Frozen vs. Watchmen

It seemed obvious to me that the character of Queen Elsa from Disney’s excellent Frozen had glimpses of similarity to Dr. Manhattan from Snyder’s excellent The Watchmen. Both had nearly infinite power, which detached them from their humanity and fellow humans. Each secluded themselves far away in a self-made palace as a way of both escaping and saving the people close to them. Both had trouble containing their power.

That said, I don’t think I remember Dr. Manhattan ever breaking out into song.

The STEM gap

There’s a great info-graphic and article on Adecco, concerning the widening gap between available Science, Technology, Engineering, & Mathematics (STEM) candidates and those job vacancies waiting to be filled.

I have much to be thankful for this year.  In particular, I have Adecco to thank for placing me at a great, international science-based company — Thermo Fisher Scientific.  Our relatively small local branch is a great group of people to be working with.  It’s challenging, new, exciting, and growing.

So it’s odd to think that I’m part of only 8% of all STEM grads still doing this 10 years later.

STEM Jobs Infographic: Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics

So where are all the STEM people?  It’s a strange dilemma.  If nothing else, the problem makes me thankful that the job future looks more secure today than it did years prior.

Failure analysis on the HoMedics Lullaby Soundspa

We have one of these little do-dads for our kid: HoMedics SS-3000 Soundspa Lullaby.  It’s a nifty little product, makes different simulated white noise sounds and projects these images from a spinning disk apparatus.  Like I said, nifty.

But also fragile, and prone to breakage.  The company, HoMedics, replaced our first one because its little motor that turns the disk just quite one day.  Well, the replacement now has the same symptom.

So enough was enough!  Time to tear this thing apart.

It’s a complicated little gizmo.  I had some difficulty separating the front from the back housing, but if you shove a flat head screwdriver into the side, it will pop out.

After get the motor assembly all torn apart, with some simple tests, I determined that the motor magically worked again.  In my estimation, the point of failure here is misalignment of the projector disks with the engaging gear drive.

You see, HoMedics is relying on the forgiving tolerances of the plastic gears in the motor drive system, such that when you engage the projector disk into the disk bay, there will be proper alignment.  I believe this isn’t a safe bet.  When you feel resistance flipping the switch, that means the gears aren’t in alignment.  Don’t proceed!  This will dislodge the worm gear and your motor won’t turn anymore.

Or at least that’s my educated guess.

 

cell phone plan switcheroo, part 2

Here’s a triumphant update to the last post on switching cell phone carriers.  It’s been a long road, but we finally got there.  As of now, we are now truly paying $80 per month for two cell phones (with about $10 tacked on for taxes).

If you too want to try to make the switch, here are a few things I learned that might help you too.

  1. Getting approval for unlocking from AT&T can be tricky.  I got approval right away for the main phone line.  For the second phone (mine), it was considerably harder.  After about a half dozen phone calls to support, we finally got it.  Make certain that if you have multiple lines, that all IMEI 1 numbers are “attached to the account” (whatever that actually means is anyone’s guess).
  2. This bit is for iPhones owners.  To properly unlock the phone from AT&T, follow their instructions to the letter; don’t cheat like I did and restore a backup of the phone.  The iPhone will still be locked!  Instead, you must restore first.  Then restore your recent backup.  You can’t just skip the blank restore directly to backup.
  3. After you pay your last remaining balance, don’t forget to request approval for refunding your deposit (if you had to prepay one month).  For us, this was about 7 years ago; but hey, it’s worth getting back every penny you’ve loaned to a multi-billion dollar company!

    iTunes restore option
    iTunes restore option

The only remaining uncertainty is coverage area comparison.  It’s still too soon to tell, but so far the data coverage quality is much better in my experience.  At my office, I have far better 3G data connection. We also have excellent voice coverage in our house.

Another observation, less related to service quality: T-Mobile’s website is far superior.  AT&T’s was cluttered and hard to navigate.  T-Mobile seems to have taken a web design note from Google’s latest “card” esthetic.  I like it.  It’s part of the whole clean, unobtrusive design principle.

So if you are looking to lower your bill, T-Mobile seems to be the real deal right now.  Count us as two of the recent millions of switchers from AT&T to T-Mobile.

