I just watched “Aoi Hana” and I have one major gripe

But first some background information.

It’s the day after the New Year so I had all the time in the world to pursue my various recreational interests. I was in a shoujo-ai type of mood today, so I first finished watching Sasameki Koto, which I had began watching again yesterday after stalling on it since I watched the first few episodes when it was initially airing. It was all right. In fact, it was pretty decent.

kazama ushiokazama ushio

When I was a little kid and we had two kittens, I always had this fear that I would kill one or both of them by hugging it too hard and breaking its neck or spine or something. You know the feeling: that one where something is cute to the extent that you need to squeeze it harder than you really ought to and its brains come out through the eye sockets, which are empty because the eyes already popped because of the immense pressure caused by the hug? Well, that’s what’s going on with that Kazama Ushio character. The achievement of that effect on the viewer means the art directors, casting people for voice actors, writers and, of course, Takamoto Megumi, the voice actor herself, did a real bang-up job there. Cheers to pushing the envelope on cutesy, huggable characters. Who knows how far we can go?

I did find myself growing bored occasionally. I liked Akemiya the trap though.

So I went ahead and watched Aoi Hana, expecting more or less a similarly structured deal. That is, a yuri harem type of setting with generic high school girl archetypes (i.e. sporty girl, bungaku girl, miko, etc…). That’s more or less what I got, so I have no complaints there.

The problem, and maybe I’m crazy here, is that I thought that the main voice actor who played Manjoume Fumi could not possibly have been a worse fit for the role.
aoi hanaaoi hanaaoi hanaaoi hana

She sounded more like one of those meek, princessy type characters. The tall partner in these yuri deals are supposed to have a much, much deeper and even-toned voice. Everybody knows that. Like Utena. The short one is supposed to be the more timid one. Granted, the Fumi character was hella meek, but she never once appears like a character with such a high and whiny voice. Tall characters are simply not supposed to sound like that.

There have been plenty of successful meek, tall characters who have not had squeaky, whiny voices in anime history. Just look at Sakaki.

sakaki

Much less do meganekko have voices like that! Every time she spoke I cringed. And not so much because I thought the CV was doing a bad job or anything, it’s just that the voice so completely clashed with the character and the body language assigned to her.

This really ruined my day. Thanks a lot, Mr. Casting Director for stealing away my smile. Now how will I get it back?

FiOS just keeps getting better and better

Firewire card

This firewire card served me loyally since 2004, now it's time for him to meet the great OEM in the sky

That’s my firewire card. Or at least it was. It’s dead now. There’s a connection here between the title of this post and the image, which I’ll get to presently.

Apparently the FCC requires that television service providers offer consumers STBs with active IEEE 1394 ports. I just learned this recently when I was idly wondering whether or not it was possible to copy recorded programs from my Verizon DVR to an external storage device or the hard drive of my computer.

It turns out that you can’t. In the process of confirming that though I found out that Verizon STBs not only have an “active” firewire port but that you can actually capture live television programming by connecting the STB to any computer with a firewire port. You can also play a recorded program on the DVR and capture it as it plays to your computer via firewire.

It’s always been my default position, more or less, to view the FCC as fulfilling some sort of adversarial role with respect to the goals and ideals of the tech crowd, but this development may force me to modify my views. I really don’t understand what purpose such a law could serve other than making life easier for copyright infringers.

Hell, I bought my Hauppauge HD-PVR more or less to exploit its component connections to record whatever I wanted from broadcast TV. That was before I had a DVR though.

Which brings me to the next thing that I’m astounded at: you can record 5C encrypted programming on Verizon DVRs and play it back! Of course, you can’t play it or anything if you record it via firewire, but if you just want to play it back on your DVR then it actually works!

Not that I’m complaining, but that doesn’t make any sense. I figured that with a Verizon DVR you’d be able to record clear QAM channels only. But I can record anything it seems, even premium channels like HBO.

The ability to capture programs via firewire is great though, since I don’t have to spend money on a capture card this way. I don’t get degraded recordings this way either like I do when I resort to using my HD-PVR. The firewire recordings are the actual MPEG transport streams themselves, so you get the untouched video, audio and even closed captions. This is nice for both pirates and honest people like me. Pirates can give the TS to their encoder friends who then share the file. Honest folks like me also benefit though because I can encode the file however the hell I want. I can do a low CRF x264 encode for archival purposes if I don’t care about storage space, I can do an SD XviD encode to play on my hardware player, I can make an iPod or PSP version of the recording, author a Blu-ray disc, video DVD, etc…

One complaint that I have about the firewire recording though is that some of the HD local channels are 5C encrypted even though they’re not supposed to be. For example, CBS HD is 5C encrypted and cannot be played back if recorded via firewire. CBS SD though is not. It’s mildly irritating since I kinda thought that this was illegal. The only HD channels that it seems one can record via firewire and actually play back are NBC, Fox, ABC, 9 (the one that used to be UPN) and 11. Possibly PBS too, I can’t remember. Ultimately it makes the utility of this discovery somewhat limited, but it’s still pretty far out that it was the government that mandated it.

