Carl Hutzler's Blog

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Please make it stop :-) !

I think I shoveled the driveway and sidewalk 6 times already. It really came down today from maybe 11am until 5pm…it was just snowing. Likely an inch to two inches an hour.

It is still flurrying/snowing a bit from time to time but mostly it has finally died down. In Reston we got around 18″ or 19″. Nice dry fluffy stuff. Still a lot of work to shovel.

Very impressive storm. We really have not had a snow like this in at least 6 years and likely longer. A rare snow event for around here, especially this much volume in December. But hey, at least we get a white Christmas, guaranteed! :-)

Corporate hypocrisy is terribly commonplace these days. So the fact that another huge, oligopolistic, company is at it again might not even be worthy of me passing gas much less taking the time to continue writing about it.

But I finally realized a couple of things about AT&T and their lack of service that made me realize why I am so ticked at them….

1) AT&T requires absolutely every iPhone user to purchase a data plan. There is no choice. $30 bucks every month for 2 years. Period.

2) The data plan is unlimited. It says so on the AT&T website. Don’t believe me?

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A couple of months ago I visited a dentist who I thought did not do a great job. I have since filed a fraud alert with the insurance company. They are investigating the issue.

One thing they did say is that the two $90 claims for “Behavior Management” are the two most abused claim codes, something they know all too well. And that these claim codes require substantial justification for reimbursement. They also found it interesting that the dentist crossed these off the bill when they handed it to me….the charges were listed under “patient pays”.

So while I don’t know the end result of the investigation, I thought I would update the blog.

Weird thing happened this past week. Two different friends asked me what kind of video camera to buy. They had been looking at the new HD video cameras and debating one model against another….feature for feature, dollar for dollar, etc. So they asked me what to buy.

I told both people to just not get one, period. And they agreed!

What?! How would they video tape their kids opening presents….learning to ride a bike, their first birthday, etc?

A little history…I was given a video camera by my dad when my first child was born. He handed me down his Sony Hi8mm camera. I dutifully shot 10 or 12 tapes full of this and that. A few years later I bought a very small DV camera made by Canon. I shot more footage of my second child and dog and other stuff.

What have I learned? No one ever watches the video they shoot. Why? It is mind numbingly boring. If you think looking through someone’s slide collection from their trip to Africa 20 years ago is boring, just try lasting for 10 minutes viewing raw video off a DV tape. (they were lucky all they got was water boarding).

Why is this? Well one clue are the words “raw video”. Raw video is terrible stuff to watch. Most people shoot minutes of video of the same thing when in fact if you watch any TV show or movie you quickly see that professionals do not stick with a single angle or scene longer than a few seconds! Yup.

Another thing is the “single angle” view we get from amateur home video. It is boring. It is just not that interesting to have one view of a scene or conversation or anything. So what can you do? Buy another camera and have someone else shooting in parallel with you? I guess, but there are other problems with that too.

Even if you have two cameras and different angles, the sound quality and lighting is always terrible. Sure you could buy lights and learn how to use them. And they make microphones too. But now you are talking about a serious production and your 3 year old ain’t gonna sit still for that at their birthday party (not to mention your wife, etc).

But even if they did. And even if you got good at it, there is another huge issue lurking. EDITING! Yup, raw footage is just that…raw. And unless it is edited, well then it will still be raw and it will be incredibly boring. So why not just edit it? iMovie? Final Cut? Adobe Premier? Sure. Sure….go for it. But make sure you know what you are getting into. Editors do win awards from the Academy, right? So the job of editing must not be such an easy process. It ain’t. Not to mention the learning curve on these applications. Think you are a good editor or good enough? Well you can expect to spend several hours editing each minute of final edited video. That’s right, hours spent for each reasonable minute of edited video. (think I am exaggerating….the pros spend months editing a 90 minute movie)

And to add one more point….what are you going to do with the fabulous 5 minute HD video you just spent a day shooting and a week editing? Well, likely burn it to a DVD where you loose the quality anyway. Or share it on youtube where it drops even further. Oh, OK, someone out there will burn it to a blu-ray DVD somehow but your mom does not have a player so she can’t watch it anyway.

So you need an example…OK. I have 2 hours of video from my wedding. I have never watched the entire thing. The only thing I still look at once in a while is the last 90 seconds of the tape which has a professionally edited re-cap of the entire wedding day with music, nice transitions, and all the bells and whistles. It is actually watchable even if you could care less about my wedding (and can get past those side burns! :-)

So what should you do if you want some video of your kids? I told my two friends to just buy an iPhone 3G[s]. The video quality is just fine for shooting kids. And you can upload it to youtube, email it, and even do quick edits right on the phone. And since it is always with you, you never miss a fun moment. And the price is likely around the same price as a brand new HD video cam including the AT&T fees. Or maybe buy one without a contract and use it as just an expensive iPod Touch (too bad the iPod Touch does not have a camera yet, otherwise it would be perfect…it will in 2010 – trust me).

But if you don’t want an iPhone, get a $150 FLIP video camera. Shoots good video and has a USB plug built in. Simple import of videos. Simple upload to youtube and email.

Supplement your video with quality still photography. Get a Nikon D40 and 18-200 lens and capture some stills. They mean more to people anyway.

Anyways, maybe this will help you before you blow another grand on some gadget. And let me know if you have better ideas on the subject. Always interested.

