Hey Juicers,

This may be poorly thought through, but I would like to invite anyone available in Rochester up for the weekend of April 8th – April 11th. There are several fun things going on that weekend. It would be great to hang out with good people.

Thursday, April 8th – 5:00 PM
RIT Hockey plays in the frozen four. If we are not going to Detroit, we will have a little party with wings and beer.

Saturday, April 10th – 5:30 PM
ArtAwake event in Rochester. ArtAwake is a CELEBRATION OF CREATIVITY that UNITES THE COMMUNITY to GIVE LIFE TO AN UNDERUSED SPACE in Rochester, NY. Website

Sunday, April 11th – 7:00 PM
Freezepop / Plushgun concert at Water Street Music Hall in Rochester. Two very awesome bands at a cheap price.

Again, not sure that any of these events can materialize, but we may as well try to commit.

From here:

Google is planning to launch an experiment that we hope will make Internet access better and faster for everyone. We plan to test ultra-high speed broadband networks in one or more trial locations across the country. Our networks will deliver Internet speeds more than 100 times faster than what most Americans have access to today over 1 gigabit per second, fiber-to-the-home connections. We’ll offer service at a competitive price to at least 50,000 and potentially up to 500,000 people.

From now until March 26th, we’re asking interested municipalities to provide us with information about their communities through a Request for information (RFI), which we’ll use to determine where to build our network.

You know what would make for a perfect test community?

Timothy Wells (profile), an adjunct professor from the IT department at RIT (Rochester Institute of Technology), has been charged with second degree murder the afternoon of December 1st, 2009, WHAM reports. The murder was of Christine Sevilla, his wife and former RIT Professor

Wells, who was arraigned in Perinton Town Court, allegedly strangled his wife, Christine Sevilla, around 10 a.m. Monday in their house. Sevilla was a published photographer whose photos and politics favored wooded areas and wetlands in Monroe County. She co-authored a work with Wells entitled “Where the Wild Things Are.”

WHAM falsely reports that Christine Sevilla co-authored a work titled “Where the Wild Things Are.” The actual book was “Where the Wired Things Are” and is actually just PDF. (source)

Timothy Wells was also responsible for putting together the Knowledge and Learning program with Professor Yacci that Choof was considering.
The original article can be found here

Here are some hardly relevant links I found as well:

• Colloquy: A Project of Timothy Wells (unverified)
• List of books by Timothy Wells
• List of books by Christine Sevilla

h/t Adam

Also: insults to my intelligence, douchebags:

Time Warner Cable Charts a New Course on Consumption Based Billing

Measurement Tools to be Made Available

(New York, NY) — Time Warner Cable (NYSE:TWC) today announced it would alter plans to test Consumption Based Billing, shelving the trials while the customer education process continues.

Time Warner Cable Chief Executive Officer Glenn Britt said, “It is clear from the public response over the last two weeks that there is a great deal of misunderstanding about our plans to roll out additional tests on consumption based billing. As a result, we will not proceed with implementation of additional tests until further consultation with our customers and other interested parties, ensuring that community needs are being met. While we continue to believe that consumption based billing may be the best pricing plan for consumers, we want to do everything we can to inform our customers of our plans and have the benefit of their views as part of our testing process.”

Time Warner Cable also announced that it is working to make measurement tools available as quickly as possible. These tools will help customers understand how much bandwidth they consume and aid in the dialog going forward.

Britt added, “We look forward to continuing to work with Senator Schumer, our customers and all of the other interested parties as the process moves forward, to ensure that informed decisions are made about the best way to continue to provide our customers with the level of service that they expect and deserve from Time Warner Cable.”

Once again; Fuck you, Time Warner Cable.

Looks like Time Warner Cable has thrown out their proposed pricing tiers in Rochester all test markets. Chuck Schumer gave Time Warner a call and let them know that he didn’t want Rochester part of the testing. They listened.

Rochester 1, Time Warner Cable 0

[Source: 13wham.com]

Some good news from the free market:

StoptheCap! has learned that Frontier Communications will officially pull the rug out from under Time Warner and announce it will not be imposing any usage caps or rationing plans in the metropolitan Rochester (area code 585) service area, giving the DSL provider a potential competitive advantage in the area.  The company still reserves the right to revisit the matter should their network be completely overwhelmed, but company officials also stated that they are fully equipped to handle the traffic they are getting now.

http://stopthecap.com/2009/04/05/breaking-news-frontier-officially-abandons-caps-will-go-on-marketing-attack-to-sign-new-customers/

H/t to Morgan for the research.

Eat your heart out Chicago.

From BusinessWeek:

Rut Roh Juicers.

Time Warner cable, starting in April, is beginning to collect usage data from users in Austin, San Antonio, and Rochester. Later in the summer, they will begin charging based on multiple levels of usage per month: 5, 10, 20, and 40 GB. 

Kind of sucks hard, and feels like a step backwards.

—

Just something to add: I planned on writing this post about how I am pretty pissed about the capping, and I am, but I got sidetracked because I think I found a flaw in the article. I think they are wrong in some of their math.

According to Hulu and RealWorldVideoCompression.com, an average video stream from hulu will be between 480 and 700 kbps. That is an average of 590 kbps, which translates into ~74 KBps, rounding up for audio.

270 MB for an hour long, low definition video on Hulu. Which sounds about right.

The article, however, claims

A recent report from Sanford C. Bernstein suggests that a family on the 40 GB plan that streams 7.25 hours of online video a week (a fraction of the 60 hours Americans spend watching TV in a week) could end up spending $200 per month on broadband usage fees. And that’s just for video viewing, before factoring in such Internet activities as music downloads and photo sharing.

Really? Lets take our 270 MB for an hour of video. You would need to watch about 148 hours a month @ 270 MB an hour to use 40 GB of data. Thats 37 hours of video a week.

Lets assume that kb and KB were never properly converted, and that an hour of streaming video was 2,160 MB, or 2.160 GB (which is definitely not true), then a family that watches 7.25 hours of video a week would be using 15.66 GB / week, or 62.64 GB / Month, which … is still off by a factor of ten, according to this guy, who claims that 7.25 hours of streaming video a week is effectively 240 GB of transfer a month.

Sounds like some stretched numbers to me. What is he assuming, that the average household streams blue ray data to their home?