Anyway, as soon as I found this out I started getting cryptic BSODs here and there when starting D-VHS, the program people seem to use for firewire captures. After getting such a BSOD my PC wouldn’t turn back on for quite some time, about thirty minutes to an hour. No beeps, no BIOS splash screen, nothing at all. After leaving the PSU switch off or unplugging the computer for some time it would eventually come back alive and function normally as though nothing had happened.

After a few days of successfully making firewire captures (with progressively more BSODs) I came to the realization that it was my firewire card that was causing the problem. I could use the PC for hours without a BSOD as long as I didn’t open D-VHS. Once I did I was certain to get a BSOD. So I removed the firewire card and now the PC works fine again. I don’t know what the hell happened. I always thought that a PC component either worked or it didn’t work, not that it may sometimes work and other times prevent your PC from turning on at all.

This all happened within a few days of my discovery of the “active” firewire port on the STB. I feel ripped off. As soon as I discover something great that the government has done for me, some unrelated technical issue prevents me from actually taking advantage of the FCC’s goodwill.

I’m now eagerly awaiting my new firewire card to arrive in the mail. In the meantime though I can still record onto my old iBook G4 using some programs included in the Apple Firewire SDK.

I feel like they must have taught this in grade school

…on a day when I was absent. I can never figure out the etiquette on city buses. I was on the bus yesterday and a very uncomfortable situation arose. The way I see it, this is the type of situation that only a caring, sensitive fellow like me would even perceive as uncomfortable. The majority of people are probably too inconsiderate to even realise that this is an issue. But I digress.

The issue I refer to is that I still don’t have a set-in-stone code for where to sit when boarding a bus. Obviously, the seats marked as “priority seating” are for cripples, hags, geezers and the like, so I avoid those. As long as it’s not a particularly crowded bus, however, there’s still a wide array of seating choices even after eliminating the priority seating area.

The only consistent pattern I have when it comes to choosing where to sit on a bus, when given the choice, is that I usually avoid the double window seats. Of course, like everything I say, there’s a good reason for this. The reason is that it’s a lose-lose situation. First of all, it’s always more pleasant to have a seat to yourself than to share it with a stranger. Therefore, if I get on the bus and the double window seats each have one person in them while the rows of seats towards the back of the bus are relatively free, I will almost always choose to sit in one of the longer rows of seats in the back of the bus so that the people in the double seats can have as much space as they want. Plus, there’s always that instantaneous panic that manifests itself immediately before sitting right next to a stranger on public transportation. What if he or she emits a foul stench? What if he or she has luggage? Do you offer to let the stranger put some of his or her luggage down by your feet if he or she has too many bags to fit on his or her own side of the double seat? What if he or she is drunk? What if he or she is eating a messy food? It could spill on you. What if he or she is someone you have once met but don’t recognise? Not saying hello will surely come back to haunt you at some point in the future. Any of these things — or a combination thereof — could easily happen to you if you sit in a double seat.

This is a different bus model, but the double seats are almost the same

The second reason not to sit in a double seat is that if you’re sitting in the seat closest to the window and someone sits down in the seat adjacent to the aisle, you have no choice but to awkwardly excuse yourself when you need to get off. One of two things can happen, both of which are mildly uncomfortable. One possibility is that you politely excuse yourself and squeeze past the person. This is awkward for both of you. The other possibility is that you politely excuse yourself and the person stands up and moves into the aisle to provide you with an easier pathway. This is also unpleasant because it arouses guilt in you for slightly inconveniencing the stranger so that you could get off the bus.

Now let’s consider the possibility that you are sitting in the seat by the aisle, rather than the one by the window. The same problems arise, except this time in reverse. If somebody is already sitting by the window when you sit down by the aisle, then you will at some point have to let the person through so that he or she can get off the bus at his or her stop. It’s unpleasant for you because if you stand up, you’re being accommodating to an unusual degree. On the other hand, if you don’t stand up you’re being an asshole. You lose no matter what.

The only way to avoid unpleasantness when sitting in a double seat is not to have anyone sit next to you for the entire duration of your trip. This is precisely why I never sit in a double seat if given the choice.

