Why being an engineer in the US now sucks

This is a rant related to an IEEE press release. If you look at the background of the current federal polititians, national policy is being made by managers and lawyers. Neither of these groups consider engineering to have any value except when it involves ownable intellectual property. IP is not a totally evil concept, although I do work with folks that think it is, but these polititians see no fundamental difference in the "IP" refered to by the MPAA/RIAA and the "IP" refered to by the IEEE/ACM. Obviously the former group would like to see Copyright eliminated and replaced with something like a 100 year Patent and they're well on their way. Of course with the advent of tele-medicine, maybe it should be pointed out to Dr. Frist that his profession can now safely be outsourced to the worldwide lowest bidders as well.

CSS Tutorial by Example

Thanks to davidg47 and company I've got some raw material for a tutorial on going from a site design image to a working page using CSS rather than tables for layout. Here's the related thread at WebDeveloper Forums. Now all I have to do is figure out where my web site is since the ones I had on Comcast will be toast Real Soon Now. 8-)

Bye Bye Comcast

May 25 will be the last day of my Comcast service. Want to hear the tale? I knew you would. Comcast HS Internet is not cheap. It runs about $50/month for 3 mega-bit downstream and fairly good service in this area. Comcast wants to sell you more stuff, especially if you're just a cable Internet customer like we are. Comcast wants you to buy cable TV. Given how much they're charging my take on it is they should be giving us basic cable for free bundled with the ISP service. Well they don't see it that way.

At the end of March they sent us a little letter saying we were a bunch of freeloaders for only using their wire for networking and they had discovered that we were getting a $10/month discount that we didn't deserve because we were scum of the earth HSI customers and not glorious TV viewers. The gist of it was they were going to start taxing us an extra $10 unless we coughed up another $30/month for TV! Nope, that was the last straw.

SBC/Yahoo is currently offering up to 1.5 Mb service for $26, no setup fees, no modem cost. Say what you will about the difference in speed but the bottom line is that your speed with a broadband (>1 Mb) connection is totally dependent on the speed of the server on the other end of your request.

SBC delivered on everything on or ahead of schedule. I'm getting >1 Mb downstream, my old Linksys router is running as the PPPoE client and keeping my connection hot all the time. Everything is going quite smoothly. The trade offs? Well, there's no free web site without ads but a personal site hosted much better than this one is easy to come by for no more than $5/month and that will include lots of server-side goodies that aren't available here. The absolute top downstream is less than a third but it's generally unnoticable and, hey, it's half the cost of these shysters!

So long cable guys. If you had a clue you'd still have some customers but I suspect a lot of others will be jumping your ship in the near future.

A ride through hell

Elena is a nuclear engineer and a motorcyle enthusiest. Sometimes she rides where no one else has the courage to go. In our push to "energy independence" these are pictures that must not be lost from our collective memory.