There must be something about summer in Seattle that slows my blogging down. It's been almost 3 months since I wrote anything at all. Looking through my blog I also noticed that I my blogging frequency was low most of last summer as well culminating in a mid-summer update exactly 365 days ago :-)
Anyway, life has been busy over the past few months both at work and outside of it. Stuff I've been upto:
- Work: Nothing major to report here, though we're getting close. The next year should be exciting, though :-)
- Travel: In May, the wife & I hauled ourselves across the little pond called the Atlantic and on to Old World. I've been meaning to write up a long, detailed post about our trip (and even wrote up a few hundred words on about our first day on the flight back), but I don’t think I'll ever get to completing it. Given that, here's a quick summary of the trip, for posterity's sake.
First, the logistics: We spent 8 days, across the memorial day long weekend, in Europe. We flew in and spent 3 days in Rome, took a train to Venice and spent a day there and then flew to Paris to spend 4 days (5 nights) there to fly back on the 5th day.
Rome:
We flew into Rome on an uneventful, if cramped, American Airlines flight via New York JFK. We had a classic 'Welcome to Italy' moment as we landed and we realized that the passport control line stretched all the way to the exit gates. It turns out 5 or so international flights had landed at the time and Rome's Leonardo Da Vinci international airport was ill-equipped and understaffed to handle such a load (especially at 8am on a Sunday morning). That was probably the low point of the trip and the rest of our stay in Rome was amazing - from the ruins of the Roman forum to the Museums at the Vatican to lazy evening walks around the Piazza Navona, we had a ball in Rome and probably loved it the most of the three cities we visited on the trip.
Venice:
Venice is probably the most overhyped tourist location in the world. The canals and the decaying old buildings were amazing for a total of 20 minutes before we realized that we had to walk everywhere or take the slow water taxies :-) I described Venice to others as a maze filled with tourists and many agreed. We spent a night in Venice and spent the day at the Doge's Palace and St Mark's square. It was fun, but only for a day.
Paris:
Given how hectic the first part of our trip in Italy was, I wanted to take the it easy in the second part and so, we stayed in Paris for 5 nights. Chilling out, in no hurry, watching TV till 2 in the morning and getting up at noon to check out the Louvre and the Eiffel tower. Paris was beautiful, busy, expensive and classy. But I still preferred Rome.
Versailles:
Versailles was a day trip from Paris and we took the train there early on a Sunday morning and were back in Paris in the evening. Versailles was probably what we liked the most in France. Touring through the palace and later, though Marie Antoinette's Domaine, we were awed by the opulence and grandeur with with the French monarchs (and their groupies) lived.
- More Travel: Now, if flying halfway around the world for a whirlwind tour of the Old World wasn't hectic enough, I decided to go camping in Montana during the Independence Day long weekend. D bailed on this one, so it was Ullas, me & 7 others. This trip was waay more hectic than our last trip to Montana, but it was arguably more fun inspite of the fact that I got 12 hours of sleep during the entire long weekend (or probably because of it) :-)
Photos from the trip:
- Photography: If it wasn't obvious from the photos so far in this post, I've picked up photography in a big way over the past year. I've been reading and practicing a lot (10000+ photos in the past 12 months) and will probably write a blog post sometime on the stuff I've learned (and have yet to learn). My favorite shot so far:
Stuff I've not been upto:
- Blogging: Self-explanatory.
- Staying fit: I've reneged on my plan to run the Seattle marathon this year since I got only 2 or 3 days of running before laziness set in. I've also done no biking this year which makes me worried about how my legs will survive the ski season. Note to self: Fix bike up and get back on the road.
- Gaming: (Looks at my unopened copy of GTA4). 'nuff said.
Other rambling thoughts:
- My Roomba died (as in stopped sucking) almost a year back. It's still in my living room charging itself and running around once in a while. Must figure out what to do with it next - robotic pet project?
- I finally solved the HD PVR conundrum by getting myself a TivoHD. The news, at 1080i, is beautiful :-) So, is Discovery HD and other channels, but somehow the local evening news looks extra sharp.