Even if there is nobody in any of the double seats, I will take a seat in one of the longer rows in the back of the bus or, depending on which bus I’m on, in one of the single seats on the driver side of the bus because someone could eventually sit next to me if I sat in a double seat. Of course, if there are double seats that already have one person in them, I will not sit in them if there are other seats available because I don’t want to have to let the person past me when it is his or her stop.

The only time I will sit in a double seat is if there are no other seats available and there is nobody standing on the bus. If there is one person standing and one seat available in a double seat, I will not sit in that double seat. However, if there is one seat available in a double seat and nobody else is standing, I will take the available seat because I am even more of an obstruction to people trying to get off the bus standing in the aisle than I am while sitting in a seat.

Now, you may ask yourself why I don’t simply always sit in the single seats on the driver side of the bus. The reason is almost completely irrational, based mostly on my own experiences, but I tend to avoid those seats because when a lunatic boards the bus he or she inevitably hangs out around the front of the bus, which is where the single seats are located. The bus I most often take is very popular with lunatics. On a related note, I should mention that I actually only take buses very rarely, since the subway is adequate most of the time. There are only a few buses I take with any degree of regularity, since the subway really is faster and more convenient most of the time (incidentally, I do have a set of battle-tested, iron-clad rules for seating in subways, with separate editions for both MTA and PATH trains). For some reason, I have never been on a bus with a lunatic in the back. They always hang out in the front because they like to harass the driver. That’s not to say that lunatics don’t harass passengers — they certainly do — but in my experience, their primary target is usually the driver. If the driver ignores them that’s when they harass the passengers. But they stick near to the driver to prod him or her every so often for a response they find satisfying or to criticize the MTA, give advice on route changes, suggest shortcuts, recite a shopping list, ask for directions, complain about the VA or to mess with the railing thing by the MetroCard reader.

Anyway, if I’m on a bus that doesn’t get very many lunatics I actually do try to sit in the single seats on the driver side. During morning and evening rush hour as well as the time when schools are getting out there are usually no lunatics on my usual bus, so it’s worth it to take a single seat.

I got onto a bus yesterday just a few minutes before 3:00 PM and I was the only passenger. Though it was, in fact, close to school closing time I went straight for the back of the bus. I knew that the stop immediately after the one that I got on at was right in front of an elementary school. I figured that there would be many parents and children waiting for the bus. I estimated that there would be a number of duos of one adult and one child, so I figured that they would quite nicely fill up the double seats by the windows. It must have been 2:59 PM or something and school hadn’t quite let out yet because only one trio got on the bus. It was what appeared to be a mother and two very young kids. I guessed they must have been first graders or something. I was proud of myself for sitting in the back since I assumed the two kids and the mother would take a double seat and either one single seat or one seat from another double seat. Instead, the two kids got on board the bus and immediately ran to precisely where I, the only other passenger on the entire bus was sitting and sat down across from me. It was a minute or two before the mother came after them since it seemed she was having trouble with her MetroCard. She came back and sat down next to the two kids, who were sitting in the row of three seats directly across from me. I was sitting in the seat farthest towards the back in the three seat row opposite from them.

I was pissed off. Of course, I wasn’t pissed off at the kids so much as I was pissed off at myself, for what seemed to a be a total lack of foresight. Of course, groups of three people would want to take a three-seat row to themselves. There were three rows of three seats on the bus, but one of them was the collapsible row of three seats that has straps to secure a wheelchair in place, which I always try to avoid sitting in, when possible. One of them was the row I was sitting in and the last was now occupied by the two kids and the woman who I took to be their mother.

That wasn’t the end of my failure though. I had agonized before leaving my landfill over whether to bring a book to read on the bus. Generally, I always bring a book to read when I anticipate taking the subway. The reason is that when someone comes on the train asking for money to pay for their rent, lunch or insulin, it’s much easier to pretend you didn’t notice their request if you’ve got your face buried in a book or newspaper. It’s possible, though unlikely, that you could be so deeply engrossed in your book or newspaper that you didn’t notice the guy talking about how he lost his fingers in a bomb explosion and if you don’t have any money to give him then at least show him a smile. If you have a book or newspaper, then for all anybody else knows, you could simply have your attention focused very narrowly. If you’re just blankly staring at the floor though you end up looking like an uncaring miser.

I didn’t have any sort of bag with me yesterday though, so before leaving I finally came to the conclusion that I didn’t want to bring a book and just carry it in my hands the entire time I was out, especially since it’s a relatively short bus ride. Moreover, I didn’t want to bring a bag for the sole purpose of carrying my book, a book that I didn’t even have much desire to read, whose only value was its capability to make it look like I was distracted.

