I knew it was coming. The MSN Direct service is like an old car that is sitting in your driveway. You’ve had some good trips with it. It’s been with you during those special times, those milestones. But deep down, you know it’s barely worth anything, and you know you should just donate it to Kidney Kars, but you just can’t let it go! Well, I guess it’s time to let go. Here is an article about MSN Direct shutting down.
The MSN Direct service was nifty. For a nominal yearly subscription fee ($50 at it’s peak), you could get movie times, weather, stock quotes, news snippets, traffic updates, new vocabulary words, and even instant messages delivered over FM radio to your smart watch (or coffeemaker or GPS unit). Of course, I could get all that on my phone, but still, it was a really cool show and tell item and conversation starter and ender.
I was going to wait until January 1, 2012 to write my fondest memories of the MSN Direct service, but I might not remember, so here are a few now.
I got my watch while working as an intern at Microsoft. They were promoting the watches at the Company Store, and I got mine for $99, which they said was a good deal. Here is a pic.
I really enjoy watching Glenn Beck. I think he’s dead on most of the time. However, on Net Neutrality, he’s jumping to the wrong conclusion. Watch the following video:
In the video above, Glenn and his guest are claiming that a core component of the Net Neutrality cause is to provide and subsidize a broadband connection to the Internet for every American. He’s getting this from a comment made by his favorite Marxist punching bag, Van Jones. While Van Jones did say that he is a proponent of the government providing a free broadband connection for every American, that is not what the general Net Neutrality movement is about.
The purpose of Net Neutrality is to “guard against discriminatory favoritism for, or degradation of, lawful content, applications, or services, by network operators based on their source, ownership, or destination on the Internet.” This is from the House Bill 3458, voted on in July 2009.
It does not say anywhere that the ISPs would be required to provide everyone with a broadband connection. However, one could argue that the term “Internet access” is too vague, which is why I choose to clarify the difference between providing a broadband connection to the Internet and providing access to the Internet.
Think of it this way. The Internet is like a network of highways, freeways, country lanes, and toll roads. On the Internet, most of the roads are toll roads. Opponents of Net Neutrality (e.g. AT&T, who own a lot of the super-sized toll roads) argue that they want to restrict what content/services are accessible by those who send or receive data over their toll roads. This is akin to the owner of a toll road (who is also a Yankees fan) saying that you cannot drive on his toll road if you are going to a Red Sox game. It is also akin to such a toll road owner (let’s say he’s an athiest) saying that you cannot drive on his toll road if you are a Christian. We all could come up with many more hypothetical examples of discrimination.
Of course, we would hope that AT&T, Time Warner Cable, Comcast, and Verizon (the four big guys not in favor of Net Neutrality) would play nice and not block or degrade access to Christian web sites, Athiest web sites, Yankee web sites or Red Sox web sites, but it’s actually pretty easy to come up with plausible scenarios where they might want to do that.
Recently, Time Warner and ABC got into a spat over something, and ABC pulled their programming off of Time Warner’s cable network. I believe they’ve become friends again, but let’s say they have a falling out with NBC this time. Let’s assume NBC will again cover the Olympics in London. In addition to losing NBC content on their cable network, Time Warner might decide to block access to www.nbcolympics.com, preventing users from watching Michael Phelps win 31 gold medals. While the Olympics might be a yawn-inducing example, what if Time Warner decides to block foxnews.com or msnbc.com, or some other web site that you choose to get your news from? Still worse, what if they start blocking specific blogs or religious web sites simply because the executives at Time Warner don’t agree with the content (speech) on those sites? No, you may not drive on my toll road because you have a bumper sticker that says Jesus Saves on it.
This is sensitive area, though. While the House bill doesn’t grant the government the ability to regulate content access on the Internet, we as concerned Americans need to make sure that doesn’t sneak in there somewhere.
Now, on the other side of the issue, one of the arguments that these big companies make is about network reliability. They argue that they need the right to block certain services in order to keep the networks under their control from bogging down and failing. I agree with this. I believe that Comcast was totally in the right when it blocked the ports used by BitTorrent, because BitTorrent was degrading the overall “access” of all other services on their network. In the above analogy, the ability to block network-degrading traffic is similar to the toll road owner saying that trucks over a certain weight or width are prohibited from driving on the toll road because they would damage the road or pose a safety hazard to other drivers. Makes sense, right?
