Another post that’s been lingering in the drafts for too long…

If I were ever to build a last mile ISP, this is what I’d do:

• QOS things like I would QOS my own network, relegating bulk services to the bottom of the heap, giving sensible priorities to everything else. No odd net-neutrality biases, just being fair or unfair equally to everyone, just to keep base services snappy so you don’t notice that your neighbor is hogging all the bandwidth. Buy a decent size pipe, but set expectations that everybody will be sharing it and to be good stewards of a communal resource.
• Allow multicast. I don’t know how this would work, but nobody else is doing it, and I would imagine it would help a bunch. Ideally this would cut down on transit bandwidth, with the added plus of just being really cool.
• Allow/maybe even facilitate file sharing across the local network. Intra-network bandwidth should be cheap. Let people share all they want on the local lan. Give some guidance so that people know what they’re sharing, how that will affect their bandwidth and their personal computer’s performance, and what liabilities they might incur by sharing.
• Pursue aggressively cached content. Start with http, but cache as much as possible, even videos or whatever. Maybe even try to work with the big content providers to see what we can work out to be mutually beneficial. But, don’t sacrifice bandwidth for latency. Always make sure that the cached content is as snappy (if not more so) as the original.
• Give little to no professional technical support. Other cheap ISPs have done this. I would too.
• Use a good system to mitigate virus traffic and segment offenders from the network. I think that there are a couple of implementations in the wild doing this. Re-checks must be quick and efficient, so as to not punish people unduly.
• Don’t provide any email or web hosting. Less complexity, less to support, and less to break. Point them to nice email hosting like Gmail or Google Apps.

This post probably isn’t quite baked all the way, but you get the drift and I get it out of my draft blog posts…

I wrote Part I quite a long time ago, but recently, the Justice department released an opinion coming out in favor of allowing market forces to determine whether or not an ISP can offer non-net-neutrality tiered services. And the I’d-rather-see-less-legislation-than-more-legislation side of me can see their argument. But I’m not really sure here that free market forces would truly be able to outweigh the telco’s greed and desire to get in on a piece of the proverbial pie. We’re talking about a service that every day comes closer and closer to being less like a luxury and more like a necessity (almost as much as electricity, water, etc.).

So, they cite the Post Office, charging differently for different types and sizes of parcels, expediency requirements, and safety requirements. That’s fine. That’s the market at work responding to people’s willingness to pay more for more services, while a perfectly reasonable form of sending a package will always exist at an acceptably low cost. But, this does not directly correspond to what I think has been proposed. What has been proposed is that someone would pay not based on the size or type of parcel, but what the parcel contains. I suppose the Postal Service analogy does make its way through, in that the sender (the website you’re trying to reach) would have to cough up the extra change. But there the parallel breaks down because then you don’t really have control if the website you want to go to has paid extortion money to your ISP to actually allow them onto their network.

So, in this parcel analogy, let’s say there is no other option but FedEx Express Shipping. Shipping is cheap, and everybody’s parcel is equal, and things get around the country pretty quickly. Let’s say you just bought a book from Amazon. They ship it, it goes into shipping first come, first served, and you get your book. In this new world though, Amazon has to pay for your package just to eventually arrive at your house. I suppose they could even do tiers and say you have to pay us to even allow your package through FedEx shipping, pay even more to get the old level of service, and can pay even more for Extra-Express Shipping, which will bump you to the front of the line in the FedEx shipping world. Now that may be fine if I choose exactly how quickly I want my book to get here, but it’s not ok if the shipper extorts money from the big shippers like Amazon and plays favorites with some other book seller.

Shouldn’t market forces drive the cost down and the quality of service (no pun intended) up? Doesn’t Amazon sign a deal with FedEx that’s mutually beneficial to both of them, and the consumer.

I think there’s also a lot to be said about how people don’t really have a choice when buying high speed internet. I ran across a comparison of provider choice in the US versus the UK and it was mind boggling. They had something like 50 providers to choose from where we have 2. Doubtful that the market can work itself out with odds like that.

It’s been quite a dry spell, here at the ol’ blog. What juicy bits can I dig up to tell…

I was in California for 2 weeks, from August 27 through September 9. Looking back, it was a perfectly fine trip. But I felt pretty odd about it just before and during. I really just didn’t want to go in the first place. I never really understood why, but I put off packing as late as humanly possible (I started packing at like 1am the night before I left). My heart just wasn’t in it. Then I had this string of a couple of bad days. And then I guess for whatever reason I started feeling better, and at the end of the 2 weeks, I didn’t want to leave. Which seems altogether odd to me, but perhaps it’s the change that I shy away from and not really the actual trip or the destination.