I regretted that decision immensely as I sat there, trying vainly to avoid eye contact with the two first-graders sitting across from me while disguising the considerable effort that it took to do so.

There are windows behind the three-seat rows. For the sixty seconds or so between the time I initially sat down on the bus and the time the children got on the bus I had been happily looking out the window immediately across from me, watching the familiar scenery of my neighbourhood drift by, proud of myself for my excellent choice of seat for the additional reason that it had an unrivaled view, adding to its value as a relatively shielded area from lunatics.

Once the children and their mother got on the bus, however, I could no longer stare straight blankly ahead, as I had hoped to be able to do for my entire ride. Staring straight ahead would force me to make eye contact with one of the small children. 3D children are not to my liking. 2D is all fine and good but 3D children pose 3D risks, so the last thing in the world that I wanted to do was make eye contact with a 3D first-grader, especially in the presence of this woman who I took to be its mother. Looking slightly to my left was the second first-grader. Looking even more to my left, but still not so far so as to make my neck turn in an obviously unnatural position to the observers across from me, was the mother. I certainly didn’t want to make eye contact with her either. She was stout and fearsomely protective in both appearance and deed. Looking to my right would have been unnatural as well, since there are no windows in that direction, only a row of seats perpendicular to our three-seat rows. My only choice was to crane my neck in an obviously strained manner to look out the next window over, which was in the middle of the bus. I stared for a while in that direction, but I could feel that to an observer, it was quite obvious that I was trying very, very hard not to look in the direction of the trio across from me.

I rolled up my sleeve dramatically and looked at my watch. I wear a high-tech, waterproof-up-to-200-meters, digital watch with a stopwatch, world clock and date display. It doesn’t take long to read a digital watch. It takes even less time to read mine, due its undeniable superiority over all other watches. I pretended like I had an analog watch though and furrowed my eyebrows as though I had forgotten how to tell time. I held that position for as long as seemed believable. Since I was looking at my watch while doing so, I can say that it only felt believable for about two seconds, after which any idiot could have read the time on their watch. I rolled my sleeve back down with less dramatic emphasis than when I had rolled it up.

I looked at the ground. The aisle is actually very narrow, unlike in my little drawing down there, so looking at the ground requires you to tilt your head pretty significantly downwards. I realised that this was also unnatural-looking and twisted my body around awkwardly to resume looking out the window up in the middle of the bus.

After what felt like an endless nightmare but was actually only the time it took to pass by one stop the mother took out two bananas, one for each of the kids. This bothered me even more somehow. Here I was, inhibiting their banana-eating plans. Who did I think I was?

I couldn’t get up and sit somewhere else though. If I did that it would be obvious that the only reason I was getting up was because I was uncomfortable sitting so near to children, and that would be downright unusual. Being a very usual sort of person, I knew I had to stay seated exactly where I was until it was my stop. Only an unusual person would get up before the bus had arrived at his or her stop. Only an exceedingly unusual person would get up and switch seats before the bus had arrived at his or her stop. I had to bear it with good will, so to speak.

At the next stop a mother, father and little girl, about the same age as the two that were already on the bus, boarded. Again, the mother and father seemed to have some trouble getting their MetroCards to work. Or perhaps they were paying with exact change and had to count it out? I was too mortified to notice how they paid at the time. In any case, the little girl bolted to the back of the bus and sat down in the seat furthest to the driver side in the row of seats against the back of the bus, perpendicular to the two rows of three seats each that the trio and I were sitting in. Having successfully paid, the mother and father followed about a minute later. The situation was now thus, where the three Wendells represent children, the two June Cleavers represent mothers and the one Ward Cleaver represents the father:
bus

There are windows behind me, the gardevoir, as well as behind the trio across from me. There are no windows behind the newcomers. The new girl starts looking out the window that I’m sitting in front of. From another perspective, she was looking directly at me. Things had gone from bad to worse.

At this point, I couldn’t even look down at the floor now, since the father, represented in the diagram by Ward Cleaver, was leaning very far forward in his seat so that he could make eye contact with his daughter while he tried to get her attention. Had I tried to look down towards the floor of the bus it would have just looked as though I was staring at the father. My only choice was to continue looking towards the front of the bus, which probably made me look like I was trying too hard to not to make eye contact with them.

