Mark.KirstenAndMark.com

I’ve been with Time Warner Cable for about a year and a half now and for the most part have been pretty happy with them as an internet provider. The connection has glitched out a few times and the DNS has been horrid (thank goodness for OpenDNS), but no catastrophic failures. However, I read some disturbing news this morning detailing Time Warner’s bandwidth cap plans. Ars Technica has a great article pointing out a lot of the problems with the proposed price structure. Raising prices while costs are going down and the general economy is in a slump? Sounds like typical monopoly behavior to me. How bad are the proposed plans? See for yourself at the original post (scroll about half-way down to the bullet points). Here’s a quick summary with current pricing in Los Angeles:

• $15 for 1 GB per month  at 768 KB/128 KB
• $25? for 10GB per month at 768 KB/128 KB
• $37 for 20GB per month at 1.5M/384K
• $47 for 40GB per month at 6M/512K
• $57 for 60GB per month at 10M/1M
• $75 for 100GB per month at 10M/1M

All but the lowest plan will have $1/GB overage (which will be $2/GB) and overages will max out at $75/month.

Let’s ignore for a moment that they’re tying caps and speed together, almost all of their peers (let’s face it, you don’t have a choice when it comes to your cable provider) are charging less and/or giving their customers more (Comcast and Verizon FIOS both kill TW in terms of price/performance, and while Comcast has a cap, it’s 250gb, even on their low end, lower speed plans) and the fact that they’re changing plans for the worse while their price per subscriber is going down, and look at some real world scenarios.

If all you did was stream music at 128k (about 1M/Minute), you’d be paying the following:

• $15 for 17 hours/month (a little over half an hour a day)
• $25 for 170 hours (over 5.5 hours a day)
• $37 for 340 hours (over 11 hours a day)
• $47 for 680 hours (almost a full day)
• (no need to go on- there are only 24 hours a day)

At my current rate ($47), that’s no biggie- I’m not streaming online music constantly and I’d be more than covered, but good luck to someone on the lowest plan who discovers Napster or Pandora at the beginning of a billing cycle- they’re going to be in overage city pretty fast (assuming that’s the only thing they use their connection for that month, a little YouTube and a few big software updates will get them there even faster).

However, it gets a lot uglier when you start dealing with streaming video which can easily run 10x the bandwidth of audio. Since you wouldn’t even get the speed needed to stream video properly on the lowest 2 plans, I’ll leave them out:

• $37 for 34 hours (a little more than an hour a day)
• $47 for 68 hours
• $57 for 102 hours
• $75 for 170 hours (a little over 5.5 hours a day)

Each additional hour is going to cost you about 60 cents. Here, with my current usage patterns and plan, I’m probably ok, but combined with my music streaming and other web usage (including large downloads like OS images for testing/development), I’m too close to the cap for comfort. As more shows stream online in hi-def and as the quality improves, it’s only going to get worse. I’m guessing TW is trying desperately to hold onto their Cable TV business in a time where it no longer makes sense.

<Dinosaur Media Rant>

I’ve made the conscious decision that I won’t want to pay for media that has advertising (ideally I’d have the choice to pay with my time (ads) or my money, I shouldn’t ever have to pay with both), so Cable TV is out (besides the fact that I’d be paying for something that looks worse than what we get OTA for free). I also don’t want to pay for content with ads and then pay for Tivo to skip the ads. The technical capability for HD internet streaming is here today, and if I can’t consume on my (reasonable) terms, I won’t be consuming your media. When (not if) enough people come to the same conclusion, your content that costs multiple millions to produce becomes worthless.

</Dinosaur Media Rant>

So, where does that leave me? As with the vast majority of the country, I can’t just tell another cable provider that I want their service instead, because there is no other cable provider in my area. FIOS isn’t here yet (not sure who the telco here is since we don’t have a land line- we only recently got a home phone, and it’s VoIP - T-Mobile @Home), so I guess my only choice is to go with DSL and hope we’re not very far from the switching station <sigh>.