Upon my arrival back to Atlanta, my car promptly didn’t start. No lights, no nothing. The guy who picked me up from the airport was finally able to jump start me. I let it sit for a bit and eventually headed towards home. I drove around for a bit, picked up dinner, and searched for an open auto parts store, only to find none. Once I got home I let it sit and charge for a bit. I then turned it off so I could test to see if I would be stranded again in the morning. It immediately returned to a no lights, no nothing state. The next morning I managed to get someone to jump me off again and headed to the Napa store. They checked the battery, found it dead, so we replaced it. I guess while it was pretty straightforward, it was still a pain.

My car still needs new tires. I continue to put it off. I have no real idea how many tires I really need and I will eventually have to get new tires before I head up to the East Coast Wesleyite thing. I definitely don’t trust them enough now to go all the way there and back.

My video card started being very flaky on me. X would freeze, and start using 100% cpu. You could still move the mouse, but not click on anything, and the keyboard wouldn’t work. You could still ssh into it and restart. What was worse is that eventually it got so bad that it would do this 5 minutes after boot. A 5 minute usable window isn’t that usable. I got another video card from a friend, but it’s not dual headed, so it’s not too much fun.

Also, I thought it would be nifty to run a self-test on my ups. Not a good idea. Now it says I need to get the battery replaced (Emergency! Batteries have failed on UPS argento. Change them NOW). Not a good sign. I guess it’s had a good run, but I’d rather not spend money on stuff like that. I’ve been needing a second one anyway, so if I got one, I’d really need to get two.

And, since I was having all these issues with argento, I’m thinking that now might be a good time to buy new guts for it.

Well, I did manage to read Freakonomics while I was gone (actually I read a bunch of it on the way back on the plane).

I will be signing a 3 month lease, so my rent is going up to the “market rate” of $730. I continue to have this looming question of how soon I should go to California. This decision has been especially hard for me. I really don’t know what to do about it.

I don’t think I ever mentioned it here, but I got a new manager way back when at the first of July. It means I’m officially doing different stuff than I was before and working for a group based out of Mountain View. All in all a very good thing.

There has been a whole lot of buzz around net neutrality, so I’m going to take a crack at it from my perspective. There are a lot of people out there commenting on this, such as here and here and even at Ask A Ninja. I’m in the middle of reading some of the commentary over here at the moment. I’m in the middle of a 65 page position paper that I’m not sure quite gets the gist of the real network neutrality debate. Which is especially hard to do now, because none of the telcos have actually yet disturbed network neutrality. So, that means that everyone is commenting on pure speculation as to what the telcos might do in the future. And, unless you have some inside information as to what that might really turn out to be, you’re sort of tilting at windmills. From what I can gather, the telcos would extort money from website owner. Telcos would penalize those who didn’t pay up, making their websites slower or even unreachable. And in today’s “Web 2.0″ atmosphere, latency is king, which is why I can imagine many websites would pony up to gain yet another advantage. Some say that it would akin to freeways

If you think of this in terms of freeways, what if the rich people were allowed to go faster than the poor people simply because they paid more taxes?¹

Which I don’t think is quite right, because I don’t think that the telcos would make us pay, but rather I think they would find more money getting websites to pay. This document (that I’m not done reading yet) speaks to congestion economics, which I can only imagine are really talking about user of streaming video, peer to peer (P2P), and Bittorent traffic squeezing out other users. Which I also don’t think is quite right. I would imagine that most people would be happy to have those general file transfer protocols QOS’ed heavily to make room for the latency sensitive traffic such as http, voip, ssh, streaming video, etc. (Streaming video is both high bandwidth and latency sensitive…) I think he misses the point and the likely way that this will be turned against internet-goers. As always, companies will pass the buck. If they have to pay extra to get better latency to their customers, but ultimately the cost will simply be passed on to the customer as higher priced goods and services. So the telcos might squeeze the website owners in the beginning, but we’ll get squeezed in the end. So not only do I think that he missed the way that net neutrality will be used against us, I imagine that he also missed many of the technical aspects of how hard it really would be to really reduce peer to peer traffic. Not only will people turn to obfuscation, encryption, and anonymization, but QOS’ing bittorrent traffic might actually have the exact opposite effect, being more detrimental to an ISP’s bandwidth². Now whether or not this is true needs more study, but it is interesting none the less. Also, if telcos were to implement what I have outlined here, I am curious if they then become liable for the content being transmitted over their network. Up until now, I don’t think that the telcos are in any way liable or responsible for anything illegal done via their phones or via their backbones. I think they’ve been immune to such lawsuits, but I’m curious if they start filtering on the application level, if they will then be sued so that they have to filter for illegal music or movie downloads, child pornography, spam, viruses, etc.

