Category: General commentary

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New year, new way

Well, we are further down the “cord cutting” path as of 12/31. Friday night I got my billing notification from Cox… over double the amount I had expected, and well over $400. There was an unexplained “equipment” charge of $122, and some other new stuff. Apparently when we ported the phone number to Ooma, they canceled the phone service… along with a bunch of “package discounts” that significantly increased the cable TV costs.

I spent half an hour Monday gathering up all the Cox equipment. One Contour TV box, two mini boxes, a CableCard, the phone modem box, and a “tuning resolver” of some sort that was connected to the HDHomeRun box that had the CableCard. Took it all up to the Cox store, and returned it all. I told the nice woman there that I wanted to drop everything except Internet. She did not seem surprised at all, and much to my surprise didn’t even try to talk me out of it. I suspect it’s pretty common now.

I’d been seeing a persistent nag box on the Cox web site for the past few weeks, telling me I could upgrade to “GigaBlast” 1 Gbps Internet service for $99.99 per month — for the first year, anyway, with no indication of the cost after that period. That’s what they have been charging me for 300 Mbps, but it requires a new DOCSIS 3.1 cable modem. I just bought a nice DOCSIS 3.0 less than two years ago, so I wasn’t wild about that since 300 Mbps is more than adequate for our needs. The GB service is normally $119.99, not that they disclose that anywhere I could find. I asked her what the next step down in Internet access would cost — she said 100 Mbps for $87.95. That’s not much of a discount for a 2/3 reduction in speed, so I passed. However, that caused her to look at my other options. She said we qualified for a special deal on GigaBlast. $65.99 for two years, $85.99 after that, AND a free new cable modem with wifi. Cox calls it “Panoramic Wifi” for some reason. How could I pass that up? Another $34 off my monthly bill? Sure, let’s do that.

I wasn’t expecting this new twist, so I hadn’t given any thought to how to make this new equipment work in our network. I spent an hour or two getting things set up. I thought I’d keep the existing wifi router, so I created a new wifi network. As it turns out I could have saved myself a lot of extra work, because I ended up just using the Cox router and unplugging the old Netgear box. I may use it to set up a guest network, I don’t know. Anyway, we now have fairly good wifi coverage and really good speeds. At some point I’ll drag coax up to the shelf on the main floor where the Netgear router lived, so we will have better coverage. Sure wish I’d thought of that when we did the remodel and it would have been easy. I’m just glad those two Ethernet runs aren’t stapled down to the studs; I’ll be able to use one as a pull line to pull the coax through.

The new hardware and service solutions are still not perfect, but we’re living with it. That’s a subject for another blog post. If you’re looking for a seamless transition or a totally trouble-free experience, we’re not there yet and may never be. Some of us remember when you could pick up a telephone and make a call to anyone, always know for sure you’re going to get a dial tone, calls virtually never got disconnected for no reason, and the voice quality — while not stellar — was always the same. With simplicity comes reliability, I guess. Now, I will grant that we are a little bit of an edge case. I could have gone out and bought a new TV for the family room and used its built-in Amazon/Hulu/whatever apps. That means it all gets power cycled at least once a day. I could have gone with a Fire TV Stick, same deal. I didn’t, because of our specific hardware limitations. After dealing with the Cube for a while, though, I’m going to try the 4K Stick and see if that works for us. Long story, but the Fire TV Stick (or anything else) would have required a second remote. Or so I thought. As it turns out, the newest remote does have an IR emitter to control the soundbar.

So here’s the score so far… our monthly Cox bill, back before our “special deal” ran out, was $210 per month for Internet, TV and phone. We weren’t paying anything extra for streaming services — no Netflix, Hulu, etc. We have Amazon Prime, but I treat that separately because it pays for itself between shipping and credit card discounts. That amount had been gradually creeping upward for over a year as little additions were made to fees and surcharges. After the special deal expired, we were paying $241 monthly. That did include HBO and Showtime — utterly worthless wastes of money, and I just hadn’t gotten around to canceling them both. That would have dropped the bill to roughly $215.

Our total monthly spend now works out as follows:

  • Ooma Premiere phone service $17.64/month
  • Hulu with Live TV $42.77 per month
  • GigaBlast Internet $65.99 per month

Total new monthly spend: $126.40. Total savings: Between $86 and $114 per month, depending on how you look at it. Is over $1K to nearly $1400 a year worth the incremental amount of button pushing to watch TV? I think yes.

