mental packrat

In 2000, I moved with my new wife across the country from San Francisco to Burlington, Vermont, to work at my dream job: web developer for Burton Snowboards. I couldn’t believe my luck! I would actually be getting paid to do websites for the best snowboarding company in the world. Apparently they were getting a team together to take some of the web stuff in-house, after years of outsourcing it. I was getting in on the ground floor of something new.

I had no idea what to expect. I’d worked in a bunch of different kinds of places, from a little five person startup to a huge multinational corporation, but I figured Burton would be a different kind of gig. All I knew was that I was going to be able to combine my loves for tech and snowboarding – my only hesitation was moving across the country after having lived on the West Coast my whole life. I had been to Vermont before, but I couldn’t say what Burlington was like or if it would suit me at all. Still, I was 28, and my wife said it would be great, so that was good enough for me.

She was right.  Working for Burton for the past nine and a half years has been a dream come true (and once in a while a nightmare, as well).  I have learned more stuff, met more cool people, done more stellar projects, and enjoyed myself there more than I would have ever thought possible.

But it’s time for my run to come to an end.  I’m taking another job with Green Mountain Coffee Roasters, starting on Monday, Sept 28.

It was a hard decision.  Over the years I’ve been lucky enough for opportunities to come my way, and many of them were pretty good jobs that lots of people would be glad to get a crack at.  But I’d compare them to Burton, and I was always more stoked to stay where I was than jump ship.  That’s part of what kept me there that long – I loved working there, and I didn’t want to go anywhere else.

But all good things must come to an end, they say, and this breakup is more about me than it is about Burton.  There’s no sordid tale behind my decision or anything, it’s simply time to do something else, and I have an exciting opportunity with a quickly growing company to look forward to.  I’m excited and scared shitless in equal measure.

The craziest thing about making this transition is how much my life has changed between now and then. While I’ve been working there I’ve gone from a newlywed to being 10 years in love with my wife, and we’ve had two kids that are now starting school. We own a house that we’ve lived in for five years, and I’ve now lived here longer than anywhere else I’ve ever lived, except for the town I grew up in.  When I started we were still doing sites in classic ASP with VBScript on machines running Windows NT.  The web crew was called the “E-team,” of all things, and there were only a few of us.  It evolved into the Burton Media Syndicate (or Syndicate) a while after that, and I can still take credit for that name – my idea won the vote we all took.  I think in retrospect we can all agree that it’s better that “Spork” didn’t win.  We moved the office three times, from the HQ to the Lake Champlain waterfront and back again.  And in the end, I worked there longer than anyone in the media Syndicate, except Greg (props to you, Syndicate Survivor!).

Lucky for me my lovely wife Kacey just started there so I still get to stay connected to all my friends.  I think that I will never really lose touch with them, since we are still local and Burton is such a big part of the Burlington scene, but it’s nice to know that for now I can still reap some of those snowboard-specific benefits and drop by sometimes to harass my former teammates.

To everyone I ever worked with at Burton, past and present: it was a pleasure and a privilege, and I salute you all.  Keep killing it and may all your days on the hill be bluebird pow with all your friends.  I will see you up there – and I’ll bring the coffee!

Usually the best part of my day is my bike commute to work from the New North End of Burlington. It’s about 6 1/2 miles, and takes me about a half hour. I get some valuable time to myself, freed from the demands of work or family, it’s great exercise, and it’s a good time to mentally prepare for or unwind from the work day. I’m saving money on gas and health club memberships, it’s good for the environment, and it’s just more fun than sitting in the car.

I’ve been bike commuting in the summers for years, but in the fall last year I attended a lunchtime session sponsored by the EPIC crew about winter biking. They brought in Chapin Spencer, the director of Local Motion (a local “active transportation” advocacy group) and one of the mechanics from the local bike shop The Old Spokes Home to give advice on clothes, equipment, and things to watch out for.

It didn’t seem all that hard, so I decided to give it a try, and for the most part it turned out to be way easier than I thought it would be. Once I figured out the clothes and equipment parts of it, the actual biking turned into part of my daily routine, just like it is in the summer. It even made snowboarding more fun, because my legs were much stronger than they’ve been through previous winters.

