Category: Geekdom

BendBroadBand Changes Mind, Still Caps ‘net Usage, But Raises The Cap

(If you haven’t been following the BendBroadband bandwidth cap update, read up here first which links to the few entries that follow this whole mess. Most of the discussion has happened here.)

BendBroadband announced today that they’ve dropped their tiered-bandwidth-cap for the upcoming service change in July, in favor of an across-the-board residential 100GB cap. The pricing differences will now be because of the speed differences and the Platinum Plan that was created during this whole discussion has been dropped.

Just the same, Comcast still gives you a higher cap.

The press release (full text after the jump) also mentions their business plans that are coming soon. It was originally thought and mentioned that these would be uncapped, but it appears that the cap will be set at 150GB for all but the high-end plan (no details on pricing has been released — which I’m still a bit miffed about and have been all along). As was mentioned before, the cap on business plans might hurt Bend as a destination for new technology entrepreneurs. Experimentation with technology can sometimes be an expensive and stressful endeavor if you have to worry about caps.

And there is still is my problem with the overnight downloads/uploads that I do (for backup/security purposes). Again, they shouldn’t count against me, but they’re going to, even though they’re going to hurt nobody. While I’m not over the 100GB limit, there are times where I easily could be. And I can’t consider a business plan as they still haven’t released them.

So an improvement? Yes. Completely fixed? Nope. Are people still going to complain? You bet. Will the usage graph be fixed? As of May 7th, it say it is on the site, but who knows if it’ll break again.

I just don’t think people will realize the impact this could potentially have on their bill. While the cap is much higher than before, with Summer coming and the kids being at home and discovering torrents and iTunes video and such, I just have a feeling there will be more outrage to come.

Full press release after the jump, feel free to comment below.

Update: FixBBB is all over it as well.

(more…)

May 14, 2008

Even Comcast Gives More Bandwidth Than BendBroadband

(If you haven’t been following the BendBroadband bandwidth cap news, read up here.)

Comcast, the nationwide cable company everybody loves to hate, is mulling over putting caps on their monthly bandwidth — at a level 25x higher than BendBroadband’s base plan (and still 2.5x higher than their high-end plan).

My biggest gripe about this whole mess: Their usage graphs still don’t work and probably their biggest PR blunder in all this (in my opinion): they still haven’t released their new uncapped Business plans, which would be an option for some folks. Then if folks still wanted uncapped access, they could then point to the business plans.

My sources at BendBroadband say they’re working on it, as they are with fine-tuning the details of the residential plans (they are listening, folks), so expect an annoucement from them at some point, but I couldn’t tell you when.

May 7, 2008

Geekdom Link Dump

As per my usual every-couple-of-weeks routine, here are a bunch of geek links that are mostly for my reference but might be handy for somebody else.

Jeez that’s a bunch of stuff. Have fun!

April 23, 2008

My New Toy

I mentioned a couple years ago the new laptop I got. It’s a great little system, and I like the size and power in it. However, it came time to get some more laptops here at the office, and instead of getting a new one for the lady at the office who’s not really going to use it much, she’s going to get the old one, and I got myself a new one (along with another co-worker, who will be taking over some of my marketing and graphics duties here so I can hopefully focus on bigger-picture and more complicated projects for the companies I work for).

Once again, I went with Sager because of my reseller arrangement with them. I loved the 1920×1200 pixel resolution of my old laptop, but didn’t necessarily like it on such a small screen (it was fine most of the time, but sometimes when I was tired it was really hard to focus on things because they were so small). Since portability isn’t as much of a concern as power, I decided to go up to a 17″ screen with the same resolution, and got myself (and my co-worker) Sager NP5793s (I guess they’re not ours, they are the company’s, but we’ll be using them exclusively).

Our configurations are slightly different (I have the higher res on mine, plus a larger hard drive), but here are the basic specs:

  • 17″ WUXGA (1920×1200) LCD.
  • Intel Core2 Duo Mobile Processor T8100 (2.1ghz with 800mhz bus and 3MB L2 cache). The thing will upgrade up to a Core 2 Extreme X9000 processor down the road, which I was looking at for future upgrades (I’ve maxed out my current laptop).
  • nVidia GeForce Go 8700M GT Video Card w/512mb of DDR3 RAM.
  • 2GBs of dual channel DDR2 667
  • 160GB 7200RPM Hard Drive
  • Windows XP Pro (will be setting up Vista Business edition, which I have a copy here, as a dual boot so I can start learning the OS, but can’t use it full time because of hardware and software issues here at the office).
  • DVD±R/RW Combo drive.
  • Intel 4965AGN 802.11a/b/g/n WiFi
  • Bluetooth 2.0 (which will help with my Blackberry — one less cable to carry around).
  • Gigabit ethernet, fingerprint scanner, media reader, 2MP video camera, serial port (yes, I still need one of these), firewire, USB 2.0, etc… .
  • I’ll also be moving my internal mini-PCI TV Tuner from my old laptop over to the new one, as it’ll work with Windows XP while the one that Sager sells now only works with Vista.