I managed to watched both Apocalypto and Shooter this weekend. It’s seemed like forever since I’ve watched a movie at home or in the theater. They were both good; I’d say Shooter better than Apocalypto, since there was a lot of hype/buzz around Apocalypto, which set my expectations higher than for the relatively unknown Shooter (well unknown to me at least).

I thought that Apocalypto had a whole lot of potential that it didn’t meet up to. The story was timeless and well constructed; at its base a story about a man and his family and the things he had to do to survive and the things he had to do to bring his family back together again. The sort of story that very much transcends the time, cultural, and language differences. The acting was spectacular. I don’t know how much acting experience the majority of the cast had, but I would imagine it was little to none, yet the acting was so believable. I think my major concerns were primarily in how several of the action scenes were shot and in some of how the stunts looked. There were times when both just seemed exceedingly amateurish, even to the point that I felt visually jarred the several times it happened. I could understand how the quality of the stunts could be compromised due to the fact that I think that most of the stunts were done by the principles, but my gripe was that there were only a handful of these stunts that were executed poorly or shot poorly. The vast majority were great, but there were these few that should have been better for a film of this size and scope. The second thing was that I felt that the music could played a much more significant role. There were several times when I expected the score to really build up the suspense or the action, or more strongly emphasize or underline what was going on. The movie, which not quite what I would have considered an epic like Braveheart of Gladiator, the story was fundamentally strong, the dialogue was colloquial and smart for the time in which it was set, and perhaps you couldn’t accompany a not-quite-epic movie with an epic score, but there were times when I really felt like the score let me down. And after I had watched it, I was of course glad to see that there was a director’s commentary, but I couldn’t even make it through all of it, in which Mel Gibson commented as the director, along with co-writer/co-producer Farhad Safinia. In what I was able to get through, Mel didn’t talk about at all (or very little) about his crew or his DP, the set design or production design, costuming or makeup, where the actors came from and their background, where things were shot, what language was being spoken; I could go on. Honestly to me, I really love a director who is grateful to everyone involved in the production all the way at the top from the studio and the producers down to the lowliest of production assistants who make the enormous undertaking it is to shoot a film these days an actually doable project. There are so many things that have to be coordinated and perfectly timed and setup that it takes a village to make a movie on this scale. In the small portion of the film that I watched with the commentary, he just really came off arrogant to me that he wouldn’t mention the army that helped him realize his vision.

Shooter on the other hand I have very little to talk about. I thought that it was a very well done film. It was very real and more or less factual, with a good plot and arch and character development. The cinematography was great as was the production design. And, in the commentary, the director gave me exactly what I like in a commentary, adding depth to the story, explaining those subtleties and nuanced things I missed the first time around, and generally adding depth to the character development while adding technical details, talking about shooting, the actors and the locations. An all around great movie with a feel that definitely hearkens back to a style of film making and story telling that we don’t see very often nowadays.

I managed to go biking this late afternoon/early evening. I think I got started a little after 7 and rode for the usual 30 minutes. Since I’ve been back, I only recall going riding once, which was the Monday or Tuesday that I returned. I managed a little longer trip that time, but then on Saturday I had the staples pulled out, so I figured it best not to aggravate it with the help. Which means that it’s been almost 2 weeks since I’ve ridden, which isn’t the best of things.

I will be heading back to Mountain View for two weeks starting Monday. I picked up a bike shipping box for my bike, so I have the possibility of taking it with me, which could be interesting. I’d love to bike around campus on my own bike or even ride it the couple of miles to work.

I won’t say that I’m second guessing the glasses, but half wondering why I picked form over function. I’m slowly getting used to having the frame within my eyesight, having to refocus outside of the lens if I want to watch my food go all the way from the plate into my mouth, and having the frame smack dab in the middle of the keyboard. It’s very odd, too, that I now have two pairs of perfectly good glasses. I don’t think this has ever happened before, as new glasses were always the result of a significant degradation in vision or due to breakage. Now I have a choice of glasses. I probably should put the old ones away and lock away the key so I’m not tempted to wear them.

For [what seems like] the first time since I moved in to my apartment in Atlanta, I browned some ground hamburger a couple of days ago. Normally I don’t cook because I think food is dumb and not worth fussing over nor cleaning up after. But I was pretty hungry when I was picking up some Zest, so things sort of got out of hand. Anyway, about halfway through the browning I realized that I didn’t have a colander to drain the meat. I could have sworn that I owned one at some time in the past. Maybe it was too far gone, or maybe I left it to Chris. Who knows these things? I got it drained ok, only to realize that I also needed a pan lid for my iron skillet to finish cooking my Hamburger Helper^TM Beef Stroganoff. I managed to slip by using a plate as a cover, but you can imagine how hot the plate got. Speaking of hot, I think my leftovers burned my tongue more in the 3 days I had them than in the past 2 years (or maybe it just feels like it…). I also think I would have preferred to use a wooden spoon to stir, but the turner did the job, albeit a little too bachelor-y for my tastes.