As though things couldn’t get any worse, the newly arrived mother extracts a banana from her bag and gives it to her daughter. The father, for his part, produces a muffin from his bag and passes it to the mother who hands it to the girl, who proceeds to tear it to bits and make a mess of the place. In general, I think that people who eat in public who don’t have an actual medical reason to do so (eg. hypoglycemia) are in the wrong and should be encouraged to eat in designated places, such as restaurants, cafeterias or in their own homes. Children, however, can’t be expected to be that considerate, especially not children as young as these, so my frustration wasn’t directed at the children. To some extent, it would have been proper to be angry at the parents who, in each case, were the ones to produce the foods the children then ate. But I wasn’t even angry at them either. I was just angry at myself for ending up in such a situation.

I had already told myself I would not get up or switch seats. That would be too unusual. I had to bear it. So I spent the rest of the bus ride alternating between looking out the window and checking my watch every thirty seconds. Nobody else ended up getting on the bus. It really wouldn’t have been so bad if the bus were actually crowded, as I had expected it to be based on the time of day.

I think that part of what made this situation so agonizing was the mysterious way in which it was the kids themselves who chose to sit right next time, rather than the parents. When I was a first grader there was no fucking way I’d sit next to a stranger on a bus as long as I could avoid it. I would sit in the seat closest to the window in a double seat and have the adult I was with sit in the aisle seat. I wouldn’t have to sit next to any scary strangers that way. But those kids yesterday must have had some kind of a complex. I mean, I’m not even a typical stranger; I’m funny-looking. If given the choice, I’d never sit next to, across from or even on the same bus as me. All the more so if I was a little girl in first grade with a delicious muffin that I didn’t want stolen.

All in all, I blame society for this development.

It’s perfectly natural to have a crush on a fictional character

…but there’s a very fundamental problem with such one-sided love affairs that never occurred to me before today: unless you’re in love with HAL 9000, there’s a real human voice actor somehow entangled in your sick crush.

I came to the conclusion somewhere around the end of season 1 of Arakawa Under the Bridge that I was, like, majorly in love with P-ko. I’d only seen two shows that I knew of at the time in which Chiaki Omigawa had played a prominent character, P-ko from Arakawa Under the Bridge being one of them and the other being what’s-her-face from Seitokai Yakuindomo. At that point, I didn’t see the conflict, since I don’t go for sporty-types; I mainly like klutzy-types.

Mitsuba MutsumiP-koHotori Arashiyama

But watching Soredemo Machi wa Mawatteiru forced me to realise a strikingly basic flaw in my thinking; how do I know whether I am in love with the klutzy characters or the voice itself? Or is it a combination of the two factors? I don’t like the idea of being in love with a voice. On the other hand, I don’t have any strong objections to being in love with a fictional character. As I said, that, at least, is perfectly normal.

In order for that to work though, I need to ignore the rather glaring coincidence that the two characters this season whose klutziness continues to prove irresistibly alluring are both played by none other than Chiaki Omigawa.

It’s troubling to think that the voice actor plays any part in this sad inequality, since for all I know, Chiaki Omigawa could be a cannibal, or even worse: not clumsy. To the viewer, she’s just a name and I don’t like the idea of being in love with a living actor.

Still, it’s hard to ignore the coincidence. Maybe she should play some unappealing class representative-type characters soon so that I can prove to myself that it’s the clumsy characters I like, not the actor(s) who play them.

Also, I hit 4.0MB/s upload speed briefly the other day. Fibre optics is great.

I finally got FiOS

I can’t write a review of it yet or anything, but the installers did, in fact, come yesterday and managed, more or less, to complete the installation. I must say that these installers were some of the most professional and friendly people you could every hope to meet. To say they knew exactly what they were doing would be an understatement. I cannot praise them enough. There were four installers, which seemed like a really smart move, since three of them worked on the wiring while one of them worked on mounting and testing the ONT (which turned out to be defective, though they had extras with them).

The installers were scheduled to arrive between 8:00 AM and 12:00 PM. They arrived right on time at about 10:00 AM to look around the apartment before unloading and bringing their equipment inside. Unfortunately, Con Edison was digging up the street for some reason. Meanwhile, some other construction crew was digging up the street for an unrelated reason on the next block. It was bad timing because it meant that the Verizon installers didn’t have anywhere to park their truck. Since all of their equipment was in the truck it ended up taking an hour and a half for them to load it all up onto some handtrucks and wheel the stuff the several blocks from the truck to my building.

So if you include the time it took them to get the equipment from the truck to my place the whole installation took about 8 hours. But that’s not a complaint really, it wasn’t their fault that it took that long.

They actually finished most of what I expected to be the difficult bits of the installation in about an hour or two. That is, they ran fibre from the hole in the wall through which it enters the apartment to the place where they ONT was going to be installed. They finished that in about an hour. This was really where having four installers was a great idea, since three of them worked on running the fibre while one of them mounted the ONT, which presumably sped things up quite a bit.

