In any state, if a person in under 25, he either is not allowed to rent a car at all, or must pay an under 25 fee. I’m not sure precisely why this is, but my guess would be for insurance purposes. But, if a person is over 21 years of age, he can walk over to the nearest Uhaul location and rent their largest truck with no problem. Does anyone else see anything wrong with this picture? Let’s say Bob is 21 years old. Bob can’t rent a Nissan Sentra, but he will have no problem renting a 25 foot long truck? How does that make any sense? Guess if you’re under 25 and you need a rental, head over to the closest Uhaul instead of Hertz.
I’m moving in 2 weeks, and my wife and I are going through the typical pre-move checklist. This involves packing, change of address forms, notifying friends and family of new address, and of course, finding new utility providers such a phone, cable, power, water, and internet provider. Although we will have to change to new providers for all these services, the only one I am worried about is the internet provider. Power, phone, water, and cable providers may change from city to city, but the services they provide are almost identical no matter which place you move. Not so with internet providers, specifically, broadband internet providers.
For the last 3 years, I have accessed the internet via cable modem through my city’s local utility company. The price is very affordable, $25/month since I own a modem, and I have seen my speeds increase literally about 6 times what I could get when I first signed on with them. Their service has been rock solid over the past years, and on the very few occasions I’ve needed to contact them, people were easily reached and the problem quickly solved. The city I’m moving to has a big name utility provider, and they charge $45/month if you own the modem. I can’t really afford $45 and I started looking at other options. And since DSL is the only other option, it looks as though I will have to sign on with either SBC, Earthlink, or Iquest. I know nothing of the quality of their speed or service, and they may well provide what I want. It is the fact that I may be paying more for slower service that has me worried.
Why is broadband service vastly different from area to area? Some friends have seriously fast connections for the same price as mine, and others are much slower yet pay more. I don’t care if your service is 72 times the speed of dial-up. I left dial-up 7 years ago. I’ve had fast, reliable broadband, and expect nothing less than I am currently getting. But alas, all of my bitching won’t do me any good when I move. I’ll be at the mercy of big internet providers who will no doubt direct my complaints to India and force me to sign a 12 month contract with a hefty early termination fee. Makes me wish my new town would start running fiber. After all, one can never have too much bandwidth.
If you have any sort of collection of digital music on your computer, or bought any music online, or ripped CDs, then I am sure you are well aware of lossy codecs and read articles and comments on competing codes and why various codecs in different settings are far superior to others. I do not wish to get into a discussion here debating the many audio codecs and why one may be better than another. To tell you the truth, I doubt most people would be able to tell the difference between a high bitrate mp3, aac, or ogg file. In fact, I find it near impossible to tell the difference beween high bitrate files myself, and I have a trained ear listening on not at all shabby audio equipment. My point is, being a musician interested in all things electroacoustic, I’ve tried listening for difference between codecs and different bitrates in the same codec, and, quite frankly, can hardly tell the difference between them. So I wished to do a simple experiment of my own.
I copied a track from a CD, Miles Davis’ Greatest Hits with EAC, cut out a 28 second snipit, and encoded it into 4 different bitrates (or quality settings) using the latest Ogg Vorbis encoder (1.1.1). For reference I’ve uploaded the lossless copy, but encoded it in flac so it isn’t quite so big. How well are your ears trained? Can you hear the difference?
64
128
160
192
Lossless
The exerpt is from Someday My Prince Will Come, with Wynton Kelly on piano solo, Paul Chambers on bass, and Jimmy Cobb on drums.
Whew. 4 months since my last post. Let’s see if I update any more frequently from now on.
MSN recently launched a map/satellite service to rival Google Maps. There has been much hoopla over Google maps and the subsequent release of MSN’s version as well. I’ve noticed, however, that while Google maps may be a hell of a lot of fun, it isn’t always accurate. I am moving in a couple of weeks, and was looking for various stores around my soon to be town, and got this completely wrong result when I typed in the address for a Kroger in Google maps. While it may look like a legitimate location in map only mode, switch to satellite view and you can easily see that this location can’t possibly be a Kroger. Well, unless it’s some new underground Kroger.
