And why aren’t the Democrats willing to say we need healthcare for everyone instead of health insurance for everyone? Get rid of the insurance industry — yes, just nationalize it — and we can provide healthcare to all including the 50 million who don’t have it for less than the total cost of the system today.

Today I was looking at my ever-increasing Comcast bill and saw an offer to upgrade to 22mbps download — a nearly 4x increase! I called and asked How Much, and the guy said that since I was already on a 16mbps service, it would be only $10 additional. 16mbps? I thought I my plan was only 6mbps. But there on my bill it said I should be getting 16mbps. So I bitched and moaned and Twittered.

Frank Eliason (@ComcastCares) saw and replied to my tweet at 9pm his time on a Sunday night. He told me my Motorola 4100 was pretty old (true) and that I might want to upgrade to something new like an SB6120 that supports DOCSIS 3.0. (I own my own mode.) He also said he’d try to reprogram the old modem.

An hour later I ran another set of tests. Wow! I guess Frank was successful. The speed jumped to an average of 14.9mbps/1.5mbps, more the 2x what I saw earlier today and respectably within what you’d expect from a “16mbps” account.

Here’s my guess as to what happened: Over the past 4.5 years, Comcast likely upgraded the speed for a so-called Burst account from 6mbps to 16mbps but didn’t bother to tell existing customers about it. It seems that some or all of the throttling might occur within the modem, so when Frank “re-programmed” mine, it upgraded my connection to the speeds I was already paying for.

In any case, I just ordered a new Motorola SB6120 from Amazon.com on the hope that DOCSIS 3.0 might give me even better throughput on real-world content (rather than speed tests).

After more than ten months of work (and waiting for third-party components), I’m thrilled to announce the release of a major update to The Levelator®. Version 2.0.3 for Windows and OS X is now available for download. Some of the changes include:

• A number of improvements have been made to The Levelator’s® algorithms based on sample audio files submitted by users. Most notably is a reduction in certain unnatural volume adjustments.
• libsndfile has been updated to version 1.0.21 which has fixed the following:
  • 24-bit files are now properly supported.
  • Soundtrack Pro 2 .aiff files are now supported.
  • Adobe Soundbooth files are now supported.
  • Unicode filenames are now supported.
• Very short source files are now supported.
• You can now drag/drop and audio file onto the application icon in the OS X Dock.
• The Levelator® now verifies that it has sufficient disk space for temporary and output files before processing the source file.
• ctrl-o/cmd-o (Open File…) now works after alt-tab has been used to switch applications.
• The .ini (settings) file is now deleted during installation in order to properly refresh the ‘news’ timestamp. (Fixed in Windows version only.)
• The formatting of error reports has been improved.
• Log files are now unique on a per-user basis.

• Windows version
• OS X version
• Changes/Release Notes
• Twitter for updates and news (@levelator, #levelator)
• Discussion/Forum (ask questions, get answers)

Remember, it’s beta, so use with care. In case of bugs, fall-back to version 1.4.1.

Update: The above links now download release 2.0.1. We found and fixed a few bugs in the first few hours.

Update: The above links now download release 2.0.2. We found and fixed one more bug. Just one left.

Spoiler Alert: We saw the film with no advance knowledge of the plot. But the trailers I’ve seen since the screening give away one important plot element. So if you want the film to be a complete surprise, read no further. (And avoid the trailers.)

Brothers is the story of a soldier who returns from Afghanistan with PTSD after his family thought he’d been killed in action. It could be illuminating and even inspiring, but it’s neither. Instead, it’s predictable and filled with clichés. The actors play their roles well, but they’re ultimately just stereotypes. When the plot takes a turn, it’s usually in a direction a novice writer would take. When the scenes are dramatic, they’re nothing we haven’t seen before.

I mentioned the weakness of the editing and directing, and looking back at director Jim Sheridan’s work, maybe this isn’t too surprising. One gripe is how he handles the lightweight happy-family scenes contrasted with the serious drama of PTSD. The lightweight stuff is so lightweight as to be fluffy and corny, complete with happy music. These scenes just obliterate the drama. Okay, I get it. Now we’re happy, and next things are awful. Where’s the subtlety?

The cutting suffers in the same way. The two very young daughters are played by good actresses, but the director and editor are so enamored with them that the movie almost grinds to a halt when they’re on screen. The same is also true to a lesser extent with Natalie Portman, who does a fine job on her own. Even in the midst of the most-serious scenes, the camera lingers on the girls a little too long — just by a second or so. The effect is that rather than giving us important reaction shots, the plot actually changes to focus on them. Then, when we cut back to the older characters, there’s a feeling of being yanked back into the story, which hasn’t really stopped. The kids are great, but they need to be used carefully and more sparingly.

Like I say, I’m prepared for the critics and public to herald this as some great film of the year, but not for me.

I had just added a fix on my development server for feeds that use GUIDs longer than 255 characters (eg, from Clear Channel) and it was time to test it. As usual, this meant starting with an empty database on the dev box then scanning the feed in question to create new program records. I’ve done this a thousand times.

DELETE FROM programs;

It wasn’t even a second later that I realized what I’d done. That’s right. I was connected to SpokenWord.org’s live database server, not my development machine. And there wasn’t a thing I could do about it. Thanks (?) to MySQL/InnoDB’s referential integrity and my own orphan-detection scripts that I forgot were still running, deleting all the programs also deleted or damaged the media instances, the titles, the tags, the descriptions, the categories, the ratings and the collections. Hey, stuff happens; what are you gonna do?

So I fired off one of those email messages to Sysadmin Tim. He says he knows there’s trouble when I reply to my own messages, adding more details, before he gets to the first one. Tim was busy — he has a day job — but he dropped what he was doing to help.

We have a decent backup strategy. Every night we dump, tar and gzip the entire database. We keep the most-recent seven days’ copies on the database server as well as copy them to Amazon S3. And we keep one backup per month forever or almost. (Not sure why we’d ever use them though.) And hey — as luck would have it, the backup had run just two hours before my fatal mistake!

Only two problems: (1) that recent backup copy appeared to be corrupted, and (2) my script that copied the backups to S3 hadn’t run successfully since January 30, 2009.

I won’t bore you with all that happened in between, but 18 hours after the initial disaster, we did succeed in restoring everything on SpokenWord.org to the state it was in two hours before my gaffe. Incredible thanks to Sysadmin Tim for (once again) saving my ass. Just goes to show that you can be sober, well-rested and well-intentioned and still destroy a year’s worth of data with a single click if you’re not careful.

At first I didn’t understand where this film was heading. Steve Evets is great as Eric Bishop, but at first we see only that the character is a pathetic mess. It would be difficult to watch were it not for the appearance of Cantona (playing himself) and other comedic moments. As we learn more about Bishop, his family and his great Full Monty-esque friends, and as Bishop learns more about himself, we’re completely sucked in. It’s an excellent script and all of the performances are first-rate.

I should be more familiar with director Ken Loach’s long career, but unfortunately I’m not. If Looking for Eric is representative of Loach’s previous films, I look forward to seeing them.