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PSB: Still cool!

Back in the late 80s, I was a huge fan of a British program called The South Bank Show. It was kind of like a “Charlie Rose for musicians and artists” – each week there’d be a long, in-depth  interview with a notable British musician or artist. There were no distractions – just the artist talking about his or her work.

One episode I remember in particular featured Neil Tennant of the Pet Shop Boys. The interviewer asked him something along the lines of “you are obviously a homosexual. How come you haven’t done more ‘overtly gay’ music?” Tennant said that PSB tried to not do “gay songs” because they didn’t want to alienate any part of their fan base; that, generally speaking, he felt that pop music was no forum for politics; and that he didn’t feel it was his place to “preach” to people.

I had a newfound respect for Tennant after seeing that interview. So many celebrities these days think it’s their mission to bring news of some “cause” to the “little people” out there, and Tennant specifically addressed how those celebs often come out looking like jackasses, and how he wanted no part of it.

It seems that Tennant still has his head on straight, as the Pet Shop Boys recently declined an offer from PETA to to change their name to the “Rescue Shelter Boys”:

The organization, the People for the Ethical Treatment for Animals (PETA), sent a letter to Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe acknowledging that its request, at first blush, might appear “bizarre.”

But, by changing its name, the band could raise awareness at every tour stop of the “cramped, filthy conditions” that breeders keep animals in before selling them to pet stores, PETA said in its letter.

The duo, which has performed under its current name for more than 20 years, reproduced PETA’s written request in full on its Web site.

The musicians said they were “unable to agree” to the request “but nonetheless think (it) raises an issue worth thinking about.”

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Harrison gets a new deal!

This is awesome news:

Pittsburgh Steelers linebacker James Harrison has reached terms on a $51.75 million, six-year contract that will make the NFL Defensive Player of the Year the second highest-paid player in franchise history.

The contract set to be announced Tuesday will pay Harrison a guaranteed $20 million—more than any other player in team history except Ben Roethlisberger. The quarterback signed a $102 million, eight-year contract last year that will pay him a guaranteed $36 million.

Harrison broke into the Steelers lineup in 2007 and had 8 1/2 sacks. He had a Steelers-record 16 sacks in 15 games last season, and his 100-yard interception return for a TD in the Super Bowl helped the Steelers beat Arizona.

Harrison and the Steelers have been going ’round and ’round over a new contract, and many Steelers fans (including this one) were worried that he might have walked away from the team. With almost $52 million on the table, however, it seems like James will stay. Hooray!

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Twitter Weekly Updates for 2009-04-12

  • I’m not originally from North Carolina… pulling for UNC is like pulling for Darth Vader (or Microsoft). #
  • This person can rot in hell: http://ping.fm/NRWOE #
  • Well… what did I tell you? #
  • the theme song to “Taxi” is now in your head! #
  • Random Internet quote of the day: “Nobody who writes ‘LOL’ should ever have the authority to fire someone.” #
  • “El cheapo” now filters to “I’m an idiot”. #
  • I’m off to the pizza buffet! 🙂 #
  • OK, I ate waaaaay too much pizza! #
  • Welcome to Charlotte… try our delicious fried pickles! 🙂 #
  • Man, I don’t wanna do the dishes today… #
  • Kannapolis? That’s like, 100 miles away, right? 😉 #

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GRAMMAR TIP: Fewer\Less

I decided to take some time off from my unending war against misplaced apostrophes to address an issue I’ve seen cropping up all over the place these days: the misuse of the words “fewer” and “less”.

In a nutshell, you should use “fewer” when you can easily count something, but “less” when whatever it is that you’re talking about cannot be easily measured.

Here’s an easy way to remember the difference: “I have less beer in my glass than you, but I’ve had fewer beers than you”. You use “less beer” because it’s not easy to tell exactly how much beer is in each glass; on the other hand, it’s easy to count how many empty beer bottles there are, so you’d use “fewer” in this case.

Here’s another example: “as the economy picks up, there will be fewer layoffs, resulting in less stress in the workplace”. Since it’s easy to count the number of people laid-off from work, you use “fewer”; since it’s impossible to measure the level of stress in the workplace, you use “less”.

By now, you might be thinking about those signs at the grocery store that say “10 items or less”. Yes, they’re wrong. It’s easy for anyone to count to ten, and counting items is sort of expected if you want to use the express lane. So, in a perfect world, those signs should read “10 items or fewer”. But they don’t.

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Quote of the Day

From some random guy on the Internet:

Being British is about driving in a German car to an Irish pub for a Belgian beer, then travelling home, grabbing an Indian curry or a Turkish kebab on the way, to sit on Swedish furniture and watch American shows on a Japanese TV. But the best thing about being British is an abiding suspicion of all things foreign!

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PBR is $9 at new Yankee Stadium!

The “new” Yankee Stadium is almost open for business… and guess what? They’ve replaced many of the “Beers Around The World” stalls with “Retro Beer” ones instead. These new stalls will sell “hipster” beers like Pabst, Ballantyne, Schlitz and Schaefer. I can’t speak for the other beers, but I do know that the 24 oz. cans of Pabst Blue Ribbon are going for the obscene price of $9 each, an 800% markup over what my local convenience store charges for the same product.