In the otherwise copycat world of Social Networking, it's interesting to see LinkedIn do something new:
http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/03/20/linkedin-now-for-companies-2/
On Friday morning they will launch company profile pages that partly serve as fact sheets for about 160,000 companies and partly serve to reveal the connections that members have with them.
...bulk of the data shown on these company pages comes from LinkedIn’s own knowledge of people’s careers...
LinkedIn uses this knowledge to display recent hires, related companies, recent promotions, top locations for employees...
...you can see which companies employees usually come from and leave for, as well as which companies the current employees are most connected to...
I've always felt that the real 'moat' that social networking sites have is the data they hold about their users and the relationships. I suspect this data has been mined so far for generating more targeted advertising, but LinkedIn is the first network I've seen that's exposing this data out in a way that's interesting for end users:
As an example, here's what the Microsoft profile shows me about the average Microsoft employee:
and here's the corresponding page for Google (http://www.techcrunch.com/wp-content/linkedinbiz_shot.png):
Now, who would have thought that the most common career path for Google employees is to join (return to?) Yahoo and Microsoft!
Random Fact of the Day:
A tidbit that you can learn only by poring over random Wikipedia articles:
'Jan' from The Office (NBC TV show) is the sister of the CEO of Flock (as in the browser company).
It's all one big happy family I guess.
Random Quote of the Day:
"Oh, I get it! Silicon Valley is like Hollywood, but for nerds, and without the chicks" - from a commenter on Valleywag (which in my humble opinion has started to read like a tired rag these days).
Random Find of the Day:
http://reddit.com/user/FunFact - this guy adds a comment to every top-voted reddit submission with a 'fun fact' about a topic in the article. He's gotten so popular that there's another guy (http://reddit.com/user/did_you_know_that/) copying him.
It's been a while since I posted anything, so I figured I'd resume on a light note :-) On the bright side, my HD PVR conundrum was solved yesterday and I have a Tivo HD on the way thanks to woot.com!
After reading a few reviews (and partly because I was in the mood for some change {lame, I know}), I decided to ditch BlockBuster Online and switch to Netflix for my movie fix. I've been with BBO almost since they started (Sep '04?) so this was a pretty drastic move! In a few hours of playing around, I've found a few things I like about NFLX:
- Multiple profiles: Now, the wife & I can both have our own queue without one of us hogging the movie queue.
- Stream to PC: This is the one thing I'm most exited about - not because I want to go from watching movies from my couch on a 40" screen to sitting at a computer chair watching movies on a 19" screen, but because I'm fairly certain that this is just a pre-cursor for Netflix providing movie downloads on the XBox.
I'm not too impressed by Netflix's UI yet - a couple of things that annoy me - for one, why doesn't the search box just take to me the movie I'm searching for when it offers me suggestions:
It offered me the right movie in the dropdown, but when I select it, it does a search on the term rather than take me to the movie directly. All that AJAXy autocomplete goodness wasted!
The other annoyance: Why is this popup displayed for every movie I add to my queue?
BBO used to let me bulk-add movies to my queue without any annoying popups! I'll probably also miss the occasional game rental and in-store exchange from Blockbuster, but I'm hoping the larger selection and stream to PC features make up for it!
Here's wishing everyone who sees this entry a happy new year 2008. In the spirit of a light and lively new year, here's a new year greeting in legalese I got from someone at work:
Please accept with no obligation, implied or implicit, my best wishes for an environmentally conscious, socially responsible, low stress, non-addictive, gender neutral celebration of the winter solstice holiday, practiced within the most enjoyable traditions of the religious persuasion of your choice, or secular practices of your choice, with respect for the religious/secular persuasions and/or traditions of others, or their choice not to practice religious or secular traditions at all...and a fiscally successful, personally fulfilling, and medically uncomplicated recognition of the onset of the generally accepted calendar year 2008, but not without due respect for the calendars of choice of other cultures whose contributions to society have helped make this country great (not to imply that this country is necessarily greater than any other country), and without regard to the race, creed, color, age, physical ability, religious faith, or sexual orientation of the wishee.
