I love my new Palm Pre, and I absolutely love the fact that it's fighting Apple with iTunes syncing. To recap, Palm shipped it saying "it syncs with iTunes" and Apple updated iTunes and basically said "Now it doesn't!" and Palm changed some things to fix it and is now saying "Now we can again!" It's a great cat and mouse game, and I hope Palm doesn't give it up.

This whole game is very similar to what we see with other devices being jailbroken or hacked, which is an important note. Palm, so far as a platform, has a very limited and closed app store, but it's a linux platform under GPL and should be the easiest to hack (it has been, you can get it into dev mode and use linux to root into the file system, I've seen an NES emulator already ported). The point I want to bring up is this: my love for the device will be GREATLY damaged if Palm takes steps to stop the hackers/jailbreakers on the Pre, which includes homebrew apps and tethering, especially given the way they're trying to circumvent Apple with the iTunes syncing. It would be pure hypocrisy to say to apple "we're circumventing your closed system to improve the user experience" and then turn around and say "hackers, we don't care if it improves things, circumventing blocks is bad."

Nowhere on the internet have I been able to find instructions for how to sync a palm pre in ubuntu. Since in media sync mode the pre pretends it's an ipod, you can use gtkpod quite easily, but as always in gtkpod you must select the type of device it is. I can't find it listed anywhere on the internet, but for all future users to note, the palm pre acts as an 8GB iPod Touch. That's model xA623. You're all freaking welcome.

  My last rant (Time Warner Sucks), I felt, was pretty good. It pretty much summed up in conclusive fashion how Time Warner abuses its power as the only possible provider of cable service to your home. However, they've failed me as a customer YET AGAIN.

  We are moving out of this house on the 15th of June, and called TWC to get it canceled that day. So what happens? A truck arrives at our house early this morning (June 7) and shuts off our cable and internet. The one time they're not late is when they shut us down a full week early. So I call, and the lady on the phone says "hmm, how odd, it's in here for the 15th, we don't know why they came out." We have to wait a whole day for the tech to get his happy ass back out here again and turn it back on. FUCK CABLE.

  This is why deregulation of cable failed. When the conservatives pushed deregulation of the cable industries through in 1996, they ended capitalism and instituted monopolies. Time Warner is my ONLY choice for cable here, and I can deal with that, get satellite (I'll deal with that in a minute) and DSL (we don't have a phone line to our house, not an option) or go without. Tell me, next time you argue with a conservative about capitalism or socialism, what they say to the idea that only one company is allowed to deliver a service to your home and they have 100% control of the price and options you get. Capitalism, the "Survival of the fittest" of the economic policies, gives way to "survival of the most prominent lobbyists."

  Case in point, when we move to Virginia, the cable provider we're assigned to is Comcast. We have 4 tv's; did you know that as part of their own internal rollout of digital services called "project Cavalry," you must have a box on top of every TV you want to watch on. A box you rent for $7 a month. I suggest you read this: "How the Unknown Digital TV Transition Could Screw You" We want the digital package where I can order my MMA Pay Per Views on the main TV, but to have that service on one TV you must have it on all.

  So get Satellite and DSL you say? Oops, where we're moving, the homeowner's association (you know, that loveable institution where people who can only get what they want by complaining to a bureaucracy get to fuck with their neighbors) has decided that having options for what you want to watch is too ugly. So we have no fucking options, except good old fashioned, monopolized, deregulated comcast.

  If you have the option to get satellite, I strongly suggest you exercise it. I would have had I know how effed up the whole cable industry was, and when I get to a place where I can have sat tv I will, but for now I will have to suck it up with this.

In a chat with Andy from work...

Andy: i wonder if [REDACTED] takes off her glasses if she will look like Kitty from Arrested Development.

me: ...
"You'll never see THESE again!"

Andy: LMFAO

me: ( .)(' )

Andy: i so almost spewed water onto the monitor

me: yup

Time Warner sucks. We've had Roadrunner for about 2 years and it's complete garbage. I've complained for a long time about it, but now I have evidence. First of all, I did 2 download tests to assess the speed of roadrunner. I downloaded an ISO of the new Ubuntu distribution (9.04) over both Bittorrent and http here at home on my Time Warner Roadrunner Cable and at school over the wifi network. At home, I activated the downloads each night at about 11:30 PM when I went to bed and stopped them at about 7 AM when I left for work the following morning. The night of the torrented download, over the whole night, I'd downloaded 46 Mb of the 700, and the night of the http download I'd downloaded 134 Mb. (BTW, could there be some throttling going on here, which they said they don't do? hmm.) That means over bittorrent I'm getting approx. 1.74k/s over torrent and 5.08k/s over http, which is paltry yet typical. We have trouble chatting while streaming video here. From the exact same source on the same laptop at the UNCG wifi network, I got the WHOLE 700Mb file in 6 minutes 28 seconds over torrent and 11 minutes 14 seconds over http, meaning speeds of 1.85Mb/s for torrent and 1.063Mb/s over http! We've even called a tech out to the house, he hooks up his meter, says "looks fine to me, have you considered paying for Turbo?" and leaves. No I'm not paying for fucking turbo, I should be paying for dial-up since it would be a GODDAMNED IMPROVEMENT.

Speed is not the only egregious offense either. For your consideration, I present the following evidence: (click the images for larger versions)

Exhibit A: Thursday, March 26, approx 7:00 PM, www.woot.com goes down. No woot-off, all other traffic works including shirt.woot.com, but woot is down.


Eshibit B: Sunday, March 29, approx 5:30 PM, my website goes down but other traffic is fine. My domain's server logs show no errors and people I chat with can access my site, only I cannot.


Exhibit C: Sunday, March 29, Approx Midnight, fark.com and some of the sub pages become inaccessible. Sites fark linked to are fine.


Exhibit D: Monday, March 30, Approx 9:30 PM, my site goes down again showing the same symptoms as Exhibit B. The site works, I know it.


Exhibit E: Tuesday, March 31, approx 7:15 PM, a single Megaupload page goes down but others don't.

This had been happening extensively around this time, I only took the care to document it a few times. Now, according to Time Warner, they're just innocent helpers. "Hey, we saw you got an error when trying to access this page, here's some things that might help you out while what you're looking for is inconveniently down." However, there's no errors. After that last intercept, I went into the little "Why am I here?" link on that page, where they have an option to "Disable Roadrunner Suggestions." I of course click that, and suddenly, I get no more intercepts. More importantly, I get NO MORE ERROR PAGES EITHER. it's not like all these sites go down for frequent swatches of time as Time Warner would have you think. What was happening is Time Warner randomly intercepts your traffic and sends you to a page full of sponsored links, collecting advertising revenue, until you opt out. This practice is SUPREMELY illegal and a violation of their end of the TOS (not the suggestions but the intercepting of my traffic, though how do you really prove that), yet for 99 of people they wouldn't think of it, they'd think TW/RR was being helpful.

Couple all of this evidence with the Time Warner tiered internet debacle that was going to be tested right here in the North Carolina Triad, and it's pretty clear you have to be an idiot to go with Time Warner for any of your services. I haven't even gotten into the 2 months we had digital cable SOLELY for the purpose of watching MMA Pay Per Views and the system didn't work from day 1, we'd try to order and they wouldn't have events or they were labeled the wrong channel or wrong time and you'd miss them or couldn't pre-order them.

We'd cancel if we weren't moving in a month or if we had a phone line coming to the house to get DSL, but the least we can do is tell you to NEVER GET TIME WARNER OR ROADRUNNER INTERNET.