laurion

Had a really good weekend.

Friday (I have fridays off in the summer) Jaeger and I went to our Music Together class where he fell in love with a new djembe, then we we went to the library for books and trains. After that we went home for fluffernutters and naps. Mimi and Poppi (the names he picked for my parents) came by and Amanda came home from a day of relief work. We cooked up some mini pizzas and packed up a picnic basket and walked down to the town common for the Friday night concert series. Dancing and balloons and ice cream happened.

Saturday Mimi and Poppi came back up and took Jaeger for a while. I went to have lunch with jducoeur and fenicedautun at Zaftigs, then went back home to do some housework. Afterwards we drove down to Plymouth for a third set of fireworks, having been to Needham and Waltham the weekend before. It was quite late when we got in, but it was worth the drive.

Sunday, there was no thrown weapons practice (most of the regulars being up at GNEW), so after sleeping in a bit, I got up and mowed the lawn. Jaeger got out his plastic lawnmower and helped. Did our grocery shopping a day early, and then after naptime we packed up our swim gear and a cooler and went over to spend the afternoon at Cochituate State Park.  I’d not actually been before despite living nearby for quite some time.  Very nice state park, and absolutely worth the modest $5 parking fee to get in. We walked around the trails for a bit, and spent some time in the lake. Jaegermonsters like swimming, who knew? He had a great time splashing and pointing at the boats and the birds. Our only regret is we forgot to bring the beach toys so he could play in the sand more. After drying off and changing back into our regular clothes I found out that craigslist had come through again, so we went out and picked up a pre-birthday birthday gift of a tricycle for the monster, and went out to dinner at the BBC. Then home for bath and bed. Jaeger’s only regret was that it was too late in the day to actually go riding on the new tricycle, which he is very excited about and keeps referring to as a motorcycle.  I’m sure he’ll be out on it today.

In the general state of things, it is going well.  Certainly better than things were. Amanda is feeling better than she has in a -long- time, and things are looking positive for the job prospects. We’ve gotten some things sorted and some help on the financial front. And the parents of the children’s center kids (most of the children aren’t of faculty or staff at the school, but are from the Weston/Wayland/Wellesley community) got together and pooled their not insignificant business and financial firepower, formed a task force, and got the college to agree to a three year plan to keep the children’s center open. So we have that back and one more source of stress has been lifted. Our current immediate stresses tend to be along the lines of not overscheduling the remainder of our rapidly filling summer. And I’m glad to have that as a problem.

Mirrored from The Black Horse of the Blog World.

So, a long post now that the knife’s edge is blunted a bit.

Cats and cat ownership has long been a big part of my emotional anchoring.  I got my first cat when I was eight (he was Italian, no really, we lived there at the time) and he was with me through the angsty teen years and through college.  He lived 18 years with us before finally succumbing to old age in 2004. Long time friends may even remember that post.  And then the first cat I got as an adult was Ozy. Again, long time friends may remember the post I made the day the day after we picked him out. I’d always hoped Ozy would live as long as Midnight did.

But we were not to be so lucky. About a month ago, as a result of a change in his eating habits (He was -always- a food motivated cat, more labrador than cat sometimes), Amanda found a lump in him. And again, I’ll link to a post where you can read more about that and what he meant to us. It quickly became obvious that this was not something that was treatable, and that we had a limited amount of time with him.

Over the past month he ‘rollercoastered’.  He would rally and have good days, and then other times he’d go downhill rapidly. We kept looking for signs as to when it was time, and we kept seeing that the ups were losing out to the downs.  He went from not eating his regular food to eating tastier dry food to eating quality wet food to eating the equivalent of junk food.  But still, wit a pill at mealtimes, even as recently as Thursday he had an up day where he ate 5 (small) cans of food across the day; on Friday he ate two cans in the morning, but would barely eat half a can in the evening.

