Car Troubles 2

So I come back to the same point I was at 2 years ago when I started this blog. I once again am having problems with my car and once again the dealership seem incapable of providing the required service to fix the problems I have.

On the 6th of July I took my car in to the Honda dealership and told them of the problems I was having with my air conditioner not working right. Basically it would periodically start to blow warm, humid air instead of the cool dry air that I am used to. They told me that it would be $100 to find out what the problem is and that if they could fix it the $100 would be counted towards the cost of those repairs.

They called me a short time later to inform me that my condenser was damaged and needed to be replaced. They said that the part was in stock and that it would run $600 to replace it. It was done a short time later, I went and paid them the money and they gave me my car back.

Sadly, my car had the exact same problems that it had before. I gave it a couple weeks to see if it would improve and sometimes the air conditioner would run great and my car would be very comfortable to ride in, but other times the car would become hot and humid and very unpleasant.

Today I took the car back in and told them that the same problems have persisted for two weeks and that I wasn't happy with the charges because they had not fixed the problem. When they called me after looking at my car I was told that the problem was a low level of refrigerant and that the machine they use to check refrigeration systems had failed completely a week ago and needed to be replaced. They said there are no leaks in my system and that the reason for the error was this faulty machine in their service shop.

It appears that I won't have to pay this time. I really hope they got it right.

Cell phone data plans

How much is it worth to get access to the internet on your cell phone? Right now I pay about $30 a month for a high speed internet connection (6mbps) and it has a nice low latency (around 50ms ping to google). Now this is a wired connection so I am only able to take advantage of it while I'm at my house. Also I personally believe that I should only be paying $20 a month for that connection and that I'm being overcharged.

If I could get the same quality of connection everywhere I could see that as an increase of value. I'd probably be willing to pay an extra $10 a month for access elsewhere even though I would very rarely make use of it. One way to get this is to add a data plan to my cell phone. There are a lot of issues with cell phone data plans. First the connection is not anywhere near as good as my wired connection. I may be able to get the same or similar bandwidth, but the latency is much much worse (most people I've talked to report on the order of 300ms ping or higher). Next, cell phone data plans seem to be moving towards only offering limited bandwidth.

There are three main reasons that I would like to be able to have internet access anywhere I go. First is simply browsing websites. Any well designed website with primarily textual content should be fine with reasonably limited internet bandwidth and latency. The trouble is that many websites have way more graphical, audio, and plugin based content and that requires much higher bandwidth, but latency is not really an issue.

Second, I would like to be able to play online games. Most online games require fairly low bandwidth but absolutely depend on low latency for a smooth gaming experience. The horrible latency of cell data networks basically makes this an impossibility.

Third is streaming online videos. When you start to watch a video online you don't really mind so much if the video takes a while to start up. What you absolutely need is a good amount of bandwidth. And you want your video to look good on whatever screen you are watching it on.

I believe that cell phone data is only actually effective for the first kind of web use since that will easily remain within the bandwidth limits and does not require a low latency connection.

Now on to the issue of tethering. If a phone has the capability to connect to a cell phone data network and a wifi network at the same time then it has the capability to share the cell phone data with any wifi enabled device. There is no value added by allowing your device to do what it can already do. However you are still stuck with the same limited bandwidth restrictions and poor latency. If a cell phone service provider would like to have a reason to charge for tethering they should at least include a much better network connection with the increased cost (which should be no more than $10). There needs to either be a lower latency connection to allow you to do some low bandwidth gaming, a much higher bandwidth limit to allow for streaming of higher quality videos that will look good on your screen, or both.

If I could propose a pricing scheme that I'd be willing to support and pay for it would be as follows:

• $10 - basic data connection with a low bandwidth limit for people that only intend to use their data connection on their phone. Consumers should be notified that this connection will be severely limited so that they know what they are getting in to.
• $20 - higher quality data connection with a higher bandwidth limit for people that want to be able to stream videos. Tethering should at least be enabled for this tier as the bandwidth would allow some amount of streaming to a larger screen. Consumers should once again be made aware of the limitations of this plan.
• $30 - highest quality data connection. This should have a very high bandwidth limit or perhaps be an unlimited plan. In addition, wherever possible, these users should be able to have a low latency connection to enable real-time multiplayer gaming through this data connection. This would be the connection I would want and happily pay for.

For my own reference I am adding a list of similar plans from the big 4 phone companies in the US that I might be interested in:

Sprint: $70 – 450 + unlimited + unlimited
T-Mobile: $80 – 500 + unlimited + unlimited
AT&T: $85 – 450 + 2 GB + unlimited
Verizon: $90 – 450 + unlimited + unlimited

Changing the Facebook Paradigm

So it occurred to me that all of the profile information on Facebook is autobiographical, or at least intended to be autobiographical. Well what if there were two sections to Facebook, the autobiographical part and then a collection of information that other people write about you? Of course there would need to be good controls over what can be published about an individual, but perhaps it should be done similarly to wikipedia. The community of Facebook could be leveraged to verify all the data and anecdotes to be true or false. The incorrect biographies could be corrected by the community and through good discussion we could end up with much better representations of who people are than what they provide on their own.

I don't usually do this but...

I just had to. I think this is really awesome.


see more funny facebook stuff!

Edit: the linked picture no longer appears, but if you click through you can still see it. Probably not worth your time though.