of trying to enforce these regulations on tenured faculty. The thing to remember about tenured faculty is that they are (a) at least 80% completely technologically inept and (b) used to constantly getting their way from students and grad assistants, and even from the College itself if they happen to bring in a particularly large grant and can threaten to take it to another institution.

For many of our discussions, we are (for better or worse) stuck in between a fast-moving object (the faculty) and an immovable object (the various regulations). Faculty that are used to getting the rules ‘bent’ for them on things like the spending of grant money or the deadlines for various applications come to us wanting things changed “just for them.” Things like password reset deadlines or complexity requirements, alterations to the email server so that their Blackberry can function (Blackberry’s server-side software, alas, tries to auto-install a rather insecure MS-SQL setup and eats up a ton of resources), or more unusual requests that often involve a fundamental inability of the faculty member to understand the limitations of technology. Quite often, we are stuck in a situation where we are the bearer of bad news (“I’m sorry, but what you are asking for cannot be done under Regulation X.Y.Z”) or else we are caught between someone asking for something and forced to tell them no on the grounds that (a) it is technologically impossible, (b) it is cost-prohibitive, or (c) it would require the purchase of X and it does not fit within our purview to make that purchase for the intended use.

Some days, they even come back and try to make threats and trouble with us for bringing the response back about regulations.

I doubt most middle-management deals with that; I imagine that most of the time “or I quit” is about the extent of the major threat, unless employees have access to sensitive information or their loss would seriously impact a project in some way. I don’t know that it the IT-side question 100% matches the “middle management” question, but it is always interesting (and sometimes quite frustrating) being the go-between.

AT&T is getting into the act:

Starting in November, AT&T will limit downloads to 20 gigabytes per month for users of their slowest DSL service, at 768 kilobits per second. The limit increases with the speed of the plan, up to 150 gigabytes per month at the 10 megabits-per-second level.

To exceed the limits, subscribers would need to download constantly at maximum speeds for more than 42 hours, depending on the tier. In practice, use of e-mail and the Web wouldn’t take a subscriber anywhere near the limit, but streaming video services like the one Netflix Inc. (NFLX) offers could. For example, subscribers who get downloads of 3 megabits per second have a monthly cap of 60 gigabytes, which allows for the download of about 30 DVD-quality movies.

The limits will initially apply to new customers in the Reno area, AT&T said. Current users will be enrolled if they exceed 150 gigabytes in a month, regardless of their connection speed.

150 is worse than 250, of course. I am also not entirely positive of the market-wisdom when AT&T (at least in the markets I’ve lived in) has been trying to play catch-up. I have to think that cable providers have more flexibility since it remains the standard.

There is one thing that AT&T is definitely doing right that I wish Comcast would:

Customers will be able to track their usage on an AT&T Web site. The company will also contact people who reach 80 percent of their limit. After a grace period to get subscribers acquainted with the system, those who exceed their allotment will pay $1 per gigabyte, Coe said.

Bandwidth tracking and notification. I would be a lot less irked at Comcast if they offered this. I don’t foresee a scenario in which I would use more than 250GB, but I’ve already found myself curbing my usage in the off-chance that I approach the point where they cut me off. So while I’m not sure about AT&T’s plan on the whole, I can at least applaud their transparency.

-{Comcast Limits Bandwidth, 9/2/8}-
-{Bandwidth Limiting The Future?, 8/9/8}-
-{The Digital Devil’s Due, 1/25/8}-

Do any of y’all have access to free email accounts that aren’t free? By which I mean someone that you have a business relationship with (you buy email, domain hosting, web hosting, or Internet connectivity from them… so long as you are a paying customer) and they give you more email addresses than you can possibly use?

If so, could you spare me an email address?

I don’t need a large email box or anything like that. Just an address and the ability to forward.

Addendum: To expound a bit, this isn’t an email that I would be giving outfar and wide or anything like that. If you ever needed to reclaim it because you’re out of addresses, it wouldn’t cause me any great inconvenience. It’s half-tool, half-experiment.