If I can do it, you can do it too! In retrospect I’m kind of surprised that more people here don’t winter bike, given the fact that we are generally big fans of winter at Burton. If you ride a snowboard in the winter, you are most of the way towards being able to do it on a bike – you probably already have a lot of what you’ll need. Fortunately we have a proform deal with the bike supply outfit Hawley, so you can probably get anything you need for pretty cheap.

The most important thing in any winter sport is to stay warm, and that means wearing the right clothes. When I started I was basically wearing an old version of what I would wear to go snowboarding, and while that worked pretty well, I ended up changing it a bit. With snowboarding, you alternate moving around and sitting still a lot, so you go through a lot of hot/cold cycles.

With bike riding, though, you’re moving the whole time, so you need less. Instead of snowpants I would just wear a first layer with a pair of shorts on top, so that there was less fabric around the drivetrain to get caught on the chain. And instead of a fleece or a sweater underneath my shell, I’d generally just wear a thick first layer and the shell, and that would be good enough. The heat you generate is enough to keep you warm, but you should carry sweater or something warm with you in case you break down or have to stop for some reason. And speaking of stopping, you should definitely carry a spare tube. They’re bigger than a patch kit, but it takes just as long to apply a patch as it does to just change the tube, and that way you’re not trying to find a tiny hole in the dark and cold.

I also started with heavier winter boots, but found that plain old sneakers worked fine. Warm socks were a must, of course. Winter in Vermont means that some days will be slushy and wet, while others will be frozen solid. On the wet days you might want to stick with the heavier waterproof boots, because your feet will get wet and we all know that wet socks + cold = painful toes. It’s equally important to keep your hands warm. Unlike with snowboarding, they’ve got to keep warm enough to work well. They are less likely to get wet, but you need a good pair of gloves to be able to have enough dexterity to work the brakes and hold on properly while still staying warm.

Some people say to just wear work clothes underneath the outwear so you’re good to go when you arrive, but I always carry a backpack with my work clothes and stuff in it. I just give myself an extra 15 minutes or so to change clothes and take a quick shower when I get here.

As far as hardware goes, you might think that you need a ton of special bike gear to bike thru the winter, but you only really need a few key things.

You will definitely want to use your warmer R.E.D. helmet with the ninjaclava underneath, and you should have a pair of your Anons in case it snows. Get some night lenses because it will probably be dark. The darkness will also mean you should have some good lights. Now, you can get really fancy and have super bright floodlights on your bike, but I used a $15 front and back light combo I got from Hawley that worked just fine. Your lighting needs will probably depend on where you are riding, but since my whole route is in Burlington I can depend on streetlights, and just need my lights to be visible to cars.

I just have one mountain bike, which I think lets me get out in the widest variety of conditions, but I see fixies and road bikes and touring bikes in the winter all the time, so don’t let that stop you. I rode on knobby tires for a long while, and they worked pretty well, but when it comes to ultimate winter domination you can’t beat studded tires. These will be the most expensive piece of winter biking equipment you might get, but I hear they last years and years because they get ridden for a relatively short period of time per year.

One of the biggest changes for me was the route I had to take. In the summer, I’m lucky enough to be able to take the bike path the whole way, but in the winter it gets taken over by cross-country skiers and never gets plowed or anything, so it’s less than ideal for biking. I ended up just taking over the sidewalks. Some people just ride on the shoulder of the road, but I always got a little worried about hitting an ice patch at the wrong time and falling, so the sidewalk seemed better.

As I mentioned before, the conditions can vary a lot, and are probably the biggest challenge to winter biking. I stayed warm with the setup I mentioned on all but the coldest days. On the below-zero days, I’d throw on a sweater underneath the shell. During the very coldest cold snaps it can be hard to keep hands and feet warm, but that only put me on the bus a handful of times when it was -10 or lower. When it’s super cold like that the sidewalks and roads can be a strange combination of dry patches melted by the salt-spreaders and sheets of ice. Studded tires will keep you upright on the ice sheets, and even on regular knobbies you will usually be ok if you take it easy. The main thing to remember on ice is not to turn or brake if you can help it. If you go slow in a straight line, gravity will stay your friend.