He wouldn’t give us clear signals though.  He didn’t become overly reclusive, still jumping up on Amanda’s lap in the evenings and purring, still coming running at mealtimes even though he wasn’t eating, and generally behaving catlike. But we could see his body wasting and he had a lot less enthusiasm and energy than he had 6 months ago when he would bolt down his dinner and go after Tica’s, or when he would attack her aggressively.

It was clear that our cat was sick, getting sicker, and wasn’t going to get better.  And we could see that he was dehydrated and in a lot of discomfort.  We found spots where he’d vomited. We didn’t want him to suffer needlessly. We didn’t want the catsitter to have to be the one who was there with him at the end. We wanted him to go on a good note and in a way where we could say goodbye properly.

saturday we could see things were rough, but weren’t sure. Sunday morning we knew we needed to discuss it. And on our way back from thrown weapons practice we made a decision and came to peace with having made it.  When we got home and he asked for food I gave him some more, but again he wasn’t eating enthusiastically.  After naptime we gave him some fish, which he enjoyed, and called in a vet we knew well enough to be comfortable with, but weren’t socially connected to.

We took Ozy out on the deck, because he loved being outside even though he wasn’t an outdoor cat, only going out when we occasionally took him out on his harness. And J came out with us and loved playing in the sunshine. Ozy wanted to go down the stairs to the yard, so we let him, and we walked him all around the yard. Yesterdays picture was from that time. It was the most animated he’s been in months.

Shortly after, the vet showed up.  We brought Ozy back to the deck and sedated him. Then we brought J over to say goodbye to him, which he did, waving, saying bye-bye and giving a kiss. Much of it at our prompting because he is too young to understand. And then we killed our kitty so he wouldn’t go suffering or alone, but could go outside in the sunshine happy. It was quiet. It was peaceful. There was no spasms, no meows, no protests. We brought Tica out to see. Not sure she understood either. And we said goodbye.

It was a beautiful day, and it was everything we wanted it to be. It was perfect. And yet I still can only hope that helps in the long run because it isn’t helping in the short run.

Goodbye to the cat who picked me in the shelter.

Goodbye to the cat who hid for his first week with us.

Goodbye to the first cat I gave a name to.

Goodbye to the cat with the awesome big paws and extra toes who didn’t care if you touched them.

Goodbye to the cat who got out of the house and had us sick and worried that we lost him, but showed up the next morning for breakfast (always food motivated).

Goodbye to the cat who ate a corn cob and sent Amanda with him to the Tufts hospital only hours after she’d graduated from there.

Goodbye to the cat who would jump up and settle down on my desk while I was trying to get things done.

Goodbye to the cat who was always getting on the counters looking for food scraps.

Goodbye to the gentlest cat on four feet.

Goodbye to the cat who used to crawl inside the couch frame and hang out there for hours.

Goodbye to the cat who managed to take up half the bed in the wintertime.

We love you, and miss you already.

Mirrored from The Black Horse of the Blog World.

Recently, the FCC decided to allow ISPs to charge content providers for the services ISPs provide in conducting content to customers.  This is principally a fight over bandwidth consumption from sources like Netflix and YouTube. Critics of this move have said that this will break the notion of Network Neutrality by allowing network providers to favor some providers over others, based on how it benefits the network provider.

Brett Glass, an ISP operator in Laramie, Wyoming, accurately described this as what is economically referred to as a two-sided market, with the advantage that ISPs can continue to offer customers a fixed bill (unlike, say, your electric bill which varies based on usage), while still being able to charge to account for fluctuating usage, by billing the content provider.  He uses the newspaper model as an example of a long standing, and successful two-sided market.

In the case of the newspaper, customers pay a fixed subscription cost regardless of whether or not the size of the paper varies from day to day, week to week, or whether the customer reads some or all of the paper, et cetera.  On the other side, advertisers pay a cost which covers the overhead of making the paper bigger to include the ads, such as extra printing and delivery costs.

