Into the fast(er) lane

No. This will improve my life, not yours. 😉 Sorry.Are you using an RSS reader? I find that some — especially Web-based ones, like Bloglines — take quite a while to update. If you’re reading Media Nation on the Web, you should be seeing the content as it’s posted.

Anon: Hold down shift and click reload; that might do it, by forcing your computer to get a fresh copy of the page rather than checking cache. (If it works, you can likely adjust a setting to check pages every time.)If that doesn’t work, you may be behind a corporate caching proxy. Don’t worry what that means technically; you can’t do anything about it anyway.

Cable is much faster than DSL — four to seven times faster — and, in this case, cheaper, since EarthLink was really charging a premium.

Thanks for posting this, Dan. I’ve been thinking about my utility/household bills for awhile now and I’m just bewildered at the cost of everything. I’ve also been thinking about switching from Comcast broadband to Verizon DSL because the savings of the bulk packages. At least up here in New Hampshire, it seems pretty substantial. Right now, we’re paying a cumulative $185 for Comcast cable, broadband, and Verizon unlimited phone service. And, our cable service doesn’t offer that much which we actually use. It’s just too much. Technically, the last thing we want to get rid of his the fast Internet. But in order to keep that at the least expensive rate, you have to buy all the other services which we don’t use or need. By switching to Verizon via that $99 deal, I could potentially save more than $1,000 per year. Over a five year period, that is the difference between buying a new low-end sedan or upgrading to a hybrid, which would save me a ton of money on gas for my 150 mile per day commute to work. It seems to be a lot of money we’re paying for phone and TV services which we rarely use. I’ve also been thinking about just going down to very basic cable and saving $50 a month. However, I lose C-Span and the cable news stations, which is the only thing I watch. Ironically, the three shopping channels are taking up room on the very basic service – spots where C-Span should be – since they are free to all the cable stations. So, I have to decide: Lose news and C-Span and save $50 per month, or keep spending $600 a year for the right to watch the watchdogs of Congress and the Senate, and listen to insiders yell at each other on news channels. Yikes!I’m beginning to think that the ala carte option which has been bandied around D.C. in the last few years is the way to go. At least this way, I would only pay X amount of dollars or cents for what I want to watch – the local stations, C-Span, the four cable news stations, and OnDemand options. Surely that would amount to less than $60 per month! So I’ll close with a question: What is a subscriber to do about all of this? Does anyone have any advice on how I can get what I want without paying as much as I am now?