Best broadband in the Southeast

If you are lucky enough to live in the city of Chattanooga, Tennessee then you probably have to option to select EPB Fiber Optics as your Internet, television and phone provider. I recently signed up for the Fi-Speed Internet 20 package, which promises 20MB of bandwidth both up and down for $70 a month. Today, EPB upped the amount of bandwidth to 50MB up and down for the same price – $70 per month. Yes, you read that correctly. I live in Chattanooga, Tennessee (during the workweek) and I pay $70 a month for 50MBps of synchronous bandwidth. The image included in this blog post shows that the speeds aren’t just advertising. Of course, the Internet flows a lot like a river – there are bottlenecks. In three different speed tests to three different locations at varying physical distances from my node, I got speeds as low as 7.74MBps up and as high as 56.73 MBps down.

Having paid as much as $100 a month for much, much slower service in years past I can definitively tell people who make their living surfing the web from home that Chattanooga is a good place to live if you love cheap bandwidth. EPB Fiber isn’t just cheap and plentiful bandwidth though. They have great customer service and quick turnaround on change requests. If you’re unfortunate enough to have lived somewhere served by a non-customer oriented monopoly provider like Frontier Communications you’ll really appreciate EPB if you get the chance to sign up for their service. Where Frontier tells you the speed will be 1.5MBps and delivers 1/10th of that on a good day, EPB tells you that you’ll get 10 times that much for the same price and then delivers double what they promised consistently. Maybe that is why Frontier gets and overall rating of 62% satisfaction from its customers while EPB has a 100% positive review rate from its customers – even one guy who complained about a billing problem said the service was great.

If you have a hefty disposable income and live in Chattanooga, you can get 100MBps up and down, unlimited domestic calling and every television channel you could possible ever want from EPB Fiber for $286.41 a month. That would have been a crazy idea five years ago. Americans should be screaming for bandwidth like this at these prices. South Korea is way ahead of most of the U.S. in average data pipe size and speed. That’s a game changer when it comes to be intellectually and economically competitive.

For total Internet connectivity, the study ranks the US fifth worldwide, but 15th in broadband penetration. Akamai defines “broadband” (perhaps rather generously) as 2Mbps or higher. Compared to speedier countries, the US ranked a lowly 35th place, with just 57 percent of connections at 2Mbps or higher. The US fared better when comparing the percentage of connections with “high broadband” speeds of 5Mbps or higher. Here, the US ranked 12th globally, with 24 percent of its connections counted as “high broadband.”

If you happen to live in Chattanooga though, you can get better or at least equivalent broadband to the average South Korean. That’s worth a lot if a fat data pipe is your version of heroin. If you don’t plan to move to Chattanooga at least scream for your local officials to visit Chattanooga and learn a lesson or two about how to get real broadband going in your chosen community.

Is your hard drive mysteriously full? Adobe Acrobat may be the culprit

Much to my displeasure, I recently discovered that my primary partition for Windows 7 was dangerously full. Windows 7 will tell you about such maladies when they reach a dangerous point (which according to the engineering gods is between 10-15% remaining free space by volume.) This is all fine and dandy. However, with more than 5 terabytes of total storage and a setup that reserves most of my primary partition for applications, there should be no reason why I would need to buy a larger hard drive to store my files. I have about 200 gigabytes of photo files on the partition and of course Windows 7 64-bit Ultimate as well as a buttload of applications. That should be about 450 gigabytes.

Money is tight and I’m not interested in spending a few hundred bucks on terabytes without good reason. That led me to search for a program that would analyze my used space and tell me what the heck was going on. Google led me to Gizmo’s Freeware and a fabulous article entitled Best Free Disk Space Analyzer. The article is right on target in my opinion.

SpaceSniffer is my #1 for two simple reasons first, and foremost it’s free, and second it seems to be far and away the best free space disk analyzer I’ve seen to date. Using SpaceSniffer is fairly simple, I just clicked on the drive I wanted to work with and hit scan. Right-clicking on a box gave me several options such as delete, cut, copy, paste, etc, depending on what I had install on my machine. With these commands and the visual representation of SpaceSniffer I was able to quickly spot and delete forgotten and useless files, that otherwise would have gone unnoticed, bloating my hard drive and pulling down performance. When I left-clicked on a box I found myself zooming into the specific heading containing the box allowing me a much clearer picture of what I was looking at. The toolbar also has some interesting options such as the more and less detail buttons. These detail buttons allowed me to decide just how many file levels I wanted to view at once.The green star button toggles the option to see the the free space left on my drive. Under configure I was also able to change the colors of the treemap, because brown and blue just wasn’t doing for me.

