I would be remiss if I didn’t tell you that I used my MBR1000 with Verizon Wireless Broadband for much/most of my initial commitment to the service. The only flaws I ever found were that once every two weeks you had to power it down to reset because throughput would slow to a crawl worse than dial up. I attributed this to some kind of resource leakage or some kind of log getting full without a wrap capability. It was no big deal.

That said, I had more than my fair share of bandwidth issues with Verizon’s service. It basically was a classic case of having oversold the towers in the area. There were certain times of the day when even checking email was frustrating. Having heard these same complaints from many with Verizon Wireless Broadband and heard their “Trail of Tears” story about trying to get the issue resolved, I simply chose to suffer through it.

Low and behold, a few weeks ago Verizon gave me a “courtesy” call telling me my contractual obligations were all expired and that they wanted me to sign up for additional services in exchange for some new free equipment. I was never so glad to get a sales call in all my life. I thanked them for verifying my broadband contract was over because I had been wanting to get onto the 4G bandwagon since I saw the first commercial on TV. They sputtered and said “We’re working on that” and I responded “Sprint already has it only a few miles from here with a schedule that puts me in the coverage area before the end of 2011 Q1, quite possibly before the end of the year.” I thanked them profusely for letting me know I could finally be free of a 5Gig per month limit and hung up the phone.

I don’t download streaming porn, watch movies on-line, or even visit U-tube, but, even I get nailed by that 5Gig per month limit. If I wasn’t sharing the connection it would be less likely, but, with 4 computers on the connection, all it takes is for a round of updates to come out all at the same time and my limit is hit. I even try to avoid this by ordering CDs with new stuff from On-Disk, but this time the Ubuntu crowd decided to slip in a bunch of last minute changes which made the initial release of 10.04 LTS useless for all. I had to download my own new disks. Then I had to apply all of the patches. Then Microsoft decided to release some major patches for the sacrificial machine still running their worthless OS. You get the picture.

Every time I get close to the 5Gig limit, the back of my mind keeps tossing out the story of that sorry ass Bears fan who got a $27,000 bill for watching the game on his laptop.

http://techblips.dailyradar.com/story/27_000_to_watch_a_bears_game_chicago_sun_times_the/

So, after returning home from an out of state contract and finishing all of my computer upgrades, I decided to look into 4G service. The beauty of 4G service (when it arrives) is that it is unlimited (currently). I can pull down all of the updates I need and send all of the PDF files off to printer houses I want without having to worry about that 5Gig limit or that $27,000 phone bill.

A quick visit to the Sprint Web site made me think I lead a charmed life.

I’ve been well aware of the Sprint coverage hole in the town of Cabery because some family members have Sprint service and are there quite a bit. I’m also incredibly hopeful that coverage hole is coming to an end since Alliance Grain will be putting up a different/larger leg there this summer and I’ve been a one man lobby team shoving that information into every contact point I can find at Sprint. (For those who don’t know what a leg is, they are systems of elevating and/or transferring grain from unloading pits into various bins and silos. You can find some images here:

http://www.ag450farm.iastate.edu/sidenotes.htm )

A little bit of research showed that Sprint was selling a Franklin U301 3G/4G USB dongle along with a 4G plan which allowed you to operate at the 5Gig limit on 3G, but switch over automagically to unlimited 4G when it appeared in your area. These devices must be really popular because the “local” retailer kept getting stiffed on their shipments from central inventory. I ended up having to order one on the Web.

Word of warning. Sprint only uses Equifax to check credit. If you are like me, and have all of your credit information locked down to avoid identity theft, you MUST find your Equifax PIN and either unlock your credit for a few days, or buy a one time only PIN before you order. I burned almost a day on the phone trying to get this cleared up. (It didn’t help that I had miss-placed the PIN Equifax originally sent me and had to obtain a new one.) The real problem is that only a few people in Sprint’s credit department know how to refresh a data screen. Once they do a pull for your credit, it shows them only the originally pulled information until some magic keystroke combination is hit to force a data refresh. Most of the people working at the first level of credit checking don’t know how to do this. You have to bounce your way up to a second or third level manager before this “ knowledge” is passed along to anyone.

