Lake David Fanclub Blog - Rants

Bye-Bye Wifi

Thu, 17 Jul 2008 13:42:00 -0400

Those who have had the pleasure of listening to me rant about internet know I have been a passionate advocate for the last 7 months for the concept of Municipal wireless internet (aka muni wifi). Since Minneapolis was a pioneer in the country in building what has been heralded as the only or first successful, large metropolitan wireless internet blanket, I was set on supporting this effort as a subscriber. I closed my ears when several people offered early reports that it sucked and that they had a terrible signal. I felt, to be fair, we needed to give it an honest try and see for ourselves. Besides that the system remained under construction, the SLF (signal luck factor, as I like to call it) is highly dependent on the location of your home in proximity to a relay node.

While the service was without frequent issues for the first 5 months, it all went down the toilet when Spring arrived. We were told that leaves caused interference, and that adjustments would resolve the problems. Well, how could anyone possibly predict that tree branches would grow leaves? In any case, after 10 days without service in early June, USI offered us a month free to compensate for the now-frequent outages. The service came back, and stayed up, for several weeks. A week ago, it went down again. This isn't the typical DSL or Cable outage where you unplug and replug the power cord and wa-la, it's fixed. This is no service, solid, no matter how many times you recycle the power. The curious part of the leaves philosophy was that our signal strength (the Ruckus modem's connection with the nearest antenna; our house is only the 3rd from the end of the block...with a node stationed right around the corner) was always strong. Even on a lower level, on the opposite side of the house from where the signal originates.

It appears that our connection has been maintained but other nearby nodes lost the relay. Even 3/4 mi away at Starbucks, it is working. So it is a very localized problem, and they probably have a long list of these. Thinking this should be fixable we made 2 phone calls until we eventually reached a human, who informed us they could not provide any form of ETA for fixing the issue...they did not know if it would be a couple days or a couple months. That's right, months. Not "Maybe 3 or 4 days", not "We'll call you," not "Well, we don't work on the weekend", not even "There are parts on order, it just might be working before you get your car back from hail hell." Just 'we dunno'. Even after that round of bad news, we decided out of fairness and, so as not to be impulsive, to wait another 4 days before pulling the plug. I called Comcast last night and reactivated our previous high speed; for only $43/month we were instantly back online. Although it's expensive, we know it works. All the time.

In case any of you are considering signing up for Mpls Muni, I've provided a helpful map of service availability. Maybe in about 3 years, when they have 60,000 customers instead of 6,000 customers, they'll have these things fixed and we'll try again.

Postscript: After we attempted to cancel they offered us 2 months free to "save us." We already had one month free... what good is a free service that doesn't work? Too little, too late. Very happy to be back with CHS.

How Cold is Cold?

Wed, 16 Jan 2008 16:18:00 -0400

It's a darn good thing they put "COLD" under the weekend shot because, really, we wouldn't know that -12 degrees is cold without Mr Man telling us. Who are they reporting to, 4-year-olds?

Getting ready for the coldest weekend of the year. (I hope.)

Paper or Plastic?

Tue, 08 May 2007 15:00:00 -0400

While I know this is not the first minor rant on my blog, this one just keeps coming up again and again and getting under my skin. Why is it that every time I purchase something, I need to be asked this question as though it is SUCH an important decision? #1, If I'm using a bag, it's going to be paper because I can recycle it and use it to fill with recycled products for the recycle crew to take away for me. #2, I finally reached the breaking point and bought a nice canvas bag that so far I've been able to remember about 80% of the time, which is large enough to hold my grocery purchase nearly every time. No, I don't want to cause a ruckus by saying boisterously "Neither! I brought my own! Yippee!" However, I'm hoping that by holding it out I can avoid answering the same question for the 8 millionth time. If nothing else, maybe baggers could just DEFAULT to paper and if someone has a strong objection about it, they'll let em know.

igoogle

Wed, 02 May 2007 10:36:00 -0400

I'm sorry but this is one of the stupidest names. What a disappointment! It's one of the least creative things I have seen Google do. do we have to have ieverything? Maybe I should just change my name to iDavid. Maybe we should start calling our cars iDrive. "gonna go get in my iDrive and head to the iMarket for iFood" Now every time I use my customized page to check something it makes me cringe and squinch my face in a sign of annoyance that they couldn't just leave well enough alone. why why why

Overdue marketing rant...will the value be diluted?

Wed, 25 Apr 2007 12:30:00 -0400

Well I suppose it's long overdue...I have not shared my marketing goings-on in forever it seems like, so here goes. Did I leave you hanging? We did in fact launch our new corporate website several weeks ago. Everything went off without a hitch, and by and large all reports are that people love the face lift. So, now what? That's the question we've been chewing on in the absence of aftermath, destruction or chaos. Things that were put off for so long can now again be a priority. Much touted interactive features. The changes to our online home allow people to find what they need much more easily, but they still fall short of creating an environment for two-way interaction. We're working on several new initiatives that make a medium for conversation with our constituents and to not by passed by in the social media - social marketing explosion. While the social internet has grown to encompass millions of cyberwalkers, it has yet to become the standard. I believe it's still on the cusp of the "mainstream" - wherein real fireworks happen. When every organization online figures out the enormous potential for this, and adopts it, then blogs will be as common as the 1998-inspired site with iframes. This begs the question, will the value be diluted? In keeping up with my internet marketing news I learned that the market for search advertising is well over $5bn. If it isn't already, it'll probably approach $9 or $10Bn very soon. So my question, again, is...will the value be diluted? If every company under the sun is spending a big chunk of their marketing budget on getting their impressions for Google searches, not only can Google up the ante but they have. If every company under the sun is in your search result, the competition drives prices up and dilutes or completely eradicates any advantage people found from this medium early on. Again, blogs are becoming a part of mainstream media- you'll notice that TV News personalities all have blogs online now where you can go to learn about the news or to find online resources they mentioned on air. Eventually we'll all have blogs, and then they will offer no real marketing advantage. The trick then is to be quick about implementing it. For those people who work in high tech companies, being agile and acting on the latest cutting edge phenomenon may be as obvious as getting your next Diet Coke from the company kitchen. For the rest of us, change happens slowly, and that is where the fight is. Any suggestions for making it happen faster? Or is it better to just let things happen as they happen.