Archive for the ‘Economics’ Category

An example of how Verizon’s Portland FIOS sale could go bad

Wednesday, August 26th, 2009

Three months ago I wrote about my worries regarding the sale of Verizon’s FIOS customers in the Portland area to Frontier Communications. Yesterday’s news brought a great example of what some smaller companies will do to get an opportunity to grow.

A large part of my concern about Frontier is whether they’re ready and capable of running a data network at the level FIOS customers have come to expect. While the current FCC bureaucrats thankfully seem to be heading towards enforcing network neutrality, that only covers active disruptions of service by the provider in order to create more billable events to the customer. It doesn’t do anything to insure that a provider is capable of providing reasonable latencies and bandwidths. If the Frontier sale goes through I will still have a 15Mbps dedicated data line, but it’s anybody’s guess what will happen as data goes through Frontier’s network. The Frontier network and its connections to the internet will matter more than the fibre coming into my house.

Given that Verizon had a stake in the Fairport sale going through, I have to attribute some blame to them, not just Fairport, for faking the Fairport network readiness testing done before outside auditors. Which then makes me quite skeptical of Verizon and Frontier assertions in the news media that Frontier is ready and capable and that service will not be degraded as a result of the pending sale.

Unfortunately, not many people are aware of these things or understand how they “get on the internet” and how it can go wrong. The Verizon FIOS service is really quite fantastic currently. There is a lot of room here for future disappointment. Comcast certainly sees the opportunity, is advertising heavily and working hard (seemingly with success) to lure people to what is ultimately a worse product offering.

Fowler MS makes the front page of The Oregonian today

Monday, June 1st, 2009

Following up on the protest at Fowler last week, The Oregonian has a front page article today describing one of the teachers being laid off from Fowler. Both Mr. Rice and his wife are educators and represent a large part of Oregon’s population, being transplants from California coming for the livability of Oregon. They’ve both been laid off and are trying to figure out what to do…

Fowler Middle School students protest teacher cuts

Wednesday, May 27th, 2009

School’s out for the day and I’ve just heard that today a bunch of students at our local middle school staged a walk-out over education funding cuts. Good for them! These kids need to do more…organize demonstrations, contact their state and federal political representation, regularly go to the school board meetings and city councils and teachers union meetings (assuming those even have any sort of public transparency), and even try to scrutinize some of the relevant/public budget numbers to find bad funding prioritization choices. And get on their parents to do the same. Given the economy it is no huge surprised that education is being cut this year to the point that teaching staff are being laid off, but it doesn’t have to be this way. Choices are made by the grown-ups to prioritize certain things over others and this is a prioritization choice. Choices can be influenced. Choices can be analyzed and called out when they’re unreasonable.

It’s just a sad state of affairs that there’s a tonne of economic stimulus money going around to create jobs that invest in the future of our country and fund shovel ready work, but at the same time we’re laying off people who invest deeply in the future of the country. We’ve got wall street banks that are too big to fail but those holding the governmental purse strings are seemingly willing to let our schools fail.

Customer service still exists! Or US Divers / Aqualung rock

Thursday, September 11th, 2008

I got some snorkel gear last month at Costco. I didn’t necessarily expect much..thought “cheap costco gear”, though they weren’t exactly inexpensive and as I used them I did actually think to myself, “wow this is actually really nice gear.”
Except I had a fin break the first time I used them (looked like manufacturing defect in the plastic upon closer inspection by my lay person eyes). Monday I exchanged some email with the US Divers parent company Aqualung. Today I received replacement fins in the mail.
I’d about forgotten such great customer service exists. Certainly not what I expected originally and quite a pleasant warranty replacement surprise! Definitely the type of thing that makes you recommend a company and their product to others.

Solar panels coming

Tuesday, September 9th, 2008

house_front_in_spring.jpg
After coaching a First Lego League team last year and attending a solar power expo or two I’ve had my curiosity about solar electric piqued. As of today I’ve actually signed a contract with Gen-Con, Inc. and expect to have a 2.4kW system on my roof within about a month!
I need to pull cat5 to the garage, but apparently should be able to suck the inverter’s stat’s off onto the web even.