Farmer’s have a saying. “Never start anything on Friday as you will have nothing but trouble.” It’s a good saying. My modem arrived late on Friday, so I read the instructions during an episode of SG-U, but didn’t do anything until the following day.

My laptop has a sacrificial Windows partition on it which rarely gets used, so the CD of software worked just fine. I was able to connect seeing anywhere from 1-4 bars on the little software display with the dongle plugged directly into the laptop. A half hour into this and life was looking good! I was easily going to have plenty of time to get cleaned up and attend my nephew’s birthday party…yeah right.

With a 3G only modem like the Verizon modem. All I did after initializing it was plug it into the MBR1000 and magically we were all connected to the Internet. Fat chance with this modem. I expected to have to flash the firmware because it was a new device. I didn’t expect to have to burn in an additional BIN file with modem drivers. I also didn’t expect to endure any of the problems or the countless hours on hold trying to get this working in 3G mode without automatically trying 4G every so often.

Every time I got connected to technical support I got a different little tweak to try, but I didn’t get a working configuration, or the truth…at least until they were about to go home for the evening.

See that line which is third from the bottom? It’s a negative number and it needs to be greater than -75 before your MBR1000 will even begin to function. (Remember, with negative numbers, greater than means closer to zero.) With my Verizon modem plugged in it stays pretty much at -51 because Verizon has some pretty great cell service in the area. With the Sprint modem installed it bounces between -61 and -128 with most of its time around -98. I tried every hokey trick they told me until they finally told me the truth. I even drove to Kankakee and purchased a 10′ USB extension cable so I could tape the USB dongle to a window far away from the MBR-1000.

Now, I am waiting for regular FedEx overnight delivery. I have a signal booster on order. It sucks, but until the 4G tower gets put up, that’s what I will need.

https://secure.spotwave.com/productfinder/product_finder_results.asp

I have never used this product, but I have used things like it in the past. Being out on a farm away from everything I have a long history of dealing with weak signal strength. On the plus side, I walked around the outside of my office last night with the dongle plugged into the notebook and found the place where signal strength seems to stay at 4 bars, so I should be good to go once it is installed. I even climbed up on the roof and took of the old Direcway satellite dish since I will want to use the hole where the cable comes through the wall for this things cable. (Besides, I haven’t had satellite Internet service in years now. For those who think 5Gig per month is bad, try living with 120Meg per day.)

—- days pass

Well, I ended up having to order from a different place. The Mac Mall vendor simply committed wire fraud over and over again. When their inventory reads “in-stock” it has absolutely no meaning. They waited until 4:30pm on the day I expected my delivery to call and tell me the product was back ordered. Their Web site continued to show it as in-stock even the following day. All I can say is that it is rather obvious ethics simply don’t exist at Mac Mall.

Even after ordering a SpotWave from another supplier and hooking it up, my Trail of Tears was no different. I could plug the Sprint dongle into my laptop and see 4-5 bars with the software. I even carried my laptop and held it in such a way that it was in the exact same location with the modem facing the exact same way to make sure of the signal strength with the SpotWave running. Plug it into the MBR1000 and you get nothing. Tech support keeps telling me to use longer and longer extension cables to get the dongle farther away from the MBR1000. Each increase in distance causes a significant drop in signal strength, not an improvement. I can even test the dongle in the exact same location and position with my laptop seeing 5 bars and get absa-(*^)(&ing-lutely-nothing when it is plugged into the MBR1000.

$60/month for a paperweight that doesn’t even hold down paper. Not to mention hundreds of dollars for a booster which is probably sprouting tumors inside my body as we speak. Not only that, but the firmware update changed that resource leakage problem from physically powering down once every couple of weeks to requiring a physical power down roughly three times per day.

Tech support at Cradlepoint no longer returns my phone calls or answers my email.

