Month: August 2008

It’s Official: Comcast Joins BendBroadband and Caps ‘net Usage

During the BendBroadband cap mess, there were stories about Comcast mulling a 250GB cap (while BendBroadand was mulling a 50GB max cap, which they later raised to 100GB after public outcry). Well Comcast made it official last week by putting an official 250GB cap (on a related note, at least we’re higher than Time Warner).

Needless to say, the public is flipping out, asking many of the same kinds of questions we asked locally, and trying to figure out ways to break the limit (as well as track it properly). But the sad reality is that this is going to become more and more common, and even Qwest has the exact same policy, even if they’re not quite as obvious or open about it.

Has anybody gotten a large BendBroadband bill because of the caps they instituted locally?

August 31, 2008

An Open Letter To All Microsoft Office 2007 Users

All you folks with newer computer and IT departments that have more money that ours: Please save your Microsoft Office 2007 files in a format that the rest of the world can open easily. Not everybody can afford (or really feels the need) to spend the money on the upgrade, and can’t open the files you e-mail us. Yes, we can (and I do) install compatibility packs so we can read those*.docx and *.xlsx files, but would it just be easier for you and the clients you send files if you would just save it in the standard Word or Excel format? Or even as a PDF? I work at a real estate office where I get freaked out agents who can’t open up “a critically important document” that somebody has e-mailed them, forcing me to carry around that stupid compatibility pack on a USB key so I can avoid the nearly thirty-megabyte download. I also have vendors send around documentation to their clients that were all in *.docx format, and I know at least 75% of the folks who received the docs couldn’t open it as I just ended up converting it to PDF with CutePDF (after loading the document with the compatibility pack in Office 2003) and it worked fine. I shouldn’t be caused more work to deal with stupid crap like this.

OK, done ranting.

August 28, 2008

Welcome Bulletin Readers

Apparently my site was briefly mentioned in this morning’s paper (thanks Dave for pointing that out as I would’ve never have known otherwise). The post (and comment) referenced in the article is here.

August 27, 2008

Video Dump

Staring at progress bars, setting up a new laptop for my in-laws (it’s Vista, and UAC really sucks), so here are a pile of stuff I’ve got sitting around. Videos after the jump…

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August 26, 2008

I’m Back — What Did I miss?

So I haven’t gotten online once since last Wednesday after a small trip to the coast for the weekend to help build a deck at my grandma’s beach house. Among the highlights in my fully-packed inbox upon my return:

Apparently BendBroadband is in trouble with one commenter saying they’ve already sold (no confirmation yet — I emailed “fred”). It’s starting to make their Bandwidth Cap look more and more like a money grab if this all turns out to be true. Can anybody confirm/deny? E-mail utterlyboring [at] gmail [dot] com.
Barney has way too much fun with alliteration (knowing him, he could’ve made it much worse, but refrained).
Finding weed is apparently pretty hard in Bend (thanks Kina!)
COWPU and COISUG got some press.
The US track team sucked it up.

I haven’t gotten through all my email or my local blogs yet. It does appear that a local blog did make it into the paper, showing even more how Bend Blogs are getting read by the local media (the Bulletin’s IP address is easily BendBlogs.com’s biggest reader, which is fine as it’s a great source for local information and commentary).

Anything else I missed over the last few days?

Update on 8/26: Full BendBroadband press release after the jump.

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August 25, 2008

Google Street View Is Almost To Bend

I knew the Google Street View was expanding rather quickly, but I had no idea it was spreading like a virus all over Oregon. Look at this screen shot I just took (the blue roads are the roads where Street View is available — sorry about the large screenshot):

It basically looks like the waters of the Columbia in Portland and the Willamette through the valley flooded and are slowly filling in the rest of Oregon.

The only reason I found this was that I was looking up my grandma’s address on the coast (where we’re headed to this weekend — if you look really close at the URL in the screen shot, you’ll see the city) and noticed the little “Street View” button. Apparently the little Street View car has been combing quite a few rural (and twisty) highways and is gradually making it over to this side of the mountains, even combing some rural roads over here.

The nearest street-view image appears to be on the Madras side of Warm Springs (as well as an equidistant shot up Hwy. 97), and looking at the photo, it looks like the Google guy turned the camera on as he was heading into Warm Springs from Madras (based on the lane he’s in as the passing lanes are coming out of the Warm Springs canyon):

Anybody want to make any bets on how long it’ll take for that camera to make it that next 60 miles into Bend? It still hasn’t hit Eugene, so I don’t know when it will make it here.

August 20, 2008