Can we save more? I don’t know, but I rather doubt it. We’re paying Hulu quite a bit for the live TV portion. Can we cut that down? Not really. Apps for several networks we watch require a cable TV sign-on to use. Ooma Premiere is costing us about 1/3 what Cox was charging us, and for more and better features. Honestly I don’t know that we can do a lot better. I was paying more when I was running my own Asterisk VOIP PBX and connecting directly to a VOIP backbone provider. We pay about $11.50 per month for “enhanced” caller ID, and some call blocking features that have been moderately effective at reducing the number of robocalls and scammers ringing the house phones. Worth it.

Oh, and when I got home from the Cox store I received an email begging me to stay. They’d cut my rates by 40% if I came back, they said. For a while, anyway. Sorry, too little too late. If you wanted to keep me as a customer, then why were you screwing us by overcharging? If you’ll sell it to me for $144 per month, then why were we paying $240? I don’t want a vendor that I have to call every few months and threaten to leave, then re-negotiate our deal. I don’t enjoy doing it, and I don’t enjoy being taken for granted. We don’t hate Cox, but quite frankly they are pricing themselves out of the market.

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Re-lighting the basement

Our basement has a bunch of recessed can lights in the ceiling.  Like, 16 of them total, if you count the two in the stairwell.  Originally they were all populated with 65 W incandescent flood lamps.  Quite a while ago, I replaced them with CFL bulbs that only required 15 W each.  Since I was using the basement as my home office, that was quite a savings.  Assuming the lights were on around 12 hours a day, it saved roughly 9.6 kWH of electricity daily.  Those CFL lamps were not cheap, about $14 each as I recall…  but they paid for themselves in under a year, if I remember the math right.

Of course CFL lamps don’t turn on at full brightness immediately.  They took a few seconds to get up to snuff, maybe half a minute or so after they were installed.  It was OK, not great, but not bad at all considering the energy saved.  Over time, though, they took longer and longer to turn on.  They were also getting dimmer and dimmer over time.  Lately it’s been turn on the lights, then go do something else for five minutes or so — and the light is still not great.  It was time to replace them.

I ordered a batch of Feit 90+ CRI 75 W replacement, dimmable LED retrofit kits.  These replace the lamp and trim, and give substantially more light for roughly the same power consumption.  They’re rated at 14 W and 850 lumens.  So far I’ve installed 10 of the 16, and the difference is striking.  Of course they reach full brightness as soon as you flip the switch, which is nice.  They’re also quite a bit brighter than the CFLs ever were, so the amount of available light as gone from inadequate or barely adequate to “plenty”.  And these were cheap, at an average of less than $7.50 per fixture after shipping. 

The real surprise was how long those CFLs had been in place.  I didn’t realize it, but I found a notation on one that it was installed in mid-2007.  I’m pretty sure that was a replacement for one of the failed original lamps, because they were supposedly warrantied for a few years.  I’ll say this — after eleven years, those CFL bulbs owe me nothing.  If I get the same life out of the LEDs I’ll be a happy guy.

Now to figure out how we’re supposed to dispose of CFL bulbs.  I’m pretty sure they’re not supposed to go in the garbage, and I’ve got a pile of them now.

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Sorry, but it’s never right. Ever.

Seeing ads pop up everywhere for the Oscars reminded me of the night Lisa and I watched “Get Out”, the movie that was popular a few months back and will hopefully slide into well-deserved obscurity.

I have not seen such an appallingly and blatantly bigoted, racist movie in I don’t know how long.  Let’s take a moment to recap the themes of this piece of trash:  White people are evil and not to be trusted.  You will very likely have to kill them.  They (whites, and especially rich whites) only want to use blacks for their (far superior) physical abilities and talent.  Women are similarly not to be trusted; they will probably sell you into slavery.  Black people are weak minded and easily manipulated, especially if you dangle a white chick.

I could go on, but if you’ve seen the movie you had to have gotten the point.  It was like something out of Germany in the 30s colorized a little differently.

