Lummox JR's BYOND blog

I am passionate about fireworks. Every summer I go crazy with anticipation, looking forward to whatever displays I'll be going to see. As a kid I got to walk down the street to an open area with a view of a local speedway's fireworks every 4th of July. In my teenage years, my family went up to Marshfield, MA (near Boston), where you can see bonfires and parties and amateur fireworks all up and down Humarock beach on the night of the 3rd. Several summers during the '90s, a major national group of pyrotechnicians would meet at the fairgrounds in Weedsport to show off their latest and greatest creations, and my family went almost every year they were there. So great is my passion that a little maniacal voice in the back of my head kept nudging me to make the six-hour road trip yesterday just to see the fireworks at Humarock.

Gads I wish I had listened to that voice.

What I had planned instead this year was seeing fireworks at Alliance Bank Stadium, home of the Syracuse Chiefs, where they were going to have fireworks after the ballgame. I've seen postgame fireworks before and they've always been good, so this seemed like a great opportunity to enjoy both. The game was good, a win for the home team in the 12th inning, but that's where things went way south.

I have been disappointed by some fireworks displays in my life, but never until tonight has one actually pissed me off.

What I saw tonight transcended mere disappointment, mere crapitude. This was a display that a real budget was sunk into, and I do mean sunk in every sense of the word because the return on investment was abysmal. I have seen many relatively unimaginative displays that were still incredibly enjoyable to watch. What I have never seen, before tonight, was a failure of imagination on every conceivable level.

Lest this rant continue without substance in exactly the same way as the show I am disparaging, allow me to go into detail. There are several great staples of any fireworks show worth the name:

1. A few really big shells
2. A short time between most shells to appreciate them (except for a few more intense bursts during the show and at the end)
3. Variety
4. The grand finale

In every single aspect of that list, this show was not just a failure but an EPIC FAIL. It's like if you went to see a highly-rated comedian and instead of the show you paid to see, you got a bad stand-in whose entire repertoire consisted of fart jokes that expired before he left grade school. Also he would tell the same joke 20 times in a row each time.

A few really big shells

The standard big firework shell is called a chrysanthemum. In a normal display, you'll see quite a few moderately big mums during the show, and a few really huge ones that burst overhead. Occasionally you'll see a couple go off at once. Mums are the meat and potatoes of any fireworks display. When the finale comes, it mostly consists of lots and lots of mums of varying sizes, and usually a significant number of flashbangs.

Tonight's show featured exactly zero mums. Let me repeat that: Not. One. Single. Chrysanthemum.

In this most basic of elements, the show didn't live up to the standards of even a garden-variety low-budget professional display. And it's not that it simply fell short--it didn't even compete. This display was a marathon runner falling dead at the sound of the starter's pistol. It wasn't a glass two-thirds empty; it wasn't even good enough to be an empty glass; it was a crappy wax paper cup with holes poked in the bottom by a chewed-up pencil that wasn't even sharp enough to write with.

In fact the size of the shells was completely lackluster throughout. Not only was there not a single mum to be seen, but no shell ever aspired to even a simple "sort of big" size. The biggest shells were all, at best, a lukewarm medium. Mind you I have no problem with medium and small shells, but they should be sprinkled among the big and occasionally really huge ones.

Time to appreciate shells / Variety

This is how a normal display is supposed to look: You see a rocket launch. It goes off and you ooh and ahh. During that time maybe another rocket or two launches, or maybe they wait for a moment to raise the anticipation. The next launch comes and you ooh and ahh at the next shell, which is often a different kind or color or something. It doesn't have to be at a slow or boring pace, but even a retarded chimp can grasp the fundamentals of timing enough to make the most of their material.

What we got instead were lots and lots of very similar shells, going off one right after the other, with no regard to artistry or anticipation or presentation whatsoever. And that works just fine if you're talking about a finale, and the shells are of course several orders of magnitude bigger and infinitely more diverse. Seeing the same pansy-sized shell go off a few dozen times in a row leaves you with exactly the feeling you get from a movie where the plot is supposed to start any time now, except it's too late and the end credits are already rolling.

