This is fantastic.
I implore you to watch the entire video without singing along… 
The Avengers!
I just got back from watching it with my wife this evening, and what can I say – I have to talk about it because it’s not often that a movie actually lives up to all of the hype, especially one like The Avengers that’s technically been getting hyped ever since we saw the first Iron Man movie back in 2008!
So anyways, I’ll try to do it without spoilers, but no promises … although the movie has already been out for a few weeks so if you’re like me and have already put off seeing it this long, it’s kind of your fault at this point!!! 🙄
Internet connectivity as a utility, not a service…
So Verizon Wireless has made headlines the last couple of days with talks of trying to squelch out its unlimited data plans. They later apologized for the confusion and then reaffirmed that they intend to do this as customers upgrade from 3G to 4G services, which frankly I think is absolutely retarded.
Sure, you can move to the faster network, but you’ll have less bandwidth and you’re going to hit that cap and start paying overages even faster…
Download caps have bothered me for a while, both with wireless as well as home broadband services, and today I think I finally figured out what my beef is – essentially the ISPs are trying to double bill us for the service … both for the speed as well as the volume of data we consume. We buy a device that operates on Verizon’s 3G network and gets speeds of roughly 800 Kbps, but then also has a 4 GB download cap. At full throttle 24×7, we’ll hit that 4 GB cap in about 11 days and end up paying overages for the remaining 20 days of the month!
And granted, most people aren’t going to be consuming data 24×7 – in fact, Verizon counts on it because their network couldn’t handle everyone consuming as much data all of the time.
My point is that just like electricity or water, Internet should be treated like a utility, not a service. When we sign up for electricity with the local power company, they don’t advertise that we’re getting 2,000 kilowatt of throughput with plan #1, and then if we need more electricity service, we should move up to the 5,000 kilowatt service to make sure that we have enough electricity to power everything in our home. We simply pay a fixed amount per kilowatt hour used, which then may be tiered if we move into higher rates of consumption.
The problem is, these ISPs don’t want to be utilities simply providing network services to your home or wireless device. They want to provide services that they can bundle with other content services like television or premium web content. That was the big hubbub that we saw a few years ago with Net Neutrality because ISPs had to be told that they couldn’t tier off parts of the Internet based on who was willing to pay them more money.
It’s kind of funny because a few years ago I was strongly against download caps because I thought they were unfair to people who download large amounts of data, but I’m starting to flip-flop on the issue because I realize that bandwidth is a finite resource that the ISP has to be able to manage somehow. That said, they still need to be able to provide us with whatever they’re selling us, and it’s simply not fair to sell me on an advanced, 25 Mbps fiber line into my home, but then tell me that it’s capped at a measly 250 GB/month when in reality it’s capable of handling 8,000 GB/month. Pick one or the other, but of course, it doesn’t provide nearly as convincing of a marketing argument to advertise 250 GB/month when all of your current sales material boasts that we should be able to do streaming video and gaming across multiple devices in our home thanks to that 25 Mbps speed when in reality that kind of consumption would burn through the cap in no time…
I don’t care which you pick – selling me a 25 Mbps connection or a 250 GB data plan – but pick one.
Diluting Wizarding Around the World
I just read this article over at Attractions magazine about Universal Studios expanding The Wizarding World of Harry Potter to two of their other parks out in California and Tokyo. Some people are excited about this, thinking that it will allow even more people to experience this amazingly designed attraction, but I guess I didn’t exactly share that same sentiment from what I read…
To me, this sounds like just another example of the same problem I see with Disney right now where they’ve been developing attractions for multiple parks around the world at the same time. Sure, it may end up being cheaper for them to re-use the Imagineering efforts rather than creating unique experiences for their other parks, but from my perspective, what’s the incentive for me to visit any of those other parks if I’ve already experienced the same things here in Florida?!
The reasoning might simply be that they’re just not targeting me with these efforts – for all I know, maybe they assume that guests aren’t going to visit multiple parks so it’s not a big deal if they duplicate efforts, but it does bother someone like me who is a huge fan of pretty much everything they do and as such, wants to eventually experience all of the Disney theme parks around the world! When I look back a couple of years ago at when we visited Disneyland for our anniversary, the ones that really stood out to me weren’t Toy Story Mania or the Tower of Terror or even the ones that started first in California and got transplanted in Florida like Soarin’ and a big chunk of the original Disneyland attractions … it was the attractions like Aladdin and The Matterhorn and The World of Color that were truly unique to the California parks made a lasting impression on me because they were new experiences that I’d never seen before.
Maybe you can get away with it in smaller spurts here or there, but entire lands just seems really excessive. What will make Universal Orlando’s version of The Wizarding World of Harry Potter stand out when all is said and done, other than it was the first one???
Thin Post : When should I weigh in???
I’ve been doing a little experiment over the last week.
Normally I weigh in on Tuesday mornings, whereas my wife weighs herself every single day. She says that she prefers the daily check-ins because it gives her a better sense of how she’s doing throughout the week, whereas traditionally I’ve always preferred to keep it to once a week because the slight fluctuations tend to drive me nuts. That said, just out of random curiosity, I thought I’d try it her way for the last week and see what I thought of it…
As much as it’s a little depressing to see that I gained a couple of pounds since last week, I still think that I do ultimately prefer only weighing in once a week because I just don’t want to have to deal with those results on a daily basis. We know that losing weight isn’t necessarily just as simple as burn more calories than you consume, weight goes down – there’s also muscle growth and water retention and other random bodily happenings taking place in there, so unless a daily spike happened to coincide with my eating a ton of extra food, there’s not really a whole lot I could do about it anyways! Even then, it’s not like from Monday to Tuesday I ate an extra 9,800 calories of food to cause myself to gain 2.8 pounds literally overnight!!!