I don’t know about you, but for the past year and a half or so I’ve been experiencing problems with YouTube and similar video suppliers. Actually, it’s a problem with Adobe Flash. It’ll play for about two seconds and then stop. No matter how many times you reload the image, it keeps happening. Even if you try to open up different videos. The only thing that fixes it is restarting the browser. Happened on all of my computers, so I knew it wasn’t an installation or hardware issue.

It was one of those pandrip things that I worked around for the longest time and just tolerated up until recently when for reasons I won’t get into I couldn’t just close and re-open my browser. Then I figured that there must be someone out there experiencing the same problem. Turns out a lot of people are. A whole lot of people. It seems that Adobe has been letting this crap go on for an absurdly long time. I looked at one solution after another trying to figure out how it could be fixed but it seemed that everyone conquered it a different way and then many reported that the problem returned anyway. Eventually I determined that it had something to do with Version 9 of the software. The problem is that if I tried to install v8 it wouldn’t let me. Holy cow was I greatly angered by this development.

So my only choice was to go up to Version 10 Beta. I don’t like Beta testing when I’m not being paid for it, so I resisted. Finally, after a couple days I said to myself “What’s the worst that could happen? It won’t work right? It doesn’t work right now and it hasn’t worked right in so long that I can’t remember when it did.”

So long story short, I upgraded to v10 and have had no problems either with the freezing or anything else. So if you’re experiencing that problem, I recommend an upgrade to 10.

I would totally be getting a drivers license and birth certificate and college degree under my Hit Coffee name and alma mater. I suppose it’d be a bit tough getting one for Cascadia, Estacado, Deseret, or Delosa, though…

Ever since I was sixteen, I’ve spent inordinate amounts of time online. It started with BBSes though I eventually graduated to the Internet. When online dating services were getting going, I tried them out extensively as did a lot of my friends. Despite this, not a single person in my circle married somebody that they met on an online dating service. Of The Big Four girls in my history, only one did I meet through any matching service and neither of us had on our profiles that we were looking for significant others. On its face, online dating seems to be the most logical way to pair off that there is. You (usually) get to see a picture and get to know a little bit about them before you meet. When you do meet, you’re both ostensibly have the same goal in mind. So why is it that despite all this, it so rarely seems to pan out?

A lot of people are under the impression that it’s because only screwed up people use dating services. Even back in the old day that simply wasn’t true. The selection of girls that I met from online dating services was actually not all that different from ones I would have met anyway. Others point to the gender disparity with men using the services in much higher numbers than women. It’s true that forces a lot more work on the guys part competing with other guys and ladies filtering through a substantial number of responses… but the thing is that even once you get past that point, it still seems never to actually work out. Why?

1. Pressure. After a series of disappointments, I set up a rule where I had to try to set up a meeting with someone before no more than a week or three emails had passed. The main reason for this was that if there’s too much build-up, the meeting is bound to disappoint. The better the pre-meeting goes, the rockier the net-to-life transition. The more you know about them before you meet, the harder the meeting is. The correlation was about linear. Expectations get raised beyond the realistic when things have gone well before the meeting. You have this vision of what they will be like and they won’t ever match it. Not always because the vision is unrealistic, even. Sometimes they’re not worse in person, they’re just different.
2. Mannerisms and presence. We are more than a profile-and-pic. We are more than we can write on a profile or in even in a blog. We are more than our picture. We are a hundred thousand little things that we do that have the potential to endear or agitate someone. There are so many little subtle things that affect how it is that someone comes across to us. We make all sorts of assumptions as to how they think they will be and then when they’re not that way at all we won’t even be able to easily explain why. “I… uhhh… expected more of a nightly way about her” was how I described one. Nightly? What the hell does that mean? I’m a pretty articulate guy and I still can’t entirely explain it without resorting to comparisons with other girls I know. Not even comparisons like “She’s more ______ than the last girl I dated” but more “She’s more like Girl A than Girl B even though her profile and actual personality is more like Girl B.”
3. Raised standards. I know that I did this and I think a lot of guys do and maybe girls, too. Oddly, I think that we raise our standards when in a situation expressly designed to meet somebody. Particularly when we have someone to compare this person to. As guys glide through profiles, we see a lot of attractive girls that are out of our league. We’re naturally drawn to contact them first. With the limited information you have, the picture becomes a lot more important. Here are all of these quite attractive girls (and as a guy, those are definitely the ones that you notice the most) and they’re looking for a guy! and you’re a guy!! So you set your sites higher. You try to present yourself as being more impressive than you are so that they might meet you. Then of course they’re disappointed. Meanwhile, had you met the same exact selection in the office place, you would more naturally have gravitated towards people of your own stature if only because they’re the ones that smile at you from behind the receptionist desk while the hot girl at the copy station doesn’t even know you’re alive. Generally speaking, you have a better assessment of “How likely is it that a girl that looks like that would pair with a guy like me.” Lastly, you also don’t have the 100,000 little mannerisms to endear you to them, so you go with what you know, which is the picture, which expresses mostly more conventional beauty.
4. Intellectualizing attraction. When you meet someone explicitly in order to pair off, you’re looking very deeply at this person from the start. You’re looking at every potential pitfall. Everything they want from life that is the slightest bit incompatible with what you want. You’re asking from the get-go, “Is this something that I want to devote time and energy into making this permanent?” I think in more natural pairings there is a lot more of a mystery about whether or not the other person is thinking in that context and how. With online dating, you’ve established a lot of that. You’re put in the position of deciding whether you want to fall for this person rather than simply doing so. It turns a lot of it into more of an intellectual exercise. I think a lot of people are more likely to find problems early on from an intellectual analysis than the emotional experience that unfolds when it’s entirely personal.