Of course, I already had coax in all the rooms as well as in the hallway from Earthlink, so that also sped things up considerably (it was also cheaper since they may charge for running coax around an apartment, depending on what exactly they need to do). They actually got me a working Internet connection in only about two hours (four hours if you include the time spent waiting for them to get all their stuff into the apartment).

The rest of the time they spent doing various things, such as finding out that the ONT was somehow defective. I missed exactly how they figured that out, since the Internet connection had, at least, worked using the first one, but the guy said that one of the other installers had told him that he had performed some sort of test and that he had determined the ONT was no good. So they went ahead and got another one from the truck which was apparently working.

Once it was determined that the second ONT was working, it was just a matter of connecting it to the existing coax. Setting up the set top boxes was very easy; as soon as they were connected to the coax they did some sort of automatic activation procedure that took about ten minutes per box (had to restart that procedure for one of the boxes). I wasn’t actually required to do anything for the activation; the STBs just did it automatically without any user interaction being necessary. Afterward they all worked fine.

There are three telephone lines here. Two should be POTS and one should be what I think is called “FiOS Digital Voice”, which, to the extent that I understand it, is similar to VOIP but it never actually leaves the Verizon network, so it’s not exactly ever reaching the Internet. In any case, the digital one worked as soon as they replaced the bad ONT with the good ONT, but that’s the fax line. The two other lines are for voice calls. They didn’t work while the installers were still here. The installers said that it was not a problem with the setup here in the apartment or with the ONT but rather a bureaucratic issue that can only be fixed by someone essentially “turning on” the two telephone lines by changing some records in a database somewhere and that I should more or less just wait and see what happens. Though I was skeptical at first, the installer said to call him directly if the phone lines didn’t start working some time tomorrow (since by that point it was ~5:00 to 6:00 PM) since he could get through to the proper department that could make the fix more easily than I could. Sure enough, the phones did start working this morning. At this point the only thing that is not working is caller ID.

Now for the most important part: the speed tests. When the installer did a test using Verizon servers he got about 42Mbps downstream and I think 40Mbps upstream. Now that’s obviously amazing, but it wasn’t a proper speed test since it never left the Verizon network. Actual tests that I’ve been doing to non-Verizon servers are much lower. I like this website called Speed Guide, since it lets you look at results from other people based on hostname. So, for example, if I wanted to only see speed test results from FiOS customers in and around the New York City area, I could filter the search results to only view speed tests from people with RDNS ending in “nycmny.fios.verizon.net”. It also lets you save your own speed test history, so now I can look back at my results from my ADSL connection and marvel at how I didn’t kill myself. The top six tests below were from yesterday, right after the installers left at around 6:00 PM.

FiOS Speed Test

The nwrknj tests were not done with my connection. They were done elsewhere with a 15Mbps/5Mbps connection.

So I wasn’t getting the best results even when I used the New York test server. At other speed test sites I was getting mixed results, which were often much better than my results at any of the SG servers. I got carried away and ended up taking 40 speed tests at speedtest.net using servers in various places around the world. I was really surprised at the 42Mbps download speed from Nuuk, Greenland.

The router they gave me was an Actiontec MI424 WR Rev. F. It seems fine so far. They even let me keep my old ADSL modem/router that they initially gave me when I got the ADSL connection, not that I have any use for it now.

Torrent upload speeds vary. I have not yet hit 4MB/s, as I should theoretically be able to do based on some of the speed test results I’m getting. I did hit 1.7MB/s upload once though. The fastest I have uploaded to a single peer so far was 800KB/s to another FiOS customer in Syracuse, NY, but I’ve also managed to upload to a few Japanese peers at a sustained ~700KB/s. I still think that I need to do some reconfiguring of my client, such as increasing the maximum number of peers I connect to per torrent and the number of upload slots per torrent.

I’m not sure how uTP will work with this router yet. It always crashed the old Westell ADSL modem/router as well as my Linksys WRT54G with DD-WRT. I haven’t gotten around to trying uTP yet since I tend to have it turned off in uTorrent by habit.

All in all, I’m really very pleased with this.

UPDATE: Oct. 20 at ~4:00 PM caller ID started working. Now there’s not a thing at all that’s not working properly.

Verizon’s TOS kind of suck

I was looking at the Verizon TOS for some reason today, I suppose to psych myself up further about my forthcoming FiOS installation, and I noticed that there are some ridiculously vague (and therefore massively prohibitive) clauses in the agreement.

