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Asides
Joshua’s gift from us this birthday.
Yesterday, Joshua presented us with the plan for his birthday, which looks like this:
And yes, I am slightly heartbroken that he chose The Phantom Menace instead of one of the original trilogy. But I will get over it.
The trending hashtag here is oddly melancholy.
Shannon Whitley, in an open letter to Ryan Sarver of Twitter, responding to the new Twitter API strategy statements:
I understand the thinking behind this strategy, “We must control input to the system. We need to have X in place to generate revenue using Y.” I don’t have to tell you how wrong this thinking is, but somehow it’s moved beyond a bean counter’s dream into reality. Somehow, everyone in the boardroom forgot about Twitter’s history of amazing innovation due to having an open API. They forgot that Twitter is a beautiful messaging platform with unlimited potential. Twitter has unlimited potential specifically because innovation on top of the API has been largely unlimited, until now.
What Twitter is doing right now is exactly what happens when you build your platform without a revenue strategy. Now, the strategy appears to be incompatible with the innovation that has come before.
On Friday, State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley denounced the conditions of Bradley Manning’s detention as “ridiculous, counterproductive and stupid,” forcing President Obama to address those comments in a Press Conference and defend the treatment of Manning. Today, CNN reports, Crowley has “abruptly resigned” under “pressure from White House officials because of controversial comments he made last week about the Bradley Manning case.” In other words, he was forced to “resign” — i.e., fired.
Boy, we sure did get that change we were looking for in government, didn’t we?
Earlier, I chose the quickest method of communication to reach the most people we would have told (Twitter) that we were expecting a child, but by now I’m sure most of you know that we have unfortunately miscarried. Many of you have already sent us kind words and encouragement. I may write more later, but words aren’t readily available yet. The words may never arrive.
Those of you who know me know that I don’t hide my emotions well. I chose to share our good news early so you, my family, friends, and colleagues, could celebrate with us and share in our happiness. I appreciate that you are also so willing to share and offer your condolences in our sorrows and I am grateful beyond words for your love.
I’ve said before that being a parent is the source of both the greatest joys and the greatest sadnesses in my life. Today it is more the latter.
What it’s doing outside my door right now:
The five-day forecast, illustrating what’s more normal for this time of year:
AT&T says it will implement a 150GB monthly cap on landline DSL customers and a 250GB cap on subscribers to U-Verse high speed internet starting on May 2nd. AT&T will also charge overage fees of $10 for every additional 50GB of data, with two grace periods to start out — in other words, the third month you go over the cap is when you’ll get charged. DSLReports says it has confirmation from AT&T that these rates are legitimate, and that letters will go out to customers starting March 18th.
AT&T says that this will only affect about “2%” of their customers, but does anyone want to wager that I’m in the 2%?
I recently canceled my U-Verse television service and elected to receive my content over a combination of OTA HD and streaming services like iTunes/AppleTV and a subscription to MLB.tv. I was planning on having two or three baseball games on in the background per day. I suppose the fact that I’m not paying their ridiculous TV subscription rates but still finding ways to consume content makes me a “bad customer.”
I would jump ship to Charter, but I’ve had experience with their customer service before, and I don’t really want to go through that again. I’m also pretty sure that it’s only a matter of time before every ISP in the US is capping bandwidth like this.
This is what’s left from last year’s lawn care debacle:
Very little of what is green in this image is the type of grass you want on your lawn. I finally caved this year and hired a service to help me take care of the weed killing and fertilizing. I’m not sure I’ll have much of a yard left.