I'm Pissed But Not Quite Pissed at AT&T

Beginning in April or May, my ISP will begin to limit the amount of data that I can download over the course of a month.

That is right: AT&T is instituting data caps on their Internet services, with my U-Verse service specifically getting a 250 GB / month cap.

Here is why I am extremely pissed about this and why I am totally chill about the whole thing:

I am PISSED because: data caps are simply a money grab. Innovative new platforms and concepts - such as online streaming and cloud storage services - are nearly useless with data caps. I would love to store hundreds of gigabytes of media online so I can access it on the road, but now have to watch my usage of downstream data at home.

I am a Netflix user and a gamer. I love Steam and my Xbox 360 - both platforms which can consume dozens of gigabytes in downloads per month.

I am totally CHILL because: while I am sure I have blown past 250 GB of data usage at least a few months last year, my Netflix usage has been down lately, and I terabytes of harddisk space free now: plenty to download and store all the important files I need now and perhaps in the immediate future.

Also, I am sure that part of the reason for data caps in the first place is to prevent too many of AT&T's U-Verse subscribers from defecting from their high-profit TV options. In my case, I am a subscriber to their basic TV service only - no cable channels - and I watch so little TV that it makes no difference to me whether or not they lose or gain TV customers.

Finally, AT&T is actually pretty lenient on the caps - you have to go over your monthly limit three months in a row in order to trigger a letter and an overage charge, and even then, 50 additional gigabytes at $10 is far better than other ISP's options, which include throttling or simply a full cut-off of service (I do not think any ISP in the U.S. does this - yet).

All-in-all, I will be watching my Internet usage carefully over the next few months, and if I creep too close to 250 GB a little too often, I do have a very uncomfortable fall-back option: Time Warner cable. Yuck.

B3 out.

Ten Years Late: Windows 7

This week my desktop computer embarked on a new era: the Windows 7 era. After sticking with Windows XP for ten years, I finally purchased (yes, with real money) Windows 7 Home Premium. Ignoring Microsoft's awkwardly-vague OEM licencing rules, I bought a copy from NewEgg, along with another hard drive so as to keep my WinXP install intact. (Side note: I am sick of partitioning drives, so a new drive was a nice change of pace from my usual OS-juggling antics.)

During the installation process, I ran into one major issue: installing Windows on a dynamic disk is not a good idea, so I had to figure out how to switch one of my drives back to a basic, primary volume - hint: Google "DISKPART." Once the install process was started, however, it was amazingly quick to install with no intervention on my part until I was presented with a Windows desktop - this was a refreshingly non-Microsoft way of getting an OS installed, and it really shows how far Microsoft has come since the XP days.

My computer screams on Windoes 7. I am already familiar with the OS thanks to my laptop, but it is nice to be completely modern on my desktop.

One final side note: ATI/AMD users beware. If you are running Windows 7 with a "legacy" Radeon video card (anything pre-Radeon HD; an X1950 Pro in my case), the Catalyst Control Center provided with the legacy driver download is extremely limited in its functionality. In my case, I was unable to change GPU scaling for playing games on my widescreen monitor. The solution? Install the latest legacy drivers available for your card, but install CCC 8.12 or older (technically for Vista, but totally functional on Windows 7).

I will be back in a few months with an update on how well (or how poorly, I suppose) Windows 7 is working for me.

B3 out.

I'm Not Dead, I'm Just Not Breathing

Thanks to a painfully-busy month of work, blogging has been the last thing on my mind. I absolutely want to return to writing, however, once the month of March is over. I have some new fiction I want to work on (Meltdown-related!!!), some JavaScript articles I want to write, and plenty of old articles that need completed.

I am alive, I promise.

B3 out.

PS: Spring weather absolutely rocks.

Fun With Fiction: Is This the Future of Meltdown?

I feel that my very first foray into writing - Meltdown - will be my very last. Meltdown has always been my baby - certainly not my most active writing interest, but one day it should be completed as my life's work. Will it happen that way? I doubt it, but I do revisit my original opus from time to time, and lately I have been tackling my survival-horror story not as a novel concept, but as I originally envisioned it way back in the eighth grade: a series of short stories tied together by an over-arching plot.

Here is a quick sample of something I wrote this week. This is a sample of a scene set somewhere near the middle of the overall story.

(Note: I have never had final names for my cast of six characters in Meltdown, so for now I am using my own name as a placeholder. Probably a bad idea.)

Brandon's fingers were numb from the cold, his hands and arms not far behind. His hands were filthy - crusted with dirt and blood. They stunk, too, like something rotting, something spoiled, and something sour. The group had yet to find any halfway clean water in three days. Day after day of rationing water was killing Brandon - he wanted to drink and drink and drink, but their next batch of clean water might just be for his hands.

Brandon wondered about things from his old life. Important things. Things like who his family were - the faces of his mom and dad were distant memories. The sound of their voices were no longer distinguishable from the dozens of other sounds echoing through his broken memories. There was no used in trying to remember what joy they brought to his life as a child - that was something long gone and increasingly painful to recall.

Painful was the gun in his hand. Painful was raising a thick, heavy pistol toward the sky and putting two or three bullets through the thin, pale body of a teenage girl as she shambled near him. Boredom had a new meaning - sitting there outside the RV, waiting for Pat and Jana to get back with more food rations.

The monsters were slow to move and twice as stupid as they were ugly. Some ripped into their own flesh for a quick meal. Others took notice of Brandon and approached him out of curiosity. An older man hobbled near the side of the RV, his khaki pants and worn leather belt tangled around his ankles. "Do you understand me?" Brandon shouted at the man. The wrinkled face stared back for a second and the man took just a step before tripping over his pants, falling face first to the ground. The man gasped for air as he screamed in pain. He rolled over onto his back, looked at Brandon, and held an arm up. "Do you need my help? Do you understand me?"

The old man's screams turned to whimpers as he held his legs. His pants became more tangled as he tried to stand up. "Sorry old man, you don't get me."

Brandon aimed the gun at the man's head and shot twice. The first bullet scraped the man's shoulder, the second punched through a fleshy jaw and tore the man's head off. Blood splattered up the side of the RV, and the body fell to the ground, sitting lifeless.

There was a time when shooting another human was inconceivable to Brandon. That notion was back with his mother's voice, his father's face, and Brandon's warm, clean hands.

B3 out.

The Twelve Hour Day

Here I am again, wishing for the impossible, the unbelievable: I wish I could study.

My 2011 push into learning advanced JavaScript, SQL, and ASP.NET has come to a grinding halt because of... work! Thanks to the biggest workload that I have seen in quite a while, everyone at work is putting in sixty-hour weeks.

Rather than work ten-hour days over the weekends, I am breaking my extra time up throughout the work week with twelve-hour days and partial weekend hours, but still: I am going to be exhausted for the next couple of weeks.

When this is all over, I will be going on a gaming, writing, and most importantly, a studying speed.

B3 out.

SimpleModal 1.10

In my free time this past week (there is not a lot of that nowadays), I updated one of my mini-JavaScript projects, SimpleModal.

The biggest changes between version 1.01 and 1.10: Internet Explorer compatibility and namespacing - the entire project now sits in the JavaScript equivalent to a namespace, an object literal. This should help prevent my function declarations from conflicting with others in large projects.

Check out the demonstration page here and get the code on BrandonBruno.com.

B3 out.

Findlay's 2011 Bath

I was able to experience my first major flood in Findlay yesterday and today, and I have the pics and a video to prove it!

Facebook Album

YouTube Video

B3 out.