I have been a DirecTv customer since 1997.. or so. I swore off cable, because back then I lived in a back water city in Minnesota called Blue Earth and in order to get cable in my house it was this huge process the entailed money, which I was in short supply of then.

So as a happy very happy DirecTv customer, I have never seen the need to use cable, or cable related services. That is until Verizon screwed me… again and again and again, until I finally said enough. I canceled everything with them. Both my home and my office used Verizon for DSL and phone service. In all I was giving them 289.99 for the office and another 179.00 for the house… every month..

Now, I use Time Warner cable Internet (10 megabytes per second – consistently) and Vonage for my house phone. With Vonage I get better quality calls, no annoying line checks at two in the morning, and they automatically block anonymous callers so I don’t have to worry about it. Best of all, I can log into Vonage website and forward my phone to my cell, check my voicemail (which are also emailed to me).

For this I pay : 49.95 for internet and 14.95 for Vonage…

So, you would think that I would be happy about this. I am.. HOWEVER. You knew it was coming, stop looking so surprised.

Lately, on all the tech news, they have been talking about how Comcast, Time Warner, and Cox are all looking to go to a “Pay for use” system for their bandwidth.. Meaning I would subscribe to a 5 or 10 gigabyte per month plan and when I went over that much bandwidth, I would be charged for megabyte. So, if I download a couple of iTunes movie rentals over the course of a month, instead of being 4.99 to apple, it is 4.99 to apple and about 20.00 to 30.00 dollars extra for the bandwidth to Time Warner.

This is COMPLETE crap. Comcast has already been in the dog house for throttling bit torrents and now they are all planning this garbage…

My account will be canceled the MINUTE this goes into place. I hope that all my fellow geeks will join me in this. The only way we can send them a message is by not sending them our dollars.

The next question, is after I cancel my Time Warner, where do I go for internet access ? Not Verizon, even though they have started setting up the Fiber Optic in my area… I guess I will have to get a better wifi attennae and start using whatever open nodes I can find..

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Last Saturday me and some friends decided to go to Rosarito Mexico, on a whim..

It was fun…

I wore my binary shirt…

Laura finally got to go Horseback riding on the beach ….

Then we went to Papa’s and Beer and had … well… Papa’s and Beer… They were tasty..

These are some new friends …. we call him England, because he is from London and has a really cool english accent.

Here is the whole group…

We stayed until the sun went down … driving back across the border at night is SO much more fun then going across during the day.. LOL

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Credited to Yadin Flammer:

“I’m waiting for Adobe and Microsoft to merge and create a product so inefficient it stops time.”

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I thought this was a funny cartoon.. I would love to give credit for it since I totally believe in credit where credit is due… but I just stumbled upon with out any author information.

The reason I think this is funny is that back in September last year when I was back in South Dakota, my friend did not have internet access..  being a geek, this was just not acceptable.  So each morning, and afternoon, and generally evening I would get in his car as we would go wardriving to find some open wireless networks that I could use..

He would be driving along and I would yell “STOP!” of course he wouldn’t stop in time and I would lose the signal.  Fortunately, in South Dakota, most of the home wifi setups were all insecure so it was relatively easy to find somewhere to start surfing…

As as side note, it was SHOCKING to find out how many where not only open, but the routers were still set to the default username and password… tsk tsk..

Towards the end of the trip I realized that all the fast food places in S.D. all provide free high speed wifi.. Very enlightened.. it impressed me greatly.

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alot…

So that being the case… I love this song, even though it is “old”, and even more now that I tracked down this little “video” of it…

[ Gay Bar ]

I have watched this video so many times that my wife is threatening to make me sleep on the couch if I play it again …

The couch looks comfortable….

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I swear… everytime I buy an apple product a few days later they release a better version of it…

I waited and I waited to buy the iPhone because I didn’t want to have a repeat of the iMac, the PowerBook, the MacBook Pro …. etc etc…

So I bought the iPhone 3 weeks ago, and apparently Steve Jobs received a  notice of that purchase and then released the 16 GIG version…  [ read about it here ]

Granted, I am fine with the 8 GIG version, and I would not have likely dropped the extra 100 bucks for the 16 Gig version, but it just makes me wonder if Mr Jobs is really monitoring my purchases.

Am I really that important in the Apple world ?
Perhaps my picture hangs in the offices of Cupertino ?

It’s doubtful, but of course when I daydream that is exactly how the universe looks…

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As an apple geek, I get very excited at the prospect of using, or even better, owning a new apple product.  So after the MacWorld announcement of Apple TV Take 2, I was STOKED…  I waited as long as I could, and then ran to an apple store (4 days after the show) and picked one up.

160 Gig HDD
wireless
Optical Audio out
HDMI out

VERY VERY sexy little white box that sits proudly next to my 47″ HiDef LCD TV.

The problem is that it STILL does not have the update to allow it to connect to iTunes and download movies rentals and what not…

The above quote is from the apple corp representative explaining why it is still not updated..
Here is the [ full story ]

I am disappointed, but the apple TV is still the coolest little device. It is synced to all 4 of my computers in the house, and has several movies from my libraries on it, as well as all three seasons of BSG… WOOT!

Since I bought all my BSG episodes through iTunes rather then get the DVD’s I have, till now, been regulated to watching them on my laptop.  Now I can enjoy BSG in all it’s glory on my big screen again.

So, I guess, that will get me through another few weeks until they release the update.

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