Gizmos Grabowski

Overcharged by Telus

While the Internet is down, I feel like I have lost my arms!

A couple of weeks ago I wondered if I could get faster DSL service from my ISP, Telus, a telephone company that has the local monopoly in Alberta and British Columbia. I had been reading about new Super DSL available in some areas of the United States, and had been spoiled by the 6x faster service while teaching last Spring at the BCIT technical college.

It turns out I cannot ever have faster service, because of my distance from the central office -- I am stuck at 1.5Mbps.

As I investigated, I discovered that I was still on an old service plan (called Velocity) that (1) Telus no longer sells; (2) costs $12/mo more than the current equivalent; and (3) has half the bandwidth. I was one of Telus' oldest high-speed Internet customers, but in all their marketing phone calls and letters -- begging me to switch back to their more-expensive-than-the-competition long distance plans -- Telus never told me about the lower cost Internet plan. 

So I switched to the new plan, saving me $144 a year. The other benefit is that I now get 60GB of bandwidth, up from 30GB (which I had been bumping up against).

The switchover happened last Tuesday  morning, and got screwed up. Under the old system, I had to manually enter MAC addresses; the new system is supposed to do it automatically, but failed to do so. It took an hour on the phone to figure that out, and then another 2 hours before the automatic registration kicked in. 

Then it stopped again. And started again. For three days, the Internet went down for 30 minutes to 18 hours. A technician was scheduled to come by, but this is a worrying visit: if the fault belongs to Telus, the visit is free; if the fault lies with my networking setup, I pay.

Two hours before the techie was to visit, she called. When Telus upgraded my service, they didn't switch my line over to a new port. The old port was partially incompatible with the new system, and so kept disconnecting. 

So far, it now works correctly. But I wonder for how many years I paid $144 too much.

Downloading Firefox 3.0: Just Don't Do It

The Mozilla foundation is hoping for a new world record for downloads in a single day. It hopes to make a big splash for its FireFox browser when 3.0 is launched.

Problem is, FireFox is now so popular it suffers from Upgrade Lag. That's where third-party apps are not yet compatible with the new release of platform software.

I found that out when I installed a beta of FireFox 3; important add-ons like Google Gears don't work (yet). That meant going through the difficult process of uninstalling 3 to put 2 back on. It was unpleasant.

So, don't install FireFox 3 until the add-ons you use are updated. Feel free to help with the world record by downloading 3; just don't install it.

$44 Billion Don't Seem Much When...

Microsoft wants to pay $44 billion for Yahoo. That seemed like a lot of money to me until I heard that Mars is buying Wrigley for $23 billion.

The second-biggest Internet company is worth $44 billion, just twice the value of a chewing gum company. And to think that a candy bar company has a spare $23 billion laying around.

Puts the whole Internet thing into the small end of a perspective on what's really important in this world, don't it?

Competing Headlines: Germany

When all else fails, the state should rescue flailing banks, said Deutsche Bank's chief economist. (link)

...versus...

The German government has derailed a high-speed rail project because of runaway costs. (link)

Apple's License-free Software

There have been plenty'o complaints over Apple's repeated attempts to install its Safari-brand Web browser onto computers that run that competing operating system, Windows. Cf. fig. below.

Here are the problems with the dialog box:

Select the items you want to update
- I can't select them, because Apple has already done that for me. I can only unselect.
- Safari cannot be updated, for it was never installed on this computer.

Safari for Windows is the ... easiest to use web browser
- I had installed it on another computer, and found it non-intuitive -- not easy to use. But then I find the same for Apple's other sofware for Windows, QuickTime and iTunes. My daughter frequently calls me over to her computer to help her figure out things as (should be) simple as copying songs from her old computer onto the new one. (iTunes just wants to create links, not the song files.)

...is filled with innovative features
- If you want to run a Web browser with innovative features, then run Opera, as I do.
- Safari lacks the most basic buttons, such as one for opening a new tab (as another reviewer found). What neophyte will intuitively pess Alt+T?

