Author Archives: Ryan Markel

I Didn’t Sign Up for More Snow

What it’s doing outside my door right now:

The five-day forecast, illustrating what’s more normal for this time of year:

AT&T: Capping My Style

Engadget:

AT&T says it will implement a 150GB monthly cap on landline DSL customers and a 250GB cap on subscribers to U-Verse high speed internet starting on May 2nd. AT&T will also charge overage fees of $10 for every additional 50GB of data, with two grace periods to start out — in other words, the third month you go over the cap is when you’ll get charged. DSLReports says it has confirmation from AT&T that these rates are legitimate, and that letters will go out to customers starting March 18th.

AT&T says that this will only affect about “2%” of their customers, but does anyone want to wager that I’m in the 2%?

I recently canceled my U-Verse television service and elected to receive my content over a combination of OTA HD and streaming services like iTunes/AppleTV and a subscription to MLB.tv. I was planning on having two or three baseball games on in the background per day. I suppose the fact that I’m not paying their ridiculous TV subscription rates but still finding ways to consume content makes me a “bad customer.”

I would jump ship to Charter, but I’ve had experience with their customer service before, and I don’t really want to go through that again. I’m also pretty sure that it’s only a matter of time before every ISP in the US is capping bandwidth like this.

 

2010 Was the Year My Lawn Died

This is what’s left from last year’s lawn care debacle:

Very little of what is green in this image is the type of grass you want on your lawn. I finally caved this year and hired a service to help me take care of the weed killing and fertilizing. I’m not sure I’ll have much of a yard left.

The Salad Is Taking Over

I plan on writing more detailed thoughts on this at some point soon, but I suppose this is my way of pre-announcing to everyone that we are expecting child number five some time in October.

My wife is currently going through a slight salads craving.

And yes, in true Automattician style, that is a bottle of BBQ sauce on the shelf. Sweet Baby Ray’s Sweet and Spicy, to be exact. (The best off-the-shelf sauce money can buy IMO.)

I May Plan Things a Bit Too Much

My new TV arrives tomorrow. I sketched this out last week.