The hunt for the perfect cell phone plan

I am nothing, if not occasionally obsessive.  I get fixated with certain projects, plans, or life goals 1  Well lately (as in the last 6-9 months), I’ve been rather preoccupied with finding the perfect, affordable cell phone plan.

The last time I was this worked up about hacking my status as a cell phone user, it was all about the iPhone.  This time, it isn’t the hardware, it’s the carrier.

I have this long-standing disdain for how my data gets to my head.  Whether it be of the internet variety, or the texting and talking variety, it’s all really just chunks of data.  But so that we’re all on the same page, let’s confine our terms to the industry convention:

  • data = internet access.  Think web.  Think email.  Think Facebook.  That’s data.
  • voice = cellular phone calls.  Self explanatory.
  • text = text messages sent via SMS.  This is old-school texting here, long before there were smart phones.  But don’t believe for a second that they are as valuable as those cell carriers say they are.  Profit margins for text messages are astronomical.  And the value of said SMS messages are plummeting with the advent of other, freer platform messaging (like Facebook Messenger, iMessage, Google Hangouts, Skype, etc.).

Now the sweet spot in a smart cell phone (i.e., iPhones or any Android branded phone) plan, as I see it, would be to leverage more data heavy offerings in lieu of the more expensive voice/text services.  Why?  Well, that’s the whole point of a smart phone.  These things are internet-gobbling dynamos.  That’s arguably what they do best anyway: present the internet in amazing, fascinating, startling new ways to us consumers.  Classic voice and text are two mediums that are nearly archaic, simply because they are nearly throwaway offerings in the data world 2.

All of these reasons have led me to often call cable TV and cell phone companies merely dumb pipes.  I stand by that.  The intelligence in our data consumption has moved downstream — into our little mobile internet gizmos.  The value of the service isn’t in the pipe itself.  And knowing that their product value was losing ground, those big dumb pipes did the only thing they could to retain customers: force us.  The CEO of T-Mobile (!) summarizes it best:

“Carriers figured out a long time ago that they could make money – a lot of money – by forcing customers into restrictive, overpriced data plans.  We changed it for smartphones and we’re changing it for tablets.”

I was floored when I read this from one of the big pipes!  Speaking directly to the core problem in the cell phone market right now.  As I dug more into his company’s offerings, I was even more impressed.  But I’m getting ahead of myself.

On average, with AT&T, we are paying $135 per month for two cell phones, both iPhones.  That’s a chunk of change.  And how much service were we consuming?   Take a look:

 

As you can see, our usage was quite low overall.  So I began to look for alternatives.  And there are many, many options.  But it helps to realize a couple of key facts:

  1. If you have a GSM phone, there are only two infrastructure games in town: T-Mobile and AT&T.  All the other smaller mobile companies are renting their antennae.
  2. When you sign up for a “cheap” phone upgrade, you are getting a reduced price because the hardware is subsidized by the carrier.  It’s like a lease.  You get the privilege of using this great phone, but you must stay with the carrier for 2 years.  By the time the contract is up, you would have paid twice over for the retail cost of the phone.  Early termination fees?  Those exist to “recoup” the cost of the hardware.
  3. The above typical cell phone plan is what’s known as a post-paid plan.  It is paid in full after contract maturation.  A “pre-paid” or “pay as you go” plan is the non-contract alternative.

So contracts are bad, all agreed.  But I found that the pre-paid alternatives were harder to get right too.  And there are many:

But in the end, all of a sudden, that little T-Mobile CEO quote popped into my radar.  And I was floored.  The more I looked into it, the better it sounded.  For a 2-smartphone plan, the first line is $50 / mo.  The second is $30.  This is their baseline rate, for 500MB of 4G speed data per month.  But there is never an overage penalty.  Instead, they just throttle you down from 4G to 3G.  That’s very reasonable.  Meanwhile, text and voice are rightfully “thrown in” at unlimited.  Their coverage map is roughly equivalent to AT&T’s.

So we’ll be looking at a 40% reduction in our monthly bill!  But the switch is only on paper right now.  The SIM cards are in the mail.  I’ll post an update when they arrive.  Happy bill-slashing!

References