WiFi prices finally come down

I've always been annoyed by just how expensive WiFi access is for such spotty coverage. I've had the T-Mobile plan ($30/mo) for a few years, which provides coverage at Starbucks (until they switched to AT&T), and many airports and hotels. Its been a better deal than not having it (they have coverage at the hotel I stay at most frequently, and the airports I transit through most frequently), but it always felt like too much money for too little service, given that there is not always a TMobile hotspot available. TMobile has roaming deals with many of the other big providers (Boingo, AT&T), but the only real benefit there is the convenience of the billing arrangement, as the roaming fees are not nominal. (Though I do like that TMobile also provides convenient pay-by-the-minute roaming access at many hotspots in Europe.)

Finally there seem to be some better alternatives. Boingo now seems to have an unlimited $10/month plan, so I switched to that. Boingo claims I also get free roaming on many TMobile, AT&T, and other hotspots -- I'll report on that once I get my first bill. I downgraded my TMobile account to the "Pay as you go" plan, which has no monthly fee, and is $3 for the first hour, which seems like a good option to have.

Starbucks also has a reasonably priced plan (Starbucks Gold Card) if you spend a lot of time in or near Starbucks (they are in the process of switching their hotspots from TMobile to AT&T.) For $25/yr, you get two hours per visit of WiFi time (not sure if this is enforced or not), plus 10% discount on most Starbucks purchases.

David Foster Wallace, RIP

I was deeply saddened at the news that David Foster Wallace committed suicide last week. 

For me, the experience of reading Wallace's writing is not unlike that of watching an olympic gymnast.  While the right side of the brain is being entertained by the grace and artistry, the left side is frantically marvelling at how the human body can do that at all.  The tension between the two -- where your brain can't decide where to focus, not wanting to miss either part -- adds all the more to the experience. 

Wallace's mastery of the language is undeniable; one could read his work simply to marvel at the construction of each sentence or his ability to move effortlessly from one writing style to another.  But, unlike other authors known for their "style", the writing is merely the surface layer; Wallace actually has something to say, his arguments are compelling and challenging and beautifully constructed, and supported with relevant data drawn from disciplines ranging from literary theory to mathematics.  And somewhere along the line he also manages to make you laugh out loud -- right before you have to pick up the dictionary for the seventh time. 

One is, at the same time, amazed, informed, challenged, entertained, and, honestly, filled with that feeling of "I'm not worthy" on multiple levels. 

I would like to be able to say "I knew him when"; he and I overlapped for a year or two at Amherst.  But I never actually met him, I only heard the stories, such as his senior English thesis being published as a novel ("The Broom of the System"), or being the only student in then-recent memory to have achieved the distinction of summa cum laude for his thesis work in two separate majors (English and Philosophy.) 

Harper's Magazine has graciously made the pieces he published in that magazine available for free on the web: http://www.harpers.org/archive/2008/09/hbc-90003557.  If you've not had the pleasure, I suggest you read "Tense Present" -- which probes "the seamy underbelly of US lexicography" -- and then marvel at the notion of how entertaining and actually useful a book review of a dictionary could be. 

Rest in peace.

Hacker at work

This photo was taken in Josh Bloch's garage on a recent trip to CA.  We were installing a new fireplace grille after the fireplace had been re-faced with some beautiful vintage tiles.  Even though this was an entirely analog activity, we still managed to get a little hacking in.

Living in the information age

While reviewing my household budget recently, I realized that we had truly crossed into the information age -- we pay more for bits than we do for energy.  (By bits, I mean both the infrastructure by which information is delivered to us in electronic form, and the content we purchase; by energy, I'm including only my home utility bills, not gasoline, but since I work at home, I'm guessing my gasoline consumption is lower than average.) 

• Home telephone (basic line + unlimited long distance): $45


• Cell phone (mine, including business use): $60


• Cell phone (rest of family, 4-line family plan): $110


• NetFlix: $20


• DirecTV (including TiVo data fee): $75


• Rhapsody To Go (music subscription service): $15


• DSL: $30


• T-Mobile WiFi access plan (reasonable coverage at cafes, hotels, airports): $30

Total: $385/month for bits. 

As to fossil fuels, our combined electric and gas bill average out to around 260/mo.

Tivo + HD -- no good choices

I've been a Tivo addict since the first DirecTivo boxes came out.  After getting a big screen TV, the standard definition picture looks pretty bad (especially as it seems that DirecTV compresses the hell out of their signals to make room for more pay-per-view channels.)  So we wanted to upgrade to some sort of HD service, but of course Tivo is a must (no third-party DVRs -- no one who has had both a third-party DVR and Tivo has ever said anything good about the third-party DVRs.) 

