Shewbox.org

I was wanting to back up some field recordings I did onto my web server. These are uncompressed wavs, very big and would take AGES to upload at home with Comcast. Luckily, Indiana University is faster. Much, much, faster. So fast, in fact, that they make my Comcast connection feel worthless. I was uploading 5 files each at over 900KB/s, for a grand total of 4.5 megabytes/second. Comcast tells the world that they need to limit the total monthly throughput of their customers while I can get on a different set of pipes in the same town, upload at roughly 30 times faster and not have my total throughput limited. I wish I knew how these intertubes worked. Maybe then I wouldn’t be so confused about why home connections always suck. Is it the last mile? The cost of upgrading infrastructure too great? Too little competition? Or should I stop whining and accept my connection speeds without question?

Comments are off for this post

Time for some Mahler methinks.  A short excerpt from his second symphony

[audio:mahler2.mp3]

Comcast was big news recently.  They announced that all of their broadband customers were now under a monthly cap of 250 GB.  Supposedly, this cap was already in place but was not clearly stated and anyone going over this cap would have had their service disconnected without realizing that they have reached the cap.  (Whew! That sentence was waaaay too long) Some argued that this was at least a step in the right direction in that customers are now aware that they have a limited amount of bandwidth each month.  But I think that this ignores the root problem.  Comcast needs to update their infrastructure and not limit their customers.

Seriously.  I’m not an expert on Internet Service providers.  I’m sure that there are some customers who hog up a lot of the bandwidth.  But it seems that by focusing the discussion on whether or not there should even be a bandwidth cap for unlimited service,  Comcast is successfully directing our attention away from where it should be.  We should be wondering why broadband in the United States lags far behind many other developed countries.  It is certainly getting better, and I imagine my speeds will continue to slowly creep up as the years go by.  But I can’t help but look at other countries in the world and see that they get much faster throughput than I do.  Instead of hearing announcements by Comcast on how they have upgraded their networks to provide much faster speeds, I hear how they are now officially limiting their customers bandwidth usage every month.  The focus is on limitation and not expansion.  We’re not seeing improvements, we are seeing fixes to problems that will only continue as more and more people start using more more bandwidth.

Again, I’m not an expert on these things.  But when other countries can consistently get faster speeds then I can, I just wonder about the value of arguing over bandwidth when we should be complaining that we lag behind the rest of the world.  It is times like these that I really wish I had a choice in high speed Internet providers.  Basically I only have two real choices: AT&T or Comcast.  AT&T’s dsl is terribly slow and Comcast, while decent, is far from great.  And now I have the extra burden of trying to keep track of how much bandwidth I use every month.  I really don’t think I go over 250 GB a month, but now I’ll be checking my logs to see how much I do actually use.  I’m sure this will all die down very soon and people will continue to use the Internet as they have been.  But as more and more services require more and more bandwidth Comcast is going to face an even greater problem.  There are many services out there now and there will be more services in the future that use a great deal of bandwidth.  As people start streaming more movies from Netflix and other high bandwidth services, the hunger for bandwidth is only going to increase.  But I suppose if you’re the only real option for internet service than it really doesn’t matter about upgrading your infrastructure that much.  If people are not satisfied, then who really cares?  It’s not like they have anywhere else to go.

I guess I should stop complaining.  I just wish I had the same option for speed as my in-laws do in Japan.  A 100mb/sec fiber connection?  For $50/month?  Hell yeah.  12mpbs power boost compared to 100 up/down?  I guess I should just moved to Japan.  Then I wouldn’t have to complain so much.

In all my years of music and even my two semesters of music history in undergraduate, the only mention I ever heard of Mr. Respighi was when a student asked if she could do her term paper on him and the teacher said doing a paper on him was not recommended because most of the information regarding him was all in Italian.  In fact the first time I ever heard of Mr.Respighi was in Fantasia 2000.  His piece entitled The Pines of Rome was the music for the scene with all the flying whales.  Since I worked at the music library the first time I saw it I tried looking up other pieces by him and in fact found that he had composed a number of pieces regarding Rome.  I hadn’t listened to anything by him in quite a while when I stumbled upon this piece.  Like I said before I don’t really know much about Mr. Respighi, but nonetheless I really like this piece.  Especially the ending.  Simply beautiful.

[audio:notturno.mp3]

Let me test this out and see if it works.  It is rather strange to dictate the text instead of typing it.  In fact it’s rather frustrating at the moment because every single sentence I speak I have to correct.  And unlike talking to yourself out loud it’s hard to say exactly what you want without adding extra words such as ‘um’, or ‘you know’.  And it’s certainly difficult not to add expletives when the program does not do what you think it should.  It is nice not to have to type and I suppose it does save my wrists a little bit.

I just told it to go to a

new paragraph.  And this is what happened.  So it is far from perfect.  In fact I find myself speaking very short sentences because it is hard to figure out exactly what to say in a long sentence.  I must say though, that it does seem to getting better at recognizing my speech and if I were to become more proficient at this than perhaps it would become easier to create blog posts like this than it is typing them.

I wonder if I will actually be able to write worthwhile and interesting stuff by dictating instead of typing.  On the one hand it does seem easier to simply talk to the computer.  But on the other hand, it may take a while for me to be able to think about what to write while I’m talking out loud instead of typing.  I am finding it quite difficult to keep my train of thought going.  I suppose that’s because this is entirely new for me.  When I am typing I can use almost all of my brain power to concentrate on what I am writing.  Dictating is completely new for me.  I’ve not had much time to practice dictating so when I’m trying to write something I have to concentrate not only on what I am trying to write but also on how to get the computer to write what I want it to.  I’m hoping that if I continue to practice dictating than the process will become that much easier.  At the moment it is extremely frustrating, but even as I write this blog post I feel I’m getting just that much better at it.

Of course when you don’t see in this post are all the corrections I’ve had to make.  For example, in the previous paragraph when I said ‘blog post’, it first wrote out ‘bloc posed’, and then when I tried to say it in this paragraph it came up with ‘Balog post’.  Needless to say I spend a lot of time saying the things like ‘delete that’, or ‘correct Balog post’.  And I also wonder if I might end up creating longer posts filled with more fluff than I would if I were simply typing them.  Not to mention my throat will become dry easily if I’m constantly dictating and correcting what I am trying to dictate.

Guess we’ll just wait and see what happens from here.