The PaBlog

I blogged earlier today about the Comcast bait and switch over their “basic” cable plan.

This is the price the website quoted me at http://www.comcast.com/shop/buyflow2/products.cspx:

Here is a grab from my local channel lineup for that package, as quoted from the “View channel line-up” link visible above:

I could give two shits about ESPN anything or INSP, and don’t really need ABC Family Anything, Animal Planet Anything, or Disney Channel HD, but sort of need my local stations in High Def. But the operator insists that the $39.99 a month (NOT $10.60) package stops after the two WTVE-51’s. Any channel in three digits is not in the basic package, even the local channels.

Bait and fucking switch.

I went to the Comcast web site to consider downgrading my television service. Their website said that the “premium basic” package at $10.60 a month included my local channels in high definition.

A CSR on the phone this morning told me that the package would actually be on a promotional price of $39.99 a month, and would NOT include local high-definition.

Blatant bait and switch.

My history with Comcast has been well documented here and here, so I won’t bore you by repeating all of it. But my latest attempt at dealing with a company that deals with complaining customers by shutting them off or changing their name does raise an interesting question.

After the first customer service rep outright hung up on me, I called back and asked to speak to a supervisor. That’s when I got transferred into what I like to call “customer service limbo.”

After a brief musical interlude, a male voice came on the line asking “hello, Mr. Vee?” I explained that I am not Mr. Vee, and silence followed. I assumed I had been placed back on hold, or that the line had been disconnected again.

After about three minutes, the voice came back. “Hello, Mr. Vee?” I said “Hello?” More silence. For about three minutes again.

“Hello, Mr. Vee?”

This repeated about six times before I gave up.

So what I want to know is, was this an accident? Or has Comcast found a way to shove callers they don’t want to deal with into a new circle of tech hell? Very clever, but very evil.

Has anyone else experienced this? E-Mail me and let me know.

Being sick and tired of all of the spyware and adware in most other “free” iPod video converter programs (most notably Red Kawa’s bloated “Videora iPod Converter”) I decided to write a stripped down, bare bones conversion program for myself and anyone else who wanted a half decent converter with no strings attached.

Tiny Little iPod Video Converter is, like Videora, a wrapper around Fabrice Bellard’s FFmpeg conversion program. It lets you convert most common video formats to properly-sized H.264/AAC video files for iPods and iPhones. It will add converted files into iTunes and lets you tag files with all of the information you want imported into iTunes (such as title, TV show name, season and episode numbers, etc.). It can even make “educated guesses” at what the information should be based on a filename, saving you some of the trouble when importing folders full of files.

Best of all, I’ve not only made TLiVC open source and free, I’ve actually released it entirely into the public domain. My source code (it was written in Free Pascal 2.4, so it can easily be imported into Delphi) is included and programmers are welcome to make use of it as they see fit. You may upload the distribution .zip anywhere you want and give it to as many people as you like. The only things in the package with any kind of license on them are my Windows programming class objects (which are under Creative Commons-Attribution) and the enclosed copy of FFmpeg, which is under GPL. Everything else is yours to do with as you see fit. I just ask that you not use my source code in a commercial project without contacting me.

If you use and like TLiVC, I welcome a PayPal kickback to pab@cnx.com but I don’t require one. Programs like this should be free, and this one is. Completely free to use, modify, and distribute.

The package, including short documentation, executables, and all source code, is available for dowload here. There’s also a page for it at SourceForge if you’d like to contribute to further development of the program.

With the passing of Doug Fieger, I am compelled to tell my Knack story.

In 1991 the Knack re-formed and put out their first album in 10 years, “Serious Fun.” I was assistant music director at my college radio station, WSBU, which at the time was doing a pop/rock format. When the other assistant (Sean Deery) and I were stuck with the job of building the first playlist of the winter semester in January (since the Music Director himself couldn’t be bothered) we sat listening to all of the new music that had landed on our desk over winter break.

With one space left to fill in the lineup, we dropped the single for “Rocket O’ Love” in into the CD player. It was so wonderfully stupid and annoying that Sean and I practically fell on the floor laughing. As a joke, and also to annoy the music director who wouldn’t do his job, I filled the last slot with “Rocket O’ Love.” Then, a few seconds later, I bumped the new “Bad Company” album out of Heavy Rotation and put “Rocket O’ Love” in its slot.

For those who have never heard “Rocket O’ Love” go drop the buck at iTunes. It’s wonderfully stupid. This, for example, is the entire chorus:

I’m a rocket o’ love. TAKE ME!
I’m a rocket o’ love. RIDE!
I’m a rocket o’ love!