The thing that all four of these items have in common is that online dating (and personals of other sorts) create an unnatural environment for one of the most natural of instincts. It applies a lot of pressure to figure things out before you’re ready. It puts too much out there before you can process it. I mention above that only one of my Big Four were met online and that none of my friends married someone they met from online personals.

That is true, but it’s not the whole truth. Evangeline is the only one of the four that I got to know online, but the truth is that I fell in love with her across a room over a year prior. I just didn’t know that I had because I didn’t know who she was. As for the other three… the Internet played a roll in all of them. Clancy and I met through a friend I met on the net. Julie and I met through a job that I got by meeting a friend on a BBS. Tracey and I met simply on a BBS and got to know one another there. My friend Tony met his wife in AOL chatrooms. Even though meeting online carries some of the above risks — particularly if potential romantic interest is declared before you actually meet them or have spent any significant time with them — there is still more of an opportunity for things to unfold naturally.

When I was in early college I had to take a Defensive Driving course. At the beginning of the course, they had a little video where then-President Bill Clinton expressed the importance of driving safely. There was a woman in the audience that spent the entire three minutes of the movie groaning. Nothing was more important to her, apparently, than registering her disgust with the president while he was talking about something about as uncontroversial as you can get. The rest of us, on the other hand, were there because we wanted lower auto insurance rates. Politics wasn’t supposed to figure in.

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Free speech is one of the hallmarks of democracy. Further, it’s important that issues are discussed and candidates are adequately appraised. Even uncomfortable issues need to be discussed if for no other reason to know why people think the way they do. Also important is to clear up misperceptions about candidates, reveal their flaws and extol their virtues so that we as a people make the better decisions come election times. While I would say that the tones and rhetoric often used to discuss politics is counterproductive, it’s nonetheless important to have the conversations in the first place.

But there is a time and place for these conversations and a time and place to avoid them. For instance, I have various friends that I refuse to discuss politics because there is nothing to be gained by it. Some people that I agree with 75% of the time I can’t discuss anything with and some that I have 25% in common I can. I don’t want politics on sports news networks. Unless it’s an intrinsically political act, I don’t want it at music shows either. Even if I agree with what the dude is saying, I cringe for the guy in the audience that went there to hear a song and instead heard that the singer thinks that he voted for an idiot. I almost never discuss politics in the workplace. You get the idea.

