“Seamless" came apart at the seams

At about three last night, I was woken by constant thunder and lightning.  It was continuous, more continuous than I have ever heard in my life.  Then strong winds and heavy rain were added.

Fortunately, we only had one set of windows open and I was able to close them before much rain came in.

Then the lighted clock went dark.

I tried to sleep, but the light of every lightning bolt went right through my eyelids.  I laid on my stomach and hid my face in the pillow.

I don’t know how long it took the storm to pass, but it did.

At about seven, I woke up and checked Duluth news on my iPhone.  It was quite a wide ranging storm causing outages and deaths.  Trees were toppled blocking roads and damaging houses.  No travel was advised.

All day our cell phone service has been erratic.  Sometimes our phones work, sometimes we can’t even get a signal.

I can see a cell phone pole from our house, but I can’t remember if it had visible equipment at the top or not.

My wife couldn’t even call on her phone.  The call could not be completed.

The strength of signal was one bar most of the day; my phone is now up to four.  But instead of 4G or LTE service, it only shows E, whatever that means.

I was able to get websites, now loading some of them gets stuck.  I wonder how much local data there is.  Just now I could not load Yahoo! Finance, but I could get most of the New York Times.  But going to a different article is going very slow, but maybe that is because convention news is so popular.  On the other hand, the online banking page of my bank is not making any progress loading on my iPhone.  Meanwhile, I started and finished reading a convention article.

So much for the seamless, at-our-fingertips operation of our gadgets we rely so much on.  We are retired and it is only a nuisance.  But there are many people who depend on these gadgets to do their work.

Now, how long will this take to post?  Essentially, quite a while.  As soon as I typed the first sentence, I tried loading blogger.com.  Firefox could not find the page!

Finally!  At 4:30 pm the web seems back to normal.  I have five dots and LTE on my cellphone and Yahoo! Finance came right up!

Can our electricity be far behind?

Commerce without connection

"Historians will tell you that nothing changed the American retail experience in the 20th century more than the shopping mall. Once developers clustered hundreds of stores in a single place (with ample parking), the American Main Street all but disappeared. People stopped seeing each other in the center of town. They felt less connected to their community — certainly less connected to its businesses."

Mitch Albom, Duluth News Tribune 2013-04-08

This quote was in "'Just browsing' may become a memory" also published on his website on 2013-03-31.

His article is on how the shopping on the web is changing our shopping habits as much as or even more than the shopping malls changed our shopping habits.

I grew up walking or taking a street car or bus almost everywhere I went.  At one place we lived there were three locally-owned groceries on our block and two store-front chains a bit farther.  At another place we lived there were three locally-owned drug stores in walking distance.

Now almost everything is chains.  The only locally-owned stores are restaurants, bottle shops, hardware stores, and some gas stations.  I really appreciate the few of these places where I can walk in, know the names of the people behind the counter, and be known by them.

Limited choices for DVD rentals

Over two years ago I wrote "Netflix busts Blockbuster, or the Changing Economy". Over a year ago I wrote "Little box vs. BIG BOX (Videos)".  I meant to write some follow-on articles about little boxes vs BIG boxes, such as drug stores, hardware stores, book stores, camera stores, and others.  But I never did.  Now about the only little boxes left are hair salons and restaurants.  And the individual entrepreneurs in these have to compete with big chains.

I was also remiss in noting that almost every movie rental store in Duluth has closed.  The last convenient movie rental, Mr. Movies, closed because they could not renew their lease on their terms.  For me this was unfortunate because Mr. Movies had a good selection of foreign films, including some classics.

Now our choices for movies are DVD by mail or DVD by download.  I shied away from Netflix because I didn't see paying ten bucks for one or two movies a month.

I did try downloading from iTunes and some other sources, but that is a two-hour wait at a nominal 7Mbps rate (more like 4Mbps actual).  But at least twice, iTunes just hung up with 30 minutes or so left to download.  I could restart the download and it would pick up at the hang-up point, but one shouldn't have to babysit a download.

Oh, yes, iTunes movies have subtitles that can't be turned off.  Subtitles make it very hard to listen to the words being spoken.

We could stream DVDs, but that can be a jerky experience.  And we can't stream at all at our cabin which has only 24Kbps.  Even accessing the web has become a hassle at that speed.

We finally opted for Netflix, starting with the one DVD at a time program.   The service has been excellent; I wrote about it in "Why do people pick on the Post Office?"

My latest choice is "The Hunger Games", which was released Saturday.  I moved it to the top of our queue Sunday after I put the previous DVD in a mail box.  Netflix told me "The Hunger Games" has been shipped and I should be receiving it tomorrow.  That sure beats babysitting a download.

We do have a small problem.  My wife doesn't care for movies with any violence, including murder mysteries.  I wonder if she'll watch Miss Marple.  So, I have to schedule watching such movies when she is gone or I'll be at the cabin alone.  This, in turn, limits our shared watching.  That sucked me into upping our Netflix account to two DVDs at a time.  At about $12 a month, that beats one visit to a movie theater for both of us, or getting five DVDs a month from a store.

Has inflation changed the expression "nickel and dimed to death" to "ten dollared to death"?

I just hope this increased viewing doesn't reduce my book reading.

On freedom of the speech: Do I have a better memory than the Internet?

The Huffington Post reported that a newspaper was told by a court that it must reveal the name of an anonymous contributor to the comment section of an online story.  The plaintiffs in the case complained that the comment was libelous. See "Illinois Newspaper Forced To Disclose Names of Anonymous Commenters", Huffington Post, 2010-06-03.

This made me think of a quote that I remember as this: "The antidote to too much freedom of speech (or the press) is more freedom of speech (or the press)."  I thought Winston Churchill made it.  I can't find it in Bartlett's Quotations, George Seldes' "Famous Quotations", in Wikiquotes, or with a Google Search.

I did find a whole bunch of interesting quotes relating to freedom of speech and of the press under Censorship in Wikiquotes.  Two that seem to fit the above case are:

"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." - Benjamin Franklin, Historical Review of Pennsylvania (1759)

"Our liberty depends on the freedom of the press, and that cannot be limited without being lost." - Thomas Jefferson

I did find a good quote by Winston Churchill in the Censorship section:

"You see these dictators on their pedestals, surrounded by the bayonets of their soldiers and the truncheons of their police. Yet in their hearts there is unspoken - unspeakable! - fear. They are afraid of words and thoughts! Words spoken abroad, thoughts stirring at home, all the more powerful because they are forbidden. These terrify them. A little mouse - a little tiny mouse! -of thought appears in the room, and even the mightiest potentates are thrown into panic."

I am sure you can think of quite a few dictators or terrorists who fit this quote today.

The size of the crowds in Tehran is unbelievable

See http://www.flickr.com/photos/mousavi1388/sets/72157619701000269/ for photos posted by Moussavi1388. 1388 is the current year in the Iranian calendar.

Also a counterattack on Iranian government websites is underway. Two can play the game of web-blocking. Simply by requesting a web site, thousands of people can block that web site. Try Ahmadinejad's web site. Since there are more Iranian citizens upset with the election results than there are government employees who can block opposition web sites, the only government defense is to shut the web entirely. And that would upset lots of business people who have not been demonstrating. I think the strong-armers in the Iranian government have put themselves in a no-win situation.

I think we're going to see the Web as the biggest promoter of democracy that we've ever seen.