While the content of the House Bill is generally in line with the Net Neutrality cause, it is poorly written, in my opinion. Like I mentioned above, it does not sufficiently clarify the difference between providing Internet access and providing a broadband connection. To use the toll road analogy again, its akin to the difference between allowing anyone to use the toll road (as long as they pay, of course) and providing a private on-ramp to every person who might use the toll road. While the bill doesn’t specifically say that ISPs will have to provide a broadband connection to every American, it doesn’t clarify the opposite–plus, it includes this snippet at the end, which is very vague and ominous sounding: “…Internet access service provider shall have the duty to…provide Internet access service to any person upon reasonable request therefor;”. This does sound a little like what Glenn Beck is hearing from Van Jones, but I don’t think that was the intent. I believe the intent was to say that ISPs shouldn’t be able to deny people access if they can pay for the service. Why couldn’t they just say that?
In summary, the Net Neutrality movement isn’t about a government takeover of the Internet, even though some radicals (Van Jones) would like to piggy-back on the movement and try to get free broadband connections for everyone. So, I hope that Glenn Beck and other talking heads will take the time to draw the lines where they ought to be drawn and separate the basic ideas of Net Neutrality from the socialist, government expanding agendas of a few loud-mouths. But, I suppose that the most important thing isn’t whether Glenn Beck has his facts straight, it’s whether the legislature gets it right when it drafts the legislation and votes on it. That’s what we need to be watching and reading carefully.
An employee of our Accounting dept. just vented to me about his experience trying to get the Dept. of Defense to pay an invoice for $14K.
So the Dept. of Defense has a nifty web site that vendors are supposed to submit their invoices through. However, the web site will automatically reject an invoice if it doesn’t match up with a “receiving document” in their system. This document gets created after they receive our merchandise. In this case, they received it on Aug. 3, and three weeks later, still no document. Therefore, we cannot submit an invoice.
The worst part about this is that when we call, the only rep available is a guy who has a hardly understandable middle-eastern accent (does the govt outsource their customer service?). After numerous calls, he tells our guy that he doesn’t have time to sit on the phone and walk us through the process of submitting an invoice. What else is he supposed to be doing?
When our guy asks to speak to a supervisor, he says that he is the supervisor and that there is no one else to talk to. (I suggested that our guy ask to speak to a subordinate, since the pattern of promoting incompetent people is rampant in the government).
So, after three weeks, we still can’t submit our invoice and get the money that is owed to us from the Federal government.
Now, I know it’s a stretch, but try to imagine what the process will be like submitting a claim to the government for a $14K medical procedure–oh, and imagine a middle-eastern accent: “I’m sorry, sir, but you’re going to have to submit your claim online…I understand you don’t have Internet access at home…I understand that you are 78 years old and can’t drive yourself to the local library to use the Internet. I’m sorry sir, but until we receive the bill from the doctor’s office and it shows up in the system which takes between 4-8 weeks, your claim will be rejected by the system. Sir, I’m sorry, but I don’t have time to sit here on the phone and walk you through the process. Good bye.”
Wanna know what the main problem is: No fear. The government employee has no fear of losing his/her job. They have no reason to be helpful because your satisfaction or lack thereof has no effect on their paycheck.
Now, I know that a call to a big insurance company might sound very similar (except maybe without the accent) today, but if the government would get rid of restrictions on buying insurance across state lines, then it might put some fear into the insurance companies when I threaten to take my business elsewhere. That kind of threat will be completely impossible to make once our health care system is run by the government.
Get rid of government regulation! Let the market drive down prices naturally! The only thing a government system should do (and I suggest this should be done by the states) is maintain a special relief fund that helps people with severe pre-existing conditions afford their premiums. That’s it. The pre-existing conditions issue is the only piece of the puzzle that a capitalist approach can’t support, since no company would take on high-risk clients without charging them an arm and a leg (no pun intended). Therefore, this is the only place where government might step in.
You need to check this video out. Can you believe the nerve of this woman? She interrupted an important discussion on national security issues to chastise a Brigadier General for addressing her as ma’am. In her usual condescending tone, she asked this man (who has dedicated his life to protecting his country) to start using the title of Senator, a title she has “worked so hard to get”.
Last time I checked, ma’am was short for Madam, which itself is a term of respect, like calling someone a Lady. I have no doubt that this “servant of people” has worked very hard to get that oh so precious title of Senator, but I think she needs to work a little harder to earn the title of ma’am, Madam, or Lady.
I took the Priests in our ward down to Moab over the weekend. We camped along the Colorado river Friday night. In the morning, we hiked up to Fisher Towers, some huge rock formations. After that, we drove over to Arches National Park and hiked up to Delicate Arch. Amazing.