This wish is limited to the customary and usual good tidings for a period of one year, or until the issuance of a subsequent holiday greeting, whichever comes first. "Holiday" is not intended to, nor shall it be considered, limited to the usual Judeo-Christian celebrations or servances, or to such activities of any organized or ad hoc religious community, group, individual or belief (or lack thereof).
Note: By accepting this greeting, you are accepting these terms. This greeting is subject to clarification or withdrawal, and is revocable at the sole discretion of the wisher at any time, for any reason or for no reason at all. This greeting is freely transferable with no alteration to the original greeting. This greeting implies no promise by the wisher to actually implement any of the wishes for the wishee her/himself or others, or responsibility for the consequences which may arise from the implementation or non-implementation of same. This greeting is void where prohibited by law.
I finally gave in to geek pressure and decided to get ourselves a new TV. The gorgeous Samsung LNT4065F. 40", LCD, 1080p. The TV's due to arrive later this week or early next, so I thought I'd do some early research to figure out how to get the most out of it.
My current setup is a relatively ancient 27" Sony flat-tube TV we bought as soon as we moved to Seattle back in '04, so this is a significant upgrade in terms of screen size (27->40), technology (analog SD tube -> digital HD LCD) and most significantly, resolution (480i -> 1080p).
Our primary use of the TV is to play DVDs (thanks to BlockBuster Online and iTalkies), TV (via our trusty Series 2 Tivo and basic Comcast cable) and an XBox 360 Premium that I stood in line for 8 hours to buy on launch day.
The only HD-capable device on this list is the XBox 360 - capable of doing 1080p games and 1080i movies over component and 1080p movies over VGA. So, this one was easy - I picked up a Xbox VGA cable for cheap that I can use to get upscaled DVD playback and I'm all set of experience movies and gaming at full HD. I thought about getting the XBox HD-DVD player given the great deals we're seeing on them this holiday season, but figured that it wasn't wise to invest on either side of the HD format wars till there was a clear winner. Moreover, only some movies are available in HD-DVD and others are in Blu-Ray, so it didn't make sense to confine myself to a single format till dual-format players become more common down the road.
My DVD player - a Panasonic home-theater-in-a-box from the same bygone era - doesn't upconvert DVDs to 1080i. I figured I'll let this one slip and keep my current DVD player, especially since it supports 480p and use the XBox for DVD playback when I really wanted upconverted video.
Cable - this one's tricky. I don't have digital cable , so the only HD-channels I can get right now in HD are the local channels through the TV's built-in QAM tuner. The bigger problem for me, even if I do switch from cable to Satellite or OTA/ATSC, is how to get a PVR solution that supports HD video. The Series2 Tivo that I've owned for the past couple of years clearly doesn't support HD-video of any kind. My significant other is addicted to the Tivo and would immediately disapprove of any solution that involves losing the PVR functionality (I know - I asked!).
So, my options are:
- HD Tivo: Luckily for me, Tivo launched it's HD-capable Series 3 last year. More recently, they launched the scaled down and cheaper HD Tivo. This PVR supports upto 20 hours of recorded HD content from OTA or digital cable (via the CableCard). Sounds perfect, except, that it costs $249 + $12.95/mo. That puts it out of this year's tech budget!
- Media Center PC: As I detailed in a series of earlier posts, I put together a killer quad core PC earlier in the year that runs Vista Ultimate and Windows Media Center. I've been using the XBox as a Media Center extender for a few months which works pretty well. So, all I need to do is get a TV tuner that supports HD and I should be all set, right? It turns that life is not that simple. Most HD tuners support decoding only QAM or ATSC signals - i.e. only free-to-air channels can be decoded. There are a handful of TV tuner cards that support CableCard so that digital cable channels can also be decoded, but get this - those cards are only sold integrated into a new PC!!! That's right - you can't just buy a CableCard capable decoder and plug it into your PC - you have to buy a cable-industry Certified PC that in their words "would absolutely be able to deliver on the wide range of things that you couldn’t predict with certainty would happen on a home-built PC". Hmm.. we all know what means -thanks to DRM requirements, there's no way a home-built PC can use a CableCard tuner right now! So, my HD-MCE dreams end there - even if I wanted to pay ComCast the extra $5 a month for the CableCard!
