Jared Mauch's Comments

I sometimes travel for work and pleasure, but also have packages shipped to my home without some sort of pre-notice of what they are or when they will arrive. For several years I have been subscribed to FedEx Insight to get notices of inbound packages. This is very nice as we could enter in many variations of our home address and people who would receive and get notices of this. It is often incomplete as shippers can block this visibility or it may come to yet another variation that we are unaware of.

UPS has finally launched a consumer-oriented version of this service they dub “My Choice”. One can sign-up online here and get notices when packages are inbound, usually the night before. What’s even better here is you can ask them to hold/delay delivery, and see what items may be signature required. They also give an estimated time of delivery based on the schedule and expected load of the drivers.

I’ve already come to love this capability as it can easily identify when a package is coming to our home. If you miss your driver, or have people ship items to you unexpectedly I strongly suggest you sign up for this service, as well as the FexEx variant. FedEx will call you to verify each addition, even if it’s just an address variant (eg: LN vs LANE).

Gizmodo has been banned from WWDC 2010, and it sure seems like they’re going down the “Please-Hurt-Me” path. They are looking to violate the “hot news doctrine” which has been decided case law since 1918 (248 U.S. 215).

They are going to aggregate and re-publish other “hot news” from their competitor blogs. This was ruled illegal then, and surely applies in this case where they were BANNED and can not blog live legitimately.

Should be interesting to see what happens tomorrow.

It’s been reported recently that part of the FCC broadband plan is the desire to move some broadcast TV stations out of the 500Mhz frequency band so this can be used for cellular companies to have more bandwidth for their userbases.

This is entirely the WRONG move. Much more can be attained by using smaller cellular sites, and the deployment of picocell/microcell technology. If each home had even just 5Mb/s internet access, and a microcell device, the need for this would be minimized and cellular customers would be happier with increased coverage at their homes/offices.

While some people have been working on the Google Fiber Proposal for the city of Ann Arbor, my research was cited locally at the annarbor.com site.

I’m hoping that something good comes of this, and not just for the areas that are served by ATT and Comcast, but the outlying parts of the county as well.

While I did expect some feedback as a result of my post regarding wiring Washtenaw County with fiber, I did not quite expect such a broad set of people to be reading the text.

Google announced they want to do a pilot-project whereby they run fiber-to-the-home of up to ~500k people. This similarly aligns with my desire to connect the local community with a carrier-neutral FTTH deployment. I’ve submitted some basic data to the Google RFI, and hope that a more formal proposal comes together for the area.

Tomorrow Night (16 Feb 2010) there is the A2Geeks Meetup. I hope that there will be some interesting discussion there regarding the Google proposal, and how we as a community can leverage this to demonstrate what can be done.

The readers of my post about wiring the county included people at the US House of Reps and some people looking at funding FTTH deployments. This does make for some interesting possibilities. If you’re at either of these two and want to discuss the data and model that I put together, don’t hesitate to contact me via E-Mail or Phone (google will reveal good contact info).

Looking forward to seeing some people in the local tech community tomorrow.

I’ve always been a bit of an apple fanboy (fanboi) since the 1980’s, having found ways to do interesting things with the Apple ][e //c etc’s at school, and programming pascal on the Plus/Classic with my friend MacsBugs in the MacOS 6 days. Having an iPhone has simplified some aspects of my life significantly and allowed me to keep on-task and on-schedule in an increasingly hectic day.

WIth the months of rumors of pricing, features, etc.. leading into this past weeks announcement, I figured if a tablet was launched, we would get one for my wife.

With the prospect of the platform not being a success and just hype, I read everyone dumping on the lack of flash and other capabilities. (Personally, I hope this helps kill Flash, it’s usually improperly and overly used to navigate websites. Those developers should be put out to pasture). I’m now convinced that it will be a success. Why? My father is going to get one. He’s a techie, sure, but not in the traditional tear the hardware apart and overclock the cpu with the right water cooling system. He’s a techie that reads books. He’s one that sees the value in the device.

I suspect that if the naysayers start polling their parents, they will find a similar pattern. Something cheap, immune to malware and with the possibility of $15 or $30/month for mobile E-Mail, a value for them. They were not going to get an iPhone/Blackberry/Android phone anyways.