—- days pass

I have to spend a lot of time in meetings in the Naperville area one day, so I go onto Hotwire and book myself a room at Candlewood for an unbelievable price. I take along my $60 paper weight because according to the maps Sprint has the bulk of the Naperville/Warrenville area covered with 4G service. A consultant I used to work with is staying in the area and using Clear 4G (which is supposedly using the Sprint network). I spend a lot of time with my ear-piece in while driving around to meetings. A couple of times people ask me to email them stuff. I find a parking lot and boot the sacrificial Windows partition, connect to Sprint (3G because I can never find 4G) and surf to my email page to send them things. When my day is finally over I check into the Candlewood (very beautiful room, very comfortable, even the towels feel new) and test out my $60/month paperweight again. No 4G found. The consultant I know is staying at a hotel less than one mile south of where I am as the crow flies and gets great 4G with Clear. I get bupkiss with Sprint’s wonderful device. I use 3G for a few minutes, then plug in the provided network cable and boot a real operating system to get some things done.

Still $60/month for a paperweight which doesn’t even hold paper down.

—- days pass

Some non-technical person from sprint kept calling my land line offering to help resolve my issues. They also annoy me with an email. Why they kept calling my land line that I never answer unless I completely recognize the caller is beyond me. My email sig line clearly states my cell phone number, which is generally the only number anyone actually reaches me on. I email them the early portion of this document showing all of the maps and pointing out how I have contacted them incessantly about getting additional antenna’s in place to serve this area only to receive dead silence. In fact, in the town of Herscher, the Herscher Grain elevator was currently putting up a shiny new leg. Some antenna is hanging on it, but I haven’t talked with anyone in the know to find out just what kind and who owns it. I know this. It hasn’t boosted the Sprint/Nextel signal in the area even the tiniest bit.

The first of July comes and I find there is a shiny new firmware version for the MBR1000 and yet another BIN file for modem support. I dutifully install both and once again conduct tests with Sprint. Still absolutely worthless. The resource leakage issue has improved, but is still light years from being resolved. Even turning on the flag for brutal physical modem reset hasn’t solved the issue. We are now down to a once per day power down in order to fix connection speed issues.

Still $60/month for a paperweight which doesn’t even hold paper down.

What I can tell Joe and Jane consumer from this experience is that those maps are just random wishful colorings. According to the map on-line, I should have been awash in 4G bandwidth while staying at Candlewood Suites.

Did I even see a “ hint” of access? No. Believe me, I clicked on that 4G button the software puts up more than once looking for coverage, nada. One thing which really strikes me as I look at this map in more detail, however, is just how little Sprint cares. Illinois isn’t Washington. We don’t have mountain ranges cropping up between downtown Chicago and the suburbs. Why do we have all of these orange blobs in the 4G coverage area? Many years ago there was a comic strip which had the wife leaving yellow post-it notes around the house with things for the hubby to do (and not to do). The punch line was that until these little yellow things hit the market, he never knew the color of nagging. Well, until I took a good look at this map, I didn’t know the color of half-assed.

I have a particularly unforgiving place in my heart for companies that let MBAs choose the rolling out of coverage based upon “where they get a deal” to put an antenna instead of letting the engineers put together a coverage map and roll out plan. I’m not an engineer, but at a young and impressionable age, I worked as a computer operator for Airfone, Inc. before it was sold the first time. I did call record collection and ran the nightly jobs. We had a big map up on the wall which showed the location of each ground station. We also kept charts of how many calls came in to each ground station each day. (This was long before the process was automated.) Today, the company has been sold once again. Since most people have cell phones and many break the law by using their cell phone in flight, call volume dropped to far too low of a level.

http://www.unwiredview.com/2008/06/09/jetblue-buys-verizons-airfone-network/

Nobody has said just how much was paid for the company by JetBlue, but I’m pretty certain I know why the company continues to find buyers and new life long after most have written it off. The groundstation network (those things which received the calls from the airplanes) was complete. After the engineers got done mapping out and building the groundstations they thought would be needed, they tested the network flying around to ensure no dropped calls. (This was pre-cell phone days, so “dropped calls” wasn’t common in the English language.) As a result, we ended up building a few more stations to plug some coverage holes. A favorite of the operations staff was Winnemucca, not only because it was fun to say, but because it had peak volumes of 2 calls per day except around Xmas time where it might spike to 4. It could go for days without ever getting a call.