Use of this software is subject to the original Software License Agreement(s) that accompanied the software being udpated.
- Since Safari was never installed on this computer, there is no original SLA to govern my use of it. For me, Safari is license-free.

Now there are some Microsoft apologists who claim Apple could learn a lesson from the convicted monopolist on how to push updates properly. Being apologists (or evangelists, or whichever religious term you prefer), they forget about how Microsoft without permission installed software onto individual's computers last year -- including mine.

Mt St Helens Webcam

Every day or so I check the webcam trained on Mt St Helens. This mountain blew off its top in 1980. The US parks service mounted a Web cam on a nearby mountain, and trained it on the crater across the valley. It lets you observe mountain conditions; a friend who teaches Grade 3 students gets them to observe it from time to time.

The real reason for the web cam, of course, is to record the next eruption. Several summers ago, hoards of media camped out for several weeks, speculating that another eruption was imminent. It would have been much cheaper for them to hire someone to watch the webcam...

There is a fundamental flaw, however. What if the volcano comes to life when weather conditions are unsuitable for the show? Such as today's view:

* Rain and frost obscure the camera lens.
* Fog is common.
* I have seen snow drifts cover up the lens.

Let's hope that if it happens, it'll be a sunny day, like this one:

This is Web 2.0

Yesterday was Christmas, and I should have taken a picture of our living room last night:

My son, his girlfriend, and my daughters -- sitting in our living room, notebook computers in their laps: chatting to each other, at the same time as typing to each other and their friends through MSN Messenger and Facebook.

How Low Can MSFT's Marketshare Go?

The November numbers are out, and Microsoft's marketshare in search continues to sink.

November =7.1%
October = 7.4%
November last year = 9.8%

And it makes one wonder just how tiny their marketshare will get. Continuing to fall 2.7 points a year, we can project the intersection with 0% in June 2010.

We Don't Want a "Better" Experience

My wife uses Hotmail for email, and she is irritated these days by Microsoft's insistance that the new Live version of Hotmail is a "better" experience.

I am sure that marketing types and programmer people are all excited over what they've created, but change only irritates my wife. She is, what I would comfortably call, a computer neophyte.

Once she learns how to accomplish a task, she doesn't want to have to relearn it just because some over-excited marketing type or bored programmer person decides that Hotmail's screens need change.

Not that the better experience claimed by Microsoft is in practice better -- ever since DOS v6 we've known that. My wife and I spent the better part of nine minutes trying to figure out how to add the sender's address from a newly arrived email to her Contacts list. I finally resorted to copy and paste.

Memo to hyperactive marketing types and programmer people who specialize in creating overly subtle interfaces: stop.

AOL Really Is That Bad

I had never experienced AOL, other than receiving all those diskettes and CDs over the years. I think the funniest AOL CD was the one co-branded with the Royal Bank of Canada. Say what?

While in Germany visiting an elderly relative, I was excited to learn that she had Internet! Excited, because I thought I would be sans-Internet for 3-4 days.

All I needed to do, I figured, was unplug the ethernet cable from her computer, and then plug it into my notebook computer. But it could not connect to the Internet. Hmm.

The relative offered to phone a friend "who knew about computers." The reply: I needed to run the AOL software. Huh? I ran it on her computer, but that didn't work either. She then connected me with her son, who lives some 400km away. He told me that the DSL modem provided by T-connect has a problem and does not always connect. So, I just needed to retry a number of times. And that I had to use the AOL software, because AOL was the ISP.

Shocking, but true. My notebook computer couldn't simply plug in, because the DSL modem worked only with AOL software, which is like a wrapper around a branded version of Internet Explorer. Even IE would not work on the relative's computer, because only the AOL software was allowed to connect to the Internet.

And AOL is still in business? Amazing that such lock-in could exist in today's world. Reminded me of using CompuServe in the late 1980s.

In the end, I managed to access my email through the dreadful AOL software. But it sure was an unpleasant experience.