Option 1: DirecTV's HD Tivo.  This was released a few years back, but is going to be incompatible with the HD locals that DTV is rolling out, which will be using a different encoding.  (Some people have combined this solution with OTA HD, but I have no interest in playing games with antennas.)  And DTV has yet to roll out HD locals in this area anyway, and there's little sign they're coming soon.  So even if there was HD local channels here, there's no Tivo solution that can record them, only the DirecTV DVR.

Option 2: Digital cable + Series3 Tivo.  This seems like the obvious choice, except for the high cost of the Tivo box (600+, plus the increased cost of the Tivo data service which I'd been insulated from since DTV customers were grandfathered in at the low rates).  But...no TivoToGo or MRV on the Series3 yet, which means you can't transfer videos to the video iPod.  This has to do with content restrictions surrounding their CableCard certification, but annoying it applies not only to protected HD but also to unprotected SD content.  Ugh.  (As to MRV, if you have two Series3 Tivos with CableCards, why is there a problem moving the content from one Tivo to another?) 

Option 3: Comcast DVR with Tivo.  Comcast did a deal with Tivo where you can get their Motorola DVR and upgrade to Tivo software as it is rolled out.  But its going to be a long time before the rollout reaches here. 

MythTV is not an option; you can't put a CableCard in a MythTV box. 

So far, no hacks have appeared for the Series3 (other than those that involve reprogramming the PROM and resoldering it) that get around these restrictions.

We're going to bite the bullet and go with Option 2, and hope that eventually Tivo resolves its dispute with CableLabs and reinstates some form of TivoToGo and/or MRV.

Flying has its upsides too

I was in New York yesterday for my great-aunt's 90th birthday party.  The party was over at six, and our flight wasn't until 11, but we figured that New York was a pretty good place to pass a few hours, so we weren't worried.  But as the party was ending, it started to rain pretty hard, so we decided to just pack it in and head to the airport, even though JFK isn't the most fun place to kill a few hours.

Wandering around, I passed a half-asleep fellow camped out behind his laptop and thought "That looks an awful lot like Doug Lea".  And it was -- he was on a six hour layover on the way home from Amsterdam (yuck).  Usually the surprises you get at the airport are of the unpleasant variety, but not always.

Data packrat

I'm finally moving forward with my plan to get all my life data into digital form.  The infrastructure is there (see earlier posts), with lots of redundant disk space and subversion repositories.  Now I just have to clean out the file cabinets.

All the various entities that send me monthly statements (banks, brokerages, utilities) are trying to get me onto some sort of "paperless" plan (and, IMO, going about it in a pretty stupid way) by offering some sort of online statements.  That's great going forward, but what about existing statements?  (And, how long should I really hold on to these records?  Can I throw away those tax returns from 1987?  Won't they be useful to my biographer?)  They all seem to offer some set of past statements in downloadable form; some going back only a few months, some going back seven years. 

Most will only let you see the older statements if you agree to let them stop mailing you statements.  (You can rescind that agreement at any time, so you know what I did.  I don't really _want_ the paper statements if I can have good PDFs, but e-mail is so unreliable that I hesitate to let them use e-mail to send me important notices that might be indicators of identity theft or other bad things.)  So I downloaded all the statements I could find, scanned some of the others I thought were worth having, and relegated the paper copies to a box in the basement that, if it got destroyed, I wouldn't be upset. 

Not one of the dozen banks, utilities, or brokerages has the statement download thing right.  None of them have a "download all my statements" feature, which make downloading seven years worth pretty annoying.  (And all are implemented in ways that prevent you from shortcutting around their bad UIs or scripting it yourself.)  None offers any sort of scriptable interface for downloading statements, so if you want to continue to gather statements, you have to visit twelve web sites.  (I'd like to have the PDFs delivered right into my Quicken; they've been talking about electronic bill presentment for years but I don't see it here yet.)  Some make it easier by offering an option to e-mail you the PDF monthly in addition to the physical delivery; some only offer that as an alternative to the physical delivery.  Some (Wells Fargo) won't even let you download any e-statements unless you consent to online-only delivery (and the online statements don't have the check images that the physical statements do.)  Guess I'll be "consenting" for them five minutes a year to get the past year's statements, yuck. 

Bulk scanning turns out to be not so easy with cheap consumer grade scanners.  I bought a Visioneer RoadWarrior for receipts and such, but use the scanning features of my HP LaserJet 3050 for bulk scanning because it has a document feeder.  But its still pretty slow, and the software sucks.  (I'm surprised that the throughput with the RoadWarrior is bound not by the physical scanning speed, but the software that turns it into the appropriate file format and drops it into a drop folder.)  So I ended up not scanning everything I thought I would, at least not in the first round.  Slowly migrating...

Farewell Quiotix, hello Sun!

I've been self-employed for fifteen years; I founded Quiotix in 1992 to pursue some short-term consulting opportunities after getting laid off from my last job, and I never looked back. I like the flexibility, and I don't mind the stress of not knowing what my income is going to be in any given month. I like not having to ask permission to take a day off, or buy a new monitor, or attend a conference that looks interesting. So in the past, when offered full-time positions, my response has usually been "Why would I want that?" (This can be very perplexing to someone offering you a job; they're used to getting a very different response.)