If it’s snowing heavily, I usually depended on the diligence of the road crews to keep me rolling. It’s easy to bike in up to about 6 inches of snow, especially with good wide knobby and preferably studded tires, but anything more than that can be slow going. Generally the roads are cleared pretty quick thanks to our tax dollars at work, though it’s pretty fun to ride through loose snow, though, and your snowboarding skills will come in handy with knowing the fall line and how to manage a skid gracefully without having to bail.

On the warmer days the challenge is keeping your feet dry, but fenders and good waterproof boots will help keep you dry, along with slowing down through the block-long puddles that can form in the spring.

Bring your bike inside at Burton and at home if you can, because the water that builds up on it during the ride can hurt your parts when it freezes. And since you’ll be ridiing through lots of salty water, you will rust out most of your drivetrain over the course of the winter. Once spring comes around it’s a good idea to get your friendly local bike mechanic to check it out, and they’ll probably to replace at least the chain and a few other parts.

Trust me when I say that winter biking’s really not that hard. You’re already going outside on a regular basis to ride a snowboard, so it’s really not that much different to ride a bike, and it’s another way to enjoy playing in the snow on those work days where you might not be able to any other way.

Honestly, what with getting all sweaty and swallowing bugs by accident and dodging all the yahoos that walk their dogs on those stupid retractable leashes on the bike path, I’ve been missing my dark silent lonesome winter rides lately…

The Burlington Free Press recently ran an article about talk of the New North End neighborhood seceding from the town.  Aside from the fact that I think that’s a dumb idea and would never actually go anywhere, the article itself seemed to be trying to report a nonexistent story.

There was not a single quote from anyone advocating for secession, and the sixth paragraph admits that there’s no official movement.  You get a few quotes from City Councilor Paul Decelles and neighborhood activist Lea Terhune saying “people” are discontented.  Terhune, in particular, provides the only real substantial quote:

Still, people like Lea Terhune, a Ward 4 resident, see a good deal of political discontent over a good number of issues: zoning, code enforcement, instant-runoff voting, use of tax dollars and the disc-golf proposal at Leddy Park. People in her neighborhood are disgruntled, and with reason, she said.

“The question is, will things change significantly in the city so that the New North End feels less alienated from the decisions that are made in City Hall?” she said.

After those introductory paragraphs, there’s a short history of the area, which is only marginally related to secession.  Stats are provided that show the NNE differs demographically from the rest of the city: more people there vote, own homes, and then one semi-misleading stat is provided: 40% of Burlington residents 65 and over live in the New North End.

I couldn’t find census data that was broken out by age and neighborhood, so I couldn’t verify the stat itself, but according to the 2000 census, the 65 and over age group was 10.5% of the population of Burlington, or 4,092 people.  40% of that is 1637 people.  My question is, what’s the total population of the NNE?  What percentage of that total is made up of people 65 and older?

The next paragraphs of the story give some interesting (but unattributed) statistics about how voter turnout is much higher in Wards 4 and 7, and how much lower percentages of Wards 4 and 7 voted to approve the school budget, which did pass, but only narrowly.  Jean O’Sullivan, a former city councilor and longtime NNE resident, explains it this way:

Senior citizens on limited incomes are sensitive to tax increases, and this explains part of the voting on school issues in the New North End, O’Sullivan suggested. It’s a mistake to assume New North End residents are all conservatives, as many do, the Democrat emphasized.

“I have been re-elected three times,” O’Sullivan said. “No one could possibly accuse me of being conservative in any way, shape or form.”

A paragraph later, a conservative weighs in:

Vincent Dober Sr., a newly elected Republican city councilor from Ward 7, heard many constituents voice concern about the school budget’s increasing so much this year, on the heels of a 10 percent increase last year. Budget approval by the rest of the city left some residents of Wards 4 and 7 feeling they must pay the tab for food somebody else ordered.

“Everyone wants good schools, but we can’t afford to keep going at this pace,” Dober said.

So by this point of the story, you get the strong impression that the NNE is full of older folks who don’t want to pay for those durn schools any more.  I guess the quote from O’Sullivan is meant to show it’s not universal, and Decelles ends the article by saying that he’s head secession talk come and go, and how his goal is to keep the NNE as part of Burlington, but the stereotype of our neighborhood came through quite strongly.

