Al's Blog-o-Sphere

A conversation on the Reason talk show on WECK this morning about the trouble someone had getting Verizon to honor an offer they mailed to potential FIOS customers reminded me of a recent phone adventure with DirecTV.

I had DirecTV installed a year ago and they threw in all kinds of extras for the first year. But the year is now up and I’m paying full price for everything now, so I’ve been watching the bill a little closer than usual. I opened my last bill and was shocked. Continue Reading…

Did you ever buy something online? Of course you did. Do you realize they track you and try to show you things they think you will buy again? Of course.

But does it really work? Does your history predict what you will buy in the future? Maybe, maybe not. In some cases it has no bearing on what you want to see or are looking for the next time you are shopping online. Continue Reading…

Well, today is the day that WIVB and WNLO will vanish from the sets of Time Warner cable customers. Time Warner took over in this area after Adelphia went belly-up a while ago.

From what I can figure out, the dispute is over LIN television, the parent company of WIVB and WNLO, wanting to charge the cable operator to carry their signals.

According to LIN Television, they want “less than a penny a day per station/per subscriber, for that ability to resell our station’s programming.” The also talk about “fair market compensation” for a signal that they make available over-the-air for free to individuals.

LIN Television’s side of the story is here and Time Warner’s side is here.

Now, I watch these channels either over the air (for free) or using DirecTV, neither of which is affected by this. So I have no axe to grind in this issue.

But I have an opinion. (Of course!) Continue Reading…

But how many people have died in the name of Democracy? or Capitalism?

You can twist things around to support almost anything.

I was reading a site called Don’t Join the Creepy Obamaton Cult: 40 Reasons not to Vote for Barack Obama (not a complete list) that Scott Leffler mentioned on his blog. Some of it was repeating things that have widely been disproven. A lot is taken out of context, or twisted to another way of looking at it. But a lot of it just left me saying to myself “you say that like it’s a bad thing.”

The site, apparently as “wide-right” as you can get, claims Obama is the most left-wing Senator in Congress, saying “Obama’s voting record is to the left of even leftist senators such as Ted Kennedy.” Gee, I think of Ted Kennedy as such an old fossil, that he’s pretty much irrelevant. As left-wingers go, he’s pretty conservative. That’s not Conservative^TM the political term, but conservative, as in stodgy. Being more Left, Right or anything than him should be easy.

The site is so far overboard, it runs a risk of not making it’s intended point, but of making the opposite point through sarcastic effect.

I can’t wait for Scott’s promised discussion on the McCain side of things tomorrow…