So, those of you who know me well may be a little surprised to learn that as of September, I will be joining Sun Microsystems as a Sr. Staff Engineer / Technical Evangelist in the Java SE engineering organization. I'll be involved in a lot of things, including a lot of the same things I've been doing as an independent -- like writing technical papers on JVM internals and speaking at conferences. I'll also be involved with the Java SE engineering, QA, and education efforts. I have a feeling I'm going to be pretty busy.

To the customers, colleagues, business partners, and employees I've worked with at Quiotix, I offer thanks for fifteen good years and the best of luck in the future.

India wrap-up

Overall, I didn't get a chance to see as much as I would have liked; the already compressed schedule got further compressed by arriving a day late, and the very hot weather (42-45).

I was _very_ impressed with the caliber of students in my class. They were bright, well educated, and motivated -- this made for a great class experience, and we had a lot of fun. The food was good, and all the people I met (well, except for the shopkeepers and hawkers) were very nice. Indians seem very protective of Westerners; they expressed
constant concern that the weather or the food might be hotter than I could take.

I was truly impressed with the industriousness and resilience of the Indian people. No matter how poor, it seemed everyone was working hard to raise their situation. Everyone is a businessman; we could learn a thing or two about capitalism from them. And my god, there are a lot of people there. Everywhere you went, even outside the city, it seemed to have the population density of Grand Central Station.

The roads are mind boggling. A mix of cars, scooters, bikes, bicycle taxis, mini taxis, and cows, all going different speeds and sometimes different directions. Clearly they play this game by different rules.

I took a day trip to Agra and saw the Taj and the Agra Fort, and got one afternoon in Delhi to do some additional sightseeing and shopping. Unfortunately, I managed to get a spot of Delhi Belly on the last day, which lessened my motivation to leave the hotel for further sightseeing. And man, was it hot. 42-45C (110-115F) in the shade. Power outages were frequent; every day the paper reported the net power shortfall.

Dysentery roulette

The health advisories I read before leaving all warn strongly of avoiding the local water supply. Of course, this is nearly impossible -- dishes are washed in water, food prep staff washes their hands before touching the food (you hope), etc. So while its easy to say "don't drink the water", in reality it is pretty hard not to. So every time I eat something, I am playing a game of "dysentery roulette" -- it might be yummy, it might make me sick. Kind of makes everything just a little more exciting.

Something surprising

Today, I saw a man riding an elephant on a city street! I'm not in Kansas any more...

Arrived, eventually

Well, the best laid plans...

I was supposed to get onto the nonstop from NY to Delhi, but the feeder flight from Burlington was delayed 2.5 hours and it was clear that I was not going to make my connection. So they rebooked me for the next day, but at that point the nonstop was full, and I had to be booked onto a connecting flight with a 4hr layover in NY and a 4h layover in Amsterdam at 7AM (and which got into Delhi several hours later.) So, instead of the 17h trip I planned, I effectively had a 44 hour trip.

Once on the ground, things went smoothly. There were about 300 drivers waiting with name placards outside of baggage claim, but I eventually found mine and got to the hotel around 1:00AM local time. The hotel facilities and the service are very nice.

Traffic here is mind boggling. The roads are a free-for-all with cars, trucks, motorcycles, bicycles, pedestrians, and cows, often going vastly different speeds and sometimes different directions.

Heading to India

I'm heading to India on Friday, to teach my Java for C++ Programmers class. One of my training customers has offices all over the world, and the India office is next on the rotation. I feel like I've won the outsourcing lottery -- outsourcing is now putting money in my pocket.

Fortunately, my customer is springing for a business class ticket (which is effectively a first class ticket, as the only airline that runs a nonstop from the US to Delhi, Continental, merged their business class and first cabins into "BusinessFirst", and on the international flights BusinessFirst compares to first on other airlines.) The nonstop NY-DEL is approximately 14 hours, which shaves 5h off the "change planes in Europe" options.

A business class ticket to India costs approximately 6K; a coach ticket costs 1-1.5K. If I had the choice of buying the coach ticket and pocketing the difference, would I? Not sure. On the one hand, I wouldn't pay 4.5K out of my own pocket to upgrade, but on the other hand I might just not go if it meant flying coach. It's a long trip.

Getting a visa turned out to be somewhat of a hassle. Apparently, standard procedure for getting a visa involves sending your ORIGINAL passport to the foreign consulate, and hoping that they send it back in time (and don't lose it.) I used an expediter service to process it, which reduced the hassle factor, and they also rented me a local cell phone to take with me, which was pretty convenient.

After the training is over, I should have about three days to sightsee. That gives me a day each in Agra, Jaipur, and Delhi. I don't know what to expect, but it should be interesting.