But while this is a good example of a two-sided market, this is a terrible model for ISPs to ape.  An ISP is not a newspaper.  Take away all the ads from a newspaper and you still have a product that customers want to buy.  In fact, customers almost never want the advertising they receive anyhow, but accept it as the shared price of keeping their newspaper subscription costs low.  But take away all the Netflixs and YouTubes of the world from what your ISP brings you and the service distinctly loses value.  It comes down to the fact that a newspaper -is- a content provider, and is the primary content provider.  ISPs are a service provider.  They provide little to no content of their own.

Advertisers pay a newspaper for access to the subscribers because advertising is fundamentally an undesired product to most people. Netflix shouldn’t pay an ISP under a similar model because Netflix is providing a product that people want and pay to access.

The real problem comes with trying to apply a two-sided market model to a utility service model.  Currently, ISPs sell a fixed amount of bandwidth to customers at a fixed monthly cost, and offer tiers of service with different bandwidth speeds to try to differentiate their customers. And they charge very large amounts of money, while simultaneously underprovisioning.  They sell the speeds they offer to a large number of people, knowing that many people aren’t going to use nearly that much.  And now that popular offerings like Netflix and twitch.tv are around, more people are in fact using more of what they’ve bought.  And rather than improving their infrastructure to accommodate, or altering their tiered offerings or pricing structure, ISPs are taking this as an opportunity to get paid twice for the same traffic, once from the customer requesting it, and once from the content provider providing it. And they can do this because customers don’t really understand the concept of bandwidth.  Ever since the days of dialup access they’ve paid a fixed monthly cost without really understanding what that entails beyond unmodified access to the internet. So when streaming video gets choppy, customers are just as likely to blame the service provider as they are anyone else, even if it is a result of network congestion on the part of the ISP.  To return to the utility analogy, that would be like blaming the reservoir because the water pressure in your house is too low.  It’s -possible- the reservoir is out of water, but unlikely.

So a two-sided economic market model makes little sense when applied to ISPs which function more like a utility. And ISPs don’t want to switch to metered usage models (like your electricity or gas) because they lose the ability to oversubscribe and underprovision. And customers like the idea of a fixed bill with ‘unlimited’ usage.  So what’s the way out? How do we get to a model where people pay for what they use, and ‘fairness’ is restored?

Some people think the way out is for the FCC to actually regulate ISPs the way they do another utility service: the phone companies. This is called ‘common carrier status’ and proponents see it as a way to encourage competition and to allow for new entrants into the market that can experiment with different pricing models and service offerings.  Recent legal outcomes have made it clear that the FCC can choose to take this route, but so far they have been very reluctant to do so.  Time will tell.

Mirrored from The Black Horse of the Blog World.

Did you know that childcare is really expensive? Some of you don’t have kids, and some of you plan to never have kids, in which case, you’ll never know this personally. And this post may not be for you.

Still here? Yeah, so child care is really expensive. As of a 2008 study [1] it was the largest expense on average for middle class families, eclipsing both food and housing. As of a 2013 study [2], it often exceeds the cost of tuition at a state school. As you’ll read later, I had reason to gather facts and figures on this.

In Massachusetts, the average cost of childcare is $16,000 a year. That makes us if not the most expensive state, the second most expensive. Depends on the source and timing of the data. That’s the average cost. Quality care at an accredited center, will, of course, cost more. And centers in the more affluent and higher cost of living eastern part of the state will skew above average as well.

But we are lucky. I work at a college that has a very high quality, fully accredited program that has been established for 30 years and gives about a 33% staff discount. Meaning we have been able to enroll our toddler in a top tier program for a little less than it would have cost at the not-nationally-accredited KinderCare facility that he was in when he was too young to be enrolled at Regis. (Both are still above that average figure cited above but not by much. Those geographical factors.) And obviously it is convenient, because what could be more convenient than driving where you are going anyhow? And there is a safe and spacious campus around it, so the children can go on long(er) walks to the athletic fields or the gym, or to the science department to do exploratory and educational play, etc. His previous KinderCare we referred to as day care, and the Regis center we refer to as school. That kind of difference.