- Comcast's HD-PVR: Comcast gives^H^H^H^H^H rents an HD-capable PVR (nee DVR) for the low low price of $13.95/mo. This sounds like a good option till you read reviews of the DVR and realize that it's a piece of cr*p. I'll pass, and wait till Comcast starts offering Tivo's which they've started doing in some regions already.
- Do nothing: The PM in me decided to go with this option for now. As discussed above, all options have significant downsides or costs that do not align with current priorities :-) Therefore, I decided to do nothing for now and be content with SD cable programming and the Tivo Series 2 till such a time when the above issues are resolved. Tivo prices are sure to drop in the next few months and Comcast will probably start offering Tivo's in the Seattle region sometime next year.
So, I'll just wait a few months till options 1 or 3 above become viable. This is definitely the best option given current realities...
PS: The fall update for the XBox 360 introduced support for viewing Xvid/DivX streaming video. So, a 5th option, of questionable appropriateness is to download err.. place/time-shifted videos from that European site that charges € 1/month. That's a viable option for viewing the occasionally TV show at 720p as long as € 1 < $13.95 :-)
I rarely write anything about politics or my view of the world, but Arvind's post "Africa: why it's fucked up and what you can do" appealed too much to the armchair economist in me to keep quiet. Particularly interesting is this quote:
The main problem with Africa is petty dictators. Don't take my word for it -- a Ghanaian economist argues passionately for this view in this video. One phrase in particular is worth quoting -- "Africa's begging bowl leaks" referring to the futility of conventional foreign aid because of government corruption. He also explains how Africa's traditional societies were free markets, even if not industrialized, and what Africa needs is more capitalism, not less.
Maybe the begging bowl is the problem. Africa needs to stop looking towards the West with a begging bowl and start looking towards the East with a photocopier instead. They need to open up their economies, encourage entrepreneurship and emulate what Asia has done over the past 50 years. After all, in countries like South Korea, China, India and Vietnam, economic liberalization has lifted hundreds of millions of people out of poverty and that has in turn led to political stability.
Also interesting:
An avid follower of my blog (the only follower of my blog ?) reminded me the other day that I never completed my series on putting my PC together. I think the fact is that I've been too busy playing with it to write up my experience in assembling it!
Putting the PC together was a lot simpler than I expected. Granted, the last PC I put together was back in '99 (or was it 2000?) when I put together a P3-500 for my parents so that they could browse the Internet, send me email and so that I could play Unreal Tournament and Quake 3 whenever I visited them. That was also my first time, so it took me a while to figure out how to screw the motherboard to the case, plug in the CPU etc.
This time, it was all a lot easier, partly because I had the Internet to look up anything I couldn't figure out and because all the parts actually came with manuals! The only thing that stumped me was the fact that the video card only had a DVI out while my LCD monitor had only VGA input. In the excitement of wanting to see it all boot, I didn't want to wait an extra day to get a DVI-to-VGA adapter, so I tried using my LCD TV as a monitor (via S-video). That didn't work as expected and my motherboard didn't have an on-board speaker, so I finally had to wait till I could find an adapter and used that to connect the rig up to the LCD and make sure it booted correctly. I also had a scary incident when the CPU made a crunch sound as I bolted it into the motherboard. My heart stopped for a second, but I was glad I didn't damage anything in the process.
Soon enough, I had it up and booting:
and in an hour or so, had Vista installed and running with Aero enabled. Check out the Processor, Hard Disk and Memory ratings in the Perf Rating tool:
CPU: 5.9 (the maximum - W00t!!)
Memory: 5.8 and Hard disk 5.4.
Sadly, the PC only get's a 3.4 in the graphics department because of the sucky video card, but that's another upgrade for another time.
Next time, I'll talk about how I tried to install Ubuntu on this PC. I think that post will be called "How Ubuntu ruined my weekend (and why Linux is still not ready for the Desktop)".
Reason #253 that Facebook rocks:
You can keep track of other crappy social networks using their corresponding facebook apps:
+1 for Extensible Platforms and the Social OS.
Today, while shopping at Costco, I had the option of picking between Tellicherry pepper and Malabar Pepper.