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Once upon a time, I used to be a political blogger. I enjoyed it a great deal for a while, though as time passed I began to enjoy it less and less. Early on there were a lot of discussions about policies and even politicians and you could find reasonable people of every political stripe to talk to and even find common ground with or at least a better understanding where, precisely, you see things differently. Over time, though, those friends became opponents because we stopped trying to find common ground or a sense of understanding. Then they became enemies as we stopped believing that the other person was acting with honesty and good faith. By the time I closed shop, there wasn’t a single issue that I didn’t already know who was going to object to my view, what incendiary figures they would bring up to discredit my view, what anecdotes that proved their case they would find, and what sorts of selective facts they would use from selective Internet surfing between sites that were more sympathetic to their point of view.

Because of this experience, I decided that I did not want Hit Coffee to be a political blog even though I am just as opinionated as I’ve always been and just as interested in politics and policy. This creates a bit of a problem for me because I am constantly thinking about politics, tracking the latest polls, considering the latest policy proposals, and weighing the stances on all sorts of issues. But for the most part I bite my tongue. When I do write about politics I try to maintain as neutral a tone as possible and represent both sides even if clearly coming out on one side or the other. I avoid contentious debates over which there is no compromise and nobody’s mind is going to be changed. I also avoid issues like race where things have the ability to turn very nasty very quickly. I try to avoid talking about the candidates directly either to endorse them or to denounce them.

The main reason I do this is because I want people to be comfortable coming here whether they are Republicans, Democrats, Libertarians, or Independents. Or if they don’t care about politics at all. Politically contentious issues have the ability to suck the air of a room, so to speak. So politics would be a distraction towards the life issues and personal posts that I want to focus on. I don’t want to come home and think to myself “I wonder what political point I’m going to have to refute today…” as I did years ago and I don’t want a post about my immigrant neighbors to get hijacked into a conversation about immigration with broad stereotypes, selective statistics, accusations or racism, and so on.

Yesterday I wrote a post quoting Barack Obama about how he professes to have come by his faith and how he was initially suspicious of it. Maybe his entire account was a fictional creation to explain away an opportunistic conversion. Maybe it was the honest truth. I don’t really know and you don’t, either. Yet I think that there is a part of us that will always want to pin down the specifics in order to demonstrate that Obama is an honorable or dishonorable man, depending on what our politics are compared to his. I quoted the passage, though, as a thought about faith. Even if it was purely fictitious, it spoke to me and so I shared it as well as how it resonated with me. It took less than three comments before it was a referendum on Obama.

I have in the past put up pre-emptive notices on where I don’t want the comment thread of a post to go. People seem disinclined to say anything when I do so I think because nobody wants what they say to be misinterpreted as the aspect of the post that I don’t want to talk about. So I tried going without on the Salvation post and that really didn’t work. I don’t want to dictate the parameters of the comment section of every post that could fall prey to a political axe that someone wants to grind. So I’m not entirely sure what to do.

But for now I’m going to ask this: Hit Coffee is a venue to relax, think, and be entertained. If your comment will not help people (including me) do one of these three things and it has the potential to make people angry, reconsider posting it or at least how you post it. Calling somebody names or accusing their preferred candidate, party, religion, or whatever of being fraudulent, asinine, or stupid is not going to make someone reconsider their position. Implying that nobody intelligent or moral could take a position other than your own… well, same deal.

But in addition to wanting discussion to be thoughtful, I also would like discussion. If nobody commented on this blog I would have stopped writing it a long time ago. I consider most of you to be friends that I’ve never met (or that I have met, in some cases). So please don’t take any of this to mean that I don’t appreciate all of your contributions to this site which in many cases outmatch my own. More than anything I actually want to avoid the kinds of subjects that suck the air out of the room and prevent us from having the kinds of conversations that we ordinarily do.

A discussion broke out a while back on Comcast’s decision to limit users to 250GB of file transfers a month. My Beneficent Webmaster took the position against it, arguing that these companies promise unlimited downloads and now they’re putting restrictions on it and the problems that they cite are the product of infrastructure problems that they refuse to correct. Brandon thinks that Comcast’s decision is extremely reasonable because nobody should need more than that kind of transfers and anybody that does is costing Comcast money.

At the time I leaned more towards Brandon’s point-of-view. The big thing for me was (and is) that Comcast and other providers at least be honest about whatever restrictions that they’re doing rather than using backdoor methods to restrict usage to profitable levels. That sounds right to me.

