Dammit Jim!

I just moved to Philadelphia and had to find internet. I was having a pretty rough time so I googled around for advice but didn’t find any so I thought I’d put this up to help any other new Philadelphians. Anyway, it looks like there are three possible companies in Philadelphia: Comcast, Verizon, and RCN.

Comcast charges $62/month for basic internet if you don’t get some sort of bundle with phone and cable (which I didn’t really need or want). $62 seemed too much so I didn’t go any further with them although they do at least tell the truth about their prices on the internet (I think).

Verizon says they charge $30/month but once you get through the endless holds on their phone system, it turns out to be $45/month if you don’t get phone service from them. I can’t find any sign of this on their webpage. Did I mention you have to wait on hold more than half an hour to even talk to some one? I waited 45 minutes before their phone service dropped me, then waited another 30 minutes (this is when I still though their service was reasonably priced) before I got to talk to anyone (I had waited more than 10 minutes and given up a few times earlier so this isn’t an isolated event). Even better, once I finally got someone I couldn’t actually start my service because some other customer had their suspended account registered to my line. They would only allow me to use the line if my landlord called them personally (not very likely given the 30 minute holds). So in summary Verizon sucks. Oh also it would have taken at least a week to get my service started.

I was about to bite the bullet and go with Comcast when my girlfriend found RCN. They offer (1.5 mbps) internet for $17/month (or 5 mbps for $35). An actual human operator picked up the phone without any holding when I called. There wasn’t any bundling crap (they did have a $25 installation fee that didn’t appear on the internet but the operator said they were updating the webpage). And they had a cable guy at my house less than 24 hours after I called. After all the crap with Verizon, this was amazing.

So if you’re looking for internet in Philadelphia (or perhaps anywhere these companies operate) RCN seems like a much better company than Verizon (did I mention Verizon sucks?) and offers cheaper services than Comcast. I’ve been using the $17/month internet for a couple days now and it seems fine for normal usage (I don’t do much file sharing so I’m not sure how that would hold up).

I just watched Letters from Iwo Jima. I thought it was a really good movie. Quite a bit different than (and in my opinion better) than Flags of Our Fathers and definitely worth renting if you get the chance. It’s currently the 141st best movie on IMDB and there’s many reviews out there so I’ll leave the review at that but I did want to point out a couple things I found funny (one fishy, one comical).

One thing that bugged me was that the part of Saigo, the guy who just wants to go home, seemed to be written for an older man and the actor they picked looked quite young (in fact he’s currently only 24). In the special features, the commentators were even talking about how he was being drafted late in the war because he was old. In any case, he did do a good job acting so it’s only a minor nitpick.

Anyway, what I found amusing is that the title in Japanese is 硫黄島からの手紙 (you can see it in the poster to the left) with “硫黄島” meaning Iwo Jima (sulfur island) and “手紙” meaning letters. The word for letters is made up of hand (手 - kind of looks like a hand with the fingers to the right or maybe the 5 points are fingers) and paper (紙 - this ones not quite as clear, the left bit means thread and I suppose the right part could look like a sheet of paper). That kind of makes sense since letters are paper with hand writing on them. Anyway the funny part is that the complex characters of Japanese can also be read by Chinese speakers but sometimes with shifted meaning. In this case, Chinese has a quite different meaning for the combination of hand and paper: bathroom tissue. Somehow ‘Toilet Paper from Iwo Jima’ just doesn’t have the same ring.

Thanks to Xiaofen for the Chinese translation

I was skimming Simon Willison’s blog (I know his uncle) when I came across this cool idea for automatic avatar generation. Well to tell the truth, I took one look at the title “Visual Security: 9-block IP Identification” and deleted the link from my RSS reader but the next day a link based on that idea came up for generating a unique monster avatar for each user that did catch my interest. After all if it’s got monsters, it has got to be interesting.

As a biologist, I’ve often thought “I could really use an instrument that did X”. Logging temperatures, locations, depth, light levels and other variables, controlling devices like cameras or servos, and communicating with a computer seem like a task for microcontrollers. So it’s been in my head for a while to try and learn a bit about them.

This summer I needed a GPS logger for some field work. After looking through a few different possibilities, none of which were particularily satisfying, I finally found the (ununiquely named) NaviGPS GPS from GPS Central for $200 Canadian. At the time, there weren’t any reviews of it online. I’ve come to depend on reviews whenever I buy something so I figure I’ll do my part and post my review of it. While digging up the company link, I noticed on they’ve changed the name to a ‘GT-11′ and redone the layout of the website. Looks better now. I’m not sure the name is any better though. Sounds like a car. Anyway, I also noticed they have drivers for Mac, XP and Linux so that’s a plus if you need that. 1/18/2007 Edit: It looks like the name has changed again. It appears to be called an Amaryllo Trip Tracker now. Not sure what has changed but the picture sure looks the same as my unit except the big A logo.