People like to harp on the violence and glorification of drug culture in rap (or R&B or whatever it’s called this year) music.  It’s certainly not my style, I don’t listen to it — ever — and so could not tell you just how prevalent the themes are.  About as polar opposite as you can get, though, is the current crop of country stars.  Of course in country music it’s OK to murder your husband, at least according to Carrie Underwood and Miranda Lambert.  And drug use is OK, according to — well, just about every country singer.  Just imagine, though, Luke Bryan or Blake Shelton singing about beating or murdering their girlfriend or wife.

So why do some people seem to think it’s OK to be bigoted and racist — as long as you’re not white?  Or it’s fine to talk about shooting or poisoning your abusive spouse — as long as you’re a woman?  Rioting and destruction is fine — as long as you’re a minority?  And drug use is OK, no matter who you are?

We can and should be better than this.  Murder, destruction, racism, bigotry, drug abuse — it doesn’t matter who you are.  It’s not OK.

 

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A stock market bloodbath? Meh… maybe.

Looks like the Dow dropped over 1100 points today.  Part of me wants to be shocked and a little panicky — that’s a big-ass hit, and for us personally it means a significant hit to our retirement savings.  I mean, that’s a lot of dollars gone in one day.

Looking at it a little more calmly, though, what we lost is about what we had gained in the past few weeks of ridiculously over-optimistic frenzy.  Berkshire, for example (BRK.B, not the hoity-toity flavor) dropped to its early January price.  AAPL dropped a little more, down to where it spent the majority of the second half of last year.  The index funds, like QQQ, DIA and SPY, have all dropped to about where I’d have normally expected to see them about now.  In other words, if you look at the chart for the past year, and extend the trend line — there you are.  We just erased a very anomalous growth bump that just reeked of a near-hysterical speculative bubble.

Now, if we can just go a few days without continued hysteria we’ll be in good shape.

 

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Neato vs. Roomba

I had a chance to pick up a Roomba 550 for $75, in really good shape other than a weak battery.  Our Neato does a great job, but we can’t let it clean the living room because it seems all the furniture is just the wrong height.  Poor little Rosie will get jammed under every piece of furniture.  The Roomba is half an inch shorter, so it’s able to get under more stuff without jamming.  So here’s a rare opportunity to see a side by side comparison of the two leading floor cleaning robots…

[Update: I replaced the original battery with a new 4500 mAH NiMH for about $35.  I also installed a new brush, since the one that was in it was pretty worn.  Results are reflected below.]

[table id=3 /]

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A week of Real Appeal

Well, I just finished out my first week on the new Real Appeal diet & fitness plan.  I didn’t have a great increase in exercise.  I got out and walked with the dog a couple of times, which is twice more than the weeks previous.  Figure a little under 2 miles each time, which is not a whole lot of walking.  There’s an app for my phone and tablet that lets me track everything I eat and drink, and I’ve been using that as close to 100% of the time as possible.  That has been a big help in figuring out what foods are better and which ones are worse as far as calories, fat, protein, etc.  It even has a bar code scanner to pull up information on most stuff that’s packaged.

The end result…  I’m down 5# from when I started.  That in itself is not shocking or cause for wild celebration, I’ve lost 5# in a week many times.  Always the same 5#, though.  The biggest change I have noticed is the consistency of results.  Before starting the program, when I was trying to do this on my own, I’d weigh myself every couple of days.  Some days I was down, some days I was up, but always bouncing within a 5-6 pound range.  That’s been going on for a couple of years now.  Over the past week I’ve been down consistently every time I stepped on the scale, no exceptions.

So, so far so good.  We’ll see how well I’m able to keep it up.  The biggest difference is that I’ve got a consistent (but non-annoying) level of motivation and encouragement to watch what I’m eating, keep the snacking down within reason, etc.  The calories set are entirely reasonable, and I don’t feel like I’m having to cut way back on eating.  In fact, I usually eat less than the plan recommends.  I just have a little better and more consistent control.

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How much is your time worth?

Lord, I hear this question so often as justification for an overpriced widget or service.  Apparently some people think one should spend any amount of money to avoid doing a few hours’ worth of work.

