Keep Austin Weird, Tech

Sprint LTE sightings in Austin

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LTE service has been randomly popping up on my iPhone 5 in the North Austin area these past couple of days. Note that Sprint LTE has not yet launched in town.

It only lasts for a few minutes, and the speeds may differ from what we’ll get once it goes live. But the fact that they are testing is a sign that the launch is imminent.

Proof:

Obviously, when I saw LTE, I had to run a speed test. Speeds were a little disappointing compared with what I’ve read about LTE; but are about a million times better than the notoriously slow Sprint 3G service. Boy I hate CDMA.

For comparison’s sake, here are other results I’ve gotten. They vary from run to run and each run depends on a lot of factors, like how far you are sitting from the cell phone tower or WiFi station, or how much other network traffic there is at the moment. But they do provide a good idea of what to expect:

Provider Ping (ms) Download (Mbps) Upload (Mbps)
Sprint LTE (Austin, test) 76 7.77 0.71
Sprint 3G (Austin) 332 0.21 0.44
Sprint LTE (Woodlands) 56 7.95 9.44
Home (Time Warner Cable) 85 16.90 2.18
Work (jealous?) 48 48.35 23.76
AT&T LTE (Austin) 57 30.05 19.45

As you can see, 3G is soooo slow you can almost hear this. Can’t wait for LTE to go live.

Update: Reader Rolando O. sent a screenshot of SpeedTest results in AT&T LTE. They are amazing. I’ve added the numbers to the table.

Keep Austin Weird

Modeling debut

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Now that I’m back in Austin, I started going back to AVAA for Life Drawing. It’s scary how lack of practice affects you. I haven’t posted any of the latest drawings to The MKX® Photo Central in a while, but I will and you will see what I mean. But that’s a different topic.

Last week the model scheduled was running late, so the coordinator asked for volunteers to pose. The idea is that different people would pose for twenty minutes at a time. I went first.

One of the resulting pieces of art were especially impressive, even more so considering it was made in only twenty minutes! Here is my portrait by local artist Melissa Grimes. Feast your eyes:

“He’s a loathsome offensive brute, yet I can’t look away”
Reality Distortion Field

Google is not making any friends

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From Counternotions:

For over a decade, Microsoft — the monopolist of its era — treated its customers on Macs as second-class. Its Office suite never achieved parity with its Windows sibling, even when the differences were not dictated by platform architectures. Whether it was document compatibility, font-metrics, macros, integration with other Microsoft software or myriad other gotchas, Mac versions were always lacking. Every new version of Office promised better compatibility but never really delivered it. Worse, Microsoft never quite integrated Apple-grown technologies into Office to better blend it into the Mac ecosystem, claiming it would break cross-platform compatibility with the Windows versions.

Sadly, this wasn’t an occasional inconvenience but a source of daily frustration for millions of paying customers, corporations and individuals alike. With business so dependent on Office, Microsoft’s message was loud and clear: if you want the real thing switch to Windows.

Sufficiently annoyed by all the trouble, some users did.

Most didn’t, and haven’t forgiven Microsoft ever since.

Therein lies a lesson for Google

I should not need to spell out the analogy they are making, but here it goes anyway:

“Google Maps is to iOS is what Microsoft Office is to Mac OS”

To be fair, Mac users resent Microsoft for more than that. After all, Microsoft ripped off Apple’s groundbreaking user interface whole-heartedly when they created MS Windows.

Oh, wait…

Keep Austin Weird

Dinner with Bjarne

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Technically I didn’t eat dinner, I just listened to an interesting lecture by Bjarne Stroustrup, creator of C++ right around dinner time. He has no clue of who I am. I had “lunch” with him 9 years ago and things have changed since: his talk was about the latest C++ standard: C++11 and best practices with it. Very interesting and appropriate for me given my current projects.

Many readers may not be aware of who he is, so you should think of him this way: Dr. Stroustrup’s contributions to computer science and thus to modern life is enormous. Comparable if not greater than the more famous guys like Bill Gates or Steve Jobs.

Life of Marcos

Beer bottle collection

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For years I accumulated this incredible collection of beer bottles. It breaks my heart to say goodbye, but I no longer have the room for them. All that is left left are my memories and these photos.

I haven’t yet gotten rid of them. If you want them, you can have them. They look really nice on a well lit display.

My Blog

Cease and desist

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It’s fairly common for large blogs to receive “cease and desist” letters threatening legal action unless some content is removed. Usually this happens when a website posts photos of an unreleased iPhone lost in a bar.

The MKX® recently received such a letter from an individual claiming that our popular “English with Andy” series slandered his persona due to the physical resemblance between a recurring character used in the images and his persona; given the possibility that someone may stumble upon one of the images and mistakenly believe that the depicted situation happened in real life and that the individual in question may actually confuse the terms “mushroom” with “much room” or “tissue” with “teach you”, to quote two examples.

In order to eliminate all possibility of said mistake, we:

  1. Stress that the situations shown in the series are not real. Some were invented by our team of writers but most were lifted directly from unfunny mass emails that were forwarded to us. All the characters are fictional and any resemblance to actual persons is purely coincidental. Names were not changed to protect any identities, because there are no identities to protect.
  2. Don’t actually know of anyone who speaks English like that; but would like to meet him/her.
  3. Added a disclaimer to all posts.
  4. Modified all the images using a face from the more crude yet widely known Rage Comics. This image is in the public domain.

The MKX® staff hopes that these actions are sufficient to satisfy all the parties involved. No further entries to the series are planned.

No ugly people were harmed making this blog.