Dear Comcast…

I recently received a letter in the mail from Comcast, now known as Xfucutity, or something like that. The letter went something like this:

“Dear Comcast Customer, our records indicate that you do not currently have a digital cable TV box in your home. We are informing you that after March 16, we will be discontinuing our service of our basic digital cable package and homes will now be required to use a digital cable TV box.”

This makes me mad because I hate boxes and remotes. I loathe the fact that they actually call their piece of shit box “a cable TV box”. Seriously?

Because I’m a sentient human being with a desire to eat and live in shelter, I decided nearly 5 years ago that I would not be fleeced by Insight, (now Comcast) in Noblesville because I thought, “what if I move?” Sure enough, I moved. I moved to Fishers, where I still had Insight, but I thought, “what if I move?” Sure enough, I moved. All the while, thinking it silly to pay money for a box I’m likely not going to need for long. So, years ago I went to BestBuy and bought a $400 cable tuner and DVR combo – sorta like a Tivo, but with no subscription fees because I hate monthly fees. With a passion.

I figured that Comcast would charge me $156 a year to “rent” their digital TV box. After 2.5 years, I’d be saving money. Sure enough, I’ve saved $390 over the last 2.5 years because I don’t rent a “box”.

Now, Comcast is forcing me to rent the box. Or, they’ll give me one for free if I want to take their basic local channel package with the locals instead of the basic package I have now which has the standard cable lineup.

But, I don’t want the extra boxes because I don’t want more things to plug in, more things to look at and more remotes laying around. I want 1 remote called “the TV remote”. To watch TV Land should not require the startup of cathode rays, descramblers, LCDs, infrared and radiators. I want to watch Andy Griffith in my living room, not on the Starship Enterprise. Plus, Andy Griffith is 40 freaking years old. People used to watch it with a metal stick in the ground and a screen with two knobs. Somehow, we’ve lost our way.

Do not be surprised if I drop them entirely and stick with just the Internet, which I can still plug into the wall like God intended. And, Andy Griffith streams beautifully from a multitude of sites.

Apple Has Solved the Digital Divide

Who knew companies like Apple fixed something in a couple years that the federal government has been attempting to fix for 20. And all it took was cheaper devices! Shocking!

My conservative friends can insert their own “leave it to the private sector” phrase here. My liberal friends can insert their own “but this doesn’t address X” story here, too.

Vaughn, who is African-American and lives on the Near Westside, is just as much of an Internet user as the suburbanites who own multiple computers and pay $50 a month for home broadband service.

What it means to be an Internet user, at least according to researchers, is changing rapidly as gadget makers continue to flood the market with Web-capable mobile devices such as smartphones, netbooks and tablets such as the Apple iPad.

And when those mobile devices are taken into account, national statistics show that African-Americans access the Internet almost as much as whites do — narrowing, at least from a technology standpoint, a digital divide that for years fell along racial lines.

Today, the division of who has ready access to broadband is more about socioeconomic status than race.

“Since the first survey in 2000, race and ethnicity have become increasingly less important predictors of Internet use,” said Lee Rainie, director of the Pew Internet & American Life Project, which studies how the Web affects society. “In 2000, race alone was a predictor.”

African-Americans are now the nation’s most active users of the mobile Web, according to recent studies by Pew.

Most Facebook Users are Idiots

If you’re reading this, you’re not on Facebook. Perhaps you just came from there,  but you’re certainly not on Facebook. Confused? So are these people (h/t to Neven).

Evidently, people who want to login to Facebook google “Facebook Login” and come across a the top result which is a story from ReadWriteWeb that talks about Facebook’s login. It’s not, however, affiliated with Facebook in any way.

The idiotic part? “Facebook Login” Googlers end up at ReadWriteWeb and scroll to the bottom looking for the login prompt and end up leaving comments that really make their intelligence shine. ReadWriteWeb even has this at the top of their page:

Dear visitors from Google. This site is not Facebook. This is a website called ReadWriteWeb that reports on news about Facebook and other Internet services. You can however click here and become a Fan of ReadWriteWeb on Facebook, to receive our updates and learn more about the Internet. To access Facebook right now, click here. For future reference, type “facebook.com” into your browser address bar or enter “facebook” into Google and click on the first result. We recommend that you then save Facebook as a bookmark in your browser.

Just look at some of these comments:

I truly love Faceback.I am able to talk to more then one person.

when can we log in?

The new facebook sucks> NOW LET ME IN.

please give me back the old facebook login this is crazy……………..

IAM NEW AT FACEBOOK NOW WITH CHANGES IAM LOSSSSSSSSST!

It’s a brave new world.

The Future is Here. Flash is Not Welcome.

Notice anything odd here?

Compare it to this:

It’s tiny, but I notice it every time I launch this awful program. The “ID” in InDesign’s splash screen is slightly transparent. You can see part of the iTunes store behind that “D”. You can kinda make out an “A” and a “d” in the background. Every Adobe CS4 program has a transparent “periodic element symbol”.

Flash’s “Fl”?  Not so much. Stark, 100% black. Not real sure why InDesign uses a capital “I” and capital “D”, either. Flash just gets a capital “F” and some poor excuse for an “L”. Fireworks gets a capital “F” and “W”. Although, the “W”, like the “D” in InDesign, is physically smaller, it’s still a capital.