The more I’ve been thinking about it, though, the more concerned about this policy I am becoming. I’m not concerned insofar as 250GB is not beyond reasonable and that for current usage anybody using more than that needs to be on a business account. That’s all right. What concerns me, though, is that these policies will affect usage that I think may be harmful in the long run and that they will affect usage in ways that prevent Comcast (and other providers) from making decisions to improve infrastructure that would improve things for everyone. In short, I’m worried that applying severe economic pressures against heavy usage will prevent future commerce.

Right now 250GB is extraordinarily reasonable for a month. It’s really difficult to imagine anybody using more than that unless they’re doing something business-oriented, illegal, or both. But that’s right now. That’s with products and services that are currently on the market. By improving infrastructure, they could be opening up more and better services and because they don’t need to make improvements for the bottom line these services may be delayed or never come to pass.

Everyone has a story like this, but I’ll tell it anyway. Once upon a time, a 20GB HD was all that I could possibly need. I really couldn’t imagine what I’d do with more than that. Then came digital music and suddenly 80GB was required and eventually it was not enough without making sacrifices on the quality of audio that I wanted to listen to. However, hard drive costs kept going down as the drives became bigger, and so not only could I go buy a HD with the space that I wanted, but I could improve the quality of the music that I was ripping. Then, when they went down even more, I could start saving my video to HD the same way that I had my music. Suddenly it became hard to find ways to fill the amounts of space that I could get.

Demand sometimes follows capacity. Had the HD never become larger, I would have stuck with relatively low-quality music rips and all of my movies would still be on DVD and VHS and burned media. I would have been fine with that because I wouldn’t have known what I was missing out on. But increases in capacity have given me more than I ever could have dreamed of. I am worried that if infrastructure does not improve, Internet capacity will not improve, and we’ll start missing out on things that don’t really occur to us.

Of course current capacity allows us to stream videos during most or all of our waking hours without having to worry about running into Comcast’s imposed limitations. So having conquered video and audio and games, what’s left? Well, for one thing, higher quality videos. The videos that we stream over are okay, but they’re not going to look good on the latest televisions. Nobody expects them to, really. That’s not what they’re for. But why not? Why can’t we do that? More to the point, why must I simply get used to these low-quality videos periodically skipping and goofing up when I’m using during peek hours? The short-term solution is “Don’t use during peak hours”, but wouldn’t it be better if we could use the Internet as reliably as we use the telephone and cable television? We accept less and unless things improve technologically I’m not terribly sure that we’ll ever get more.

It’s pretty presumptuous for me to say that Comcast should take it in the chin so that the Internet can become a lot more than it currently is. A lot of the money that is going to be made by content providers won’t be made by Comcast and definitely won’t be made unless they they’re getting reimbursed for the improvements that they invest in. So in that sense I think it’s fair that providers take in more money from people that use their services more heavily. The problem that I have with Comcast compared to say Time-Warner is that Comcast’s approach is entirely punitive. It’s not that they want more money for more usage so much as they don’t want high-volume users at all. That’s at odds with what I think everyone’s goal should be that everybody becomes a high-volume user. It’s too much to ask a provider to take a financial hit in service of that goal, but at least with a tiered system there’ll be room for expansion.

A great comparison is with cell phones. Cell phones really started taking off when companies could start offering large volumes of minutes so that people didn’t have to worry about the meter running every time they use it. There are still excess fees, but it’s been expansive enough and the competition has been fierce enough that it hasn’t gotten in the way of increased usage. It would have been very different, though, if cell phone companies had announced “Anyone who uses more than 1,500 is kicked off of our plan.”

Of course, the cell phone companies couldn’t have done that because if Verizon were to have instituted such a policy then Cingular would have seen a great potential market and would have catered to high-volume users. Unfortunately, no such level of competition exists in the Internet World. The services offered by cable, telco, and satellite companies are too different to be in direct competition with one another and putting in your own line is not realistic for large segments of the market. So they could theoretically just focus on milking whatever money they can from the current infrastructure without any substantial improvements.

