A Day Late

Assume you come home from work one night and decide to fix enchiladas for dinner. Thinking ahead, you decide to fix an extra large batch so you can have some for lunch and possibly again for dinner the next day. Naturally they turn out excellent and you are very glad you have leftovers.

Here’s where the tip comes in. You come home for lunch the next day, start watching one of your favorite shows, selected from your DVR listings. You put some enchiladas in the microwave, on half power, for a few minutes to reheat. Now…before you decide to do this, make sure the enchiladas you tossed in the microwave are properly ventilated. If you don’t, you’re going to miss 20 minutes of that favorite episode while you clean out the microwave. Who knew a tightly wrapped enchilada could be a bomb waiting to go off?

I wanted to take a moment and express my utter disappointment in the broadband internet options around Provo. If you live in Provo, you basically have one option and that’s Comcast high speed internet. On average I lose my connection and have to reboot my comcast modem around 4 or 5 times a day (keep in mind I’m at work 8 hours of the day). When it is working, it’s really not that fast. The upload speed is rarely above 200kbps and the download hovers around 600kbps. For all this, I pay around $45.00/month. Now that may not sound bad to some people, but compared to what I had in the past, it’s awful!

A little over five years ago I lived in Springville, which is roughly 2 or 3 miles south of where I live in Provo. At the time Springville had an ISP called AirSwitch. I won’t go in to the entire AirSwitch story (if you want to read it, go here) but basically a few techy neighbors decided to create a LAN around their neighborhood. They connected their LAN to a high speed backbone (T1 line I think) and suddenly the whole neighborhood was enjoying high speed internet access. Naturally word spread, demand increased and the company was born. Eventually, almost the entire town was wired with a fiber optic backbone. Depending on the network usage at the time you could connect to the internet at up to 10mbps. For this, I paid $19.95 /month. The service was reliable, cheap, and incredibly fast. I remember downloading RedHat ISO images in the time it took me to eat a sandwich. I’m not sure what happened to the company, I suspect mismanagement, but a few years ago it went under and AirSwitch was no more.

That was how things used to be. Now I’m stuck with this unreliable, poor quality, overpriced, COMCAST TRASH. There are a few other high speed options in the area that utilize wireless technology but they’re not any cheaper (which is really what I’m looking for). Isn’t technology supposed to improve as time passes? I’m betting it’ll be quite a few years before I see a 10mbps internet connection for $20/month. Supposedly Provo city has started the iProvo project. Unfortunately the area I live in is in the very last phase of the project (scheduled for July 2006). Assuming the project stays on schedule (it won’t) that’s a long time away. So, I have to wonder, what would it take to wire my subdivision and connect it with a T1 line (or something faster)? Possibly something worth looking in to.

Was there ever doubt that I would get one of these? Really it was only a matter of time. This was actually a business purchase, not a personal one. A few weeks ago I was developing a web site which was mainly going to be used by Safari users. Every time I made a change I felt compelled to walk over to our graphic designers G5 and make sure everything still looked ok in Safari. That’s when it hit me, if I had a nice Mac Mini on my desk I could just switch over to it, test the page on Safari and keep on working. Fortunately the low cost made it an easy sell. So far I’m very impressed. As expected, it’s well designed. It’s a shame I have to ruin the sleek and sexy design by attaching cables to it, but there’s not much I can do about that.

UPDATE: FreeMiniMacs.com

As you can probably see, I migrated my Movable Type weblog to WordPress. The process was pretty straight forward. A big concern I had about migrating was losing my search engine links. Fortunately I was able to find some nice Movable Type import and mod rewrite instructions that will automatically redirect anyone who tries to access one of the old movable type pages. The whole process only took an hour or two (and most of the time was spent searching for the search engine fix). Anyway, I know the weblog looks a little WordPress generic. I’ll get around to customizing it one of these days, but not today.