Blessed by the Potato

For years my dad has dealt with using the internet via dial-up while at the cottage, or when the Rogers internet goes down at home. Perhaps due to increasing usage in cottage country, perhaps due to old copper, the quality of dial-up has really taken a nosedive in the last few years at the cottage. What was once slow but tolerable has become unacceptably slow — not only has grabbing a handful of emails via POP (i.e.: old-school stuff) gotten so slow it’s painful, but he’s actually had trades timeout on him when trying to use the online brokerage. That’s costing him money.

I’ve been trying to get him to try something different for a while, but he hasn’t been too interested in increasing his monthly bills, plus since the cell phone service is so spotty up there he figured that the wireless options, such as the Rogers Rocket Stick, just wouldn’t be worthwhile. Finally I just decided to pick one up while I was up there and test it out, because every time I was talking to him, he was complaining about the dial-up. It had a 15-day return policy, which was enough for us to see how well it would work in our location.

Fortunately, it’s been pretty good, and simple to use, too: plug it into a USB slot, hit connect, and you’re off. We typically see speeds of about 300 kbps — about 10 times slower than the cable service at home, but a significant improvement over dial-up. He’s been pretty pleased with how the service functions. At first we thought it’d even save money: the basic plan is about $30/mo (plus fees A[bsurd], B[ogus], and C[razy]), which is less than the cost of dial-up (~$20) and a second phone line (~$20).

Unfortunately the one downside to the Rogers mobile internet is the crazy low usage available. My dad is about as light a user as you can get: he wakes up, checks his email, reads the news, reads the brokerage research reports for the day, gets some stock quotes, makes a trade, and takes a nap. No streaming video, no gaming, no facebook photo albums, and he’s only online for a few hours a day, and only on weekdays at that. Yet that still adds up to over 1 GB/mo, which puts him somewhere into the 2nd or 3rd usage tier. For comparison, when Rogers set the download cap for the cable internet to 60 GB/mo, they said the typical user used 5 GB/mo, and that was what, 4 years ago? There’s been a lot more streaming video use in that time! So the actual cost turned out to be a fair bit higher than the advertised cost, but I suppose that shouldn’t be anything new from Rogers.

As iPhones, Blackberries, and other smartphones become more popular I’m sure (or at least, hope) that Rogers will revamp those plans to make data available wirelessly at more reasonable rates. $35/GB is kinda silly, and doesn’t allow for a lot of usage on these things.

The most ludicrous thing though was that the rocket stick is, according to Rogers, “technically a cell phone”. From a hardware point of view, I can kinda see that — it has a SIM card, it’s a transmitter working on the cell network. Whatever. What was not cool was we got charged for “receiving text messages”. WTF? 15 cents each for what was probably spam sent to what was not actually a cell phone. Why isn’t this blocked on what is obviously not a text-message enabled device? Why is there even a charge for receiving text messages, even if it was a phone? I managed to get that bogus fee refunded by calling in to complain, but if the spam keeps coming, I’m not looking forward to having to do that every month to get my 75 cents back.

Anyway, the rocket stick has surprisingly good reception, or perhaps to put it more exactly, the Rogers network in cottage country is different than the Bell one, so just because we have zero bars with our Bell phones, doesn’t mean that the Rogers stick won’t work — if you’re in a rural area it’s probably worth checking out what their coverage map actually looks like. The service is not like cable or DSL, but it’s a damned sight more usable than dial-up, and can be used in areas not serviced by copper, which is the point. However, it’s not cheap, and keep in mind the exceptionally low usage included in the plans when pricing it out.

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Stephen Wolfram is a smart, smart guy, earning a PhD in particle physics by age 20 and writing the popular Mathematica computational engine. Personally, I have more experience with MATlab and Maple, but there were many lonely nights doing physics problem sets when I’d sneak over to the Integrator to help me solve an integral (I’m terrible at integrals — I think it’s why I ended up in the “softer” side of physics/biophysics).