Let me be the first to say that these groundstations, while not high tech by today’s standards, where neither cheap nor easy to build. Many were built on mountain tops (or as close as could legally be built to the top.) Some had their construction supplies helicoptered in because there were no roads. Months would go by before communications and electrical power could be trenched to them. We had a photo of one which had a grain scoop tied by rope about 10′ from the top of the tower. It looked odd up there in the summer time when they took the picture, but it was there for when a service tech had to drop from a helicopter in the winter and dig their way down to the door just to get inside and fix something.

This is a far cry from what cellular providers have to do today to service areas like the suburbs of Chicago or even rural America. Much of the time they simply have to sign a deal with a building or grain elevator owner, then stick an antenna on top and run some cabling.

Why was there a groundstation in Winnemucca? The story we operators were told was that it was a hole had been found during testing and that some very high roller people complained about dropped calls. We were told that these were the kinds of people who either carried around enough cash or gambled enough cash on any given day in Las Vegas to fund the company’s operation for a year.

So, long before cell phones became a phenomenon, there was a company building groundstations and erecting towers on mountain tops and servicing said equipment under some of the most god-awful conditions to provide a service certain clients absolutely had to have and others thought was a bit pricey. With that said, it was possible to get on the phone after taking off in New York and to talk all the way to Los Angeles if your pockets were deep enough. Most of the rest of the conversations where short and started with “Hey, you’ll never guess where I’m calling from…”

I guess it’s a lot like these Sprint coverage maps. Even looking at them you cannot tell if you’ll have service when you try.

This is a question which has been coming up more and more lately. Back in March I made quite a few posts on that author site I hang out on stating the business model could not survive. I have even had a previous blog entry about it last year some time I think.

Here is a prediction for you though:

Inside of three years there will either be no large publishing houses, or their financial condition will be worse than Borders was two years ago.

The future printed market is not wide scale distribution through traditional, but “available exclusively at xxx” like Craftsman used to be available only at SEARS.

I did some research and found that when book buyers at Target choose a title for their on-line book club (I didn’t even know they had a book club of any kind) it is generally a minimum 100,000 copies sold, but usually closer to 250,000 copies. We are, of course, currently talking about books available to the general book buying community. Currently they are using some broker/distributor which I have never heard of, but I cannot believe that company is getting into the middle of book buying transactions for free. If Target wants to really wade into the $10 hard cover market it is going to have to start making deals directly with Indie authors and small publishers. The other Big Box stores are all moving into the book market and many have joined the $10 hard cover battle.

While it is quite true that nobody could possibly hate Amazon.com more than I do, here is an interesting article.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704912004575253132121412028.html?KEYWORDS=vanity+press+goes+digital

Please note the portion which says Amazon will be printing this book. It didn’t say Simon & Shuster (sp?), Random House, or any other large publisher. Amazon is going to print the book and compete directly with publishers who are selling books via their site. Quite frankly, this is the new model…well close to it.

1. Books will be initially released in PDF or eBook form via authors directly (hopefully with heaps and gobs of professional editing first, because right now a lot of raw sewage gets released by CreateSpace and the other enabling firms which don’t mandate any professional editing.)

2. A paid reader for one of the big box chains will read and like one of the titles.

3. After checking with the author and verifying no other deals are on the table they will kick the title up to the buyer.

4. The buyer will skim or just take at face value the paid reader’s recommendation, then make an offer to the author of “available exclusively at XXX”. No investment will be required by the author, they will simply pay them roughly $2.00/copy and contract out the printing themselves. Deal good for one year with right of extension.

5. Author will tell friends and jump with joy when they see a small add in the weekly sales flyer for their local store.

6. Some 30-90 days later, checks will start arriving and author will be quite happy.

The new model won’t have 20 layers of middle people all taking a cut. There won’t be pulped print runs (unless there is a major printing error) as we’ve all seen these stores run “end of season clearance” sales, which is what they will do with the few titles they buy and don’t put on the book club list.