As a member of the Flynn Elementary community and a parent of young children in the NNE, I can officially say that stereotype is not true.  Sure, there are lots of retirees in our neighborhood.  But the article downplayed the fact that there are two senior centers located out here, which in my view would more than account for the fact that our population is older than in other city ‘hoods.  And there was virtually no mention of what might be the largest demographic in the neighboorhood: middle-class families. Stroll down North Avenue at 2:30 and you will see hundreds of kids getting out of school and going home to their younger families that live here.

Recently on my Front Porch Forum list some people have been complaining about Burlington Telecom’s recent rate increases.  I do agree that double-digit increases are pretty questionable, and I’m not so happy about them, either, but I will be sticking with Burlington Telecom, for several reasons.

First of all, Comcast’s customer service is terrible by comparison.  I’ve always gotten really good help from Burlington Telecom, and even if they can’t do everything, they are always super willing to take the time to talk about whatever the problem is.  With Comcast, I always got the impression that they were just trying to get rid of me so they could move on to the next caller in their queue, almost as if they got paid by the number of people they could push through.

Comcast pretty much define the term “evil empire” in the telecom world.  I’m not one of those who thinks that all large corporations are by definition evil.  Vermont needs IBM and GE, for one thing, and I use my Burlington Telecom services with products from Sony, Microsoft, Dell, Apple, Cisco and many other huge corporations happily.  But Comcast has shown an aggressive disdain for one of the foundations of the Internet, something called net neutrality, something that I think is fundamental to how the Internet should work.  Because they own such a large percentage of the network infrastructure of the nation, they think they can control how people use the Internet.  And that’s not right.

Those reasons alone are good enough for me to stay with Burlington Telecom, but the best reason, in my opinion, is that the services Comcast offers are vastly inferior to Burlington Telecom’s.  I am not a user of the telephone service, so I will leave that out of this discussion for now.  But the television and internet services are better, mainly because they have a much higher bandwidth network than Comcast does.

The main advantage with the TV is picture quality.  Because Comcast services so many people over a network of copper wires, they have to “compress” the HD signal they send to you.  This will usually show up as visible blockiness in the picture.  Because Burlington Telecom has a MUCH higher capacity network, they don’t have to compress the TV signal at all, so it looks better.

Here’s a forum posting that has some screenshots as an example (as well as a looooong technical argument about the original poster’s results, if you are into that kind of thing).  There’s also a question about it on the BTV FAQ page.

The huge capacity of the Burlington Telecom network also means better Internet service.  Comcast is pretty cagey about what speeds they offer.  Their marketing frequently says “speeds up to” xxx Mbps, and yes, those speeds are faster than most Burlington Telecom plans.  But the fine print says that they are only good for the first 5 or 10 MB of a file, which may or may not be enough for you.  And their main disadvantage is that they offer “asynchronous” service, where the download speed is fast and the upload speed is slow.  For surfing the web that isn’t such a big deal because the only uploading you do is making requests to the web server for pages, and they are small.  But if you send large emails, or you work from home sometimes and need to upload large files, it makes a big difference.  And I personally find that the network is just more snappy than it ever was with Comcast (I’m on Burlington Telecom’s 5M/5M service level).

So all in all, with Comcast, you basically pay about the same, but you get much less.

I avoided Facebook for a long time.  Like many people, I think I thought of it as a slicker MySpace.  When I first saw it they even had a weird logo with a silhouette of a dubious-faced young man, and for some reason it creeped me out a little bit.

Once my lovely wife got going with it, however, it was really only a matter of time before she pulled me in.  Once I relented I realized why it’s so popular, and it’s probably safe to say that you probably have an account and don’t need me to explain what’s useful and fun about it.  Now, my wife and I are way more net-centric than many: I’m a web developer and she’s (among many other things) a web project manager.  But it’s not just people like us any more.

In the last six months or year it seems like it’s really taken off, not only in terms of the numbers of new users, but also in terms of how much use it’s gotten from people who don’t spend hours every day on the Net like I do.  For a lot of people, the Internet means Google, email, and Facebook.  And the web-centric community has gone absolutely gaga over it.  Dave Gibson from Propeller Media Works just said on the local radio show The Browser the other day that social networking sites like Facebook were going to be as big as email.  And Slate says “there is no longer any good reason to avoid Facebook”.  They even go so far as to compare it to anti-perspirant!