This is so funny that I am crying. 18 more months of lousy AT&T before I can switch to a real network.

http://www.fakesteve.net/2009/12/a-not-so-brief-chat-with-randall-stephenson-of-att.html

I was interested in monitoring a website for changes (to see when something was back in stock). I found a website that would allow me to do that very easily aptly named www.changedetection.com. The site is very simple. Just enter the URL you want to monitor and your email address. From there you get controls on the frequency, type of change you are looking for (any change, large change, additions, subtractions, etc).

They also have a social component in that you can see what other people are monitoring. Sounds like maybe an interesting digg like thing in a way….social bookmarking of sorts.

Anyway, not a day later I found another nice use for the site. I made an FTP upload directory for my clients. Either the client would have to email me when they uploaded something or I would have to check daily. But by simply putting a .htaccess file in that directory (with a single line of “Options +indexes”), I could make the upload directory listable which allows changedetection.com to check it for changes. Works like a champ.

Only issue might be security as now anyone can see the FTP directory. But for what I am using it for (uploading recorded video clips which will be on the main website in a day anyway) this is a perfect match.

From The Unofficial Apple Weblog…

“…AT&T was working on improving service to the strained New York and San Francisco services. AT&T may soon introduce pricing tiers that would penalize high-bandwidth users.”

Good that they are working on improving service in NYC and San Fran. I hope they can make things better quicker than the 9 months AT&T told me it would take to put a new cell tower up for my area at the Reston Town Center.

Penalizing high bandwidth users is an interesting idea and approach. I know from my monthly bill that I used 1,340,989 KB of data last month (1.34GB). My wife used 784MB. My son (original iphone/edge) used just 11MB.

The month before I used 1.433GB. The month before that 1.285GB. So I am likely always the biggest consumer of data on my family plan of three iPhones and my average is fairly consistent around 1.3 to 1.4 GB. Am I a “high bandwidth user” ? I thought that my data cap was 5GB and for the $30 a month I am paying, I was entitled to up to 5GB which I have never hit.

But I bet my wife is likely more of an average iPhone 3G user and she does about 700MB a month. I likely use more BW because I stream Radio Paradise in my car a lot. And even though it is just 64kbps, if you do an hour of streaming, that totals 28MB an hour. So 10 hours of streaming is 280MB which starts to get close to the difference between an average user and me….a bit above average.

My fear is that AT&T is talking about me when they refer to high-bandwidth users. They will want to cap me. So instead of capping me at 1GB a month and lowering my data subscription fee, the fee will stay the same and the cap will be implemented. I will then have the option to pay $60 a month for that 5GB I currently have along with maybe a 3GB tier for $45 or so.

Why do I think this? I think AT&T mispriced the data portion of the iPhone plan at $30/mo. ATT offers “Laptop” data plans for $60 a month (USB modem) which also have a cap of 5GB a month. How could two plans both with 5GB caps be different prices? The answer is that AT&T mis-guessed on how much data iPhone users would actually use. The data plans offered by the carriers for each device/phone are based on how that device will most likely be used. Old WAP browsers had very low usage and the carrier knew that. Laptops can have a lot more usage. Blackberry’s are somewhere in between…but if you use your Blackberry with a corporate account, the data plan charges are more expensive as the carriers know those corporate users do a lot more email than silly AOL/Yahoo/MSN email users. So back to the iPhone and AT&T bad guesses…now that we are using the iPhone a lot more (app store, voip, streaming music, streaming video, etc) they want to change the price.

But they can’t just change the price. Or can they? We all have contracts. And Apple may have a contract too for the $30 price point. But maybe the contract does not state the limt? If it doesn’t, AT&T will keep the price but reduce the limit and make new plans available for higher tiers. Or they will change the whole pricing for data on the iPhone and open up an opportunity for iPhone users to get out of their 2 year contracts without the ETF fee.

But would people with iPhones drop their AT&T service if given an opportunity? I happen to love my iPhone and could not think of going back to a freakin’ MOTO RAZR. But I might switch to T-Mobile. Of course if AT&T waits too long and Apple does a deal with the red devil (VZW), then all bets are off. Maybe VZ would have tiered pricing for data too? Will be interesting. But wouldn’t some competition (and extra towers) be wonderful for us poor iphone folk :-)

Recently, I posted a couple of times about AT&T’s poor network in the Reston Town Center area. Well the issue is spreading.

Now the tower by my house is starting to show strain. My house is located 2 miles south of the town center and exactly 2,102 feet from the cell tower at the Fox Mill shopping center (actually in the parking lot of the fire station). I always have 5 bars. And I have never had much issue with my iPhone when I am at my house. But in the last 5 days or maybe a week now, I have noticed dropped calls, the inability to make calls, and missed voice calls (you get a voicemail but nothing in the missed call list). All of this while at my house, stationary.

For example, last night (Tuesday) I was talking to my tax guy at 3:32pm. The call lasted 6 minutes before I got the below CALL FAIL. Sitting in my living room, 5 bars, not moving much at all. I dialed back at 3:39 and we completed our conversation during the next 4 minutes.

On Sunday, I was on the phone with a customer support center getting help installing a new thermostat at 2:46pm. I was on hold for about 7 minutes before I got to a person. I was just beginning to tell the person what the issue was when I got dropped with a CALL FAIL. 9 minutes on the phone. Stationary in my kitchen. 2102 feet from a tower. 5 bars.

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Beautiful snowflake photography.

Snowflakes from Treehugger.com