Maybe they’ll see a mass exodus before it comes to that, and the caps will never make it here, but if they do, and they even closely resemble the current proposal, TW will no longer get any money from our household.

I had the itch to write some music tonight and scratched it with this:

All the smoke and ash in the air from the fires on either side of Los Angeles is turning the sky orange and dumping ash on our cars, even though they’re each 30-40 miles from here. My throat stings and my eyes burn- nowhere close to what our neighbors to the north and to the south east are dealing with, but not fun.

Boing Boing is holding an obfuscated code contest. My entry is near the bottom of the page:

http://www.boingboing.net/2008/11/12/obfuscated-code-cont.html#comment-329432

Bonus points if you can figure out what’s going on.

Here’s a meme I picked up from a blog in my feed reader:

• Grab the nearest book.
• Open it to page 56.
• Find the fifth sentence.
• Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.
• Don’t dig for your favorite book, the cool book, or the intellectual one: pick the CLOSEST.

Here’s mine:

“He’s been doing it through dinner and their pre-dinner drinks, and Cayce assumes he does it because he’s the boss, and perhaps because he really does bore easily.” – From Pattern Recognition by William Gibson (one of several books that has been sitting on my bookshelf for quite some time- I really should take more time to read).

beautiful sunset today

I love woot.com. As of today I’ve placed 20 orders from them (18 orders from woot.com and 2 from shirt.woot.com) – don’t worry Kirsten, I didn’t order anything today. They’ve had a number of amusing items of the years – Screaming Flying Monkeys with Woot capes, Leak Frogs, Bags of Crap, etc. But today’s item that closed out their woot-off made me laugh more than any other.

The final item in today’s woot-off was Bacon Salt. Yes, “Bacon Flavored Seasoning Salt” – the tagline on the bottle is “Everything should taste like bacon.” Yes this is a real product, no I am not making this up. If you’re fast, go check woot.com, or if it’s after July 30th in Texas, check their archived blog entry. When I first saw it, I was perplexed. So I googled “jd’s bacon salt”. That led me to http://www.baconsalt.com/ where I saw that they have a blog. At this point I was starting to laugh, but what really got me going was their entry titled “I can has Bacon Salt” – that image (and the other Bacon Salt lolcats) made my stomach hurt. Lolcats strike again!

A List Apart has posted their 2008 survey – “The Survey for People Who Make Websites”. If you are a web worker, go take it. It shouldn’t take more than 10 minutes:

On a completely unrelated note, I’ve been trying to take better advantage of our neighborhood’s walkability. Our place has a Walk Score of 72 out of 100. Not quite as good as our last place (which had a 92 out of 100), but still very walkable. Of course, we didn’t take much advantage of the walkability of our last apartment, so it didn’t do us much good. Last Friday we walked to dinner 1.2 miles away – there are some places that are closer that we’ve walked to a couple times before, but there are quite a few more places when we open the range to 1-1.5 miles. I also signed up for a gym that’s .8 miles away and doesn’t have a very good parking situation – encouraging me to walk. There really is quite a bit of stuff within just a few miles of us. My office is only 2 miles from our apartment, I really should start getting myself there without a 2,800 pound machine around me, at least some of the time.

This was originally posted in response to a post on MetaFilter titled “Oh dear, its the audio media server question again!“

I love music. Over the years, I’ve collected around 1600 CDs. The following is a brief look into how I’m currently managing all that music.

I built my own NAS with an old Motherboard/CPU/RAM/Boot Drive that I had laying around (I bought a new case and 5 250GB hard drives which I’m running in RAID-5 for about a Terabyte of usable space) – it’s on all the time, but it’s headless and sits in the back of a closet – I do all management of the box remotely.

Openfiler is my NAS software of choice. It makes management of the server pretty painless (aside from having to build software on a separate VM on my main machine as the install is very stripped down and doesn’t include a compiler).

