I Need a New Blog.

This one is largely an unfocused repository for whatever I happen to have to say at the moment. And while that was the original intention, it’s not an optimal solution. So, I’ve decided to break my writings up into the following categories:

• Technical articles - How-to’s, explanations, tips, etc. This will probably be the meat of my writings.
• Personal happenings - Sort of a family newsletter idea. Interesting to relatives and close friends; terribly uninteresting to everyone else.
• Snide Remarks - Political commentary, opinions, editorials, that sort of thing.

Perhaps there’s more to add, but that should be enought to get along with. I’m pretty sure I’ve got some interesting stuff to say, but one of my primary problems is that it never seems relevant to the subject of my blog… probably because my blog has no subject. Do my latest .NET coding tricks belong here? How about my musings about some bit of software I’ve been trying out? I don’t know.

I would like to have everything hosted on my site: it sure helps my search engine ratings–my personal website is actually ranked higher than my employer’s; higher than most people’s, for that matter (5 of 10 by Google), meaning that most of what I write about becomes “important” in web searches if it’s not too common a topic.

Since I’m going to be changing things around, I’d be interested to hear about alternatives for my blogging software. I’m using Wordpress right now; It’s nice and all, but I would like a bit more direct control over the content formatting. Less like blogger, more like Slashdot, if that makes sense.

Wiki-based systems are somewhat attractive if you can make the paradigm work. Wordpress is always an option. I expect that this may become my new homepage, so it should be highly customizable with minimal hacking.

More on this is probably to follow once I get more figured out.

I hadn’t realized just how much your day-to-day experience colors your overall perception. For example, listen to this little (absolutely true) story.

Last night, my wife and I decided to go to the store to get some food. It’s been fairly cold recently, so we decided to have a quick look at the weather to see if we should wear a coat or just a light jacket. The thermometer showed that it wasn’t too cold, so we both decided to take just a light fleece. We had a fun evening; it was cool out, but not too cold, just like we had envisioned.

Now that you’ve heard the story, let me fill you in on the details. We live in Colorado up in the “high country,” at around 7000 ft elevation. When I said it had been “fairly cold,” I mean that temperatures had gotten to -15°F the night before; that’s before adding wind chill. Days had stayed in the single digits most of the week.

So when we decided that it was light-fleece weather, it was actually 25°F outside, still well below freezing. Of course, it’s not humid here, so it was a nice, cozy 25°; but still, well below freezing. So how exactly did I begin to think that this sort of weather is not that bad? Well, my criteria for this sort of decision has changed. For example, above about 10° it no longer hurts to breathe. That makes me feel a lot warmer. Above 20°, I can make it from my car to the store without losing too much body heat. I never intend to spend more than 2 minutes out in the weather at a time, so extended exposure really doesn’t even factor into the decision. Having spent all my childhood in Phoenix, I still find my new perception on this subject quite surprising.

If you’ve ever had cable, you know that after your new-customer promotion is done, they about triple your monthly rate, that goes for both cable TV and Internet service. So once we had to start paying around $100/month for our basic service, we shopped around for other offers.

Thank heavens for competition. Our phone company was offering a 1-year promotion for $20/month. After the year is over, the price goes up to $25/month. I can live with that. Of course, you’re going to say, what about download speeds?

The cable company, with its massive bandwidth capacity, often advertises download rates that rival those business links that cost thousands of dollars per month. The catch, of course, is that business bandwidth is guaranteed, residental is not.

So in this rare opportunity where I have both DSL and Cable Internet access at the same time, on the same computer, I decided to conduct a scientific experiment. Using Speakeasy’s Speed Test, I did a few speed comparisons with each ISP. There was very little variation in the results; I’m not much one for statistics, but I’d guess a margin of error of about 2% or so.

A couple of points stand out here. First of all, DSL is hitting exactly 82% of its advertised speed both upload and download. That’s significant because general TCP/IP overhead counts for about 20% of your bandwith usage. That means that the DSL connection is actually delivering around 100% of its advertised bandwith.

Cable, on the otherhand, reaches a dismal 28% of its download capacity, and 56% of its upload. This test was conduced at 7pm local time, which is just after cable’s peak usage period. As you may know, total bandwidth is shared between everybody on your cable broadcast network, which is usually everybody in your immediate neighborhood. So while you may be able to get better download speeds in the middle of the night, what really counts is what you get when you’re actually using it.

Another interesting metric is price versus speed. For example, cable costs about 400% of the price of DSL (no promos), and gives you about a 136% of the speed. Conversely, DSL costs roughly 30% of what Cable costs, but gives you about 74% of the speed.

Also, the Cable provider is very protective of its bandwidth, since my usage cuts into other customers’ availablity. As such, certain methods of using your internet connection are prohibited; like for example, running any sort of server whatsoever from your home. As for DSL, it’s all the same to the phone company: whatever bandwidth you don’t use can’t be reallocated to someone else, so you might as well use it for whatever you want.

Yesterday, my wife and I made our most exciting and long-anticipated purchase of the year. We bought ourselves a grill. We’ve had our eye on the those gas grills at Home Depot for the past year or so. Every time we went there for one reason or another, we’d have a look and see if they’d dropped in price.

Well, apparently grills don’t go on sale, because we never saw one price break over the span of an entire year. However, the store was doing a promotion where friends and family of the employees got 10% off an entire purchase when they presented a coupon at the register. The event ended today; but last night, Cara and I went went for a Saturday evening trip to the hardware store to look at materials for building a picnic table. Since the “Friends and Family” event was coming to a close, the employees were giving out these coupons to nearly everyone they talked to.

The time had finally arrived.

With our 10% coupon in hand, everything was finally on sale. We made off with a few needed tools as well as the Weber gas grill we had always wanted. We took it home, and I spent the next two hours assembling the thing. Sure, we could have bought it pre-assembled at no additional charge, but then we couldn’t have fit it in the car. Besides, I enjoy a challenge.

Not surprisingly, we had grilled steak and grilled corn today for dinner. Tomorrow, shish kababs. Maybe some grilled fish on Tuesday. Who knows, we might even go an entire week without eating out.