Longklaw.com

It’s getting close to the end of the year, so I figured now would be a good time to get around to some of the writing I’ve been meaning to do over the past few months.

I signed up for Xfinity from Comcast when I first moved to Oregon almost 8 years ago. I remember planning it out to that the installer would be here the day after I arrived. Over the years, I’ve had very few problems with their service and I’ve barely spoken to their customer service. They’ve increased my speed a few times without any extra charge. I’m the kind of person who likes having a long relationship with companies and won’t switch if I don’t have to. Some people complain about Xfinity, but I know that the quality of service you get often depends on where you live.

Over the years, I may have looked into other services, but I never found a compelling reason to switch. Xfinity was fast and reliable and I couldn’t get matching speeds from the top contender, Frontier, in my neighborhood. A few years ago, however, Xfinity implemented monthly bandwidth limits. They gave customers 2 free courtesy months where we wouldn’t be charged if we went over our limit. I periodically checked my bandwidth usage on their site. I rarely came close to the limit, even when Xander was here and we were both using the Internet. There were a few months where it was really close. Then last November, Xander and I went quite a bit over. I blamed it on streaming more and a lot of new video game releases . After that things went back to normal. Then earlier this year, I believe it was August, I went way over by myself. That was my first month of not going into the office every day after finding out I was being laid off. I was streaming CNN every day, streaming on Twitch a lot, and downloading and uploading a lot of videos. Also, a bunch of new games were released. A few weeks earlier a Frontier representative had knocked on my door with a new offer. They had upgraded their service in my neighbor and for quite a bit less than Xfinity, I could get twice the download speed and over 30 times the upload speed. I said ‘no’ at the time because I didn’t know how reliable Frontier is, but I did keep the representative’s business card. After I went over the 2nd time, I decided I should probably say goodbye to Xfinity. I didn’t want to pay overage fees to them and their unlimited plan is an extra $50/month. Frontier had no bandwidth caps.

I talked to friends of mine who are Frontier customers and posted in Nextdoor asking for opinion. It seems that some people had great experiences with Frontier and some didn’t. Once again, it probably all depended on where you lived. I scheduled an appointment, which was scheduled for around the middle of September. Installation was quick. They removed the old Verizon FIOS box that was left here by the previous occupants. Apparently Frontier had bought all the Verizon lines. Frontier’s service has been really good. There were a few times early on that I lost my connection, but that could partially be because I updated my router firmware at the same time that I switched ISPs. The speed is great. I’ve been uploading videos to YouTube and it’s so much faster. I’m glad that I rook the chance. I was afraid that the service would be terrible and I’d end up wanting to switch back. Luckily, that hasn’t happened.

I know I just did this less than 2 years ago, but I have changed hosts for this site again.

The host that I moved to was great for the first few months, but after that the service became unreliable.  I moved all of my sites to that hosts as the domains came up for renewal. It wasn’t until I had already moved some of them that the issues arose.  I think the company was bought out by a larger company around this time.  If I recall, it took over a month to move my last site due to some bug and they were swamped with so many tickets they couldn’t get to mine quickly. Once the sites were up, they ran smoothly until last fall when the sites started going down. It’t not just this blog, it’s my podcasts that are unavailable for long periods of time.

As much of a pain as it will be to move 6 sites, I’m going to bite the bullet and try to move them all over the next couple of weeks. This site seems to load so much faster than it did before. Hopefully, it’ll be reliable.  The host has a lot of good reviews online, but so did the other one.

Here’s hoping I won’t have to do this again anytime soon.

I love social media and I spend a lot of time blabbering on and on using social media each day. For some reason when people aren’t engaging with your posts by liking, commenting, replying, sharing, etc, it’s easy to feel like no one is reading them. It’s almost like you’re shouting into the void or just talking to yourself.

Every once in a while I’ll run into someone in person or chat with someone and they’ll make a comment about something I wrote on Facebook. I sometimes get a little self-conscious, but only for a second. I did put it out there knowing there’s a chance someone would read it.