My one gripe is that I wish it had an external SATA port (not many do) so I could install Vista on an external drive and not have to take up space on my regular drive with a dual boot. And it weighs much more than my 15.4″ laptop. But beggars can’t be choosers.

It’s going to take me a while to get it all setup to my liking, getting all the various apps I use (won’t need all of them this time around) installed, and I’m tied up in other projects right now to really tackle it, but I’m looking forward to getting this thing fired up.

April 23, 2008

Damn You Spamming Robots

Since 11:30PM last night and this morning, I’ve gotten over 420 540 620 “Undelivered Mail Returned To Sender” (and the like) messages in my inbox. Apparently some automated spamming robot decided to spam a crapload of people faking the reply-to address to bounce back to me, basically using my server as their trash can. Usually these things just get sent to /dev/null, as they’ll use invalid reply-to addresses, but this time they used the one I actually use. Looking at the headers of the messages that were bounced back…

Return-Path: <jake@mydomain.com>

Received: from green.shirasaki.co.jp (green.shirasaki.co.jp [202.238.50.147])

by green.shirasaki.co.jp (Switch-3.1.6/Switch-3.1.2) with SMTP id 03MF0M61F00001658

for <[email protected]>; Wed, 23 Apr 2008 00:22:47 +0900

Received: from 59.12.13.99 ([59.12.13.99])

by green.shirasaki.co.jp (SMSSMTP 4.1.0.19) with SMTP id M2008042300224602851

for <[email protected]>; Wed, 23 Apr 2008 00:22:47 +0900

Message-ID: <000801c8a48c$0321b897$914eb19a@nubfw>

From: “Leivtra Cylais” <jake@mydomain.com>

To: <[email protected]>

Subject: Free Viagar Pilsl. takahashi’s discount Coupon #GYJTN.

Date: Tue, 22 Apr 2008 13:35:18 +0000

MIME-Version: 1.0

Content-Type: multipart/alternative;

boundary=”—-=_NextPart_000_0005_01C8A48C.031BAD84″

X-Priority: 3

X-MSMail-Priority: Normal

X-Mailer: Microsoft Outlook Express 6.00.2900.3138

X-MimeOLE: Produced By Microsoft MimeOLE V6.00.2900.3198

…it’s fairly obvious these didn’t come from my server (this particular one came from some ISP in Korea). I need to go through some of the other messages and start digging through the IP addresses to see if there is a few that are the bulk of it so I can report them IPs to the appropriate abuse folks.

Anybody know a bulk way to search through these in Outlook 2003?

April 22, 2008

On A Lighter Note…

With all the hullabaloo about the BendBroadband mess, some times we all just need to take a deep breath and have a laugh. And web design and SEO geeks will appreciate this:

Thanks Barb via COWPU for the link.

April 10, 2008

Don’t Try This At Home

Have a dead Xbox 360? Don’t bother fixing it — just put it in the microwave and watch the light show. Good way to destroy a microwave, too…

The rest of the site is entertaining, too, as These guys have put a ton of stuff through their microwave.

April 8, 2008

10 Ways To Kill Your Server

I’ve had some annoying server (and co-workers monkeying with server) issues the last few days, and let me tell ya, I’ve contemplated some of these:

April 3, 2008

Mac People: Can You Help Me Out?

I have a co-worker who has a Mac G5 running OS X and is having a couple issues that sound hardware related (blue bar or something on her monitor), but knowing as little as I do about Macs (I’m not a complete moron, but don’t have nearly the skill set I do with PCs), and the fact that she doesn’t have a ‘net connection at her house for me to research on the fly, I don’t think I’d be able to help her. It’s a job for somebody who knows Macs FAR better than I.

Is there any local (or even non-local) Mac Gurus that read this site that could possibly take a couple e-mails or a phone call from her and help fix it (she understands there will be costs involved)? It may be a 30-second fix or a 30-minute fix, she just wants to have an idea and doesn’t want to have to drag her computer into Connecting Point to find out (as she lives in Lapine). Comment here if interested and I’ll pass off her contact info to you (or I’ll give her yours) and you can then hash it out with her.

March 18, 2008

Geekdom Link Dump

Here we go, my once-every-couple-week tradition of posting a bunch of links (in turn, cleaning out my link stash) that are primarily for my reference but are bound to be useful to somebody.

March 17, 2008