My afternoon; cablemodem ruminations

About 3:10 this afternoon, I went up to City Utilities to pay my electric bill. To my surprise, there was quite a line formed. I guess I usually hit the place in the mornings, when there aren't as many people. I got the number 70, and the "now serving" board said 14. I considered leaving and coming back later, but then again, I had nothing better to do, so I sat down to wait, figuring I could always reread the illicit copy of Harry Potter & the Chamber of Secrets I currently have on my Visor while I waited.

And then the fellow sitting next to me asked if I wanted a better number. I looked at the crumpled numbers in his hand and asked if they were legit. He said they were; that he'd been picking up numbers discarded by people who got impatient and left, and trading up to better numbers himself. So I got 38, he was 28. There was a black fellow to my left who was 24, and we sat and talked together for a while about cell phones and things.

After a while, their numbers came up, then mine, and I went up to the counter to pay for about $40 of electricity. As I was there, I overheard a woman arguing with the receptionist to my right over a $300 power bill, for a place in which she'd apparently stayed only one month. I couldn't help but feel sorry for her, as her house had burned down and she said she had no money at all other than the deposit she'd made for power for her new place--and she had two kids to take care of (who were with her at the moment, and being rowdy). The receptionist was trying to get her to arrange a payment schedule. I hope she managed to get things worked out; I didn't wait around long enough to find out. I made my payment and left.

Dinner after that was at a little short-order cafe type place nearby called Hamby's. They make a great little burger there for $2, and that's what I had. It was the complete antithesis of that Hardee's "$6 burger" I mentioned the other day. Burger, cheese, pickles, tomato, thick slice of onion, on a toasted bun. The french fries weren't frozen pre-made, but seemed to be fresh from a genuine potato, with the skin still on it. That was a good meal. With fries and a drink it came to $4.87, and I left a dollar bill beside the plate. Yum.

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So, now I see on Mediacom's webpage a little announcement that goes like this:

Dear Valued Customer,

Today’s ruling by Bankruptcy Judge Thomas Carlson to reject Excite@Home’s contracts with the cable operators that use the Excite@Home high-speed Internet service clears the way for Excite@Home to negotiate new agreements with cable operators to continue service to high-speed cable Internet customers.

Media reports are characterizing the ruling as an order by the court to shutdown the service at midnight Friday, November 30. Despite these reports, Excite@Home continues to provide service to our customers and has not issued a notice that they will be shutting-down the network at midnight Friday or anytime in the immediate future.

Mediacom and other cable operators are negotiating with Excite@Home to maintain uninterrupted service. Mediacom continues to diligently pursue an alternate service provider to maintain high-speed Internet access to our customers. In the event of a service interruption, Mediacom will communicate with you plans to migrate your high-speed Internet service to a new service provider.

To ensure minimal disruption to your service, we request that you check your email account(s) on a daily basis. Doing this will automatically save your email to your hard drive as well as ensure timely receipt of important future communications from Mediacom. Also, backup your personal web page(s) by copying them to a diskette, CD or to your computer hard drive.

We appreciate your patience during this process and thank you for your business.

Sincerely,

John G. Pascarelli
Senior Vice President
Marketing and Consumer Services

I'm not quite clear on what this means for me. I'd been assuming that my cable service was going to go pffft, instantaneously, at the magic hour of midnight (I'd assumed Eastern, but sources elsewhere say Pacific--which I suppose makes sense, since the case was decided in a California court). But that post, correlating with a news article on CNet, seem to suggest that the ruling just means Excite can shut down, not necessarily that it will.

I suppose I won't be able to tell for sure until I wake up tomorrow and see whether the light on my cablemodem is blinking or steady. If that happens...well, I guess I'll be updating the journal from school for a while.

(no subject)

Midnight pacific time and the cable is still up. We'll see what it looks like when I get up tomorrow.

I live! / The "It" Guy

And so does my Internet connection. For the moment, at least. However, I notice that name resolution--that's the function of the Internet service that translates addresses such as "www.livejournal.com" into the series of numbers (in this case, "66.150.15.150") that the computer knows how to connect with--seems to have vanished.

Fortunately, it's simple enough to set a nameserver manually in Windows, so I simply changed the option from "receive DNS automatically" to a DNS server from another site that I know of, and now it works fine. But it makes me just a little leery about shutting down or rebooting until I know what's going on--I might not be able to get back on-line again. :)

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There's an awful lot of buzz online just at the moment about "It." No, not Stephen King's "It" ("We all float down here."); Dean Kamen's "It," otherwise known as "Ginger." For those who don't know what "It" is, it's a new invention that he announced very mysteriously in January, that was supposed to "sweep over the world and change lives, cities, and ways of thinking." Sounds pretty modest, huh?

Speculation has run rampant as to what Ginger actually is, and the most likely option seems to be a small, two-wheeled, motorized scooter--but of a revolutionary design, with the wheels side like on a two-wheeled dolly or the back half of a four-wheeled car, instead of one behind the other like a bicycle. It's rumored to use a Stirling engine--a highly efficient type of motor that's been around in theory for almost two centuries, but nobody has ever been able to perfect yet. Perhaps Kamen has.

One thing's for sure--it's completely stunned everyone Kamen has shown it to, including Steve Jobs of Apple Computer and Jeff Bezos of Amazon.com, inspiring them to heights of hyperbole like that quote a couple of paragraphs back. Now these are reasonably rational, down-to-earth people, who run successful businesses (for some value of successful, anyway) and presumably are not given to babbling inanely about other peoples' products than their own. For something to come along that makes them say things like that...it must be something pretty amazing, huh?

One has to admit that, if cheap enough, a small, fuel-efficient motorized personal transportation device could change a few things. People might drive cars less, use less gasoline. Cities might have to put in more bicycle lanes, and declare them "bicycle/Ginger lanes," so that whizzing scooters aren't a hazard to pedestrians. All the same, it's a little hard to get from that to "change the world"--unless Ginger turns out to be amazingly cheap, too, and I don't know that I see that happening.

Still, it's nice to see something like this happening. I don't know about you, but it sort of feels to me like the era of "amazing new inventions that will revolutionize the world" is over. No more amazing new devices, like aeroplanes, transistors, integrated circuits, nuclear power, and so on. Instead, what we get these days are mostly incremental improvements on prior technology. Moore's law doubling computer processing power every 18 months, and continuing to double it in spite of all expectations as the chip fabricators come up with new, smaller fabrication processes. People building better aeroplanes, nuclear power, and so on. If there are new inventions that will revolutionize the world, most of them are fairly invisible--things like nanotechnology, that get gradually invented, and may show some promise sooner or later but won't change things overnight.

It just feels kinda neat to see something come along that promises to change the world immediately with its introduction--even if the hype turns out to have been overexaggerated when it is introduced. It feels like I'm finally getting the chance to experience something I missed out on by not being born a few decades earlier. Even if it's only once in my lifetime, it's pretty neat.

Anyway, we're going to find out what it is on Good Morning America on Monday. I don't know that I'll be tuning in--I'll probably be getting ready for jury duty at about that time--but I'm sure it'll be on all the news sites later that day.

I wonder if there's any hope of me getting one for Christmas--or my birthday, since it'll apparently not be out until next year?