Powered by Twitter Tools

Tweet This Post

Powered by Twitter Tools

Tweet This Post

Powered by Twitter Tools

Tweet This Post

Powered by Twitter Tools

Tweet This Post

Powered by Twitter Tools

Tweet This Post

@Firefly99 your case is different. we are after equine surgery … even applying to Saskatoon in reply to Firefly99 #

Powered by Twitter Tools

Tweet This Post

Here’s my $0.02 (and then some).

The idea behind this is to identify (and punish) the high bandwidth users. Comcast (and other broadband companies) have skated by for years on this “bucket-of-bits” concept where you buy a bucket of bits (we’ve all seen the UPTO 16MB commercials). This is a whole additional discussion which I don’t want to get into here, but in short I refer to that advertisement as fraudband.

So with this bucket-of-bits concept you pay a monthly fee for a connection and you use it as much as you want. The problem is that the *more* you use it, the *less* the provider makes for your usage. This is an upside down business model and I’ve tried to think of other companies that are incented to sell you a product that you shouldn’t use (help me out by commenting if you know of a successful business model that follows this upside down paradigm (and don’t say cell phone companies)).

What they are doing by opening this door is saying that your monthly fee (let’s say it’s $34.99) is good for upto 250GB of usage. If you exceed this amount you will get less traffic or have to pay an additional fee. But what happens for those *good* broadband users who don’t use their allocated 250GB? Do they get to a refund on the unused portion of their bits? How about roll-over bits?

If the formula is $34.99 for upto 250GB of data … can I pay upto $34.99 for what I actually use?

I work from home and as such am probably one of the heavier users. I also watch Netflix on demand on my TV via my TivoHD XL. I rent online movies from Amazon as well. I use Vonage. I don’t do it regularly (as it makes my VoIP phone almost unusable), but I have been known to share files via P2P and download a lot of content from non P2P sites as well.

My guess is that I’m a heavier user and that I’d exceed the upto usage, but when I don’t I will be doing everything I can to get credited for what I didn’t use in a particular month.

Tweet This Post

I recently moved from Blacksburg, VA where there was a big push for local shopping and local dining (buy local. eat local. be local.). We took that to heart and while living in Blacksburg we dined at local establishments rather than chains (Blacksburg has actually been pretty successful (in the past) at keeping the chains at a distance). We shopped at the Blacksburg Farmer’s Market on weekends and we tried to keep it local for shopping when we could (we’ve been boycotting Wal-mart for years and my wife can claim not to have been in one for at least 5 years while I had to cheat once).

We moved to Raleigh, NC this summer and have found it much more difficult to keep it local. The presence of the chains and dining preferences of friends of ours have made it difficult, but as for ourselves, we would much rather eat at Daniels than at Macaroni Grill or Carrabas to name just a single type of cuisine and a few chains. We have tried the local Farmer’s Market and when in the grocery store look for the produce which is “locally grown”.  We also try to shape our home cooking with seasonal fare (e.g. with vegetables that are in season (no summer squash in November, etc.)).

However, recently on a cross continent trip of interviews, we stayed in Guelph, Ontario for a weekend. I was amazed at the focus on “Buy Ontario” while visiting. Every restaurant we visited highlighted the local ingredients on the menu (specifically local meats and sausages), local brews highlighted locally grown grain, signs on the side of the road encouraged buying local and from what I could gather when interacting with locals this is a huge trend. I’m not sure if it’s penetrated Toronto yet, but while out in the smaller suburban towns, it was very noticeable.

The benefits of buying local produced food and shopping at local stores (as opposed to corporate giants) are too numerous to be counted and I just don’t know why it hasn’t been embraced in the US and regionally where we are now with more gusto including at the policy level. Our reliance on factory everything (farming, butchering, growing, packaging, shipping, etc.) and the health codes that go along with those factories don’t actually make us safer and most likely have made us less so, cost more money, do more harm to the environment, create fewer jobs, and have a huge cultural impact with the loss of local and regional trends and flavors.

Myself, I plan on continuing what I’m doing and looking local before looking at Wallyworld. I will continue to shop at the Farmer’s Market and am even looking for a local CSA (if you know of one around Apex, NC, please drop me an e-mail).

What are you doing to support your locality?

What can we do to encourage “local friendly” policy?

Tweet This Post

Is it cheating that my twitter updates post weekly?

Tweet This Post

What I didn’t know is that I had to re-activate some of those widgets that were either automatically updated or were disabled as part of a WordPress update.  Not a huge deal, but I did miss the opportunity to capture some data from readers, update my stats, and some features were disabled (which I didn’t realize).

Word to the wise, after automagically updating WordPress or updating Plugins make sure that those that you use are active.

Tweet This Post