What’s worse is that Flash’s splash screen refuses to exist in the background. It just lords over your desktop like your mother after she caught you masturbating in the basement.

Any web designer/developer out there needs to recognize that Flash is already four feet deep in the ground. Microsoft, in their typical Microsoftian way is already racing a year backward with their Silverlight software. I wanted to learn ActionScript more extensively last summer and realized later it was a horrid waste of time. HTML 5 is going to help us move right along with the embedable <movie> and <audio> tags. It’ll be a while, as Microsoft still needs to realize no one wants to use Silverlight, either, and they’re not likely to push <movie> and <audio> into IE anytime soon. They’re still using a diskette as the icon for “Save” for Pete’s sake.

Let’s face it, no one uses Flash except for watching cute puppies on YouTube. If it weren’t for YouTube, no one would use Flash except for looking at band, energy drink and movie websites.

I’m going to go out on a limb and say the third nail in the coffin for Flash was Apple. From Wired:

Apple declined to comment, but some iPhone developers speculate Apple opted against a full Flash experience because of technical problems it could raise on the handset, such as battery drainage or sluggish web browsing

“These [smartphone] processors are going to become a lot more powerful now, but I think right now between battery and memory and raw processing power, performance is a major issue,” said Bart Decrem, CEO of Tapulous, developer of the popular iPhone game Tap Tap Revenge. “As an app developer I’m very focused on performance. I can see how Flash may not have the right performance characteristics yet.”

Gee. Ya think? Anyone wondering why you can play YouTube videos on the iPhone doesn’t realize that Flash Video is just a front for Apple’s own QuickTime H.264 rendering engine. Strip away the Flash front and you’ve got a QuickTime file. No problemo there.

Aside from video, the Flash program was evidently developed in one of Adobe’s “offices”. I have reason to believe that the folks at Adobe separate each of their software programs into separate offices in separate counties in California and they all meet once a year to figure out what the box should look like for the Creative Suite. Each office clamoring for their software to be the foremost box, of course.

I have another beef with Flash that makes me irate every time I try to move it. For you Mac users, let’s have an experiment.

1. Open Flash.
2. Click outside of Flash, either on another window or your desktop after Flash has loaded.
3. Now, click on that Flash toolbar and try to move it out of the way.

You can’t. You have to click inside Flash to make it active, then click again in the title bar to make it move. Slick.

I’ve been using Flash for almost 5 years now. I still can’t figure out keyframes and tweening. I don’t use Flash every day, I’m sure I’d get the hang of it, but it’s not exactly helpful. Why it isn’t smart enough to figure out keyframes for me when all I want is for a few things to fade in and out is beyond me. I was a SWiSH user long before I used Flash. Flash scared the crap out of me. Why must it take an hour of programming or tweening to make text bounce or something else equally simple? SWiSH had templates effects built in out of the box. Sorta like, you know, Photoshop filters.

Here’s another test. Try dragging something out of Photoshop and into Flash with an alpha layer (Photoshop document on left, Flash document on right):

Whoa. Bet no one saw that one awful black-to-white box coming. In the process of producing this little gem, it almost crashed Flash and caused OS X to give me the clock cursor for a few seconds. Proof positive that no one on the Flash team at Adobe uses Photoshop and vice-versa.

Death of the Newspaper

Over the past couple of days I’ve been reading a lot about the death of U.S. newspapers. Some analysts say that print is dead and we all should just move along to the Internet. Others say otherwise, like this guy:

We live under the happy illusion that we can transfer news-gathering to the Internet. News-gathering will continue to exist, as it does on this Web site and sites such as ProPublica and Slate, but these traditions now have to contend with a new, widespread and ideologically driven partisanship that dominates the dissemination of views and information, from Fox News to blogger screeds. The majority of bloggers and Internet addicts, like the endless rows of talking heads on television, do not report. They are largely parasites who cling to traditional news outlets. They can produce stinging and insightful commentary, which has happily seen the monopoly on opinion pieces by large papers shattered, but they rarely pick up the phone, much less go out and find a story. Nearly all reporting — I would guess at least 80 percent — is done by newspapers and the wire services. Take that away and we have a huge black hole.

I even read where one guy thinks we should make universities pass along the costs of newspapers to their students so they’re forced to read it. Well, that may be one way to raise money for ailing newspapers, but a piss poor way of pleasing your customers. As an IUPUI student I subsidize The Indianapolis Star, New York Times and the Wall Street Journal and USA today. Too bad I’m never on campus early enough in the day to actually pick up one and read it. Heck, I’m not even on campus most days of the week to pick one up. So that’s a retarded idea.

Some other arguments include moving all newspapers to the Internet. To that, I say, well, maybe you should. You already spend millions on printing the things and my frugal self never pays a dime for newspapers. Heck, I even write for one. I just get it all online. The folks that don’t have net access probably don’t have a newspaper subscription, either.

As usual, I’m here with an idea: shut down all the unprofitable print newspapers and turn it all to the Internet. Keep your reporters and staff and generate revenue via web ads like you already do and cut the frickin’ printer. It’s draining you people ragged.