After months of construction, American Glory BBQ, replete with its redundancies in signage, is about to open. Located one door up the street from a proven legendary Hudson restaurant, Swoon, we expect it to open over this Memorial Day weekend. Walked by today and noticed that stools are at the bar and chairs and table at the ready.
Lets hope that American Glory BBQ turns out to be even half as “legendary” as its neighbor. That will be a great addition to the eating and drinking in Hudson.
Back in September I wrote my first complaint here about our internet service from Mid-Hudson Cablevision (MHC).1 The situation with our internet service has only gotten worse. I wrote a letter to the President of MHC in December. This elicited a call from a higher level technician who told me that he had looked at my account and “made some changes” that should improve the service level. Since then, I have had times where I quite literally counted “1 Mississippi 2 Mississippi” between the click of the mouse and any response from the target server.
So, I dug into the situation and continued to gather data and more information about what constitutes good internet service. Turns out that download speed is only a part of the story. In my case the “latency” – that’s the response time to get a target server to respond to a request for a page or other information – is also critical. In addition, latency has great effects on services like Skype.
The upshot is that the latency (ping) for service at my house over the last month has been running nearly 2,000 milliseconds, and, for the entire period I have been testing since August 2009, the latency averages 568 milliseconds.2 As MHC’s own technicians have said, and is widely cited in discussions about latency on cable internet systems, latency should be below 100 milliseconds and excellent is 25 milliseconds.
To add to the insults the advertised download speeds of 5 MB/s are still a distant dream and recently the upload speeds, typically 10% or so of the download speeds, have barely gotten over 0.05 MB/s.
MHC amazingly has now begun to offer:
“DOUBLE YOUR SPEED for only $ 5.00 more per month (up to 10 MB*)”
“TRIPLE YOUR SPEED for only $ 10.00 more per month (up to 15 MB*)”
PT Barnum would love these offers.
So, where does this leave me. Given the monopoly status of MHC, I am not holding out much hope for some miraculous cure. Internet service is a cash cow for cable companies. It operates over the same infrastructure as their TV services so it only requires the head end equipment necessary to connect to a trunk and manage the distribution of services. MHC has taken a futher step to insure the cash cow. They only offer internet service bundled with a cable TV service. Some deal!
i am now searching around in the state county and local governments for some agency and/or some politician interested in this issue. I am sure that I will return to this topic soon.
Here in Hudson, we just successfully passed a voter referendum to increase the City of Hudson’s support for our library for the first time in a decade. By a better than 60% margin voters here affirmed the importance of the library in our daily life.
Now we are faced with cuts at the state level that will make it more difficult to sustain the library here and across the state.
From the New York Library Association:
This will be the fifth cut in less than two years and will bring Library Aid down from $102 million in 2007 to $84.5 million in 2010. These cuts combined total an $18 million or 18% reduction in funding for library services. Libraries are part of our safety net—they are essential to life long learning, jobs and opportunity, quality of life and community empowerment.
There is an online petition you can sign to support funding for public libraries in the upcoming state budget:
Fireworks begin - 114 Warren to extreme right of photo.
Yesterday was Hudson’s 13th annual Winter Walk, a three hour event up and down Warren St.
Our BeLo3rd business group made a number of efforts to attract the crowds down the street. For the first time Warren St. was car free its entire length. The parade started at Front St., instead of Third St. Merchant windows below Third featured special custom window displays by local artists following the 12 Nights of Christmas theme. Music was offered in one gallery and the wine bar. BeLo3rd even bought radio advertisements in the two weeks leading up to the event. One idea seemed compelling but turned out to be a complete flop, lining both sides of the street with candles on the curbs in white paper bags. Unfortunately between the snow and the ambient light, the effect was less than underwhelming. But, all these efforts to move people to visit the bottom third of Warren could not overcome the inertia of thirteen years in which nothing happened below Third. My theory is that next year we will save the money spent of the radio ads and hire a noisy rock band to play at Warren and Front St., at the very bottom of the street. Build in a little light show and and all of this ruckus will surely brings the mobs to our end of the street.
Still, we had a good time on Winter Walk night. We had a few interesting folks show up and our visitors from Cambridge thought the whole event was fun.
Polar Bear and Ginger Bread men - unrelated - visit the Gallery