Subscribe to the Peer to Patent RSS Feed

Tuesday, September 9th, 2008

It’s been on the back of my mind for ages to check if the Peer to Patent project has an RSS feed for new patents added to the system. Today I actually noticed I’d written it on a TODO list at some point and since it would only take a second and my mind was already on it…I checked.
Not too suprisingly there is a feed. Given the ease of adding feeds to a feed reader, the huge value in having a massive, distributed pool of eyeballs helping patent offices and that from what I’ve heard the biggest weakness of Peer to Patent currently is the lack of reviewers…I thought I’d do my small part by throwing a suggestion out into the blogosphere that people subscribe to this feed.

William Gibson on Marketplace

Tuesday, July 29th, 2008

…or mention of his Pattern Recognition anyway, today in the form of a recommended summer/beach reading. Especially after going to OSCON last week and seeing that practically everybody is using MacBook’s these days and also at the same time hearing a lot of wailing about vendor lock-in and the need for openness, I’m surprised there aren’t more Cayce’s walking the streets. For the record there were a few Apple laptops with their glowing clam-shell logo covered with some non-corporate-brand logo.

Guerrilla gardening

Monday, June 2nd, 2008

Boingboing’s linked an LATimes article on the subject of Guerrilla Gardening. Individual property rights are always bumping up against the good of the collective society. There usually aren’t many people standing up for the latter and those that do aren’t usually empowered to make a change. There’s something very libertarianly socialist about this guerrilla gardening concept though and it seems like it’s generally a positive thing, besides maybe police hassles.
There are definitely some areas in my metro region (Portland), city (Tigard), neighborhood (Bull Mountain) and my neighbor’s yard (I’ll leave him be) which could use guerrilla gardening. I might just have to try to tackle one occasionally!

Verizon may have some intelligence after all

Tuesday, February 5th, 2008

Last I knew Verizon was still a fan of a tiered-internet. On the other hand they’re now saying at least when it comes to blocking copyrighted materials they wont tier things.
Their VP of PR specifically has said, “We generally are reluctant to get into the business of examining content that flows across our networks and taking some action as a result of that content.”
I’m not sure how they can say that and at the same time be for a tiered internet. Unless they envision that as discriminating against traffic by source and destination only and not content? But some of the other quotes in the NYT article make it seem like Verizon may be moving more towards accepting that they’re in the business of selling pipes and the more and fatter pipes customers want because of a thriving internet means more business for them.

FIRST LEGO League’s Power Puzzle

Tuesday, December 11th, 2007

In my last entry I didn’t really describe what all the kids had to do this year and I should have.
Each year the FIRST LEGO League competition has a theme. Last year the theme was nanotechnology which was a real challenge for fifth graders. But this year’s theme was much easier because issues of power consumption, reduction and alternative energy production are all around us day to day. The kids started out somewhat familiar with the concepts already and it was much easier for them to research and comprehend the problem space.
In addition to move visible aspect of building LEGO robots which compete on a table to manipulate challenges in a proscribed way, the teams also get points in the competition based on judging of the technical merits of their robot mechanism and software designs, judging of an interview on their teamwork skills and judging of a presentation.
The presentation this year had three components: go out in the community and perform an energy audit, analyse the audit data to find ways to reduce energy consumption and adopt alternative energy sources, and finally return to the community building to present the findings and proposals. LEGOtricity audited the headquarters of Medical Teams International here in Tigard. Their primary observations were that the heating of the office space was poorly balanced, the windows and concrete walls and were not sufficiently insulating, their water heating seemed inefficient (old boiler far from usage) and there was a substantial amount of electricity being used for lighting and appliances. MTI in particular was interested in their suggestions for tank-less water heaters and removing one of three tubes in the flourescent light installations throughout their cubicles. The team also researched solar power, but found MTI would need something like a $4million installation of panels (which they did calculate could fit on MTI’s roof). The bummer is that MTI is a non-profit so they don’t pay taxes and can’t take advantage of the massive solar incentives available today.
To that end I really want to thank Dan Crowell (Excalibur Solar, LLC) for answering the kids questions about solar electric. After going to the NW Solar Expo earlier this year, I’ve been thinking seriously of trying to get a photovoltaic installation on my roof and need to give him a call so see about spec’ing something out. I greatly appreciate his willingness to interact with some kids in his local (Tigard/Portland/Oregon) community to help them learn.