PBR at NYS

Of course, this might actually be a “bargain” if the new stadium is charging $6 for a 12oz. Bud draft. At the very least, buying 24oz. of beer at a time should cut down on the amount of time you stand in line. But still…

Click here to read about it on a “New Yankee Stadium” blog.

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Windows XP and local DFS Shares

In this post, I talked about Distributed File System (DFS), a technology that lets you combine disparate file shares into one “virtual” share that can be shared out to all users. So, for example, if you need to share ten folders off of seven different servers, you can opt to create a DFS share containing all of those shares, instead of mapping a drive letter to each individual share.

You might, however, encounter a problem with Windows XP-based PCs trying to connect to a local share via DFS. In SP2, Microsoft changed the way Windows XP handles loopback connections; this might cause a user to receive a “network path not found” error when trying to access a local share hosted on DFS.

If other users can access the share, and if the share can be accessed locally via UNC path (\\computer\share), then the fix should be easy:

1) Fire up Regedit.

2) Go to HKLM > System > CurrentControlSet > Services > Mup > Parameters.

3) Create a new DWORD value called “EnableDfsLoopbackTargets” (without the quotes).

4) Give it a value of 1.

5) Reboot the computer.

After the reboot, the local user should now be able to access the local share via DFS without that pesky error message.

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The Revolt Against TWC Begins…

Last year, Time Warner Cable’s RoadRunner division began testing “consumption based” Internet service in Beaumont, Texas. In corporate-speak, “consumption based” is a polite euphemism for “capped bandwidth”. In Beaumont, new TWC customers were given a paltry cap of 40GB a month. TWC has since rolled their “test” out to several other markets, and has also played with the caps, in some cases making them as small as 5GB/month.

5GB/month might be fine for older couples that use the Internet mainly for surfing a few web pages and emailing pictures of their grandkids. But for “digital families” that use streaming video services like Hulu or Netflix, that back up their computers using an online service like Mozy, that use a non-cable company telephone service like Vonage, that have kids that use Xbox Live or some other gaming service, that use VPN or RDP to connect to their corporate networks… well, metered bandwidth simply won’t work.

It might be one thing if TWC was offering a reasonable pricing package for these wimpy Internet plans. After all, it is only fair for grandma and grandpa to pay $9.99/month for using a mere 1GB of bandwidth, right? Wrong. From the looks of things, TWC appears to be prepared to offer a super-crippled 5GB/month plan for a tiny discount (say, $29.99/month) while at the same time, they want to jack up the prices for heavy users to $150/month (or more).

Let me also point out that Comcast – perhaps the most reviled company in America – has had bandwidth caps for some time now… and their cap is 250GB/month. TWC hasn’t mentioned what their “final cap” might be, but consider this: if TWC and Comcast both charge $44.95 a month for high speed Internet, and if TWC goes with a 40GB/month cap, Comcast customers will pay 18¢ per GB per month, while TWC customers will pay $1.12 per GB per month… for the exact same product.

So… why is TWC doing this? There are two reasons.

First, Time Warner (and other cable companies) initially “oversold” their broadband capacity. It costs a lot of money to run fiber optic cables and set up an Internet infrastructure. The only way TWC (and the others) could make it cost effective was to have far more customers than the network could support. Back in 1997, when web pages were small and bandwidth-intensive services like YouTube, Hulu and Bittorrent didn’t exist, this was an easy bet. But now that many people use their Internet connections 24\7 for one reason or another, TWC’s networks are groaning under the weight of all that traffic. By putting caps in place, TWC is hoping to coax (or force) people to stop using so much damn bandwidth, thus bringing their network back under control.

Secondly, Time Warner is rolling out a bunch of new services, and they want you to use them instead of a third-party. If you currently have Vonage or VoiceEclipse phone service, TWC wants to put a bandwidth cap in place to scare you into using their service. If you currently use Hulu to watch TV shows you might have missed, TWC wants to put a bandwidth cap in place to scare you into renting one of their DVRs. If you currently use Netflix’s new streaming service, TWC wants to put a bandwidth cap in place to scare you into using their Video On Demand service instead. Like most of life’s big questions, this all comes down to money, and this is as naked a money grab as every there was.

Thankfully, people are starting to take notice. New York Congressman Eric Massa (of Rochester, the site of TWC’s 5GB/month test) is mad as hell about it, and is looking into creating legislation that would ban bandwidth caps. Ars Technica has been on this story for a while, and just today published this piece, taking TWC to task for their half-truths and lies.

For my part, I can only say this: TWC, if you bring such caps to the Gastonia, NC market, here’s one customer that will switch over to AT&T’s U-Verse so fast it will rip a hole in spacetime!

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1,000th post!

This is the 1,000th post on jimcofer.com! Hooray!

1000 posts

Of course, 157 of those posts are cut-and-paste jobs from my old site, but still… it’s amazing to me that I’ve hit such a milestone in such a short time! As always, THANK YOU for reading jimcofer.com! I hope you’ve enjoyed the “fun” articles, and I hope the “tech” articles have either helped you solve some problem or made your “digital life” easier in some way.

Here’s to 1,000 more posts!

Jim