What gives me hope is that some ISPs do seem to be still investing in infrastructure. AT&T was continually improving their package back in Estacado and were boasting speeds a lot faster than the DSL I was getting in Colosse. In fact, Comcast itself has just unleashed a new service with faster connections. I see it in my downloads times which are now faster than ever. That’s not enough to alleve my concerns, though, because despite the improvements with Comcast there is still quite a bit of variation and during peek hours it is still moving slowly and despite the wizbang new technology even things like watching videos can still cause problems. All of that tells me that the improvements are well shy of what they need to be.

Regular Hit Coffee readers know that I am an evangelist for ThinkPads. The quality of the computers I’ve gotten has been so great that I don’t even bother to buy their stellar throw-it-off-a-cliff warranties. The customer service is of course unsurpassed to the extent that they are the one company that I believe will actually solve my problem whenever I call them.

I do have one bone to pick with them, however. They have such a great product… but they make it hard to get one sometimes with their Not-In-Time inventory system. I don’t think that I am alone in this regard. In fact, I know that I’m not alone. My friend Kyle’s employer bought a whole fleet of ThinkPads and ThinkCentres only to have one delay after another and after three months they negated the contract and went with HP. My father-in-law had a similar issue where he ordered it and two months later it hadn’t arrived and so he cancelled the order.

I’ve personally had two experiences with this. First, when I got the most recent laptop in our possession we were about to move from Deseret to Estacado. Unfortunately the other laptop had died and I needed something quickly. So naturally ThinkPad cited 6-8 weeks as the likely delivery time when by that point I’d be in Estacado and having it wouldn’t be nearly so important.

They made up for it, though. At first they tried to sell me something that was a little more than I needed for a lot more than I wanted to spend, but since I was desperate I agreed. Then they called me back ten minutes later with a way that I could get what I wanted and actually spend less than I had initially intended to (it only required that I put the RAM in myself and get a different battery than I wanted to). So they actually made up for the whole affair by giving me something resembling what I wanted, if not exactly, in the time that I wanted it.

And now it’s happened again. I ordered my laptop from them and had been counting down the days until it was set to ship. Then, the count reached zero, I went to the website to see what the arrival date might be… and discovered that the shipping date had been pushed back two weeks. Once again, though, the customer service helped mitigate the inconvenience by shedding as much light on the problem as they could. They were able to tell me precisely what part was causing the delays. Once again it turned out to be the power supply. They told me that I could change my order to get it out to be sooner, but he said that if I could just sit tight for a couple days it was likely that they’d be able to find one before the new estimated shipping date.

And so they did. Further, to repay me for the inconvenience of the delay, they express-shipped it. Since the port-of-entry into the US is Zaulem, it literally arrived at my doorstep the day after they sent it (from Hong Kong) and before it would have with UPS Ground had they shipped it on the original date.

But while I appreciate the lengths that they go to in order to please me, I have to ask why this problem keeps arising. If the power supplies are such a problem, why not have a few more of them around? Obviously they’re not keeping up with demand when both times I’ve had delays that was a cited reason for it. It all worked out well with me, but Kyle’s employer and my father-in-law are customers that they either lost or almost lost because most people aren’t as patient as I am.

The complaints aside, holy cow is it an awesome laptop! Because a friend helped me get a particularly good deal I upgraded the video and I honestly did not know that the video on a laptop could look so good. I was worried about having to get widescreen and how that might hurt visibility but when the resolution is 1680-by-1050 and crystal clear. The writing is tiny and yet completely readable, which means that I can read full-page digital comic books on that laptop that I can’t on my wife’s laptop which is actually taller.

The whole downgrade-to-XP was a little bit tougher than anticipated, though and ended up taking several hours and ultimately cost me my copy of Vista. I goofed up and zapped the Vista operating system without having a backup. ThinkPads don’t have restore CDs. What they do have is just as good… except in special cases like this. Then I had to figure out which of the three CDs did what to get XP on there. I eventually got there. It would have been sooooo much easier if I’d simply installed a pirated copy of XP on there, though.

That’s really one of the biggest problems with Microsoft’s copy protection… they make going illegit not only cheaper, but easier.