Both grown in the "tropics of India's Southwestern coast" no less...
Tom Friedman is probably turning in his grave bed now and mumbling something about the world being flat.
Ever since I got my DSLR and a couple of 4 gig CF cards a few months back, I've been shooting away to glory each weekend and contending with 100s of RAW images. My poor 'kitchen laptop' with a 40 gig hard drive and an outdated processor couldn't take it anymore and was thinking of bailing on me when I decided that it's about time to get a new PC.
A bit of history -- I haven't had a desktop at home since '01 when I sold my aging P2-233 to an unsuspecting college junior. I got myself a 'gaming' laptop (an HP Pavilion ZT1260) the following year and it was a mixed experience. I loved the portability, but the video card on the laptop overheated after an hour or two of gaming and literally burned the motherboard in a year. It was still under warranty, so HP replaced it (sans all my data) for free, but the replacement lasted only another year or so before it suffered the same fate. So, I vowed never to get a gaming laptop ever again and got us a cheap Toshiba laptop that we used at home predominantly for browsing and email.
I've been toying with the idea of getting a media center/media server ever since I got my Tivo and Xbox, and figured I could use it for transcoding recorded tv shows to the iPod, streaming photo and music to the xbox and other misc uses.
Here's the config I came up with:
CPU: Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 quad-core processor, 2.40GHz
. I figured I needed a multi-core processor to handle all the photo editing and video transcoding I planned to do. So, well, might as well get as many cores as I can afford :) I didn't manage to get the lower-powered G0 stepping though, just the older B3.
Motherboard: This was the most confusing part of my search. Unlike other components, there are literally hundreds of unique motherboards and there's no real quantitative measure that I can filter my searches by. So, I had to go solely by price, reviews on tech forums and a couple of features (like size and number of DIMM slots) that I knew were important to me.
I needed something that could keep up with the quad-core while staying stable and cool. I wasn't too keen on RAID support though I wanted SATA to serve up all the media I'm planning to host :). I thought I could get a full sized ATX mobo w/ built in Video, but proved pretty difficult. So, finally, I got the ABIT IP35-E
, which had good reviews on NewEgg and had the works as far as features were concerned. This mobo has the double boot problem described in some forums, but it's not a real bug, just an annoyance.
RAM: I figured that since memory prices drop over time, I'll get just enough for my needs now and expand later as required. So, I got 2 gigs of dual channel DDR2 800 Mhz memory from Corsair - the highly rater Corsair 2GB TWIN2X2048-6400C4
. I have two slots left on the mobo which will help in future expansion.
Hard Drive: Again, I wanted to get the best bang for the buck here since hdd prices and capacities are always moving in opposite directions. The best deal I got was on the Western Digital 400GB SATA 150
drive which was on sale on NewEgg at the time. It's only 7200 RPM and 150MB/s, but I'll probably be buying a hard drive every year to keep up with growing storage needs :)
Video Card: I wasn't planning to use this PC for major gaming, since I already have an Xbox 360. I initially planned to get a mobo with on board video but since those were hard to come by with the features I wanted, I decided to get the cheapest general purpose video card with DirectX 9 and Vista Aero support. That turned out to be the MSI ATI RADEON X1550 
with 128MB on board video memory, HDMI out and TV out. Not a bad card, and totally worth the 30 bucks I paid for it.
Case and Power Supply: These were easy. I didn't need a fancy case since I wasn't going to keep this PC in the living room. I needed a fairly powerful power supply, though because of the quad core processor, SATA drive(s) and my long term plans of getting a better video card. So, I picked up a Rosewill case for cheap and a rather basic Coolmax 450W Power Supply
from newegg and buy.com respectively. Both of them have built in fans, so that should help keep the system cool, if not quiet.
So, I ordered all the components over the period of a week and played the waiting game for FedEx, UPS and others to get them to me.