What I've just described is basically a ground display. Pretty much all of the show was one pretty ground display after another. And I mean right after another, no pauses between. No change in tempo, little change in shell type and none at all within a given "set", low-altitude, small-diameter, piddling bursts. And this is good if it's a ground display that happens in between a bunch of real shells, you get to appreciate it for its brief spectacle, and then you get back to the real shells. The real shells never came; it was bland launch after bland launch after bland launch, but far less interesting than how I'm describing it. Yes there was a little bit of difference from set to set, but almost never within the set.

The grand finale

Everyone knows what a good finale looks like. A ton of shells go up at once--though this itself isn't necessarily the cue, since a good show has a few places where they do this. The shells go off and it's several big ones, only while they're going off a few more launches go up, and there's another bunch of bursts. They vary in color and size, and a few flashbangs get thrown in for good measure. The shells increase in pace, size, and altitude until a huge number of them are going off in a row, spread out all over, in an amazing array of colors and a deafening cacophony of booms. Often, but not always, the show will end with a single shell, usually big and usually with some kind of trailing sparks.

Without mums or even a repeat of the flashbangs used to open the show, there was no sign of any finale at all. The utter sameness of the "groundathon" didn't change in intensity or tempo, didn't build up to any crescendo, didn't show any signs of really changing anything much at all in fact. The show never wavered in its lack of luster until suddenly it was over. The whole audience waited with anticipation to see if, now that the parade of ground displays was over, the real show would begin--or at least a real finale. Instead the stadium crew sat as confused as the rest of us for a minute, and finally the lights came up. That was it.

The verdict: GUILTY

Whoever planned that show needs to be fired. From a cannon, into a vat of flaming sewage imported from New Jersey. There is no excuse for a display as bad as that, which surpassed any other I have seen in my entire lifetime--and hopefully any will ever see again--in awfulness. I've been to many shows where I could shrug and say "Eh, it was all right." I've never been to one before that made me mad. Seriously, I want to find the person responsible for this atrocity and punch them right in the neck. With a rock. I don't feel anything less than a neck-punch with a rock would adequately vent the bile I feel towards this miserable excuse for a human being. Also maybe a kick to the groin.

It is completely inexcusable for a show to consist of absolutely nothing but ground displays, and that's exactly what this is. Ground displays are a worthy part of a whole display that can add to its variety, although for my part I can take or leave them. They are not, in any way, a substitute for proper shells and adequate timing thereof. The entire display lasted about 10 minutes; any really excellent display, particularly on the 4th of July, should last around half an hour. This show was more like the leftover dregs after an awesome one-hour display was completely stripped of everything but its ground portions by some busybody safety Nazi.

I paid to see some frelling fireworks on the 4th of July. This outrage is unforgivable. So whoever you are out there who's behind this mess, you'd better start wearing turtlenecks and a jock strap because I AM GOING TO PUNCH YOU IN THE NECK WITH A FREAKING ROCK.

(On a lighter note, if anyone knows of any fireworks shows in the Syracuse area coming up that are being done by actual professionals, or know of a Website where someone might look up such a thing, I would be most grateful. Somehow or other I'm going to have to see a real display.)

One of my favorite pastimes is skewering idiots who claim to be knowledgeable, so it should come as no surprise if you read this article by Mark McKinnon that he's due for a righteous Fisking. Mark's foray into professional stupidity is on the subject of Time-Warner's bandwidth cap plans. He thinks that, gosh, it's a shame we didn't get to see how they played out. Is he a complete imbecile or an industry shill grinding their ax for them? You be the judge, and by all means, judge harshly.

And, uh... Mark? We may yet see that pricing thing play out, and it isn't a shame, for reasons that will become clear once you have been awake for any length of time. Also, you're a moron. Let us begin.

When it comes to the future -- the future of content distribution, the future of the Internet, the future of technology -- no one is exactly sure what will work and what won't. The best way forward is experimentation: a marketplace of business models.

Hulu versus Netflix, iTunes versus Rhapsody, fiber to the home versus Docsis 3.0, LTE versus WiMax: Only time will tell which technologies work best for consumers and will thrive.