For example, according to the FiOS Acceptable Use Policy, customers are not allowed to,

post off-topic information on message boards, chat rooms or social networking sites

generate excessive amounts of email or other Internet traffic

use the service in any fashion for the transmission or dissemination of images containing child pornography or in a manner that is obscene, sexually explicit, cruel or racist in nature or which espouses, promotes or incites bigotry, hatred or racism

I agree with some of the terms of that last one. Specifically, I agree that the customer ought to be required to agree not to use the Service to engage in activities of any nature at all that violate a federal, state or local law (but the customer is already made to agree not to violate the law in a different clause, so the child pornography part should have been covered by that). However, most of those things aren’t illegal. In fact, Verizon specifically states in the same agreement that the customer must agree essentially to not be a prude and blame Verizon if they accidentally come across something on the Internet or via FiOS TV that they find offensive:

You acknowledge that the Service will allow access to information which may be sexually explicit, obscene or offensive, or otherwise unsuitable for children. You agree…that Verizon is not responsible for access by you or any other users to objectionable or offensive content.

So it seems like a clear contradiction, if you ask me. On the one hand, you must acknowledge that the Service gives you access to materials that may be “obscene” to some people (which cannot be legally determined until someone actually asserts that something is “obscene”, since something is not “obscene” until it is subjected to the Miller Test, which cannot be done without a jury). Yet on the other hand, you’re not allowed to transmit “obscene” materials. In fact, the TOS are impossible to agree to, since if I agree that the Service gives me access to obscene materials, I cannot also agree that I will not “transmit” any of the “obscene” materials that the Service is giving me access to.

I think FiOS TV has the Playboy Channel if you pay extra for it. If you had a jury full of puritanical zealots from Evangelicalville, TX then I think there’s a pretty good chance they’d call it “obscene” on all three prongs of the Miller Test. They’d consider “community standards” to refer the community standards of Evangelicalville, TX, so of course it violates those. As for depicting sexual conduct in a “patently offensive” way, they’d almost certainly agree that it does (again, since they can be assumed to be a bunch of prudes). Finally, they would most likely quickly agree that it has no artistic merit. Hell, I think that under that last prong at least, most shotacon would stand a better chance than Playboy.

The “excessive amounts of email or other Internet traffic” thing is also irritating. It’s only irritating though because Verizon has this big sparkly announcement on their FiOS front page about how, unlike their nasty competitors, they don’t throttle their customers.
fios home page
But if they reserve the right to arbitrarily impose bandwidth caps on their customers without prior notification, that’s equivalent, abstractly speaking at least, to what their competitors do. At least it’s with the same intention in mind. It wouldn’t be annoying at all if Verizon would come off their high horse and be honest about it. In fact, I would even respect them quite a bit if they came right out on their TV commercials and said, “We currently offer FTTH with no throttling or bandwidth caps so you should sign up today. Be aware though that if you sign up today, we may introduce a 1GB per month transfer cap tomorrow. Then again, we may not. It’s your gamble”.

I guess the lesson here is that TOS are better left unread. Now I know that not only can I not generate “excessive traffic”, download pornography or watch it on TV, post off-topic messages on forums or message boards, or do anything, “harmful to the…Internet generally or other Internet users”, but I’m also not allowed to

exceed the bandwidth usage limitations that Verizon may establish from time to time for the Service, or use the Service to host any type of server. Violation of this section may result in bandwidth restrictions on your Service or suspension or termination of your Service.

How frightening. If I exceed my bandwidth limit the punishment is the imposition of a bandwidth limit!

In all seriousness though, I can’t fucking wait until the installation is complete. This will be one of the best days of my life.

I thought of doing this myself once

When I went ahead and bought this stupid domain name I considered using fake contact details to prevent spam and also avoid paying for “private” registration (where the domain registrar’s contact details are posted in the whois data instead of the registrant’s). But I used my real email address at least. Anyway, I know it’s common to use the postal address of your company headquarters and some email address such as [email protected] for abuse contact, instead of the actual contact information for the person who registered the domain, but I rarely have seen contact information that can properly be called fake.

In any case, this one was downright silly.
usw-dunderhead
Looking at the details for the organization “DUNDER”…
usw-dunderhead

Also, I can’t believe someone else already had taken “smilecitrus.com”. It must have been one of my various nemeses. If only I had had FiOS back then I’d surely have beaten that scoundrel to the punch.

I am finally getting FiOS

FTTH

FTTH

There is now virtually zero doubt about it. I can say with almost complete certainty that I will have FiOS at some point within the next one to three months.