New authors will end up with something they never get from a major publishing house. Marketing! These big box stores know how to work their customer base and they won’t select a title which doesn’t feed directly into their market. The companies buying movie options will have something they don’t often get…real numbers and direct feedback from Joe and Jane consumer who paid for and read the book. (Most of those big box book clubs have on-line forums for people to comment on the books.) In short, we won’t have to live through another “Sahara” movie or court drama.

http://www.omm.com/newsroom/News.aspx?news=767

Major grocery and supermarket chains have also started wading into the book business, and even the $10 hard cover battle.

http://new.publishersweekly.com/pw/print/20090427/17159-books-stay-part-of-the-grocery-store-mix-.html

Meijer has taken books in their store from a small rack on a back wall to a section of the store which stocks roughly 100,000 units according to some sources.

Think about it. What is pretty much the only thing fueling the growth of POD right now? Scams telling Indie authors they can make big money paying an exorbitant per unit printing cost if they “publish” with this service, only printing books as needed…after they pay for NNN copies up front. While there are legitimate business reasons to move long tail titles into POD, printing first run books which are not low volume textbooks or graphics intense is simply inexcusable. Toner puts out a much lower quality product at a much higher cost than ink. You need to have a print run of around 1,000 copies to get the benefits of ink, but for a big box store that is going to print 100,000 – 250,000 copies initially (or only 5,000 copies if the title is to be a regular shelf title) this is not a problem. (Actually, some of the direct to plate printers can only print about 50,000 copies with a single set of plates, so the bigger runs would be scheduled as separate runs of 50,000 each.)

Amazon has already fired the first volley. They have announced that THEY, not one of the publishers supplying them with books, will be the printer for that woman’s book. This won’t be an isolated case with them. It is one of the reasons they make it so free and easy for Indie authors to get books onto the Kindle. They want the Kindle to be the screen for those titles they choose to print. Now other retailers will have to buy books FROM Amazon if they want the title. If it sold 36,000 eBooks, it will most likely sell enough print copies to warrant shelf space. Some current industry numbers put eBooks at 5% of unit sales for a title: 0.05x = 36,000 x = 36,000 / 0.05 x = 720,000 if the industry analysts are correct.

Yes, there will be some die hard book buyers who will say nothing compares to the experience of reading a book with a $12 Latte before buying it from a book store. They are a minority. Everybody has to eat and go to the bathroom. This means everybody shops at either a supermarket or a big box store with a grocery section every week. If you don’t consider yourself a book buyer, how often do you actually go into a book store? Only during the Christmas shopping season? I thought so.

As a travelling consultant you would think that I would encounter this situation more often than I do. Well, one would think that if they didn’t know I usually try to take contracts long enough in length that I can move directly into a Corporate Housing unit rather than a hotel. My current contract was a phone call of desperation out of the blue. It seems that I specialize in these contracts anymore…off-shore resource brought in was a supposed OpenVMS expert…they sat at the client site sucking air for a length of time without ever actually doing anything and without bothering to buy a copy of my OpenVMS application development book in a desperate attempt to learn the platform…now project is desperately behind and off-shore consulting company is about to be thrown out on their collective asses unless they bring someone in to get the project back on track…I’m sure you guys have heard this all before. No off-shore project ever actually succeeds, they simply have success redefined to be whatever got delivered and all documentation about what was requested shredded.

The unseen downside I’m talking about today though, is the hotel industry. There have been too many commercials on television for the cheap hotel and travel sites. It worked out well when they were a secret know buy a connected few thousand business travelers. It was even OK when they were known by mom & dad planning to take that trip to spend some time with the grand kids. It’s certainly not OK now. Last night was a shining example of that.

