reply – Wetmachine

Vista Performance

Stearns December 17, 2008 February 26, 2013General, Inventing the Future

I was out of town and I FORGOT MY LAPTOP’S CHARGER. On reaching the hotel, I had only enough juice to check my mail and maybe make one reply. Scanning my inbox, there seemed to be one message I could send that might plausibly be useful. It turned out to have a huge impact for some of our users. What was this wisdom?….

Divining the deep implications of the writers' strike

John February 12, 2008 February 12, 2008My Thoughts Exactly, Writing

I sent a note to a friend of mine who is a longtime Hollywood actor & photographer, recently turned producer. When the strike began, he had just landed a big recurring role in one of CBS’s new shows, which has since been canceled (along with several other projects he had some involvement in). I asked him his opinion of the settlement. Here’s his reply:

It seems to have either been a stupendously costly farce, or a bold step in the right direction. I have no opinion worth making, but I do have a beard, a lot of time for making photographs, and a bank account that would make a ascetic shudder.

Whiny Techies or Dishonest Salesmen?

Harold September 10, 2007 September 10, 2007Series of Tubes, Tales of the Sausage Factory

I cannot help but add a coda onto my latest article. Steven Pearlstein, econ columnist for the Washington Post, has written this piece on the recent complaints wrt to Comcast. To quote Mr. Pearlstein:

The latest rallying cry is “network neutrality.” This campaign started out with the legitimate goal of making sure that consumers could continue to access whichever services or content they want, rather than having to take those offered by the cable and phone company duopolists. But lately the campaign seems to have morphed into a broader demand that all consumers should be able to pay the same monthly fee for using the Internet, no matter how much bandwidth they use or how much their movie downloads and video chats are slowing service to everyone else in the neighborhood.

Perhaps this is the kind of economic illiteracy we should expect from people who get their information from “The Daily Show” and the Daily Kos. But isn’t it time for the rest of us to move on and acknowledge that the days of the online free lunch are over?

As you may imagine from my recent post, my complaint is not with charging more for more bandwidth, but for dishonestly promising me an “always on all you can eat” connection, then cutting me off when I use it all the time for all I can eat. I sent Mr. Pearlstein the following reply, reproduced below….

Wetmachine Wants Music

Gary March 30, 2004 February 24, 2013General, General Exception, My Thoughts Exactly

Hi, it’s Gary, the guy who maintains the drunken machinery[1] here at Wetmachine.

John has asked me to install a Soundblox MP3 player on Wetmachine for your listening pleasure (don’t panic, it won’t start playing automatically, and it’s a lot better than those cheesy MIDI tunes of yesteryear).

But we need music to play!