WalkerPad

Mello Birthday for charise, we just had a nice family lunch and I got her ring fixed. Oh and there was ice cream cake of course.

So I took another stab at Wells Fargo today, 3rd call it’s now been almost two months since the program was launched… I thought they might have at least some basic time lines for customer contact put together by now. After first line agent made a series of excuses for why it was so slow to roll out he mentioned he had a special number he could transfer me too that would be able to help me a bit more.
So he transfers me, turns out the Wells Fargo phone system is having some um interesting problems. They keep transferring all us stressed out home owners to some company (ATA I think he said) in Canada, that has nothing to do with WF or loans or well anything.
The company has been complaining to Wells Fargo for a while now but they don’t seem to interested in fixing the problem (according to the guy at ATA)
Minor technical problem or Wells Fargo just not wanting to deal with this program despite sticking their hand into the TARP treat bag….? It’s probable of course a goof ,but it sure feels like (giving the long rollout and total lack of solid info) a ongoing blow off from them .

My thoughts on the new time warner bandwidth caps

Gamers with jobs has a pretty good article breaking it down for gamers.

This issue only exists because of a horrible lack of competition. Cable and teleco’s where gifted with huge public trusts and right of ways and have been raping the US ever since in one fashion or another. The cure is constant and real competitive threat and forced asset sharing to smash monopolistic tactics (caps being only the tip of the iceberg). That being said caps, while annoying (and these are VERY annoying) are really aimed at big contented purveyors (google is of course target number one) to force them to subsides and pay for right of way (and then priority). Pipe providers as usual (as the RIAA or MPAA due) are vastly over valuing their end of the proposition and thus feel empowered (by a lack of competition nipping at their heels) to try and hold the world hostage for as much of the pie as they can get, and if a few consumers or producers get smashed in the crossfire oh well.

Add hock statistic, I’m a average silly cone head valley kind of geek and gamer, last month my house hold usage was
* March 2009 (Incoming: 54814 MB / Outgoing: 20035 MB)
So, about 53 Gigs and change, so well bellow comcasts 250GB, and just over the $54 40GB cap. I pay around $49 I think for comcast. So while it’s not clear what small overages would range or continual overage it’s obvious these tiers are being broken up in a silly (anti med-heavy user) way. That said I don’t think it’s going to be that big of a deal for most users. Though studies of certainly shown that caps slow innovation and usage due to the mind share effect (everybody remember when your cel phone minutes where metered tightly?), but again that is about squeezing the big guys.

Just like the telco’s feel they missed out on e-mail and now avenge themselves upon us all with insane costs for SMS (a pretty much free b channel transmission for them) cable now wants to change the video story and be the IP pipe and be the content guys instead of all those annoying them that give their pipes value (never mind they have utterly failed in the past at this, they always end up trying to rebuild AOL).

Only wide spread and significant cross market competition will save us from this crap and enforce a natural order of open services and neutral pipes.