That whole paragraph will soon need to be rewritten to be past tense. At the end of April we received a letter informing us that because the center has had declining enrollments and has been running at increasing deficits, the program is being terminated at the end of June and will not reopen. This was a complete shock to us and the other parents. Many of us had already signed contracts for next year. And many of the almost comparable nearby facilities have already filled up for the next year. And it was a bombshell to the teachers at the center, who will also have a hard time getting new jobs because the nearby centers have already planned out their staffing for the next year.

We’re ‘lucky’. His previous facility has openings, so we have someplace for the Jägermonster. And as good as the people there are, and as clean and pleasant as the facility is, it is very hard to return to average when you’ve had excellent and were expecting excellent as an option. But the other excellent options either don’t have full day options, are way out of our price range, don’t have openings, or some combination of the three.

The parents of the children did rally and have a meeting with the President and CFO, but I don’t know as anything will come of it.

So this is one more thing that has been adding to our mental and financial stress.

[1] http://www.pewstates.org/uploadedFiles/PCS_Assets/2008/PEW_PkN_pre-kpinch_Nov2008_report.pdf

[2] http://usa.childcareaware.org/sites/default/files/Cost%20of%20Care%202013%20110613.pdf

Mirrored from The Black Horse of the Blog World.

Does anyone have a use for 18/2 stranded lamp wire? Home Depot apparently only sells it in spools of 250 ft. now, and as I am only wiring up a few lamps, this is more than I need. Let me know if you have a use for some of it.

Mirrored from The Black Horse of the Blog World.

Apparently some graduate schools, principally law schools, have found a way to combine two laws so their students get to shift the entire cost of tuition onto the taxpaying public…

http://chronicle.com/article/article-content/141103/

Another case of the law of unintended consequences.

Mirrored from The Black Horse of the Blog World.

My son turned one this morning at 6:58 am.

There is so much in that statement.  I hope to take the time later to unpack that a little bit.

Mirrored from The Black Horse of the Blog World.

I think this article from The Atlantic starts in a way that describes very well how I feel right now. “ We know what happened in Boston; we do not yet know what the hell happened in Boston.”  All we know at this time is the tragedy of it all, with none of the explanation.  Almost all we have is questions, and sadness.  But we also have a lot of ‘We will not let this drag us down’ attitude, which I find to be a healthy and positive reaction.  As a society, we may not be inured to events of terror, but we are learning to handle them.  You could argue that it is either a good thing or a bad thing that we have learned to react this way, or that we have had to learn to react this way.

The rest of the article goes on to describe two small examples of the communal reaction expressed in the form of google doc spreadsheets, of all things.  Another highlight of how technology in the past decade has changed the game in these sorts of events.  With the advent of smartphones and the social web, we now have much faster communication of what has happened as word spreads rapidly on sites like reddit and twitter as well as the traditional journalism streams.  We have orders of magnitude more live video and photos (especially as the marathon lends itself to spectators shooting video) for both the public and the police to examine and investigate.  We have more ways of organizing ourselves out of the chaos that erupts – in addition to the above mentioned google docs, there were near instantly ways for people to check in and report their safety, to track and find missing people, to gather up friends and family separated by the catastrophe, and to organize support for individuals and the community as a whole (such as the spontaneous concert at Wellesley being organized for tonight).

But still, while we are moving rapidly to make what we can of the situation, we are only more acute of how slow it can be to get facts out of chaos. Casualty counts change, investigations of additional devices come and go, reports of persons of interest being detained surface and submerge, and speculations float all around tempting conclusions.  There is the all too human need to understand, to point fingers, to not just act in support, but to react in anger.  And these emotions are often faster than those of love and compassion, so it leaves us all the more unsettled when we must wait for an accurate and investigated set of facts to be shared.

Until then, the facts we have are those of consequences, and of lives affected or unaffected, and the emotions of caring, of hurting, and of defiance.  Runners will run again next year, and the year after, and the year after, until the people who commit these atrocities learn that we will not give in to their fear-mongering.

Mirrored from The Black Horse of the Blog World.