Seven years ago he came out with a book, A New Kind of Science (abbreviated NKS). It was a big, big book. I started reading it, but the first few sections were on cellular automata and chaos theory, stuff I had already done a bit of work on in my undergrad. From the tone of the narration, it seemed like he was making a big huge deal over something that I had worked with a fair bit on my own in undergrad, and moreover had already made its way into the popular media, and I got turned off. I’m a little ashamed to say I never even tried to pick the book up again, but in the process of getting the PDF version (which I’ve since lost), I signed up for his NKS mailing list.

Then a few days ago I got an email announcing the launch of Wolfram|Alpha. The email was lengthy, but aside from talking about vast possibilities and universal computing, I didn’t see exactly what this “killer app” of NKS did. I pretty much ignored it due to the grandiose, hyperbolic tone:

If one looks at Wolfram|Alpha today, much of what it computes is
firmly based on OKS (the “Old Kind of Science”), and in this
sense Wolfram|Alpha can be viewed as a shining example of what
can be achieved with pre-NKS mathematical science.

“Old Kind of Science”?!

…Anyway, as it turns out Alpha is a bit like Google, in that you type in a question and get answers. Unlike Google it’s not a search engine — instead of directing you to pages where you might get an answer, it tries to answer the question for you directly. So if you want to say, find out the interest you would pay on a mortgage, you could just ask it.

Unfortunately it’s still a little shaky on that front. I tried “mortgage interest paid principal=$300000 interest=3% 25 year amortization” and it wouldn’t go, but just “25 year amortization” brought up the calculator. You can also try other queries like “Canada oil exports” to see the 2005 figure, or “moon phase” to see the phase of today’s moon. So far none of that really impressed me much — I doubt it would make me visit Wolfram|Alpha ahead of Google or Wikipedia. “Next solar eclipse” was neat though, not only showing the date of the next eclipse, but also a little picture of the places on earth it would be visible from (the path of the eclipse). “Next total solar eclipse Canada” tells me that we’ll have to wait until April 8, 2024 until the next total solar eclipse comes through Canada. Clicking on the boxes gets you “copyable plaintext” which is kind of neat, but an extra step from just having copyable text to begin with.

So hey, give it a whirl, but to an end user who doesn’t care enough to get blown away by the computational algorithms underlying it I’d hesitate to call it the killer app of a new kind of science.

First off, this is the 600th post here at BbtP. For a long while there were roughly two comments for every post (typically, someone commenting and myself replying), but lately the comments have dropped off… at this rate posts will outnumber comments around post #700.

I’d like to start off with a public service announcement: back up your data. I just backed up my most important stuff: my digital pictures, spreadsheets, blog posts, etc., to my external hard drive as part of my quarterly backup task (which was supposed to have been in March closer to the equinox, but I procrastinated). I’m now tempted to secure the external hard drive somehow, perhaps create a drywall compartment in the wall and make it a fixture of the house so that if someone breaks in and steals my computer, they’ll leave the drive alone. Another option might be to get a network drive and keep it somewhere else in the house inconspicuous. Of course, with a 60 GB hard drive the Xbox also looks like a good place to hide a backup. For the paranoid readers (and come on, with this site that must be nearly half of you) TrueCrypt is a good way of keeping your files secure on those DVD or external hard drive backups.

As the spring weather rolls in (and with today’s snow, back out) I start to think about the upcoming european trip I’ll be taking. The incessant reminder emails to register for the conference I’m attending may have also influenced this train of thought. I’ve already booked my plane tickets, after seeing the price jump a few times, but hadn’t looked at the train situation at all yet. I just sort of assumed that everyone always talks about how great the european train system is, so it must be no problem to hop from place to place by train while we’re there. Indeed, there are some bright spots, such as France’s TGV, but now that I’m looking into it, the whole experience sounds rather miserable. This is of course because we’ll be starting out in Switzerland, which is not flat. Check out this image of the rail line I snagged from Google maps:

Is that a railway or a roller-coaster?!