Hotels are hard hit. Really be hotels are the hardest hit of all. They are also the hotels capable of offering the cheapest room rates via those travel sites…but…none of those travel sites make a bidder read and sign a “Code of Conduct” before allowing them to book their hotel stay. None of those hotel sites ask for driver’s license or perform a background check prior to renting someone with a “valid” credit card a room. None of that matters when they are surfing the 2 star and under bracket, but now things are tight enough you can get 3.5 stars and up for around $45/night. I know I booked this 3.5 star hotel for 21 nights at $45/night. When the hotel is selling rooms at this rate to business travellers they are getting customers who implicitly understand the code of conduct for hotels in the higher star brackets. They also tend to spend a bit more on the over priced drinks at the hotel bar and opt to purchase the $12 breakfast buffet which doesn’t come with the room. We are odd creatures we business travelers. When we spend over $50 for a room we want some kind of breakfast thrown in, but under $50 we will go ahead and buy breakfast.

What is happening now is that a lot of the “ Motel 6” crowd is finding its way into the 3 star and up hotels. I don’t begrudge anyone who knows how to behave in such a hotel getting a great room at a cheap price. The Motel 6/Red Roof Inn/frat party crowd on the other hand, I begrudge whole heartedly. You see, they are the ones that tend to check in shit-faced drunk at 8:30pm then put one guy on the luggage cart with two pushing down the hallway screaming their heads off. Not only does it piss off the other guests (some of whom didn’t book via those hotel sites and paid near full price for their rooms) it overworks the understaffed front desk which must now send someone up to the room in question to educate the people about proper hotel etiquette and the fact that if they don’t quiet down the police will have to be brought in to haul their asses out of the building.

Like logic ever works with someone that drunk and rowdy.

Hotels need to offer two different rates to these discount sites. One rate for customers which have already provided the driver’s license of EVERY OCCUPANT and all have come back with a clean background check, and the near list price rates for those people who have a few drunk and disorderly or other arrests in their background. It’s not that those people cannot be entertaining to be around, and generally good people otherwise, it’s just that there is a higher percentage chance they end up having cart races down the hall while other guests are asleep.

There are times when I could save myself a lot of heart ache if I followed my instincts or took my own advice. Recently, I’ve been back in Dublin, OH doing some work for a new client out that way. The start date was kind of rushed so I didn’t get everything packed I wanted to or configured the way it would be needed. I even had to use my own notebook at the client site, a thing which doesn’t happen often in this day and age. Of course, this is one of the last few remaining sites in the world still using Windows on the desktop, so my unused Vista Home Premium partition has been pressed into service.

I guess you could say this frustration started a few years ago. After having nothing but miserable experiences with the Winbook I purchased at Micro Center. I was told by many that the motherboard in it was by Toshiba, yet, a year or so later when they had supposedly high end Toshiba A215 notebooks on sale for next to no money, I ignored my own advice and bought one. It’s a classic Toshiba product, a boat anchor the day it was made. Advertized as having a “faxmodem”, just like the Winbook, it has only a modem. The thing was also strangled with only 2Gig of RAM. Ubuntu could work fine, but multiple terminal sessions open along with a couple browser windows and Vista was wheezing like death warmed over.

I tolerated this condition for a couple of weeks, but could take it no longer. Despite knowing I would be better off to buy the memory at Micro Center and installing it myself, I called the local Worst Buy to chat with the Geek Squad since they were close to the hotel where I was staying. They wanted $39 labor to put the thing in. I knew I was being Googled by that fee, but I persisted. I asked them to quote the memory price (knowing full well a 2Gig module for this notebook goes for around $50) and the person on the phone said they had them for around $55.

After arriving at the store, I was told I had to go pick out the memory from the store floor. Naturally the only memory module they had was listing for over $70. The sales rep swore I couldn’t possibly have been quoted a price of around $50. I took the thing back over to the Geek Squad desk and told him about the price shaft. After confering with the person in the back, the one I actually spoke with, he told me I was quoted an “Internet Only” price, but if they could find a matching price they could price match it for me. I stood there for a while longer letting the price of not having brought a toolkit sink in. This $50 upgrade was now over $120 and climbing. Finally, I picked up my notebook and walked out of the store.