While I was in Canyon, I managed to hit up several doctors including a dermatologist, a barber, and an optometrist. Ok, a barber’s not really a doctor, but I had to duck out of my dentist appointment to see the dermatologist. I’ve been needing a new pair of glasses for longer than I’d like to admit, as they had become pretty scratched up and the coating had become worn a bunch. And so I was going to the optometrist without expecting my eyes to have changed, nor to actually buy any new glasses. Honestly I wondered more than once why I had gotten my Mother to make the appointment at all. But, after the runaround the several eye care centers had given her while trying to make my appointment, I figured the least I could do would be to show up. So, I had my eye exam at like noon (which was like after “the doctor’s last appointment of the day” — seriously how much more could he have been slacking?). So I guess I effectively made him push back his lunch, and if I messed up his lunch plans for that day, he definitely didn’t mention it and was in fact exceedingly nice. The result of the exam was that my eyesight actually got better, not worse, if you can imagine that. I gained some astigmatism, though. So, he advised that since I did sit in front of a computer all day that it would behoove me to keep my spectacles up to date.

My old pair of glasses has to be, I’d say 4–5 years old. I got them in College Station when an old pair broke one day. My current/old pair had a pretty good run, and I was just waiting for them to get sat on or break in two or some other random happenstance which would force my hand. So it was nice that I now have a really decent backup pair that fits me well and is a very close prescription. So, he said I should get some new ones, which obviously had been on my mind, but that day I wasn’t too terribly in the mood to shop for new glasses. Plus I didn’t have a vision insurance card thingy, so I wasn’t quite sure how much it would cost me out of pocket. Which wound up being moot as I made a phone call and got the info and it saved me a bunch of money and hassle. So, I’m looking at frames, thinking about all of the times that Max counseled me to get contacts or new glasses. I sort of gravitate toward the smaller frames and start trying on frames. I do this for a little while before one of the frame-fitter-ladies comes around to help me, so by this time I have a couple already picked out and in mind of what I would prefer. She starts to help me pick something out and I try on those that she thinks might look good. I shoot down the really trendy/throwback ones. I’m trying my best to cling to a not completely tiny frame. Like I said, I wasn’t particularly in a shopping mood, so I somehow manage to whittle it down to two pairs. The one that I like best, which are definitely smaller than my old pair and have some round at the corners. And the other pair that I think my mother and the young lady helping us prefer better, which are even smaller being more square in the corners. I honestly couldn’t tell you the frame colors of either. I think neither was black. They had this nifty little camera booth thing where you could take pictures of yourself so you could directly compare. I was pretty firm that I personally like my choice better, but wasn’t sure which one I should go with. The girl working with us mentioned that she could probably get one of the other young ladies working to get a second opinion. So, just then there happened to be a gaggle of the female techs walking by. So, she asked them for their opinion, starting with the pair I liked best, then to the other pair. The response was immediate and unanimous. Immediately when I put on the second pair, they all in chorus said “yes, definitely that one”. I was definitely taken aback by their response, being so quick and definitive. I figured that all these women knew better than I how best I looked, so I caved. I’m sure the fact that the young lady tech who did the first part of my eye exam was rather cute and happened to be in this group made no difference whatsoever. :)

Since it was through my insurance, it’s taken a couple of weeks for the insurance provider to make them, ship them to Amarillo, get them inspected, then finally shipped out to me, which I got today when I got home. I think the frames will take more getting used to than the actual prescription (which I can hardly tell a difference). [Warning run on sentence ahead!] But the frames are small enough that without moving my head too much, the frame is just where my hands are on the keyboard when I need to readjust or double check hand position, so that will definitely take some getting used to to have to move my head down a little further when I want to look in that particular direction or just get used to the line and blurriness. Only time will tell whether I like them or not. And somehow I doubt that they will somehow magically conjure up a wife for me. :(

Blogging about talking about blogging about fulfilling Josh’s prophesy of blogging about talking about blogging Josh’s prophesy. :)

All of the trips/visits/weddings/receptions all went off pretty much without a hitch. I realized after the fact that I didn’t actually get a chance to congratulate Ben and LouLou personally and properly at their reception…

FYI, I’ll be in Canyon starting tomorrow (Saturday) afternoon and in College Station starting Wednesday morning.

I had the strongest craving for Laynes tonight. Already craving Canyon/Amarillo/CS/Texas food. :)