Since I’m on the topic of telecommunications, I think we’re going to see some interesting moves in the telecommunications industry now that the Copyright Office has ruled that as of December 1st unlocking your cellphone is legal. Read this PC Magazine article explaining what the law says is legal.
Perhaps some competition will bloom now that phone service doesn’t have to be tied to the phone.
You may or may not be aware that AT&T (actually what was known as SBC Communications before SBC adopted the AT&T name) is trying to merge with Bellsouth. This merger was announced early this year and has been held up by a deadlocked FCC. The merger would put tie together the majority of former Baby Bells into a reconstituted AT&T, reversing the decades of progress that the breakup of AT&T achieved.
Thanks to AT&T’s 1984 breakup, Americans now have more phone choices than ever before. The cost of telephone calls has plummeted. Cell phones are ubiquitous. Companies actually compete for your business (to some extent, anyway). Few of any of these would have happened – or happened as quickly – if AT&T was still guarding their mostly taxpayer-funded universe. If SBC … oops, I mean AT&T succeeds in swallowing Bellsouth it will put a huge swath of American telecommunications back under near-monopoly control, leaving only Qwest and Verizon out of this new, improved Ma Bell.
The reason for the delay is the FCC. Commissioners are deadlocked, 2 to 2, on the merger. FCC Commissioner (and Tar Heel) Kevin J. Martin break the impasse/a> by bringing back commissioner Robert McDowell, who recused himself due to earlier lobbying against similar big mergers. McDowell used to be general counsel for a trade group representing small phone companies.
In spite of Martin’s desire to clear this off the FCC’s decks, I think major changes will be needed for this thing to pass. Even though I believe McDowell’s vote may torpedo the merger, I think the conflict-of-interest laws should be respected and his participation should be barred. If the merger can’t convince the two commissioners, Michael J. Copps and Jonathan S. Adelstein, to vote yes then the two companies will just have to buckle down and make a more convincing case or call it off.
I’ve written before about MVNOs, the cell phone providers who lease airtime from Cingular, Verizon, and Sprint. I decided that my Sprint PCS Vision plan was way too expensive. I don’t use the Internet option much at all now that I’ve got a Boingo account and the 2,000 minutes per month is far more than I ever come close to using. Thus it was time to do some shopping.
After visiting some online forums, I discovered Net10 (and have written about it before), an MVNO which has one of the most affordable plans around. The cost for calls is 10 cents per minute, period. No contracts, monthly fees or daily minimums, just a dime a minute. As opposed to other services, Net10’s minutes can be bought in quantites which last all year. I can buy a card from them providing 1500 minutes and keep them fora whole year. Thus, my monthly cellphone bill can be as low as $12.50 if that’s all the minutes I need a year. Instead, my usage is about 300 minutes per month, which equals (duh) $30 per month. That’s less than half of what I’m currently paying for Sprint!
The phones aren’t flashy, which to me is a good thing since I don’t care to have to lug around a PDA/camera phone/rocket launcher when I need to talk. The battery life should be pretty lengthy without those add-ons, too. The underlying cell phone service is provided by Cingular and T-Mobile, so the coverage is good.
I bought a reconditioned Motorola V171 from Net10 to try them out. Cost was $40. This flip phone has a color screen and is fairly easy to use. The remaining minutes are displayed on the screen so I know what I have as well as when they expire. It has support for polyphonic ringtones, in case I ever go insane and want them for some reason.
My biggest beef with the phone is that the volume on calls is a bit weak. I had trouble hearing Kelly when I took a call from her while I was driving. I thought this was a fatal flaw so I called their support number to return the phone. A nice woman in Belize answered the call and took down all my information. Even though I told her I wanted to switch to a Nokia phone, Net10 sent me an identical V171 in return! I was going to send both of them back when I decided to give the new phone a spin. It turns out the volume wasn’t turned up to the highest level, which makes a difference. Also, I reasoned, if I’m talking while driving I should be using a headset, anyway. I bought a headset and now everything seems fine.
My other beef with the V171 is that the phone just doesn’t seem to fit my ear. Motorola designed the earpiece to be totally flat, which doesn’t match any human ear I’ve ever seen. Thus you can press it against your ear and never get a good seal around it, nor feel comfortable talking on it. Once again, the headset saves the day.
To summarize, I’m happy so far with the Net10 service. I’m marginally happy with the phone. Given what I’ve spent on the phone so far, I don’t have much room to complain. Oh, by the way, the phones come with free airtime, so my $40 bought not only a phone but 300 free minutes, too.