One thing’s for sure, Sid Meier’s Railroads! would never let me build that line. So looking up the train times now (something I should have done before agreeing that we’d visit Venice after the conference) I find that we’d spend the better part of 3 of our 10 non-conference days in Europe just lollygagging around on trains.

/train

Wayfare’s old Toshiba laptop is having some issues lately. It’s a “regular” 15.4″ laptop weighing in at roughly 6 pounds. While I take my 8-pound monster nearly everywhere, for her 6 pounds is too much and she often doesn’t bother to take it on the train with her. Combined with the other issues (such as an upcoming trip), she’s looking at getting a new netbook now, something under 3 lbs and 12″.

I have a computer under my desk running the Apache/SQL server behind this website. It’s 10 years old, a Pentium-III. Despite its age it has plenty of power to surf the net and do word processing (maybe not with Windows XP and Office 2009, but that’s beside the point). So when my brother spilled water on his laptop and fried it (for the second time), my purchasing advice for him was to just go to the store and get the one he liked the most. Any of them would have plenty of power for what he needed.

So likewise when Wayfare wanted to buy a netbook, my advice was to just try it out in store to make sure she liked the usability, they should all do what she wants (and in fact, they all seem to be running the same Intel Atom processor and chipset). She had done her own research and decided on an Acer Aspire One. It’s a cute little 10″ thing, comes in an attractive shiny case… and within seconds of trying it, she realized she hated it. Why? Because they made the moronic decision of changing the keyboard layout. There are of course always unique keyboard layouts on any laptop under 17″ because there just isn’t enough space for a standard full-sized keyboard, but usually the compromises are made at the periphery: half-sized function keys, weird insert-home-delete-page keys with dual or triple functions depending on concomitant key presses. The parts for touch-typing are often left alone. However, we found the weirdest thing (and I wish I took a picture): they put a half-sized backslash key where the enter key should be, and then made a tall enter key that was further from the home row.

They sacrificed the usability of the enter key in favour of backslash.

Wayfare walked into Best Buy, credit card in hand, ready to buy that Acer tonight, and didn’t because she knew that changing how she typed (on a computer that would only be used for web surfing and word processing) would cause her more frustration than the computer was worth. Bizzarely enough, that same keyboard layout was used on a few “regular” (14-15″) laptops from Acer, Gateway, and HP. Thankfully, HP’s 10-inch laptop didn’t succumb to the same insanity. I’ve complained before about how prominently the backslash key is featured on keyboards, and it makes even less sense in its new position.

She’s out in the living room right now researching alternatives (the Dell Inspiron Minis and the HP 10″s are still in the running) and muttering “stupid Acer” to herself all the while. So obviously that keyboard layout lost them a customer, and I can’t fathom any that it would bring in, unless *nix uses a lot more backslashes than I thought (I really thought they were forward slashes, which is how we have forward slashes in URLs). Even then, ewww. Backslash should be above enter, and that’s all there is to it.

Right now the HP 1035 10″ netbook and the Dell Inspiron Mini 12″ are neck-and-neck in the running. My favourite of the two is the Dell: it’s a more comfortable size, you get a bigger, higher-resolution screen (12″ you could use for quite a long time for work, whereas I wouldn’t want to use a 10″ screen for much more than I’d use an iPhone for) and a better keyboard/trackpad combo (thanks to the marginally larger size) for only a small increase in weight (about 2.5 vs 2.7 lbs). Because of the larger screen the Dell is reported to have a bit less battery life (about 2.9 hrs vs 2.5 hrs), but has an option to go over 3 pounds (up to about 3.1 lbs — this figure is harder to come by exactly) for a 6-cell battery (5-6 hrs of battery life, $50 more). It just seemed to have to make fewer sacrifices: a half a pound for more usability. If she’s carrying it in her backpack then the extra width shouldn’t matter, and it’s actually a bit thinner than the HP (though the smaller HP or Acer might just fit in her purse, whereas the Dell looked a little too big for that). The Dell has 3 USB ports to the HP’s 2, and the Dell also has a standard VGA-out port in the event that she wants to connect an external monitor or run a presentation; the HP has a proprietary port that requires a dongle.