I have a co-worker who uses WinDirStat religiously and it’s also quite good at telling you where the horror of waste files is hidden in the bowels of your hard drive. Important note if you’re exploring for lost files that take up lots of room – WinDirStat hasn’t been updated in several years. SpaceSniffer has, and it is Windows 7 compatible.

In any case, when I ran my search, I discovered that half of my terabyte partition was being consumed by acr*.tmp files. That revealing fact gleaned thanks to SpaceSniffer led me to this article pinning the blame squarely on Adobe, a company long maligned for a multiplicity of reasons. If you’ve never been to the Dear Adobe blog it’s worth a visit just to read the gripes. In any case, rather than spending  bucks you will have to apply for federal stimulus aid to pay back your credit card fraudsters with, clean up your temp files. Adobe may not admit they make bloatware, but they do tell you how to use Microsoft’s built-in tools to get your hard drive humming again.

Handy cross blogging for WordPress: Blog Desk

Serious bloggers might want to check out Blog Desk. It is a totally free application for WordPress (and other less popular blogging systems). A key feature for me is the ability to cross post to multiple blogs.

Blog Desk works with Windows 98, NT, 2000, ME, XP, Vista and 7. The interface is very simple. I find it easy to work with, particularly when it comes to images. However, I think the best feature is the cross posting ability. Blog Desk can post to multiple blogs easily once it has been set up.

The interface is spartan but has the features that I need to share my opinions, views and topics of interest with the world. Good stuff. If you are serious about putting out a lot of content across multiple blogs you should check out Blog Desk. Be sure to read the frequently asked questions as some of the more useful features do not necessarily jump out and beg a blogger to use them.

Ketamine and the sense of self

It is fascinating (to me) to ponder the nature of self. I recently came across this article in Scientific American that explores the ease with which we can be separated from reality.

But even this axiomatic foundation of your existence can be called into question under certain circumstances. Your sense of inhabiting your body, it turns out, is just as tenuous an internal construct as any of your other perceptions—and just as vulnerable to illusion and distortion. Even your sense of “owning” your own arm is not fundamentally different—in evolutionary and neurological terms—from owning your car (if you are Californian) or your shotgun (if you are Sarah Palin).

Outlandish as such a notion may seem, what you think of as your self is not the monolithic entity that you—and it—believe it to be. In fact, it is possible to pharmacologically manipulate body ownership with a drug called ketamine, which reliably generates out-of-body experiences in normal people. Patients on ketamine report the sensation of hovering above their body and watching it. If someone gives them a sharp poke, they might say, “My body down below is feeling the pain, but I don’t feel it myself.” Because in such patients the “I” is dissociated from the body it inhabits, they do not experience any agony or emotional distress (for this reason, ketamine is sometimes used as an anesthetic).

At the risk of being judged and found guilty of thinking too independently, I would be very interested in trying some experiments with this product. Unfortunately, that wouldn’t be legal. The Office of National Drug Control Policy does acknowledge that some people don’t care about little details like legality. They have published a helpful list of street terminology associated with ketamine.

In any case, the key point is that it is important for humans to explore how the sense of self impacts our existence and the societies we create. Go read, Hey is that me over there?

Observations on the Barnes and Noble Nook

I have more than a dozen books and several dozen technical PDF books on my Nook at this time. I’ve been using the product for about a month.

If you are considering buying a Nook here are some things to think about:

• Barnes and Noble isn’t doing a good job making store employees into Nook evangelists. At my local store in Chattanooga they could care less about Nooks or Nook accessories.
• Barnes and Noble keeps promising different dates for Nook and Nook items to be carried in stores. I’ve been waiting to look at and touch covers for my Nook for 60 days. This is frustrating.
• Nook software continues to improve. The last update took me to version 1.20. Pages turn more “naturally” now and the Nook itself powers up and down a bit quicker.
• Sometimes while holding the Nook, pages change by themselves or the color navigation screen lights up and kicks me out of my book. This is due to oversensitivity of the controls.

Buying books is a fairly simple process but there are not enough technical books available yet for the Nook. Additionally, I’m used to Amazon’s web site telling me about the kind of books I want to buy. Barnes and Noble’s site keeps pushing garbage I don’t want to read. It is insulting to be directed towards Twilight novels when I am absolutely not and never will be a part of the demographic that wants to read about glittery morally upright vampires who enjoy dating humans and attending high school prom even though they are hundreds of years old.