It’s extremely useful, it’s really fun, it’s got millions and millions of users, natch.  But I also think that it’s still entirely possible it’s a fad, and it will almost certainly face the same sort of rise and fall as MySpace, Friendster, and every other social network so far has experienced.

In Dave’s defense he elaborates a lot of the things that separate Facebook from MySpace, and he’s right.  Facebook is much better than MySpace ever was, and it fixes a lot of the things that were wrong about MySpace.  My intial feeling that Facebook was just a slicker MySpace was wrong.   Facebook is better, but it’s still probably going to fall harder. The history of the web is littered with glittering ascents followed by staggering falls.  Don’t forget that News Corp. paid $580 million for MySpace just a few short years ago, to much fanfare.  Despite the current hysteria (and my own time investment in it!) I see no reason why the same won’t happen again.  The web is built upon the flamed-out ashes of last year’s hot new thing, and that’s really been the only constant for the last fifteen years.

Why?

There are two reasons: Facebook apps and the fact that it’s a closed system.

The apps are a masterstroke and an Achilles heel at the same time.  They’re a masterstroke because they create a platform that encourages people to make cool stuff.  And if people make cool stuff, Facebook becomes more attractive, and more people join.  But it’s an Achilles heel at the same time because they create a platform that allows people to create useless crap.  And if people create useless crap and spam their friends with it, Facebook becomes less attractive, and more people leave.  Unfortunately the history of the web shows that so far spammers end up taking over sooner or later.

The fact that it’s a closed system is why it’ll never approach the usefulness of email or the cell phone.

The SMTP standard was first published in 1982, and through the collaborative work on many people, has evolved and matured so that it’s used by nearly every Internet user in the world on a daily basis.  No one owns the standard, and anyone who wants to implement the standard can write an email server or client, leading to a competitive ecosystem that’s led to a whole galaxy of ways to slice and dice email on nearly any internet-capable device.

I know less about the technical side of cell phones, but I know that there are communication standards that handset makers and service providers agree on in order to keep the lines open, and to be able to sell more products and services.  By working on open (or at least agreed-upon) standards, a competitive cellular ecosystem exists that means you can buy a used handset from someone on Ebay and have it activated with the network of your choice.

Now Facebook is cool, but when you really get down to it, it doesn’t really do anything that you can’t do other ways.  The only real utility that it has going for it is that everyone seems to be on it.

Within a couple of years someone will come up with a way of putting text and photos together in a way that’s just a little bit slicker, and then what will Facebook have?

I went to my first Vermont .NET Users Group meeting last night, which was pretty interesting.  Julia Lerman, who leads the group, gave a presentation on the .NET Entity Framework, which she just finished a book about.  My boss says he’s heard that there are many Microsoft MVPs who are pretty against the EF, because it has many of the usual problems that accompany the first release of something big.  But after listening to Julia last night, it sounds like something that many of us in the .NET world will be using sooner or later.

One of the main interesting things was the fact that apparently there’s been a split between the people who created the LINQ to SQL stuff and the Entity Framework people.  They do similar things, and yet Microsoft hasn’t addressed the difference between them until recently, where they revealed that “the Entity Framework will be our recommended data access solution for LINQ to relational scenarios.”

That is why I don’t spend too much time learning Microsoft technologies until they are out of beta.  Half the time, the effort expended to learn their latest and greatest is wasted!

Click the link to read my meeting notes…

Continue reading ‘vt dotnet user group meeting’

Enzo dictated a story to me this morning where he had a magic drill that would turn you into a skeleton (I had a choice between zombie, skeleton, and ghost, and I chose skeleton).

I was washing dishes, and told him I had to finish them.

“OK, so when you’re done with that dish, then turn to me like this,” and he turns quickly and freezes, “and I’ll turn you into a skeleton.  But you’ll still have a face.”

So I did.  And he put his magic drill, made from a paper towel tube that’d been unpeeled along the seam, against my breast and wound it very solemnly and made a sound at the end like “pshow”.

“There, you’re a skeleton,” he said.

“Aaah! My hands are bone hands!  My head is all smooth!” I said.

“No, you still have a face, remember?”

“Oh, does that mean I still have hair?”

