Category: Uncategorized

Today my satellite provider pulled the plug on Viacom stations including MTV, VH1, and Comedy Central. Fortunately the Osbournes season was over, but I will miss The Daily Show. Although some CBS stations were pulled, the Atlanta station is still on. The disagreement stems from CBS charging Dish Network to carry their signal. Not only were they increasing the rate, but also requiring Dish Network to carry their Viacom stations which they also charge for. The end result is everyone pays more for their cable bill. But what bothers me the most is that they charge providers *anything* since they should be getting their revenue from advertisers. CBS makes these signals available free over the air but charge the cable providers to carry them. It makes no sense.

Dear CBS and Viacom,

If you didn’t run commercials on all of your programming then you should be able to charge whatever you want to cable companies to carry your signal just as HBO does. But because you burden your viewers with commericals (more than ever) you should not charge cable or satellite companies anything to carry your signal. Nor should they charge you to carry your signal since you need viewers and they can supply them. I blame CBS and Viacom for the constantly increasing cable and satellite bills. Dish Network on the other hand is trying to look out for its subscribers by resisting your attempts to extract more money from the viewers. I applaud Dish Network and their efforts to keep rates low. And I ask that CBS and Viacom not only go back to their old rates, but stop collecting fees from cable providers altogether and support your programming via the advertising that you subject us to. Until then I will continue to enjoy watching other networks and other programming and watching their commericials.

Thank you for your time,

I knew there was some phrase shorter than “The quick brown fox . . . ” that contains all 26 letters of the alphabet, but I couldn’t remember it. So I started poking around and came across some anagrams which are words or phrases consisting of the same letters (“stop” and “post”). Here is a great one, where each phrase has the same letters, but it is also mathematically correct:

“Eleven plus two” and “Twelve plus one”

That’s almost as good as “Rocket Boys” and “October Sky”

Oh . . . and I found several shorter versions of quick brown fox, but this is the best:

Pack my box with five dozen liquor jugs

With the fifth book in the series J. K. Rowling takes a step backwards. While the first book was very simple with extremely flat characters, she has added depth with each successive book. In this one we return to characters who are so clueless and/or so evil that it simply isn’t believable. At the end of the fourth book Harry Potter tells the world that the leader of evil, Lord Voldemort, has returned to power. Rather than raise any alarms he is ridiculed as a liar by both the governing Ministry of Magic and the wizard media.

Continue reading “Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix”

The Columbus newspaper ran a story about a public information meeting for some of my projects at work. I think it’s funny that no matter what newspaper you get in, you can still call it “the paper”. So I was in the paper.

http://www.ledger-enquirer.com/mld/ledgerenquirer/2004/01/16/news/local/7722161.htm

http://tinyurl.com/3c7ka

I signed up for the Georgia Power Power Credit program. The idea is that if everyone has their air conditioners running at the same time during the summer they will have to provide an enormous amount of electricity all at once. And that peak demand may only happen a few times a year. By making sure that not everyone has their air running at the same time, the peak will be much lower meaning they don’t have to have as much equipment or power plants to supply that peak.

This is one of those things that just makes a lot of sense to me. They probably already have something similar in effect with some of their biggest customers (office buildings probably cycle through different floors so not all floors are getting AC at the same time) but feel a need to expand it to residential service as well.

It keeps your AC from running as much in the summer from 12 PM to 7 PM but only on peak days and during peak hours (and not on weekends or holidays). I don’t even usually get home until 6:30 so I feel like this is an easy way for me to participate. The brochure says it shouldn’t raise the temperature more than “a few degrees” but there’s a big difference between 78 degrees and 81. It also says they expect to activate the switch only 10 times per year. Of course those will be the 10 hottest days of the year.

I get $20 for signing up and $2 for each time they activate the switch. It sounds like a great thing now in the dead of winter, but I’ll post again next summer and say how it worked out.

While this program seems good, their “green energy” program apparently is a ripoff. Under that program you volunteer to pay more money for electricity and Georgia Power promises to get that power from “renewable resources” but they are charging a lot of extra money and apparently just using sources they already use, namely a small powerplant that is running off of methane from a trash dump.

For more information on the power credit program go to www.georgiapower.com/powercredit.