Once they were all here, I started putting them together. That story will be covered in a future post :)
3rd time's a charm I guess. I finally realized that the best place to watch the Blue Angels show is from the I-90 bridge when it's closed. Not Genesee Park, not some random location in Mercer Island, but right there on the bridge. I took my parents to the show today inspite of the fact that I hated it the last two times I went and managed to get the best view of the show that I could have hoped for (without owning a boat or a prime piece of lakeside real-estate). We parked in some spot north of the Bridge, near Martin Luther King Way and walked down to the I-90 bridge just before it closed and managed to get a spectacular view of the show with the planes flying right over us a couple of times.
Here's a pic I clicked, technically not of the Blue Angels, but of the Patriots Jet Team:
As I mentioned in an earlier post, Shamu destroyed my Fuji P&S and I had to capture all the beauty of the Bahamas on my lousy cameraphone. So, I decided to make the best of the situation and get my self a DSLR rather than another point-and-shoot. Armed with a $1k budget and some basic research, I settled on the Canon EOS 400D (aka Digital Rebel XTi) which is nearly unbeatable at that price range. My goal was to end up with a setup as close as possible to the Fuji S5100 I had, especially in terms on lens length -the Fuji had a 10x zoom: 37-370mm at 35mm eq. So, at first, I decided to forgo the kit lens and buy a used Tamron 28-200 f4.0-5.6 lens off eBay. I also managed to snag a 2 gig CF card from newegg, a 4 gig CF microdrive off of woot and a rather large camera case from Case Logic in preperation for our New York trip.
During the trip, I found the lens rather lacking especially in terms of build quality. After using it for 2 days, I started getting the infamous Error-99 that is common for 3rd party lenses when used with Canon cameras. So, after getting back from the trip, I decided to return the zoom lens and replace it with the Canon 50mm/f1.8 II, which is pretty much the best portrait lens you can get (other than the f/1.4 which costs 4 times as much). I also bought the 18-55mm kit lens, to cover some zoom range and I was pleasantly surprised by the image quality on the lens. I had read really bad reviews of the lens and didn't have very high expectations, but coming from a point-and-shoot world, I suppose my bar for image quality was pretty low :) It was also good to have, for the first time, an 18mm (28mm @ 35mm eq) lens which could take some pretty sweet wide-angled shots. I don't think I had ever taken a photo wider than 35mm before, so it was neat to take relatively wide shots like this one:
What was really cool, however, was the ability to take a series of exposure locked 18mm shots and stitch them together to get a panoramic view like this shot of the Columbia River Gorge:
You can see remnants of the vignetting in the shot above that is probably the reason experts pan this lens, but well, it does its job pretty well as far as I care, especially with shots like the one below.
A few days later, I gave in to high-zoom temptation again and decided to buy a new Tamron lens. After debating between the 18-250mm and the 28-300 mm, I decided to get the 28-300mm - mainly because it was cheaper. This lens is f3.5-6.3 - so though it's a little slow on the long end, the f3.5 gives me the ability to shoot indoors at the wide end. The image quality is nothing to write home about, but with the 11x range, this lens will probably be my primary walkaround lens till I save up to get a higher end Canon IS or Sigma OS lens. The only thing I miss in this lens is macro mode, but I figure since that's something the kit lens has, I'm covered there.
Some shots I took with this lens:
My favorite shot with this lens so far - surprisingly sharp at 300mm/f6.3.
I also took this lens out to a softball game that D's coworkers' were playing. This was my first attempt at sports photography and I learned a lot of don't and don'ts. Here're some shots that stood out:
Overall, I've taken 2500+ photos in the one month that I've had the camera - that sounds like a crazy figure, but it's been a fun ride learning all about what the camera, lens and a bit of post-processing can do.
Once in a while I realize that I've been so behind on my blogging that I feel like I have to do a catch up post so that people who follow my blog (yes, that means all 15 of you) can know what's happening in my life. Here's what's been happening in no particular order:
- Work - Work has been chugging along fairly uneventfully for the past few months. Things look on track, no major fires etc. I was at a meeting the other day where Sid remarked "It's been a while since I've been in a meeting with you. And that's a good thing!". That left me thinking the rest of the day about how a lot of our meetings are firedrills and all about crisis management. Maybe something Dilbert-esque like ' feel good and do nothing' meetings are needed so that people feel better about attending meetings.