I’m porting my Sprint number to my new Net10 service now. I won’t miss Sprint’s fat phone bill nor its now-redundant Vision internet service. Net10 may be as close to a perfect cell phone service as I’ve seen yet.
When I was a kid, being grounded was a bad thing. Being the daddy in a cool family has turned that upside down, though. I had a nice weekend to become grounded and quite enjoyed it.
Friday was Kelly’s birthday, so we went out to dinner with the help of a neighbor who volunteered to take the kids for a while. We went to a local restaurant near the local mall. Bad move. The service sucked and the food was only marginally better. Atmosphere was zero, too. At least we didn’t invest much time in it and could head home to take in a movie.
The flick was The Da Vinci Code, which I understand everyone else on the planet has already seen. I thought it was interesting – mainly due to Tom Hanks’s excellent acting – but I found myself squirming and checking my watch well before it ended. There were some things too implausable to for me to maintain my “suspension of disbelief.” Like inexplicably carting around the goon that had just tried to kill you, for instance. Or a priest casually taking a cellphone call at 40,000 feet. Or a junkie takinig money to walk away from a fix. On the good side, Ron Howard is getting much better as a director: this movie didn’t seem nearly as wooden as some of his others. Overall, I give it 2.5 stars out of five.
Saturday morning I cooked the family a breakfast of pancakes. Then I went to the local Big Box Electronics Retailer and picked up a new car stereo for Kelly’s Oddity. The CD player refused to play CDs, so I reasoned we could buy a new deck and get free installation for less than the cost of taking the old one to the dealer and having them troubleshoot it. I wasn’t planning to install it myself but the professional installers balked when they saw the navigation system in the van. They said if they installed it the navigation system wouldn’t work right. The installation was probably the easiest of the half-dozen I’ve ever done but what they told me was true: the navigation system doesn’t talk through the stereo anymore. I figure I can figure that out at a later time: not having music in the car when the kids are riding in it is a much bigger problem!
Cleaned out the leaves on the lawn with the leafblower Saturday evening. Then got cleaned up and visited my parents’ house. My sister’s family was visiting from Shelby and everyone seemed to be pretty happy. I found myself feeling pretty emotional that night, just enjoying everyone’s company. I was sad when we had to go. I guess when I sneaked upstairs to look through a few photo albums from twenty years ago, I started to realize just how quickly time flies. Too often I don’t make the most of every minute of my life and that is a crime for which I can’t forgive myself. I’ve only got one life (this time around, at least) and its up to me to enjoy it.
This morning Kelly mentioned needing some time to get some work done. I realized today is the first Sunday of the month, so my solution was to cart the kids off to the New Hope Valley Railway for a train ride. Kelly decided to join us so we threw some snacks together and headed off to Bonsal.
As usual, we had a great time. If the train wasn’t enough, Santa and Frosty the Snowman were there. We found seats in a caboose’s cupula where we could watch the rails and stay warm at the same time. A bonus was hearing the steam whistle on Engine 17 blow throughout the day. There’s something magical about the sound of a steam whistle!
Hallie looked positively exhausted after the train ride but wound up sleeping only an hour. Kelly was anxious to keep working so I entertained Hallie by pulling out a deck of cards and teaching her “Go Fish.” She caught on quickly though she had trouble fanning her cards to see her hand. It’s so fun to watch her pick up new games and skills – mainly because she does it so effortlessly. I wonder if its too early to start her on chess?
I again stepped up to the “dinner” plate and cooked up a tasty spaghetti for the family. The kids and I wrestled a bit before bedtime, which went smoothly. Now its time for me to finish up a few chores before retiring tonight myself. The upcoming workweek doesn’t excite me much but I do have plenty of upcoming visits with family and friends to keep me happy.
Thanks to y’all for reading, too. It’s nice to have an audience sometimes.
As a musical guy and a father, I’ve learned to appreciate the children’s music my kids listen to. Here are my thoughts on those CDs we play around the Turner household.
They Might Be Giants’s No! album is good enough, but it doesn’t stay with you. Some songs are annoying enough to shelf the whole CD. I’m a big fan of TMBG, but the overall tone of No! is a little disjointed to be a long-time favorite.
Cathy Fink and Marcy Marxer can write catchy, clever songs but they’re aimed more towards the kids than the kids-and-adults music I prefer. If you’re going to have to listen to songs with your kids, you might as well enjoy them, too. There is too much children’s chorus in the songs for my liking. Still, songs like “A Pirate’s Life” are clever enough to put smiles on even the crabbiest parents. Arr arr arr arr!
