Christianity is a Cooked Pickle

That's right: humans are nothing more than ugly pickles until we tap into the lethal voltage of God. When humans become Christians, they too will steam and bleed their juices uncontrollably.

Homeless Tea

I saw these signs in the back of somebody's driveway. I don't know if it's still homeless tea time or not.

On the Frustrations of Automated Systems

As some of you may know, I am a college student. Being a college student, but not having any real money, you could then conclude that I take out a fair amount of student loans (so that I can be owned by the system indefinitely, but whatever). Your assumptions would be correct.

Recently I applied for a new student loan with SallieMae. While I'm happy with what they offer, their online process of loan applications is less than satisfactory. That is to say, their entire system is very thoroughly automated. However, like all automated systems, if you haven't considered all scenarios, you're bound to create a very frustrating customer experience.

While I was filling out my loan information, I must have checked off a box incorrectly. For some reason, SallieMae's automated system was convinced that I was not a citizen of the US, when in fact I am. I got all this paperwork telling me to send a copy of my permanent resident card before I could continue with the process.

I called all the numbers available on their website a good number of times. I tried many different options, but they all eventually lead me to entering in my account info, which would then always send me back to this same message about how I need to photocopy and send them pictures of my resident card. The only way I was able to finally get through to a human being was to pretend like I was starting a new loan over the phone. I was worried about doing this because I thought it might further complicate my problem for them to have two loans in process under my name.

However, soon after I started -that- process I was connected to a human. Once I was connected to an actual person, fixing my problem just took a couple questions and a couple of minutes. Presto!

Perhaps this is just a bit of social commentary on the techno-bureaucratization of our society. Maybe this is a short note to companies trying to streamline their customer service processes. Regardless, while I have great faith in the potential of automated systems, it just makes sense to have a real human being easily available to watch the process and be available.

On Bandwidth Throttling

In light of the FCC's brief moment of enlightenment, whereby they ruled Comcast could no longer throttle bandwidth based on protocol (such as bittorrenting), I feel the need to take a moment to respond. In particular, I would like to respond to Comcasts backup plan to manage internet traffic. Comcast has announced a preliminary plan whereby "heavy bandwidth users" will have their connections artificially slowed down in order to make the traffic more manageable. It seems reasonable enough, there's only so much bandwidth to go around, and it makes no sense to let a few throughput hungry users take it all up during peak hours.

Perhaps a useful inquery is to consider why ISP's like Comcast or Verizon are selling subscriptions that their infrastructure can't actually withstand. It seems criminal to me, that these companies can advertise throughput speeds that they can't actually live up to. The telecom networks would not last very long if everyone using them was taking advantage of the bandwidth that they subscribe to.

My suggestion would be to tell the ISP's that they can only market connection speeds their networks could handle if every user were taking advantage of their full contract. Currently they weasel out of this by saying things like "speeds up to," and contracts say that the telecom is actually not responsible for the speed or quality of a connection. That seems backwards to me. They are providing a service, they ought to be 100% responsible.

This isn't even an issue of Net Neutrality, which I feel very strongly about. This is a basic matter of an industry that's gotten used to false promises and faulty advertising. If Verizon only promised me 10Mbits/s, I might be happily surprised when it peaks to 20 or 30Mbits/s, but I won't be angry when I only get 10.

What do other people think?