That said, last weekend Sara and I did help each other take some body measurements (waist, chest, thigh, etc…) so that we can start to look at how those numbers are changing over time, so I think that’ll be interesting to compare alongside the actual weight loss because I totally understand that strictly losing weight isn’t a good metric when it comes to improving your body. Obviously for us overweight folks it does happen to be the big one because reducing the waistline coincides pretty firmly with pounds going down, but some of the others will look at less fatty areas that may actually have muscle growth, which is something that I’ve never really focused on much in the past because, hey – priorities! 🙂
I think we’re only going to do the body measurements once a month or so. Maybe every two weeks if we think about it, but I don’t see as big of a rush with those because it’s more long term change that we’re looking to track.
Now just to get that line inverted before next Tuesday…
Dream Journal – Searching for Her Cinnamon Rolls
I was walking around a grocery store, and a lot of people who I knew were also there.
This wasn’t your typical store with just aisles upon aisles of products, though. It was unclear why, but it was more like a giant mansion that just happened to be used for selling food and whatnot. There were lots of big, sprawling staircases and elegant hallways, and even some hidden passages that I was exploring.
At one point I think I was being chased by someone and I used one of the passages to get away, but the mansion store remained calm the entire time like it was no big deal.
Eventually I ran into a close friend of mine – we’ll call him Simon, just to avoid any awkwardness by association – and we walked around the store for a while together, in particular looking for some cinnamon rolls that he was supposed to be finding for his girlfriend.
After finding the rolls, I decided to stick around until he met up with her, and we searched and searched and searched throughout the store, but she was nowhere to be found. As we kept walking and looking, a strange sense of sympathy came over me, and eventually we stopped and I sat him down to talk. I asked him if he had really brought his girlfriend, Anne, with him to the store, and he shook his head no with a very straight, pale face.
The dream ended with me comforting him as I woke up, and I couldn’t help but wonder what the next piece of the story was … was my friend going through Alzheimer’s and didn’t remember that he had come to the store alone, or perhaps she had actually died and he was having trouble letting her go. It was a very sad, heavyhearted feeling to know that all I could really do for my friend was be there, but that’s what I did.
Thin Post : Stick with it!
I think sometimes my biggest problem when it comes to losing weight is that I have a really hard time sticking with things more than a week or two.
It doesn’t even necessarily matter if it ended up being wildly successful – like with the jars, my first week and a half or so I was spot on and even earned my bonus from having 7 consecutive days of staying under my calorie limit, but lately I’ve only earned beads on one or two completely random days and otherwise my total has remained largely unchanged. Sometimes I’ve missed my total by just 100-200 calories or so, and others I just blew it out of the water … it’s really weird.
Needless to say, I need to figure out what it takes for me to remain focused on these ideas much more long-term, especially considering that it seems like my own weight loss patterns seem to come in spurts – rather than losing 1-2 pounds consistently every week, I’ll lose fractions of a pound and then suddenly take a drop out of nowhere. If I can’t stay focused and keep the pace even through those low times, the question starts to present itself of whether that bigger drop will actually ever come!
I think I’ve had a lot of good ideas for ways to stay active and keep focused – at this point, I think my efforts would be better focused, though, on maintaining some of those ideas so that they’re a regular part of my routine for months instead of just a quick 10-day spurt before I grow tired of them and try to move on to something else. Reward jars, push-ups, more veggies in place of snacks – all seemingly fantastic ideas … so what am I waiting for?!?!?! 😳
Toy Story 2 … Almost Lost Forever?!
Now whether this story happens to be a bit dramatized or not remains to be debated … I guess I’d like to think that a multi-billion dollar company like Pixar would have backups of their backups of their backups when it comes to their production movie files, but either way, talk about an absolutely terrifying account nonetheless!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EL_g0tyaIeE
“Not much we can do except BE, and in being, become aware…”
I really love this eulogy.
I used to mostly fixate on the musical medley that the Muppet performers did from that memorial service for Jim Henson, and occasionally maybe I’d replay the video of Frank Oz telling his bizarre story about Jim’s Bert Introspective and the wonderful friendship that they shared, but more recently I’ve been playing these short words from Richard Hunt back every now and then when I need a bit of a pick me up or to try and get myself back on track when I feel like I’m getting lost in the minutia of life.
I think that the words he chose are just a very simple and eloquent reminder of where we all fit into the bigger picture at the end of the day, and sometimes when I find myself buried under a veritable mountain of stress, it’s good to be reminded of that in memory of one of the greatest creative minds the world has ever known. 🙂
An UNDERWATER hotel?! Only in Dubai…
Seriously – will that Prince in Dubai ever run out of money?!?!?!
(don’t get me wrong, the concept art looking absolutely gorgeous … it’s just that this man will stop at nothing until he builds one of everything out in the middle of the desert!)
(click through the image for more pics and general inane extravagance…)