This is the middle 8:

Well I’m a driver.
And I’m a raver.
And I’m a flamer.
Yes, I’m the Savior.
And I’m a diver. YEAH!
And I’m a craver.
OOOoh! Oooh baby, baby, look at me
I’M ON FIRE!

It’s quintessential Knack. And it’s not what radio was playing in January of 1991.

I was having a blast, playing the crap out of the song on my morning show and dealing with annoyed listeners calling in. I started doing doubleshots of “Rocket O’ Love” and “Good Girls Don’t.” Everyone hated the song, but because our music director couldn’t be bothered to do his job and take it off the playlist, we were spinning it 40 times a week.

Something that didn’t occur to us at the time: WSBU at the time (and I believe it is once again) was considered one of the best college stations in the country and one of the most influential. Two of the stations in Buffalo (WGR-FM and WMJQ) were actually paying a few locals to listen to the station and log all of the music we were playing. Their research team would then rebuild our playlists from those reports, and see what the college kids were listening to. I guess one thing led to another, because in short order WMJQ started playing “Rocket O’ Love” in heavy rotation. Shortly after that the other pop stations in Buffalo added it. Then the stations in Toronto and Rochester that were tracking WMJQ added it. And it went on down the line.

Until one morning when I opened Radio and Records and looked at the rock charts. “Rocket O’ Love” had reached #9. Coming to my senses, I started playing “Rocket O’ Love,” and interrupted it saying “THIS HAS GONE FAR ENOUGH.” I played a cart with the “scratching vinyl” soundeffect (since you can’t really do that with a CD) and went into something else. Sean and I took “Rocket O’ Love” off the playlist and moved it to recurrent, and then I quit as Assistant Music Director. I never played it again, even ironically. WMJQ dropped it, as did everyone else like ripples in a pool.

So while I can’t say for certain that I helped launch the Knack’s 1991 comeback single-handed, I’d like to say I had a share in it. Maybe even a big share. I also demonstrated that even back in 1991 corporate radio had no sense of humor.

Three years later, my friend Mike Nelson and I went to see The Knack at the TLA in Philadelphia. At one point, Doug Fieger asked “is there anything in particular you folks want to hear?” The chorus of shouts went up, yelling lots of different songs. After the clamor had died down, Mike and I stood up and yelled “ROCKET O’ LOVE!”

Doug Fieger stared at us, paused, said “no.” Then launched into “Another Lousy Day in Paradise.”

We will miss you, Doug. You brought so many of us such joy.

Here’s another programming code contribution for anyone who wants it.

This unit contains a class to manage file searches. Written in Free Pascal, it can also be used in Lazarus and Delphi. It relies on no direct OS API calls, so it can be compiled under any OS that supports the FindFirst, FindNext, and FindClose procedures native to Pascal.

This class allows for searching based on multiple search filters (for example, it lets you search for all Word files in a directory by specifying a search filter of ‘*.doc,*.docx,*.rtf’), and also allows you to recursively search subdirectories under the main directory.

Results are returned either as an array property, or as a TStringList for easy insertion into a Delphi or Lazarus component that supports TStringLists.

As usual, The code and programs compiled with this code may be freely redistributed, although I wouldn’t turn up my nose at a buck or two in PayPal if you find it useful.

You can download it here: TFileSearch class for Free Pascal. The archive includes the source code and HTML documentation.

I believe in sharing code. When I have something that’s up to snuff, and I think can help other programmers, I believe in spreading it around. That’s what the programming community is all about (or, at least, should be).

Back in 1998, I wrote a small package of routines for programming for the internet under Virtual Pascal for OS/2. Over the years the library grew, I moved to Windows, and I moved from the now-discontinued VP to Free Pascal (as did most other Pascal programmers). The library kept evolving over time.

Recently, while working on my still-in-progress “Scooter” podcatcher (which hopefully I will finish one of these days), I adapted the library to the “class” model for objects as defined by Delphi and adopted by FPC. With nothing better to do the past few days I went in, polished up the code a bit, finally wrote some documentation (in the form of HTML help as used by FPC), and have decided to put it out there.

Briefly, what this unit does is create an object class called TSocketObj, which allows you to create and use socket connections over TCP/IP in programs created by Free Pascal. This encapsulates and greatly simplifies the techniques normally used in Winsock programming. There’s also an implementation of TStream called TSocketStream, which lets you use Internet connections the same way you would use memory or file streams, and a descendant of TSocketObj specifically for retrieving files from web servers using HTTP GET calls. Until you try it, you won’t believe how easy it can be for your program to grab a file off a webserver.