Just recently things I’ve said on Facebook have let to party invitations, a subtle offer for sex, and an actual date. Some old friends that I’ve talked to or chatted with have asked me about Oregon. So, yeah, people are reading.

Maybe there needs to be a button to say “I read this but I don’t have anything to say about this right now.” Or maybe they should tell you how many times it’s been read. I’ll just have to try not to feel like no one is paying attention just because they’re not liking my posts.

I didn’t realize it until a month after the fact, but this site turned 10 years old in August.  Time flies, doesn’t it?

I remember trying to decide which platform to use before deciding on Movable Type.  Now I’m using WordPress.  I remember switching hosts at some point,  but I don’t remember why.  I’m sure it’s in the archives somewhere.  I’ve gone through at least a couple of different redesigns.

Blogging isn’t as popular as it used to be, but I hope I’m still doing some form of this 10 years from now.  It’s a good way to help remember things that happened to me.  I’m going to try to write more often in the future, but I’m pretty sure I’ve said that before :).

I found out about this on Twitter and had to share.

With DVRs and the Internet, we can watch TV shows whenever we want to. We’re not forced to sit down in front of the TV at a certain time on a certain night to watch out favorite shows. I wouldn’t want it any other way.

One thing you have to be really careful about is spoilers. Nobody really likes to be spoiled when it comes to shows that you watch, especially popular shows with big mysteries like LOST and Battlestar Galactica. We want to find out for ourselves what happened.

I’ve noticed that a lot of the articles I read online have carefully worded headlines that don’t give anything away. Also, on podcasts that I listen to they are usually carefully about not giving away spoilers or putting them at the end so that people can avoid them if they like. If there are spoilers contained within these articles or podcasts, there is usually a spoiler warning. Fortunately, avoidance of giving spoilers doesn’t last forever. After a certain amount of time people feel that it’s okay to talk about the important developments in an episode and it’s not their fault if someone hasn’t seen it yet. Depending on the source that amount of time could be a few days, a few weeks, a few months, etc. I don’t like getting spoiled, but it’s not that big a deal and I’m over it in a second.

My problem is with spoilers on Twitter. Whenever a big show like Heroes or LOST comes I see at least one person warning everyone not to spoil anything or scolding someone who gave away a big plot point. Yes, I do understand that West Coast viewers see everything 2 hours after we do and some people choose not to watch live anyway. But still. Twitter is all about the conversation, but I can’t talk about this show that I’m so excited about that I’m taking the time to watch it and watch it live and that. I hate being peer pressured into anything.

I’ve seen Twitter described as the tech watercooler. Haven’t TV shows traditionally been watercooler conversation topics? It seems to me like you shouldn’t hang out around the watercooler if you don’t want to have anything spoiled. If you go into the break room/kitchen at work and people are talking about an episode that you haven’t seen, would you tell everyone to shut up because you don’t want to be spoiled? I don’t think so. I think this may be another situation where people behave differently on the Internet than they do in real life.

I don’t remember spoilers being as big of a problem in the VCR days. Those tapes could only hold a few hours so you couldn’t wait too long to watch what you recorded before you needed that space back. And technological changes in general have made it easy now to watch an episode when you want and get spoiled before you watch it.

It’s just frustrating that when I’m most excited about a TV show episode, I can’t talk about it. As much as I want to blurt out plot points sometimes, I don’t out of politeness. Maybe some Twitter client out there will implement a filter where users can enter keywords (LOST, the hatch, Oceanic 6, etc.) and not receive tweets can contain those keywords. Maybe there is one already.

This is the new Joss Whedon web musical starring Neil Patrick Harris, Nathon Fillion, and Felicia Day. It’ll probably be a lot like that musical episode of Buffy. I’m excited about it…because it’s Joss.

Yeah, I’ve gotten hooked on Twitter too. I wasn’t really interested in it at first, but once I started I just couldn’t stop. My profile is here. I’ll probably put a widget in the sidebar one day. If you don’t know what Twitter is, then that might be a good thing.