Verizon has been digging the bejesus out of the building, to use what I find to be a surprisingly charming phrase, making a lot of noise and dust while they’re at it. This is, of course, all perfectly fine with me since it means we will all be getting FiOS in the apartment complex soon. At one point they even screwed up the plumbing and broke something, causing the whole building to smell like sewage for a day or so, until the janitor used some powerful air freshener thing that smelled like some kind of scented candle, which was almost as bad. Tenants received notification in July that they’d begin the wiring work at some point in September and that service should be offered soon after that. I was skeptical about taking that at face value, since the last time any upgrade to the building wiring was done were at least eleven or twelve years ago when the place was wired for Time Warner cable TV and Earthlink cable Internet (the only non-ADSL ISP available here for the entire time; not even Road Runner is available).

Anyway, there’s no need to dwell on the miserable Internet situation of the past anymore; it’s in the past. The future is FTTH! This will be almost as good as living inside a datacenter. Or Korea. I just hope that Verizon doesn’t introduce any bandwidth caps. It seems inconceivable to me that they offer a service like this and don’t either have a bandwidth cap or throttle customers who do more than check email once a week. As far as I understand it, most FTTH providers simply have no choice but to have very low bandwidth caps. I know at least that that’s the norm for most ISPs in Japan. It just seems too good to be true that I could have 5Mbps upstream (or, dare I hope, maybe even more?) and be allowed to actually upload at that rate 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. I can understand why my ISP doesn’t currently care that I upload at 384Kbps 24/7, since that’s probably not even making a dent in their network, but 5Mbps is not small potatoes, as it were.

I’m alarmed because I read someone complaining somewhere the other day about a newly-introduced transfer cap for FiOS in his or her service area. He or she didn’t mention what area that actually was though so it was more frightening than actually informative. It was pretty restrictive though if I remember correctly. I don’t recall the actual number, but I do remember that it was significantly less than 200GB (more than 100GB though). The whole point of FiOS is to upload something like 30GB a day, so a 200GB monthly transfer cap (where both uploads and downloads are counted equally) is complete and utter fail. It more or less defeats the purpose of having a fast connection for the end-user, though I don’t deny that it’s most likely completely rational for the ISP. If I were an FTTP provider, I’d probably also use transfer caps and some insane “network management” techniques to prioritize content that my investors had an interest in.

The fact that it may be rational and understandable, however, doesn’t mean I’d be any less devastated if I were affected by these practices as a customer. Of course, the terms of the contract are not yet available for me to read, since the installation is not yet finished and, as such, I’m not technically even a potential customer yet.

I shouldn’t jinx things though. If I just think positively I know they won’t throttle or cap me. I’ll expect the best. Besides, Verizon says right on their website that they don’t throttle, at least:

Some Internet providers will resort to “throttling,” or slowing down your Internet connection if they decide your usage is too heavy. Verizon doesn’t. FiOS is always blazingly fast.

I really hope they offer the 35Mbps/35Mbps plan to me. It’s not listed on the main Verizon web site though, so I’m a bit concerned that maybe it’s discontinued. If it has been discontinued, then hopefully I can get the 25/25 plan. It’s cheaper than the “best” plan, which is 50/20.

One of the biggest questions about FiOS I’ve had though since I first heard about it has been, “How the hell do they install those ONT things?”. Verizon’s goal is to have every single NYC resident (yes, all five boroughs) eligible to receive FiOS service by 2014. Why they would choose a place where so many people live in apartment buildings was a mystery to me though. It seemed like a bad idea as far as I could tell. How do you do that? Do you just drill a hole in the customer’s wall, thread the line in and then mount the ONT in the poor bastard’s living room? Actually, at least in my case, they have a better method. Since I live underground, they just went ahead and put the ONT on the outisde wall of the building. They did drill a small hole above the door from the outside into the building (not the door to my apartment though) and that’s how the ONT is connected to the inside wiring. I already have a hole in my living room wall for cable TV/Internet so presumably that’s how I’ll get connected to the ONT (otherwise it’ll have to be through the window!).

FiOS ONT NYC

This makes some degree of sense I suppose. While the ONT is, in fact, smaller than I thought it would be, it would still be a pain to have this thing in my living room. Of course, even if I did have to have it in my living room it would be a small price to pay for true FTTH, but with it outside, things are even nicer. The downside is that it’s gonna be damned hard to access the ONT. That grid-looking thing above the ONT in the picture is the fire escape for the apartment one floor above me, so it’s quite high up there. I don’t own a ladder either, so that’ll be annoying. Hopefully I won’t have to mess with it myself. This is definite progress though.