SqueezeCenter runs on the same box and feeds audio to my Squeezebox (though if I were buying now, I’d go with the Squeezebox Duet – it’s cheaper to add additional units and the remote/controller is much nicer). Not only does this allow me to listen to music in my living room (via 802.11G), away from the PC (which is in a closet in another room), but also remotely using Softsqueeze (a Java emulation of the Squeezebox hardware, which is included with SqueezeCenter).

As for how I got there, I ripped my (now 1600) CD collection into FLAC format on my PC using EAC. Altogether, my lossless (FLAC) rips take up about 560GB. It took me about a year (there were a few periods of a month or two at a time that went by with out me ripping a CD and other times I was ripping several dozen a day). It was painful, but now that it’s done, I’m glad I saved the $1500 or so that it would have cost me to have someone else do it (your time/$ threshold may be different from mine, in which case you may want to investigate a CD ripping service).

Regardless of your decision to DIY or have a company do it for you, I would STRONGLY suggest that you rip to a lossless format, and would suggest that you go with one that’s open source (so that you can easily transcode to a different format – one of the key reasons for using a lossless format). While you may not be able to hear the difference between a high bit-rate and the original, you won’t want to re-rip if you need the files in a different format and you won’t want to transcode from one lossy format to another – you probably will be able to hear artifacts if you do that.

Once you have your music ripped in a lossless format, make sure that you back it up. Keep in mind that RAID isn’t backup – if something goes horribly wrong with your controller or your PSU spikes and takes out a few drives, you’re back to square one and will have to re-rip (which again, is a long or costly undertaking). I have a couple of external drives that I have the data on my NAS backed up onto.

As happy as I am with my solution, I’m still not finished. My primary pain point at the moment is that I don’t have an easy way to get MP3s from my FLACs. My current solution is to use foobar2000 and transcode as needed. This is somewhat clunky as it involves me booting up my PC and involves some manual work selecting what I want, moving files around, etc. I’ve looked into MP3FS, but because of the way that I ripped my CDs (1 FLAC per CD, with a CUE sheet to denote the track positions and hold the meta-data), I can’t get an MP3 per track (which is normally what I want) without manual intervention. I’ll probably end up extending MP3FS myself or just re-encoding my FLAC files to be one file per track.

I would consider just going through and transcoding everything and keeping the files around on my drive, but I’m already running out of space. As it is, I need to move to bigger drives. As it is, I have less than 40GB free – not nearly enough room to store 1600 CDs worth of content in decent bitrate MP3s. There’s also the problem of ongoing maintenance when I rip new CDs. I’d rather just rip to one format and have the system transcode on the fly. I’ve got some more ideas on that, but I’ll save them for another post.

I love The Daily Show. It’s one of a very few shows that I missed when I went from having cable TV to not having it (when Kirsten and I got married we decided that we didn’t need it). So I was thrilled when iTunes started offering it on a subscription basis. The $10 a month was well worth it, and significantly cheaper than paying $40 a month for a bunch of channels I don’t care about. At first things were great – I could sometimes even download episodes before they aired here on the west coast.

However, things quickly fell apart. Sometimes new episodes wouldn’t show up until around noon the next day, sometimes it was several days later. Complaints to Apple didn’t really change anything. I’m not sure if it was their problem or if they just weren’t being delivered the content in a timely fashion. Either way, it was annoying, but still the best option for our cable tv free household.

8 months ago, they started showing episodes on their site, but the experience was pretty bad. The episodes were broken up into clips that had to be watched individually, and the full show wasn’t even available (the toss to Colbert at the end of the show, for example). I was willing to deal with ads, but I was not interested in hunt and peck piecemeal gathering of pieces of a logical unit.

Recently The Daily Show was added to Hulu. It’s ad supported, but the ads are short, the video quality is great, whole episodes are available (in one piece), and most importantly, the previous night’s shows are always available when I wake up in the morning. Game over. iTunes loses. After trying Hulu for a few days (to make sure the timelyness of the content going up wasn’t a fluke), I canceled my iTunes multi-pass.

(and yes, I understanding the irony of writing about timely content after a 2 month absence of what was meant to be a weekly blog)