“Yes, and you still have lips and stuff.”

“This is the whole Goblinsmerg family, we’re all skeletons, for the next 80 eons.  I was turned into one too, by my great grandfather Goblinsmerg.  When you are done being a skeleton, I can give you organ lessons.”

I think this world would be a better place if everyone rode bikes more.

They’re simple machines, and you can learn to maintain them yourself or have it done for you extremely cheaply.  They last for years if properly taken care of, and they’re powered by the most renewable energy source there is.

Biking is good for you, mentally and physically.  Not only do you get good exercise while you’re moving from point A to point B, you experience the environment around you in a way that you just can’t do from a car.  And you can move at your own pace.  If you want to take it slow and just mosey along on the sidewalk, you can, or if you want to race cars and do crazy bike messenger bus-dodging, you can (though I would not recommend the latter if you like staying in one piece).

It’s also good for the environment.  Bikes cause zero emissions, of course, and they use a relatively small amount of metal for the machine itself and for the hydrocarbons needed to lubricate it.

It’s better for our collective quality of life, because it creates less traffic, less fatal accidents, and more personal interaction.  It’s not very easy to have “bike rage.”  It does happen, but since bikers have to deal with problems face-to-face in a way that drivers don’t, the crazy factor generally gets reined in.

All these benefits also add up to it being simply cheaper to bike.  It’s even cheaper than public transit, although most places you can combine the two if you need to.

You live far from your work, you say?  I think many people do, but you can make that work too.  Drive as far as you must, but take your bike for at least part of the way.  If you’re commuting into the city center, you won’t have to deal with crazy downtown traffic or the expensive parking.  And you’ll get mad respect from the bike messengers once they see you every day.  Maybe you’ll even start to see the city differently – I really think if our population centers were more bike-friendly, it would be better urban planning.

It’s not easy to start the habit.  Like anything worth doing, it takes commitment and effort.  But once you get into it, you’ll appreciate it more and more.  People will ask you if you’re working out.  Your co-workers will remember you as the bike person.  You’ll be relaxed and ready for your destination when you get there, because you had some fresh air and quiet time to think as you pedal.

Don’t you remember how free you felt when you rode your bike as a kid?  You can get that feeling back!

So Facebook is great at posting little snippets of what’s going on, but if you know me, you probably know that I like to pontificate.  Usually I just do a Cliff Claven style too-much-informational type rant in response to one of Enzo’s innocent “how does X work?” questions, but in an effort to practice my writing skills and shamelessly drive more traffic to my blog, I’ve connected it to my Facebook profile.

One thing that I want to try to preserve here is longer thoughts.  It seems like all I hear about is the death of blogs, and not just from vapid Twitterites but from places I wouldn’t expect like Wired and Nicholas Carr.  (I’ll ignore for now the fact that I read both of those pieces through Google Reader…)  And everyone, but everyone is reading less longer-format work.  I’ve been reading novels again the last six months or so and it’s really seemed to make a difference in how I think.  So both for myself and for any willing victims, I’m going to post stuff here that takes a little bit longer to say.  I want to make sure that I try to fight to preserve my favorite endangered species, the American Attention Span.

I’m sure the main result of posting a ton of notes is people de-following me and wondering why they decided to friend this guy who loves the sound of his own voice so much.  But hopefully you will find something interesting and/or thought provoking here.  Perhaps my desire to write longer pieces stems from the fact that I need to work on editing myself more.  But for years I wanted to write stuff and didn’t because I assumed that people wouldn’t want to read it.  So now I’m just trying to ignore the fact that you probably won’t care to read past the first few sentences.  If that means I get better at being terse, then good.

Not that everything is going to be long.  But some things will be, and while I enjoy the zen semi-poetic challenge of encapsulating a moment with Twitter, I am more comfortable firing off with longer pieces.

More bread, less cookie.

So I’m now writing to you all from the bleeding edge of networking technology.  Yes, our little town, incredibly, is one of a small group of municipalies in the nation who have taken the step of treating Internet connectivity as a utility, like electricity or water.

To that end, Burlington Telecom was formed a few years ago and has spent the last couple of years building out a fiberoptic IP network throughout the city.  Through it, they are offering telephone, “cable” television and Internet services to anyone the network can reach.  They’re rolling it out in different neighborhoods as they get the network built, but the plan is to eventually serve all of Burlington.