Life sucked at work the following day without having done the memory upgrade. When it was over I surfed to the Micro Center Web site and sure enough, they had the EXACT SAME BRAND memory module for $55. Apparently the Geek Squad computers don’t bother checking the stores which will actually be lower in price. Guess what? They also had a screw driver set on sale for $4.99 as I walked in the door.

Once I arrived back at the hotel room, it took longer to cut the memory module out of its plastic container than it did to do the actual installation.

Actual cost of Upgrade? $60 + tax.

Not getting Googled by Geek Squad? Priceless

It’s a beautiful day outside, and after spending some time playing with the puppy and thinking of things gone by, I got to thinking about the car I miss most. There have been a few cars that I loved over the years. Some I kept well beyond 100,000 miles long before that was considered normal or acceptable. One car which I really miss is my 1990 Eagle Premier Ltd. Since most of you probably don’t even remember that car, let me provide you a few links:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eagle_Premier

http://www.allpar.com/model/premier.html

It was the end of AMC and the beginning of the Iococca golden years at Cryco. It also happened to be when I finally had 120,000+ miles on my AMC Concord station wagon and had to look around for a new ride. (I actually didn’t trade the Concord, but sold it later, with > 130,000 miles on it, to some high school aged brothers who put a transmission in it and handed it down betwixt the three of them.) It wasn’t just the first time I had a job paying enough to let me buy a brand new car either, although many will try to that.

The Premier had lines like nothing else on the road at the time. It was one of the first production cars in an “average joe” price range to feature interior climate control. Some of you might not remember that phrase, but, when set on automatic, you chose a temperature and it chose everything else. For its day, the V6 had balls to spare. While there are faster 4 door sedans on the road now, the Premier held its own matching wheels against BMW and Mercedes models it/I encountered…of course…that was back when radar detectors actually worked and the patrol officers had a little more leeway in judgement…<sigh>

Probably the coolest thing, which I haven’t seen duplicated on any car ever again, was the “wings” on the steering column putting the most used controls within reach of your fingertips so your hands never had to leave the wheel. It lead to a beautiful and clean looking dash. I remember the bizarre turn signal which was a paddle that didn’t stick. You moved it like a regular turn signal, but it followed your finger back. The turn signal stayed on and used the same “chime” as the rest of the car’s features, so it was a bit difficult for the untrained owner to tell if the turn signal was on or someone hand managed to open a door without making any noise.

As I recall, even with the way I drove it, that car averaged in the low 20’s MPG wise. Pretty much about the same as my current Buick Rendezvous. Funny, but we have had 20 years of “improvements” from Detroit and a V6 with a 4 speed automatic still gets about 24 MPG on the highway in real life and 17-19 around town.

I have to admit. If I was shopping for a car and Cryco announced they were re-introducing the Eagle Premier Ltd. I would order one before production even got started. Of all the cars I’ve owned, it’s the one I miss the most.

It has really gone too far. I don’t follow sports at all, but I heard the bullshit reasons for expelling one U.S. Team member prior to the closing ceremonies, now we read this:

The International Olympic Committee will investigate the actions of Canadian women’s hockey players who celebrated their gold medal victory Thursday night by swigging beer and smoking cigars on the ice in Vancouver.

A number of players, including 18-year-old superstar Marie-Philip Poulin, were drinking alcohol on the ice following the team’s 2-0 defeat of the United States. (The legal drinking age in British Columbia is 19.) Players lingered for more than 70 minutes after the awards ceremony reveling in the arena, which was empty except for media and arena staff.

For crying out loud! They’re Canadian! They drink and smoke, thus enjoying life, much like we used to here in the U.S.A. until we allowed religious zealots that are one hijacked plane away from being the next Bin Laden into our governmental process. Now, everything which makes life worth living is taxed out of existence and banned in most places you would want to do it. Our jobs are being shipped over seas and viciously poor quality product is coming back in return, along with payoffs into the pockets of the terrorists which have been put into government by those same religious zealots who claim abortion is killing yet blow up abortion clinics with patients and workers inside.