The Wiggles are non-starters. Annoying times ten! I don’t like music that talks down to my kids, which is what their music seems to do. While I wish Greg Page, otherwise known as Wiggles Yellow, a speedy recovery from his disease, I wouldn’t miss the Wiggles if they never played another annoying note.
Laurie Berkner is in my view the queen of children’s music. Catchy, clever, silly songs with simple guitar accompaniment. Many of these songs were the only things we could decipher from Travis when he was first learning to talk. I can listen to Laurie Berkner all day and not want to pull my (remaining) hair out. That’s quite a feat for children’s music.
Tom Paxton, though, is a brilliant children’s music musician whom I think tops them all. Some CDs are better than others, though. I was indifferent to the first Tom Paxton CD I heard, Your Shoes, My Shoes. It’s got decent songs, but Tom’s singing usually aims for kids rather than kids-and-adults. Still, I love the deliciously morbid writing in The Worms Come Crawling Underground. Even the childrens’ chorus doesn’t take away from it.
Then there’s Tom’s 1992 release I’ve Got A Yo-Yo. I consider it the best children’s CD I have ever heard. This one doesn’t talk down to the kids. It’s good, not just good for kids. It’s silly without being goofy. Oops and The Crow’s Toes are my current favorites. Plenty of variety in musical styles are on this disc, too, so you don’t get tired of it.
So to the moms and dads out there: who am I overlooking? Got any favorites you’d like to mention?
Someone special is having a birthday today. Kelly, my babe of a wife, is celebrating another year on planet Earth and I’m fortunate to be sharing it with her.
Happy birthday, Sweetie!
After reading this post on Treehugger about these ads, I decided I needed to apply this to my own computing habits. I have a PC in the house which does nothing but backup my other machines. Though this backup job runs at 11 PM every night, I used to keep the PC running 24 hours a day.
Obviously, this is wasteful, so I poked around in the PC’s bios and found a watchdog option which will boot the computer by a clock setting. Now the PC boots right before 11 PM, does its backup chores, and shuts itself down after half an hour. Numerous trees saved, untold pounds of carbon dioxide saved from the atmosphere, and a quieter house, too! Continue reading
Y’all might remember Tom Maxwell’s visit to MT.Net a few months ago. Just found out via David Menconi’s blog that Tom’s 3 year old son Esten was diagnosed with leukemia last month. Esten is responding well but the medical bills are adding up, so a benefit concert is being held in Pittsboro at the Scoreboard December 9th.
I will be there to donate and encourage you to do the same. As a parent of two kids I have an appreciation for the terror leukemia must be for the Maxwells. I hope that Esten recovers completely and my thoughts go out to him and his family. Continue reading
So I was going through my umpteenth security screening at the airport when I realized yet another thing very stupid about the “liquid limit” busywork …er, screening the TSA is performing.
Each traveler is limited to 3.4 oz containers which fit in a 1 quart bag. Screeners will pitch an absolute hissy fit if any container is over the 3.4 oz size, yet they all must fit in a one-quart bag. If you can carry a whole quart of explosives (or the far more deadly shampoo), what’s the point of the 3.4 ounce size restriction? Who cares if your liquids are in small bottles if they can all total one quart? Why not just say you’re limited to a total of one quart of explosive shampoo and be done with it?
Sheesh. It’s times like these I wonder if the TSA is nothing more than Bush’s jobs creation program.
What I would’ve given to be a fly on the wall during this exchange! Senator-elect Jim Webb mixed it up with President Bush today during an informal meeting between new senators and the President. Check out this exchange:
At a private reception held at the White House with newly elected lawmakers shortly after the election, Bush asked Webb how his son, a Marine lance corporal serving in Iraq, was doing.
Webb responded that he really wanted to see his son brought back home, said a person who heard about the exchange from Webb.
“I didn’t ask you that, I asked how he’s doing,� Bush retorted, according to the source.
Webb confessed that he was so angered by this that he was tempted to slug the commander-in-chief, reported the source, but of course didn’t. It’s safe to say, however, that Bush and Webb won’t be taking any overseas trips together anytime soon.
I’ve admired Webb after reading about him in The Nightingale’s Song. I’m glad he’s not backing down from the President. People like Jim Webb are just what Dubya needs – someone to wake him up from the fantasy world he’s been living in the past six years.