Update: Ah, this weird vertical enter key is apparently a european feature, allowing more space for accented characters (rather than the useless backslash it is here). Still, eewww. Why not bring the enter key closer to the home row, make it a single row, and deal with the accents somewhere else?

I blogged earlier about Rogers’ 5% increase in fees this year, and how ridiculous that was especially in these economic times. I wrote them a letter about it (and in the meantime started playing around with an antenna to see if we could pull enough over-the-air stations to justify cancelling cable; unfortunately we couldn’t).

Here’s the text of the letter I sent:

Rogers Cable
855 York Mills Rd
Don Mills, Ontario, M3B 1Z1

To Whom It May Concern:

Today I received in the mail another letter from Rogers. I assumed it would be yet another piece of admail – what would have been the third this week – but opened it anyway. Instead, I found the attached notice that the price of my Rogers’ services would be going up again this year. $1.50/mo for basic cable, and $2.04/mo for internet; a 5.3% and 4.5% increase, respectively. That’s double the rate of inflation over the last few years, and five times the rate of inflation projected for this year. This is not a unique increase from Rogers: indeed, I have seen the cost of my services go up at this rate every year since I first signed up.

I am on a fixed income and I simply can’t afford to watch my services get more expensive every year like this. The change does not take place until March, which gives us a little over a month to find a solution. I sincerely hope to hear back from Rogers that this notice was sent in error and there will be no increase for 2009; if not, I’ll have to pick one of my services to downgrade or cancel outright.

A straightforward suggestion: Rogers currently sends me an enormous amount of admail (addressed and otherwise). I get, on average, 3 pieces just from Rogers every week; up to 15 ads every month. Even if the bulk admail rate with Canada Post is only 25 cents per item, Rogers could find the savings to more than make up for the proposed rate increase just by cutting out these mailings, and that’s not even including the marketing cost of designing or printing them! Believe me, Rogers is not an unknown name in this city; saturating homes with ads (especially homes that are all ready Rogers customers) will not bring the kind of subscriptions that stopping the ever-increasing price spiral will.

I look forward to hearing from you soon;

–Potato

PS: Most of those aforementioned ads are for Rogers Home Phone. My regular rate with Bell is $18.48/mo for home phone, and while they’ve fiddled with their long distance rates several times in the last decade, that base price has not increased once. Your $19.99/mo promotional offer does not impress me, no matter how many times a week it comes in the mail.

Surprisingly, they actually called me today. They’ve put a credit on my account to counter-act the price increase, but only for 3 months. Still, that’s better than nothing. They’ve also stopped the addressed admail. I tried to tell the guy that my point about the admail was not that it was annoying me specifically, but that it looked like Rogers had a problem somewhere along the chain of their marketing department and they were basically wasting money (and wasting money on one hand while demanding more from me didn’t make me a happy customer). I had to leave to get to work and the guy had a bit of an attitude like he was doing me a huge favour, so I just thanked him for the discount and let it rest at that. But for the most part I’m just astounded I got a call back: this is not the first complaint letter I’ve sent Rogers (and not the first one about price hikes), but this is the first response I’ve ever gotten (though I did get a more substantial discount when I called to cancel my Extreme service back when that went from a $2 premium over express to $10). I’m sure they’ll go away in May when my bill goes up $3.54+tx, but for now Rogers has actually managed to inspire the warm n’ fuzzies by having the courtesy to acknowledge my complaint (ok, maybe not “warm n’ fuzzies”, but definitely the this-is-not-a-faceless-corporation-out-to-swallow-my-soulzies).

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