- Travel - I've done surprising little travel since our Bahamas & Florida trips back in May. I thought summer will be all about driving around the state, hiking and stuff, but we've done pretty much none of that. D's parents were here for a month and we took them on a trip to NYC and Niagara Falls which turned out to be incredibly tiring with us missing our flight back, driving 14 hours a day to get from NY to Buffalo and back and so on. The only local trip of significance we made was a drive down to Cle Elum and the Columbia River Gorge a couple of weekends back.
- Biking - As hinted by my expanding waistline, I've done almost no biking this summer. I biked to work and back a couple of times and biked around trails in Issaquah another weekend, but other than that I've used the excuse of it being too hot or too cold or too rainy to avoid biking on most weekends. Hmm.. better get on that fast!
- Photography - Now there's something I've done a lot this summer. As a matter of fact, I wrote about my recent photographic adventures in this blog post before it became too long and I decided to move it to another post.
- Around the web - I've become a huge fan of Google reader over the few months I've been using it. It helps scan through almost a 100 blogs a day in no time, both on my desktop and mobile phone. Some interesting finds I've made recently:
That's pretty much the gist of what I've been upto so far this summer. My plans of heading down to the Olympic Peninsula are still up in the air and so are my plans for the labor day long weekend and (looking further out) Thanks giving.
One thing I never understood about the way mobile operators work is why texting (aka SMS) is so freaking expensive. I figure its something like what the drug dealer 'Nick' in New York Magazine's recent feature on profit making said about maximizing profit:
Sell to many users in small quantities. “It’s like taking a pound of coffee and selling one grain at a time,” says Nick. “If you sell by scoops, you’ll make a couple thousand dollars, but if you break it down into quarter grams and work for a few days, you’ll make tens of thousands.” Most top dealers don’t actually do this, and lazily sell in bulk, as Nick did.
Sure, 10c a message doesn't sound like a lot, but what do you get in return? A mind blowing 160 bytes of data transferred! So, that works out to...
(1048576/160 * $0.10) = $655.36 per MB of data tranferred by SMS!
Even if you have some sort of a package that lets you send, say, a 1000 messages for $10 a month (i.e. $0.01 per message), it still works out to $65.54 per MB of data transferred.
So, how does this compare with other forms of data transfer?
- Home Internet: Ok, so this may not be the fairest comparison - since we're comparing against a fixed line with a sunk initial cost (for laying down fiber/cable), but I thought I'd make the comparison anyway. Most internet providers don't have any fixed upload/download limits (atleast in the US), thought they're often rumored to send nastigrams to users who transfer large amounts of data - like 200-500 GB per month. So, lets be conservative and assume that the download limit on a regular Comcast 6-12 Mbps line is 100 GB (or ~100000 MB) per month. For this privilage, I pay $45 per mo. with no discounts. So, that works out to...
($45/100000) = $0.00045 per MB of data transferred by Cable Internet
That's right - around a million times cheaper than SMS! Dropping the bandwidth cap to 10 GB or even 1 GB changes the order of magnitude, but it's still thousands of times cheaper.
- Mobile Internet: So, I have the el-cheapo GPRS/EDGE mobile Internet plan from t-mobile that I pay $5.99/mo for. The contract doesn't state any caps other than a 1 MB file download limit - so, let's assume that you get 100 MB/mo on this plan. This works out to...
($5.99/100) = $0.06 per MB of data transferred by GPRS/EDGE.
- Mobile Voice: Voice rates vary a lot, but I figured I'll use the common $40/mo for 1000 mins T-Mobile plan for the comparison, since it doesn't include unlimited nights or weekends. Wikipedia tells me that GSM transmits at 12.2 kbps with the GSM-EFR codec. 1000 minutes at 12.2 kbps is (60 * 12.2/8 = ) 87.26 MB. For $40, that's
($40/87.26) = $0.46 per MB of (audio) data transferred by GSM.
So, the underlying medium used by texting is still waay cheaper than SMS by a factor of a 1000. And I thought SMS just used the unused bandwidth in GSM networks.
No wonder there's an abundance of free texting websites like http://www.textmefree.com/ .
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