Let me go on record as telling this terrorist organizations the following: You may have fucked America beyond recognition by taxing and or removing alcohol, tobacco, and all real pleasure known by man, BUT LEAVE CANADA ALONE. All one has to do is take one glance at this debacle known as health care reform to know that one more religious zealot added to the mix would make us the next Iran, not something any country would want to be, except the “moral minority” bound and determined to force their religious practices upon the world…just like Bin Laden.

It’s bad enough when massive banks which took millions, and in some cases billions, in taxpayer bailout money, import L1 and H1 visa workers with little to no care about either taxpayer opinion or national security. We’ve even gotten used to the “consulting firms” which were flying operatives over on tourist visas then billing them out as consultants to clients and paying these people on a 1099. Thankfully the IRS caught onto it as well and now there is a massive round up going on. Now, the colleges are even openly funding al-Qaeda. Of course, the IRS seems to have caught onto it at roughly the same time a guy was busted in Denver for buying lots of hydrogen peroxide for another group of guys in New York. Now CEO’s and HR executives are quaking in their boots because when the case goes to trial, those who signed the sponsorship will find out they agreed to serve the same sentence as the convicted.

Back in December, near the 15 ^th, a technical college in Madison Wisconsin put out an “ immediate need” requirement for a technical writer. In January, they decided to bundle all 89 IT project requirements they had into one massive bid. At no point was there a requirement that submitted candidates had to be a U.S. Citizen. Judging from the phone calls I received on this, there was also no requirement that any consulting firm submitting candidates for bid have a single U.S. Citizen on their payroll or in management. English certainly wasn’t required to be the primary language of anyone involved, which makes one wonder what the result of all the writing would be.

The “immediate need” still has not been filled. It’s now February 17 ^th, so this has gone on for more than two months. If a technical college is teaching their IT students “immediate need” means under three months, then they well and truly are turning out useless graduates, but, they don’t care, because they are directing our tax dollars into an area with the highest probability of those funds ending up in the hands of al-Qaeda. While it is true that there have been home grown terrorists in the U.S., the bulk of the recruits and funding still lies overseas. While federal authorities can track all of the charities in this country which sympathise with and are suspected of directly funding acts of terrorism against this country, It is a much more daunting task when the money leaves this country in the form of payroll or savings and enters a banking system which is not electronically monitored.

Earlier this week, the college managed to release counts, but not lists of names of those they selected. They have repeatedly had time to send out communications to all those submitting that “high bids” will not be short listed. There is no adequate description of what a “high bid” is. There is also no mention that as a school receiving federal money in one fashion or another that they are required to pay the prevailing wage AS DETERMINED BY THE U.S. DEPARTMENT OF LABOR for each job.

Then again, you would think that a college, funded with federal tax dollars, either directly or indirectly via student loans and grants, and state tax dollars, either directly or indirectly, and the college savings accounts of U.S. Citizens in and around the area would demand that all contractors submitted be U.S. Citizens. It is the only ethical thing for them to do. So far, I have seen no evidence what-so-ever that is the case.

It’s been a while since all of the crimes happened. We still haven’t seen a criminal prosecution of Google executives, and as long as the Writer’s Guild has the drug induced fantasy that they will one day be adequately compensated, we never will see actual criminal justice handed out. This has lead to a new definition of “Googling”.

Googling The displaying on a Web site without permission or intent of financial compensation, copyrighted material, most notably books, in PDF or other easily pirated formats.

Given that nobody from Google has went to prison for it, this has become a new Internet Mega-Trend. There are now more and more sites engaging in the practice. One Googling site I discovered today doesn’t even try to look legitimate.

http://www.pdfqueen.com/

No ownership or contact information is displayed. Just like Google, they are breaking international law and they know it. It appears to have some serious crawling software behind it as well. When I was attempting to get my SOA book converted into EPUB format using Calibre, I found a number of bugs. I ended up sending the first 205 pages of the PDF file up as an attachment to the bug report as this file could reproduce every problem I was having. In order to look at that portion of the information in the bug database you had to be a valid registered user. I say this now because that very file and information leading back to it turned up on PDFQueen. There is no method listed for protesting the use of copyrighted material or requesting its removal.

Once again, I’ve been Googled.