Back in the old days when I was just coming of age and calculating the cost of buying my first house, when I considered cost of utilities, I figured electricity, heat, water & sewer, and phone.
Surely electricity, heat, and water in-and-out are still with us, though for many, telephone cost has shifted from land land to wireless. We still have a land line at our house, but daughter Kelly has dumped theirs and replaced it with an efficient wireless plan covering a family of four, with everybody issued a phone and an iPad or two tossed in for good measure. In addition to all that these days, you’d also have to consider television service, too, as a costly but essential home utility.
Ten years or so ago we dumped dial-up internet service and went high speed. Back then it seemed only cable was an option. In the interim, telephone line-based DSL made its advent and at least gave us an option. When Cindy Lou and I moved back home after our house fire in 2005, DSL seemed the best internet deal around.
But times have changed. Last December I realized that our DSL service provided by AT&T was pretty darned slow at times. Turning to speedtest.net to provide data, I learned that while promised download speeds of up to 5 to 7 Mbs. (that’s mega [millions of] bits/second), there were days I was plumbing only .2 or .5 Mbs. That, my friend, is pretty pokey. Still better than dial-up (I think), but slow. After talking to an AT&T service agent, I was told the problem had to be on our end, because at the very time I called, our service was hitting its low guaranteed mark.
So it was back to Time Warner cable for us. This is what I found:
Translation: The blue line is our service. On the left, you can see our AT&T DSL number was holding pretty steady at 5 Mbs for some time, with regular drops in service noted pretty often since mid-December. (Note, too, the green line: It reports the global average for high speed internet @ 10 Mbs.) The big jump you see on the right of the graph denoted our connection to Roadrunner. Time Warner promised its product at 10 Mbs, but regularly delivers numbers closer to 20 Mbs. That’s a whole lot better.
One other consideration: We were paying AT&T $40/month for our poor service. Time Warner is currently getting $30 for the much better numbers.
My point is, be sure you are getting what you pay for. Check speedtest.net to see if your provider is giving you good internet service. Everything runs faster at home these days, especially the iPad.
***
I stumbled across a really good Bill Moyers program last week. If you’re like me, feeling a bit despondent over American politics in an election year, you owe it to yourself to watch this one. Bill’s guest on Moyers & Company (PBS) was Jonathan Haidt, author of new book entitled, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion. As a guy who likes to understand what’s going on in his country, I found the 45 minutes important to understanding folks who vote the ‘other way.’ Good stuff. Link: moyers & company
***
A friend on Facebook mentioned his annual ‘yard list‘ of birds he keeps. We keep track of all the feathered critters who come our way, mostly to our four winter feeders, but I never recorded an annual list.
Such is now remedied! This is who we’ve had so far in 2012 at Wild Grace II:
American goldfinch
white breasted nuthatch
Carolina chickadee
tufted titmouse
Northern cardinal
mourning dove
American robin
house finch
dark-eyed junco
European starling
red bellied woodpecker
downy woodpecker
white throated sparrow
blue jay
Carolina wren
American crow
cooper’s hawk
house sparrow
yellow bellied sapsucker
hairy woodpecker
pileated woodpecker
No owls yet, but we’re listenin’....
Today’s Elder Idea: Study nature, love nature, stay close to nature. It will never fail you.
Frank Lloyd Wright
American architect
No comments:
Post a Comment