The latest example is a neat little box for use on experimental aircraft.  It replaces the traditional master battery and starter contactors, as well as a current measuring shunt and maybe a fuse or two.  I think there may even be a diode or two thrown in for good measure.  It would simplify the wiring on the firewall side of an experimental plane, sure.  It might even shave one or two nights off of your build time.  Maybe.  You’ll still need to do some wiring, and of course there’s a nice canon plug on the back side, so you’ll still need a crimp tool and it’ll need to be connected to various switches and stuff on the panel.  All in all, I’d say it would be a nice little $200-$300 box.

The problem is, they’re apparently going to want about $1200 for  it.  Say what?  that’s about $1050 or $1100 more than I’d spend on the parts to do the job the old fashioned way.  On one of the very few online forums I use any more, there is a little bit of discussion about it.  And just as sure as Godwin’s Law it’s only a matter of time before someone chimes in with, “How much is your time worth?” – as if that justifies any expenditure, no matter how ridiculous.

Well, I’ll tell you.  For one thing, my “internal billing rate” — how much time I’m willing to expend to avoid an expense, or conversely how much money I’m willing to spend to avoid work — varies greatly with how much I enjoy or do not enjoy the work to be avoided.  Self-surgery?  Yeah, sure, I’ll pay a professional to avoid doing that work.  Mowing the lawn?  It better be cheap, I’m not shelling out $40 a pop for that.  Wiring work on an airplane I’m building?  Well, let’s just say $1200 will buy an awful lot of hours.  I figure it will probably take about 2 evenings of work — let’s be really generous and call it six hours — to do that wiring, of which maybe half would be saved using the new whiz-bang box.  So that works out to – oh, let’s see, carry the one…  roughly $350 an hour, and if the bloody thing ever breaks I have a plane out of commission for God only knows how long, versus a trip to Auto Zone for parts.  I don’t know how long they will be manufacturing and supporting these, but I’ll bet my airplane is flying for longer than that…  meaning that some day this thing is almost certainly going to cause a time consuming and expensive problem.  Hmm, there goes all that time we “saved” on the front end.

I’m sure they’ll get some customers, but I’m afraid I won’t be one of them.  And I won’t even feel like a tightwad.

 

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Why I fear for Western civilization

I really wish I could just drop our cable T V service altogether.  I am beginning to think that just having the cable signal inside the house is lowering our IQ.

With crap like The Bachelor and the rest of the voyeuristic garbage on network TV, and the horde of brainless bullshit on the cable networks…  what have we become?  A nation in which Honey Boo Boo (and her circus sideshow of a family) can become cultural icons scares the hell out of me.  We’ve got pageants where toddlers and young girls are made up like street hookers and paraded in front of the crowd.  We can’t forget Dance Moms and now its growing horde of imitators.  And the phalanx of wedding dress micro-dramas.  And I see now Kate is back, minus spouse, but having picked up a few aides-de-camp along the way.  I can think of no more certain way to remain a single mom than to demonstrate on TV just how much of a train wreck you are.  So-called “Gypsy” clans, and the most ridiculous attempts at exploiting Amish culture that I can imagine – oh, to be Amish and have no electricity!  Then you wouldn’t ever see the fake “survival” shows, the fake “moonshine” shows, and the fake everything else shows.  I could go on and on and on. 

Honestly…  if I were of dating age and raised with a TV in the house I’d probably enter a monastery.  :shudder:  The fact that such shows find enough viewers to make them financially viable makes me question our collective futures.

 

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Why am I such a tightwad?

Yesterday in the mail I got a really nice invitation to contribute to an organization whose goals I support.  They even sent me a nice little pocket sized copy of the Declaration of Independence and the US Constitution.  And these guys are good; I really do like the work they do.  And I won’t send them any money.

Why?  Because it means that they will immediately add me to their list of people to harass constantly and incessantly for more, more, more.  I have had this happen with any organization to whom I give a dime.  I donated a couple of times to the Wounded Warrior Project, with a letter asking them very plainly to not waste their money (the money I donated, in other words) sending me crap in the mail begging for more.  I know who you are, I told them; I know where to find you and if I decide to donate more, I will do so without their prompting.  Furthermore, I told them, if they did decide to waste the money I donated on mailers and phone solicitations to try and get more from me, I would cut them off.

Unfortunately, since then they have wasted much of the money I donated on mailing me crap every week or two begging for more.  Sorry, screw ’em.  Not another penny, since they seem to be more focused on soliciting money than anything else.  I won’t donate to organizations that will simply waste the money.