I'll take Business Models Where Competition Actually Exists And Are Therefore Irrelevant, Stupid for $2000, Alex.

Even within a single company, experimentation is necessary for figuring out what works best. Should an ISP offer a single, flat-rate price for broadband? Should it consider double- or triple-play packages? Should a telecom company offer its own IP voice package? Should a cable company follow suit? These are just some of the many questions companies consider as they determine how best to invest, expand, and innovate. The fact that they have been relatively free to experiment with these options is part of the reason there's so much choice for consumers.

Consumers have choices in some of these things, but not so much in their TV or broadband service. In rural areas, TV choices are quite limited and cable may not even be available, while the ISP situation on the ground presents them with one and only one broadband solution. Or in some cases, there may be only one real broadband solution while all the others, like DSL, suck on toast. Cable runs by local monopoly, which is why consumers have to pay for packaged pricing on their TV channels instead of per channel, for instance. Mark apparently lives in a magical place where five different companies are tripping over themselves month after month to get his business by offering great deals, cable bills go down over time, and service calls are handled by leprechauns.

That's why it's a shame to see that Time Warner Cable Inc. (NYSE: TWC)'s recent plan to roll out usage-based broadband pricing in additional test markets was hobbled by political opposition before it was able to reach consumers. (Tests in Beaumont, Texas, underway since last year, have continued.)

First correction: The situation in Beaumont is not a "test"; people are actually getting real bills with this and they're still stuck with this stupid system because they have no other choice in that area. Second correction: The political opposition existed because customers reacted vehemently to the change and demanded their representatives get involved. Practically nobody wants this change except for Time-Warner's execs.

Two groups opposing the plan most aggressively were Free Press, which petitioned Congress to investigate the "price-gouging scheme," and Public Knowledge, which called Time Warner's decision to shelve the plan "yet another victory for the netroots!"

But that was a change in tune for both organizations. Last year, Public Knowledge's Gigi Sohn said she was "delighted" about Time Warner's test of metered billing because "it provides both transparency and certainty" for consumers and "makes unnecessary controversial 'network management' decisions." Free Press's Tim Wu had a similar take, telling The Washington Post, "I don't quite see [metering] as an outrage, and in fact [it] is probably the fairest system going."

That they may have had a bad idea in the past that they now choose not to champion after sobering up is evidence of possible intellectual growth, not wishy-washiness. Everyone's entitled to change their mind on a drug-induced 3 AM brainfart. But even so, screw it. Lots of other groups opposed the caps from the beginning and never changed their tune at all. Furthermore, maybe the change has something to do with the ridiculously low caps suggested by Time-Warner's plans, caps that are likely to push average consumers into higher bills and push more and more people into overage charges as their use of services like Netflix and Hulu (remember that first paragraph, Mark?) grows.

It's certainly the fairest system going for many Internet users.

One of the more interesting things Time Warner planned to offer in the new test markets was a 1-Gbyte consumption tier (representing speeds up to 768 kbit/s) for just $15 a month, with only a $2-per-Gbyte overage fee. For people who only use the net at home for light Web surfing or email, this would have been a far preferable option to a $50 per month all-you-can-eat buffet of Internet downloading service.

On a technical level, I suppose you can call more than ten people "many". But percentage-wise, not hardly. About 30% of Time-Warner's users--based on raw data they won't release to the public, mind you, this is just their claim--currently use under 1 GB per month. That percentage will fall as the Internet evolves--there is no question in that. How many light users will think to upgrade their plan before crossing the threshold? How many are likely to be seniors on fixed incomes? How many may have unsecured wireless routers that could end up costing them huge overages?

And what's this "only a $2-per-Gbyte overage fee" crap? Did you seriously use the word "only" for that? That's not only high, it's twice what it was in the initial proposal. That was high too.

But let's put this in even more perspective. The modified price structure Time-Warner came up with, offering a 1 GB tier, only came into existence because their first plan had absolutely no way for customers to save money vs. current pricing. As it is, these light users can still switch to a lower-speed plan which is offered at a lower price, have no caps at all, and still save about the same money. In what way is the metered plan "far preferable" for them, italics or not, if it makes practically no difference compared to the existing lite plan? The existing lite plan comes with the added bonus of incurring no risk of a huge surprise bill if usage spikes or you get infected with a trojan or something. And that's the only comparison worth making; comparing the low-tier metered plan to the existing high-speed plan of course is apples vs. oranges. If it looks like an apple and tastes like an apple, you are definitely not dealing with a member of the citrus family.

For everyone else, the price for their current level of service is effectively going up. It may double or even triple, or more if they happen to incur overages unexpectedly. There is no excuse whatsoever for Time-Warner's 60 GB cap (originally 40) for instance, when the universally hated Comcast only cuts people off at 250. If Comcast can have caps of 250 GB per month and Cablevision can happily get away with having none at all, why does Time-Warner have to set the bar so low? Oh, right, those ridiculous overage charges. Anyone wanting "virtually unlimited" service, though, can gladly pay three times more for their service than they do now. Yay!

People know a cash grab when they see one, Mark. Even most stupid people. That you seem not to is, well, appalling on every level. Out of the gene pool, Mark; you are not fit to share my oxygen.

As Time Warner pointed out, nearly 30 percent of its customers download 1 Gbyte or less per month. Those customers could have saved $420 a year by only paying for the bandwidth they consume, rather than subsidizing heavier users. And for only $10 more a month, users could have had a 10-Gbyte plan, saving $300 a year over the one-size-fits-all approach.

But apparently those savings constitute "highway robbery."

How nice, Mark, to repeat Time-Warner's talking points verbatim without considering the other side of it. In the first place those customers could only save that much in the absence of any possible overages and only if the existing lite plan was not already available to them. And still, this is only a minority.

But nobody objects to light users saving money. The problem is that only this minority stands to save at all, and even then only if they don't end up with a hijacked router or a granddaughter who breezes through every episode of Pokemon when she visits for the week. For everyone else, bills will go up, and that everyone else includes the core of the user base. People are enjoying a somewhat reasonably priced service now which does not include artificial limits because it does not need them. There's plenty of bandwidth to go around, will be for some time to come, and it's cheap for the company to add more. The concept that light users are "subsidizing" heavy users is a complete fiction, and you're a butt-yodeling twit, Mark, for taking it at face value without even doing basic research.

Dramatically raising people's rates and lowering their level of service for no real economic reason whatsoever is pretty much textbook highway robbery. You don't get a pass on not recognizing that merely by having apparently never cracked open a textbook.

Sure, there may have been kinks in the plan that needed ironing out -- such as finding the right service tiers and making sure that the pricing doesn't discourage the use of new, innovative Internet applications; under the fiery rhetoric, these were the critics' main concerns. But one of the best ways to figure out where the problems are would have been to include additional test markets, which is what Time Warner proposed.

If customers in the test markets overwhelmingly rejected the bill of goods, how would expanding it to other test markets improve matters? Besides, it's not like they'd try different tiers in different places--that would only increase the blowback. But users in the know are firm on this: Capped usage is completely unacceptable no matter how high the cap. Give users all the speed tiers you want, but no caps. There is no need for such caps; bandwidth and network maintenance costs to the company are peanuts. Their profits have gone up year by year and costs have been plummeting--clearly there is no need for any caps. (And just to head off the most obvious point of rebuttal, the claim that caps may be needed in the future is unfounded and in any case does not justify caps so incredibly stingy.)

It's unfortunate that so-called consumer advocates reflexively criticized the plan without considering its potential benefits before Time Warner could even finish figuring out how to bring the best set of options to consumers.

Consumers themselves criticized it, as you would know if you stopped admiring the view of your own colon and took a look around. To most consumers, even those not in the test markets, this was an act of betrayal. People are hurting and this company has tried to rip much more money out of their wallets with absolutely the thinnest of excuses. I've literally crapped out better analysis of the situation than anything you just said, Mark, and yes I'm using the word "literally" correctly. It's proof that at some point I nourished a brain that actually considered more than the company press release as a basis on which to form an opinion.

It may very well be that Time Warner's plan for usage-based billing wouldn't have worked out. But consumers -- not professional advocacy groups and politicians -- should be in the driver's seat picking winners and losers in the digital society.

Consumers have spoken, and are still speaking. They are overwhelmingly saying NO. And they are saying it as loudly as possible, because the company isn't listening. Time-Warner has said bluntly that they feel people merely weren't "educated" enough about the plans and they want to push this forward in spite of resounding hatred--hatred, Mark--of the whole affair. Customers screamed at Time-Warner in droves, and because they had no viable options for competitive service they were ignored. It took a few politicians to get involved for the company even to back off this one baby step.

Bonus question for the peanut gallery: How is it this guy can research quotes from a year back from advocacy groups that have been more or less minor players in this whole thing, yet completely miss a huge outpouring of consumer anger that's incredibly easy to find? Heck, how can he even make "Consumers should have their say" his central point without addressing any of the consumers' serious points of contention? His piece extolling the company's "experiment" is so entirely one-sided it's beyond mockable. As lazy as journalists have gotten these days, I suppose it's still possible to chalk this up to a lack of journalistic integrity and commitment to quality writing. Gathering any amount of meaningful data at all, let alone real quotes from the opposition besides the two consumer groups he attacks, would have resulted in an entirely different piece. Which is to say, at least partially informed with an attempt at objectivity.

But wait! There's more! Don't miss the author's bona fides.

-- Mark McKinnon has worked for both Democratic and Republican political campaigns, including Texas Governors Mark White, Ann Richards, and George Bush, Louisiana Governor Buddy Roemer, and, in 2006, Senator John McCain's candidacy for President. He is a co-chairman of Arts+Labs and serves on the board of the Lance Armstrong Foundation.

It's just like they've been saying at StopTheCap!: This is not a left or right issue. Stupidity crosses party lines, to whatever extent those even matter these days.

Recently, the low-priced clothing retailer Steve & Barry's closed. This was unfortunate because it was the main place I would go for T-shirts. A large portion of my current wardrobe came from there. Although I would have to wade through dozens of designs about hard partying and hard drinking, I did find some gems from time to time. Here's a sample of the shirts I own from there:

• I'm probably NOT listening to you
• I don't discriminate / I hate everybody
• It's hard to show I care / Since I don't
• Trust me, I'm perfect
• Procrastinators unite tomorrow
• I see dumb people

I get a lot of compliments on the "I hate everybody" shirt.

But since S&B kicked the bucket, I've had no good place to shop for T-shirts that fit my personality. There are tons of online stores for that kind of thing, but unfortunately I tend to run into the same kind of stuff I always did at Steve & Barry's: Too much frat-boy wear, not enough misanthropy. So it occurred to me that I should just skip the middleman and design my own shirts instead. By making my own shirts, I can plan out my entire summer wardrobe in advance.

Cafepress, it turns out, makes it difficult to set up an online store. They charge you per month for the advanced store and without that you can't have more than one design. But while looking for alternatives, I found Printfection, which is reputed to have much higher quality and makes it easy to set up a full-service shop. (And why not, after all? It makes them more money to have more designs available. Duh, Cafepress. Duh.) Printfection also supports bigger designs and a wider range of shirt colors. Sold!

So I went to work and designed some T-shirts, which soon I'll be buying for myself as well. In the meantime, I thought it'd be nice to give things a kick-start and see if anyone has any interest in it. Here's the list of designs available right now at The Ornery Geek:

• I am inclined to disagree.
  A simple yet powerful statement, combined with the inimitable Ornery Geek scowling smiley logo.
• You can't make me like anime.
  In two formats, this design boldly tells the animevangelists to stop trying to win a convert (or at least, lose a critic).
• Email was better before stupid people figured out how to use it.
  Which was around 1992, in case you were wondering. That's even before spam took hold. I'm still debating whether I should make a shirt expressing my desire to own Sanford Wallace's head as a wall decoration.
• I don't do text messaging (my spelling isn't bad enough)
  Take pride in the basic literacy a whole generation will never master. Also you can boast that you're not one of those obnoxious morons who texts in a movie theater.
• Instant messaging just makes it easier for people to bug me
  It seems like for the last decade I've been dodging conversations that pop up when I'm just quickly checking my mail. This one was suggested by my own sister, a Myspace/WoW junkie.

Suggestions for other shirt designs are welcome. They don't all have to be tech-related of course. Though I've wanted something to mock leetspeak for a while now--how to do that as a joke people will actually get is still eluding me.

There's more good stuff at Stop the Cap! today. Last night they reported that Time-Warner upped their proposed 40 GB bandwidth cap (still corresponding to a more expensive plan than I have now, mind you) to a still-paltry 60 GB, while upping the overage charge on most tiers to $2/GB/mo. Their top tier will be a whopping $75 for a still ridiculously low 100 GB, with overages at $1/GB/mo and capped at $75, so customers can have "virtually unlimited" (not actually unlimited) access for almost four times their current bill which gives them virtually unlimited access already.

Anyway there's a gem on the site this morning. Phillip Dampier went through Time-Warner's SEC filings and discovered their costs went down in 2008. Time-Warner has told customers it faces cost increases for bandwidth, yet their broadband Internet division was more profitable in 2008 than 2007.

There may be ways of massaging the numbers so things look worse for Time-Warner than they really are, but they won't release any internal data related to bandwidth consumption and network costs, making it impossible to evaluate if there is even a nugget of truth in their claims that they have to do this. However in a couple of statements from their COO Landel Hobbs, I spotted some fairly blatant lies, for which I intend to ridicule him thoroughly over the weekend. There's no reason to put any trust in what they say at this point.

What I can say for sure is that if they tell their shareholders that costs went down, and tell customers costs went up, they're lying to somebody. What should be really fun is if they try to slide this "Our costs went up" hooey by the FTC, at which point they will have officially told two radically different stories to different government agencies.

Since I now have the option available, I figured I may as well use it: Site comments have been opened to the public, and by the public I mean BYOND Members since I don't want the hassle of dealing with more spam than I must.

It's not the only spring cleaning change I've made around here. (You'll note my idea of spring cleaning does not involve actual cleaning. It doesn't, as such, even involve actual spring; it's been snowing for the past two days.) I've added a link box to some favorite sites and blogs, which I'll probably expand on soon enough, and I've prettied up the site with some better link colors that stand out better and improve readability.

What prompted the change was that one of my favorite blogs, Dubious Quality, has been posting updates on the ongoing atrocity of broadband bandwidth caps. Comcast, a company which to my knowledge is universally hated (and not just for their awful new monotone commercials), at least capped bandwidth at a quarter terabyte a month which isn't all that bad. Time-Warner on the other hand is planning several different caps which are charitably described as Draconian, and uncharitably as an all-star dick move revue. Their highest cap, a pitiful 100 GB per month, has no pricing info as yet, which means they're trying to figure out how much they can get away with charging for it. The next-highest (40 GB, which is a YouTube sneeze) comes with an uptick in price. Overages will be $1 per gigabyte. Their "test" plan is expanding into several markets including Rochester, NY, which isn't too far from me. Naturally this naked money-grab at my expense pisses me off, but fortunately Dubious Quality came to the rescue again with a link to a site dedicated to stopping these bozos in their tracks.

That website: stopthecap.com, which is posting regular news updates and Congressional contact info, offering people a real plan of action instead of just getting mad. If you're at all concerned about the future of the Internet, I suggest you get involved on this post haste, even if you're not a Time-Warner customer or (yet) in the affected areas. Broadband ISPs tend to operate by monopoly, and when they can't do that they operate by cartel. It's only a matter of time before all ISPs do this if we don't bring the hammer down now.

On a related subject, the deeply unpopular spending spree Congress is on is being protested all over the country, and on Tax Day (that's April 15) there are widespread protests scheduled all over the place. Even if you can't attend, if you're against the idea that spending recklessly is a magical cure to massive debt, you can get involved and show your support. This movement crosses party lines and it's bringing together people from all kinds of ideologies. It's the American Revolution all over again!