Today I wrote a monster query to give me the abandon rate for each step of our checkout process at Sewell Direct. We’ve been using good old Google Analytics, but we really want to see the data up to the minute, hour, etc. Anyway, running it in SQL Server Management Studio took about 4 seconds for a date range of one week. After I was satisfied, I plopped it in a stored procedure and ran it again for good measure–39 seconds. What?!! I thought (as many others do) that stored procedures are supposed to beat dynamic queries, especially on the first run before the dynamic query’s execution plan has been cached.
After a little digging, I discovered a few things. First, when running a dynamic query, SQL Server Management Studio (or whatever client you’re using like ADO.NET) actually prepares the execution plan. Apparently, SSMS was doing a better job than SQL Server proper was when the stored procedure was compiled. I found this forum post that explains why. Basically, the parameter types play a huge role in the preparation of the execution plan. My stored procedure was using two DATETIME parameters (e.g. @StartTime, @EndTime) whereas my dynamic query just CAST two string-based representations of the dates into DATETIME variables for use in the query. When I changed the parameters to VARCHAR(23) and passed in string-based dates, the stored procedure ran in 4 seconds, just like the dynamic query!
Before:
CREATE PROCEDURE CheckoutProcessAbandonRateReport
@StartTime datetime,
@EndTime datetime
AS
BEGIN
...
After:
CREATE PROCEDURE CheckoutProcessAbandonRateReport
@StartTimeStr varchar(23),
@EndTimeStr varchar(23)
AS
BEGIN
DECLARE @StartTime datetime
DECLARE @EndTime datetime
SET @StartTime = (CAST(@StartTimeStr as datetime))
SET @EndTime = (CAST(@EndTimeStr as datetime))
...
I’m going back though a few of our other hefty queries to see if this tweak can speed those up as well.
I was reading a story on Reuters today, and they cited a letter written by Mark DeMoss. The letter was in support of Mitt Romney and is directed to Christian and Evangelical leaders. It is very well written and lays out a strong case for supporting Mitt Romney. The main reasoning is that Christians (and everyone for that matter) ought to vote for candidates whose values most closely align with their own–instead of voting for or against someone based on affiliations with particular organizations, be them churches, businesses, etc. Of course, such associations can sometimes by indicative of the values a person holds, but Demoss argues that mere association should not be the primary reason for supporting or rejecting a particular candidate. He urges Christians to remember that a vote for Romney would not be a vote for Mormonism, a Mormon, Mormon doctrine, or the Mormon church. Rather, it would be a vote for this Mormon, or better put, one man who shares our values who happens to be a Mormon.
This morning, I tried to start up Visual Studio, and I got the following message in a dialog box:
The application cannot start
This KB article (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/306905) gives 7 possible causes, listed by likelihood. I tried the fix for Mxsml3.dll, but it didn’t solve the problem.
Here’s a little context. Last Friday, I was trying to install Team Server (build) on my desktop, but apparently it’s not compatible with Vista. So this morning, when Visual Studio didn’t start, I figured it was because something got messed up during the Team Server (build) installation. So, here’s the fix:
I put in my Visual Studio installation DVD and chose the Repair/Re-install option. Every few minutes, I tried to run Visual Studio–usually that’s a no no–and after about 4 minutes into the repair script, the error message went away and Visual Studio started up just fine. I then decided to gamble and cancel the repair/re-install, betting that the installer wouldn’t really rollback the broken DLL. I was correct.
This saved me a lot of time, since un-installing/re-installing Visual Studio usually takes many hours to complete.
Finally, the ability to add another monitor to your desktop computer or laptop without having to add an internal or PCMCIA card! The USB to DVI external video card comes in two varieties: a 1280×1024 version and a higher-res version that supports 1600×1200. I’m currently testing the normal-res version on my desktop at work.
Installing it is so easy. Just plug in the device (about the size of a deck of cards) to a USB port, let Windows prompt you to install the driver (you might need the CD, included), then plug in your extra monitor to the DVI port on the adapter. Suddenly, you have an extended desktop!
The adapter comes with 128 MB of built-in RAM which allows the device itself to drive the picture on the extra monitor, leaving your computer to focus on what it should be doing. One drawback exists with Vista though (although an updated driver should be forthcoming)–the mind-blowing Aero graphics (sarcasm, anyone?) in Vista are automatically disabled when this device is plugged in. On balance, this is a small price to pay to get a quick and easy extra monitor. Here is picture of my desktop. The monitor on the far right is the one I added using the USB to DVI adapter.
Over Thanksgiving, a few of my family members who will remain nameless put certain gases into a certain garbage bag and let a certain wind carry it in a certain direction toward a certain fire, and something certainly happened. Here is the video:
