For episode 8 of Feedback, which came out last week, Damien and BL played Electric Love by BØRNS! I really try to capture what it’s like to have these guys play for you from 5 feet away when I’m working on capturing sound and video, and it really helps that they’re just so good at performing!
As we first announced last week, you can also go and check out the music from Feedback Season 1. Go check it out, you’ll be able to support Feedback, get BL and Damien on your iPod or anywhere on the go!
On the Ottawhat podcast this week, we interviewed singer-songwriter Kelly Ann Wilson. It was really cool getting a look at the process of performing and putting an album together in a musical family, and hearing from somebody who has spent her whole life in what I’ll call ‘rural Ottawa’.
Kelly Ann also debuted her latest music video for the song ‘Clean’, which you can check out over on the podcast page.
I love taking pictures so much, and when I stepped off the bus yesterday, the sky looked absolutely gorgeous. I love looking at the sky, and around sunrise/sunset the colours are just unbelievable. I’m not normally able to capture the glory of the sky in such detail with my phone, but things just worked out here, and I’m getting a little better at making the phone work for me.
Anyhow, this was one of the highlights of my day yesterday, and though you probably saw it, it’s my ‘thing’ for today.
This week on Future Chat, we had a really great time chatting about cable packages (I go on a bit of a rant), talk more about alternative energy in various places, and talk about kids learning code.
Another internet company took an unlimited plan and added asterisks to it. This time, it’s Karma Mobility.
We made a mistake. We modeled Neverstop usage to be much higher than usage on Refuel. But we never anticipated that some customers would use over 1,000GB a month.
They aren’t the first company to choose to throttle mobile data after a certain usage threshold, and they won’t be the last. But time and time again, these companies obviously overpromise, or there’s something horribly wrong with the whole cellular industry and the way mobile data works.
In the company’s blog post, they note that some users were burning through 1000 GB of data, something they never envisioned happening on cellular hotspot. Certainly, that is a lot of data, and video presumably contributes most of that. I would imagine that if even a small percentage of your users are using 1000 GB of mobile data that you wouldn’t be able to make money overall unless you had a massive customer base.
However, the infrastructure associated with cellular data is the hardest part. It doesn’t make any sense why the cap they would need to put in place would be so restrictive (they set it to 15 GB, before slowing speeds way down). If 1 TB is abusive on the system, then set reasonable limits. But if you’re selling a mobile hotspot company, and you’re pledging unlimited usage for customers, 15 GB is just not enough for a month.
The Internet is composed mainly of video these days, traffic-wise. You need to expect that most users will want data, and cellular companies have been pushing 1080p and UHD screens into users hands for the last couple of years. This kind of computer is going to use more data than even the best iPhone could in 2008.
When I was working outside my home last year, I consumed most of my media on the way to and from work, and sometimes while listening to music or podcasts at work. I used between 35 and 50 GB consistently for several months doing that, and I was not doing any kind of tethering or downloading of massive amounts of media. I used WiFi when I was at home, and I just went about my day normally. I wasn’t even trying to use massive amounts of data (although I was a proud nerd when I saw how much I’d used).
If you offer or are planning to offer an unlimited plan, but want to set limits to prevent people from using a terabyte of data per month, that’s fine. But make sure your limits aren’t unreasonable, because people are using your product to connect to the internet.
15 GB is incredibly low use for a mobile hotspot in a month. If you want to set reasonable limits, start off at 500 GB (half of what you considered “abusive”). If your network or business can’t handle that traffic, you’ve obviously made some miscalculations in offering “unlimited usage”. Even a limit like 100 GB would still solve customers problems while keep usage ‘reasonable’. We’ve seen internet companies make this same mistake again and again, but nobody seems to offer a useful solution outside of companies who keep people on restrictive grandfathered unlimited data plans (like the ones I’m on).
I use a lot of data, I’m not doing anything nefarious, and I want to keep doing that. Nobody wants to get throttled, and slowing down the internet for your biggest customers is not a good experience for anybody.
If you need a new generation of network to be able to cope with internet traffic like fiberoptic networks have been doing for a few years now, let’s work on that. But the solution to the internet’s biggest customers isn’t “use less”, it’s figuring out ways we can all coexist with more.
The Internet is awesome, and everybody deserves to be able to access it at full speed on an unlimited plan.
The launch is happening about 10 minutes after this post is published. Let’s go watch!
This week, Damien and BL performed Ex’s & Oh’s by Elle King, as part of episode 8 of Feedback. This is a great cover of a really catchy song!
Today, you can also go and check out the music from Feedback Season 1. Go check it out, you’ll be able to support Feedback, get Bl and Damien on your iPod or anywhere on the go!
This week, episode 8 of Feedback was released! We discussed pre-production for the upcoming Sons of Pluto EP, and talked more about life as a part-time artist.
We also made a special announcement about the music from Feedback. Go check it out, you’ll be able to support Feedback, and listen to all the great songs from Season 1!
This week’s Ottawhat includes our interview with Pablo Juarez. He spent the last 15 months in Australia and had a ton of great stories about his travel adventures!
“Play to your strengths” is the advice given to Harry Potter during the Triwizard Tournament, and it’s invaluable insight is applicable not just to facing dragons in a magical school.
When I set out to improve my health last summer, I knew it would take more than some kind of amazing burst of willpower. I was going to have to change some of my habits, and try to control my worst impulses, like the one to eat an entire pizza in one sitting. I didn’t buy any expensive supplements or go on a strict nutrition plan. I didn’t count calories, or even consider any individual food as being off limits.
What I did end up doing, starting in July of 2015, was make a commitment to eating less, and to exercising more. In making that commitment, I had a few things I liked doing built-in to my schedule to jump start my new diet and lifestyle. The biggest thing I did was to start biking to and from work every day, about 7 km each direction, unless it was pouring rain.
Really, the only other major change I made was to purchase Soylent, the food replacement I’ve talked about to death here, and eat only that at work. I know that I tend to eat when I’m bored, and so I would bring snacks to work and eat them throughout the day, even if I wasn’t particularly hungry. By replacing that snack food with Soylent, which fills me up but which I did not crave, I was able to consume a lot less calories during the day.
Since food wasn’t around, I didn’t feel any strong urge to eat, and if I did, Soylent would be there to fill me up. I started losing around two pounds a week on average, but I started to notice a pattern developing. During the week, I would lose about 4-6 pounds, and then Friday through Sunday, I would gain back about 2-4 of that. My weight loss came in cycles, because as I mentioned, I have no willpower, and so I wasn’t afraid to have a few slices of pizza when hanging out with friends.
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| The secret to weight loss: math, patterns, and patience. |
After a couple of months of this pattern, where I would bike 4-5 times per week, play sports, and walk, my appetite, my waistline, and my stomach all shrank substantially. And through all of this, I never really had any strong cravings for food that I didn’t satisfy. When I did snack, I was less likely to indulge as much, mainly because I just wasn’t as hungry.
That’s not to say I didn’t get hungry. Another important part of this lifestyle was learning that it’s OK to be hungry sometimes without eating. I started treating hydration more seriously, and my hunger lessened in kind. In total, from the end of August (after my honeymoon) to the beginning of December, I lost about 35 pounds.
If you look in detail at my progress, weighing myself every single day from August 20, 2015 to January 13, 2016, I have lost a total of 98 pounds in the 89 days I lost weight. On the remaining days, I gained a total of 64 pounds over 57 days. In that time, I’ve learned that eating a bunch of snack food, or just too much in general, like I did on many of those 57 “gain” days, is absolutely not worth the work I put in on the 89 “loss” days
I am currently better, but far from perfect, at deciding when I’ve had enough. I still enjoy cookies, candy, pizza, delivery, chips, cheese, meat, etc., but I know a lot better how my body is going to react to those foods, and how much I eat will affect me.
Now, it’s the middle of winter, and I can’t bike all over the place (also, my bike was stolen back in October 🙁 ), but I am doing exercise where I can to keep up with food, and managing my intake better.
With the tracking system I’ve set up for myself, which I talk about here, I know that I can aim to weigh less today than I did yesterday, and less this week than I did the last, and I will be able to lose weight. It’s all about finding what works for you, and playing to your strengths. Stay healthy 🙂
If you want to get a copy of the spreadsheet I’ve been using, let me know and I can make a clean copy available for download. I have been using the wireless Withings scale to track my weight and body fat percentage, if you want to check it out, I would strongly recommend it (full disclosure: if you use that link, I do get a commission) and it’s been a big help to me. I have also been using the Withings Health Mate app, which is free, and IFTTT to make keeping track of my weight in a spreadsheet unbelievably simple.
You can do it, it’s all a matter of finding your own path.