In July we canceled Comcast and got Internet and TV service through Burlington Telecom.  We opted out of their telephone service because we use Vonage.

So how do their services stack up so far?

Internet:

As far as the Internet service goes, it’s incredibly awesome.  Besides the engineering radness of having a fiber optic link directly to my house, BT offers synchronous speeds, which at my service level means I have 5Mbps for both downloading and uploading.  With Comcast, I had bursts of that for downloads, but only 386Kbps for uploads.  Now, for most people this is not going to make a ton of difference.  The main internet activities for many are just requesting and loading web pages and email.  But for some things, it’s made a pretty huge difference.  Connecting to the work VPN is much much faster, and connecting to my home machine from work is also much faster.  And the main bottleneck in OpenArena seems to be my CPU now, not my network.  I’m sure if I had other more fancy multiplayer gaming needs I’d see similar results.

I don’t need a modem any more; they simply run ethernet from the fiber box on the outside of my house to a switch in my basement.  From there, ethernet simply runs to the Vonage router.  Pretty soon I’ll have to get a real wireless router instead of using the cheesy setup I have now (I’m torn between the Apple AirPort Express base station because of AirTunes and the Netgear WGR614L because it’s hackable), but things are running smoothly now.

The only real gripe I could come up with is that the DNS servers they run seemed really slow.  Web pages would spend 10 seconds saying “looking up blahblah.com” before finally loading.  Once they did, they’d often get stuck on other lookups as the pages requested other domains (like accuweather.com has some content on vortex.accuweather.com as well as coriolis.accuweather.com).  I switched them for a public DNS address I found on the Internet and all seems well.  KC says that it’s slow for her, but sometimes it’s hard to ferret out the sources of her impatience, since they are usually legion.

Television:

Now, the television service has been a mixed bag.  For the first three months or so, the service really sucked.  The channels all looked great, of course (even though we still have a pretty average standard-def TV), but the DVR service was terrible.  The UI was only semi-intuitive.  Most of it seems easy enough to find, and a month or so after we’d been subscribers, they put out a pamphlet describing how to do stuff that covered most of the bases.  The main thing that is a bummer is that when you are viewing the Guide (the grid of shows by channel and time), you can’t switch days easily.  If today is a Tuesday, and you want to record something on Sunday, you have to keep scrolling to the right, hour by hour, for all the hours between Tuesday and Sunday.  For the math-challenged, from noon Tuesday to noon Sunday is 120 hours!  That is just silly.

And that was a pretty minor gripe compared to the fact that there was a lot of random bugginess.  Shows we’d recorded would disappear, or the audio and video would be randomly corrupt in the middle of a show.  It got to the point where we didn’t really trust the thing to record stuff that we wanted to record.  Kacey ended up calling and chewing them out pretty hard, and told them that we shouldn’t have to pay for a service that just didn’t work.  To our surprise, they agreed with her, and credited us on our next bill.  They’d gotten tons of complaints and they were working with their vendor to fix stuff.  Supposedly there was going to be some software upgrade coming that was going to take care of a lot of these issues.

Now, any tech person knows that most software upgrades are bullshit.  They fix things, but Murphy’s law dictates that they never fix YOUR issue.  So imagine our delight when things magically started working not long after that phone call!  All of the random weirdness is now gone, thank goodness.

However, you still can’t change days in the guide, and it’s still just a digital VCR with a nice GUI.  When you click a show it basically just sets it to record at a certain time and channel for a given duration, and recurs if you want.  But it doesn’t know if a show is a rerun or and there’s nothing even close to having it recommend stuff like Tivo does.  But at least it works as advertised.

We have gotten a few things through their pay-per-view service, which works as advertised, but the offerings are nothing to write home about.  The times we’ve done it we’ve been looking for stuff for the kids, so maybe it’s just that category that’s not impressive, but I don’t really care about that stuff anyway.

So overall, now that their DVR issues are fixed, Burlington Telecom is well worth it.  They have offered solid tech, good customer service, and we can take comfort in knowing that we’re supporting a local company, and besides – it’s just cool as hell that we have a fiber-optic cable connected to our house.