The code may be freely redistributed as long as my notice remains in the source code. Programs compiled with this code may be redistributed as long as credit is given.

If you’ve come up with an improvement or new version of this unit, please let me know.

If you want to, you can grab it here: SocketClasses for Free Pascal

The mantra of the right-leaning, pro-corporate wing of the Democratic Party who are currently in control has always been that liberals and progressives will toe the line and vote for “moderate” and conservative Democrats because “they have nowhere else to go.” I think that yesterday’s special Senate race proved otherwise.

The Left went shopping.
The Left went out to dinner.
The Left went to the movies.
The Left went home.
In fact, the Left went everywhere except the polls.

Maybe someone will actually get the message, although I doubt it. The liberals and progressives are tired of having to choose between the evil of two lessers, like happened in Massachusetts. They’re done giving moderate and conservative Democrats a free pass because the Powers that Be say that they have nowhere else to go. Being offered a choice for the Last Liberal’s dearly departed seat between a Republican and an unexciting Democrat talking pretty much like a Republican, they chose to sit out the fight.

The Republicans, on the other hand, were fired up and excited and turned out in record numbers for their side. If the Democrats had given their base a candidate they can get excited about, then they would have turned out in similar numbers, too. They didn’t, so the base didn’t.

So the next time someone makes the argument that the Left have nowhere else to go, tell that to Senator Martha Coakley.

I doubt I’ll be entering this one since the agency in question has rejected both my YA novels (Go To Hell and Squire) already, but I wanted to bring it to everyone else’s attention.

May Kole, an agent at Andrea Brown Literary and blogger at Kidlit.com is having a contest for the beginnings of a YA or MG novel:

Since the query contest worked out so well in October, I’m going to do another contest at the beginning of 2010… novel beginnings! That’s right, the beginning (up to 500 words) of your YA or MG novel!

 

It’s too messy to have people post their entries in comments, so please don’t leave an entry there. Only use the comments to ask questions. This time, I’m going to let you enter by e-mail only, to mary at kidlit dot com, with the subject line “Kidlit Contest.” Copy and paste your novel text… do not send attachments. Your entry has to be for a children’s novel (YA or MG, sorry, no picture books this time around), it has to be for a manuscript that is FINISHED and could be sent out to an agent, and it must be under 500 words.

The prize is unremarkable as far as these sorts of contests go, but a valuable one: winners get a critique, anywhere from 1-15 pages depending upon your placement among the winners.

The full details can be found here at Mary’s blog.

I seemed to annoy a lot of people over the last nine years. True, my being an asshole had a lot to do with it, but one particular quirk of mine seemed to piss some people off.

It’s how I pronounced the year. Most people I knew were saying “two thousand three” (for example) while I was saying “twenty-oh three.”

It made sense to me. If the previous century had yielded “nineteen-” dates, why not “twenty-” for years beginning in “20″? True, I didn’t go so far as to call two thousand “twenty hundred,” but still….

Now I’m starting to hear people referring to the new year, lo and behold, as “twenty ten.” Rather than let my usual arrogance get the better of me and claim that I finally brought the rest of the world around to my (correct) way of thinking, I’ll confess that there is a more logical reason why I’m starting to hear people say “twenty ten” instead of “two thousand ten.”

People are lazy.

Think about it. Ours is a language where speakers will go out of their way to drop syllables whenever they can. We created the contraction, for example. (Yes, other languages do similar things, but English still created it no matter what you say, or what the facts may say. I love my bloody language, I do.) So our tongues will go the easiest route whenever possible.

“Two thousand nine” is four syllables. So is “twenty oh nine.” Given a choice between two phrases that have the same number of syllables, it then becomes a matter of how difficult each is to say.

“Two thousand nine” is almost all giding consonants, with only the “t” at the beginning and an often half-spoken “d” a plosive. “Twenty Oh Nine” has two or three plosive consonants depending on how much you emphasize either the W or second T. Gliders are easier to say than plosives, so lazy tongues went with the name of least resistence and said “Two thousan’ nine.”

“Two thousand ten” is four syllables. “Twenty ten” is three. So even with the more difficult plosives (if you bother to enunciate them) the latter is easier to say. Especially for those who will skip the second “t” and say “twennyten.”

That’s why, for the rest of the century, we can look for English speakers to finally sound like I have for most of the past decade. Welcome to Twenty Ten, everyone.

Gotta love laziness.