I told the NRA the same thing.  After I joined I was inundated with junk mail begging for donations.  I wrote them a nice letter telling them that if they continued wasting my dues on sending me junk mail, I wouldn’t renew.  The junk mail stopped, and I’ve been a member ever since.

Most of the solicitations I get, though, go unanswered.  It seems that too many organizations are no longer charitable or activist or whatever their nominal purpose is — they are focused on fundraising, apparently for the sake of fundraising.  If I could kick in a few bucks and be left in peace, maybe I would.  But I hate paying for more junk mail.  Sorry if that makes me a tightwad.

 

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Small business shipping made easy

This may at some point begin to sound like a commercial, but it really isn’t.  I promise.  I receive nothing from anyone in return for writing this kind of stuff; I do it just to hopefully help out fellow small business owners.

I know (and know of) a lot of owners of small businesses who regularly ship packages all over the US and worldwide.  Most of them expend a lot of time and effort on shipping.  I suspect this level of hassle is the norm for small businesses; I have talked to several large dealers and distributors who offer to be my exclusive distributor and relieve me of the crushing burden of shipping and order fulfillment.  The truth is, order fulfillment and shipping take up a very small amount of the total time I spend running my business.

I know people who pack up each order, write the recipient’s name and address on the package (or print a label), drive to the post office and stand in line to have packages weighed and postage added.  Ugh.  Incredible.  I used to do that too, but it was years ago.  And filling out Customs forms for overseas shipments?  Torture!  At one time I seriously considered just NOT accepting any orders from outside the USA – -including APO/FPO addresses.

Others use on line tools like USPS’ Click-n-Ship to prepare labels.  It’s a lot better, but the user interface is clunky, and you either spend time cutting and taping paper to packages, or pay through the nose for expensive labels.  I looked into it, I even used it a few times.  It’s only marginally better than the trip to the post office.

If you ship more than a few packages per week, you owe it to yourself to go with a postage supplier.  I use Endicia, a choice I made after looking at them, Stamps.com and one or two others.  Pitney Bowes was at the bottom of the list by a wide margin.  I don’t remember the specific disadvantages of Stamps.com, but Endicia was the best suited for my needs.  With any of these services, you pay for postage on line, print your labels with postage included, and drop your packages off or have them picked up.

So why Endicia instead of Click-n-Ship?  With Endicia, I get a slight discount on postage and free delivery confirmation/package tracking.  Their software is installed on my PC, and can communicate with a USB postal scale to automatically weight each package.  I don’t use one simply because I know what 90% or more of my packages weigh, but when I see a good enough deal on a scale I’m buying one.

I use 4×6″ thermal labels.  They’re available for very little money, since they’re produced in vast numbers for UPS, Fedex and others.  I buy cases of 400-label rolls.  They go into the used Zebra LP2844 printer I picked up for under a hundred bucks on eBay.  In its former life it was used in a UPS store, and it’s given me three years of trouble-free service so far.  The really nice part?  I can print ANY kind of postage.  First class parcel, Priority Mail, Express, and international — INCLUDING the Customs form.  It’s SO nice to never have to fill out that stupid non-printer-friendly green form again!  Some forms, like an Express International package, can’t be done on a 4×6″ label.  For those I have the regular printer and USPS-supplied stick-on document sleeves.  Endicia prints all the required forms with postage, ready to go.

For $15.95 per month I get the ability to print labels without the postage amount shown…  so I don’t have to explain over and over to customers why I charged them $2.50 for shipping when the postage was only $1.93 (boxes, labels, printer paper and ink for the packing slip, packing material and gasoline are not free). I can get a refund on labels I don’t use; I can print return labels when a customer needs to return something.  In short — my shipping is as close to effortless as it can be.  And the post office employees love it when I drop off a tub full of packages WITH a USPS scan form so they don’t have to scan each package, just the form that puts each one into the system for tracking and delivery confirmation.

If you’re still writing out shipping labels, or if heaven forbid you’ve got a postage meter, you really owe it to yourself to check out Endicia.  They’ll usually give you a free trial period, and you don’t need anything special to get started — you can use your existing printer and plain paper or a box of Avery labels form Office Depot while you try it out.  Then you can develop your own process and streamline your shipping to take up less of your time and energy.