Adoption Newsletter

Happy spring everyone!

This is the first newsletter I've ever cobbled together, so bear with me as I muddle through the better part of the last year in review. We are healthy, happy, and employed (though hardly wealthy). 2009 brought a lot of frustration and culminated in a life-changing decision.

Beginning in early 2007 Dawn and I started trying to conceive to start a family. After two years of heartbreaking disappointment and a clinical diagnosis for me indicating a persistent problem with no known cause we investigated our alternatives. The natural choices were artificial insemination (AI), IVF and adoption. Each has its benefits and costs. After a few failed attempts at AI we fully shifted into adoption mode.

We initiated the adoption process in December 2009, began a five week adoption course in January and wrapped up our home study interviews with a social worker last week. This means we will be eligible to be profiled and potentially matched with a birth family as soon as a week or two. The time-line for adoption after that point becomes very unpredictable and can move very quickly or drag on over a long period of time. We're hoping it moves quickly.

I realize this may come as a shock and surprise to some either because it seems so sudden or because adoption is simply a murky subject with lots of myths and misconceptions floating about. This was not a decision either of us jumped into without doing our homework and careful reflection of who we are and what we are trying to do. Below I'm hoping to dispel some common misconceptions about adoption to allay those specific concerns. We encourage and invite questions.

Myth: You get to pick out the child, like a puppy at a store.

Fact: With adoption, the adoptive parents must “sell” yourself in the form of a profile to the expectant mothers who will select you from many profiles. Profiles are a snapshot of your life, your interests, your environment and your family and friends with lots of pictures. We always have an opportunity to decline a child referral (being selected by an expectant mother) if there are unacceptable risks or other factors with the expectant mother or her baby. Matching is a very subjective process and the adoptive parents can only agree to continue a match, not initiate one.

Myth: Adoption takes years to complete

Fact: Adoption can take years to complete especially for international adoptions when complications arise with visas or the adoption policies of either country. Domestic adoption however can complete in weeks or months after a home study is complete depending on the state in which the child is born.

Myth: The birth mother can take back her child anytime after the adoption has completed in a domestic adoption

Fact: Once an adoption is finalized it is extremely difficult for the birth parents or family to gain custody of the child. Only in very rare circumstances such as when the adoption was completed in bad faith and documents were falsified or the birth mother was provably coerced by the adoptive parents or the adoption agency to make an adoption plan for her child will cancellation of the adoption even be considered by the courts. Once parental rights are voluntarily surrendered it is very difficult (and costly for the birth parent) to reverse that decision.

Myth: Adopted children have emotional / mental problems more frequently than non-adopted children

Fact: Most adopted children are perfectly healthy physically and mentally. There are always children with special needs and some international adoptions have higher rates of special needs children (such as Russia with higher rates of attachment disorders than some countries). As adoptive parents however we have the ability to only move forward with adoptions that have risks we feel we are prepared to handle. Many studies have shown little difference between the emotional health of an adopted child and the emotional heath of a child parented by his or her birth mother under similar circumstances (socially and economically).

Myth: We are adopting to give a child a better life

Fact: We are adopting because we want to have a family and cannot conceive of a child by ourselves. It is not an altruistic gesture to save a child from destitution. We are still new parents and not much different than anyone else and we are bound to make mistakes any other new parent would make (though we'd like to think we've prepared well enough to handle most anything).

Myth: Most birth mothers are teenagers who got pregnant accidentally

Fact: Most birth mothers are women in their twenties or thirties who for one reason or another have decided they are not able to parent a(nother) child at this time. It is a sign of love and forethought on the part of the birth mother to make an adoption plan for her child to ensure they are raised in a loving family that can provide what she cannot at the moment. In fact, most teenage mothers choose to parent their children.

These are the most common misunderstandings that we've encountered thus far with common conceptions of adoption. Adoption is one of those things it seems most people have heard of, have a positive feeling about, but know little about how it's actually accomplished and only ever hear about the horror stories presented on the news – such as the story recently about an American woman who adopted a boy from Russia and being unable to cope with some emotional problems he had sent him back to Russia on a plane by himself.

We'd also like to answer a few frequently asked questions about our adoption.

Q: How long does it take?

A: For us the process started in Dec. of 2009 and as of May 13^th we are home study ready which means we can be profiled to expectant mothers. From this point a match could happen immediately or take over a year. The average time from home study ready to finalized adoption with the agency we're using is 8 to 9 months. The time it takes varies on a number of factors including how many children they have to find families for, how many adoptive parents there are that are home study ready, how open we are to race and risk factors (such as drug and alcohol use). We are very open to race and quite open to several risk factors after learning more about them and the effects they might have on a developing child. We have the ability to change our openness to any of these factors at any time if we change our minds.

Q: What is an open adoption?

A: An open adoption in one in which the child has some tangible link to his or her birth family after the adoption has been finalized. The degree of openness is up to the adoptive parents and the birth family and can range from letters, photos, postcards, and/or newsletters to in-person visits and gatherings. In some cases the birth mother may maintain an active relationship with the adopted child in a similar capacity to an aunt or uncle. It is fairly common for contact with the birth mother to fade away over time as she moves on with her life and needs to end this chapter.

Q: Why open adoption? Doesn't it just confuse the child?

A: Because everyone has a need to know where they came from, who there birth parents were, what they looked like, and what their heritage is. With traditional closed adoptions many adoptees find themselves desiring to seek out who their birth parents were and more information about their birth family. This can be very emotionally difficult for the adoptive parents even though it does not at all reflect on their ability as parents. With open adoption the child has all the information available on his or her birth family. Sometimes this is a lot of information including medical history of the birth mother and father and sometimes it's just a name and a story. The adoptive parents in an open adoption however never have to feel they are lying or hiding information from the child and in many cases the adoptees of open adoptions have little or no desire to seek out additional information on their birth family because they either have all they need or know they've been given all their parents had about the adoptee's birth family.

Q: When do you tell the child they're adopted?

A: Immediately and always. Conventional wisdom suggests the adopted child be told using positive language they are adopted from the get-go. Even with infants it's encouraged to talk about adoption and make it something as second nature as breathing. The adopted child should be told an age-appropriate story about their birth and adoption and the truth should not be hidden. Even if the child's birth family has a sordid story it should be told but it does not have to be blunt either. Waiting to tell a child they're adopted until they're “old enough to understand” is only likely to lead to feelings of betrayal and, “what else haven't you been telling me?” The sooner and more frequently the better.

That pretty much sums up our adoption process thus far and the driving force of our efforts this year and last.

We hope all is well with you and look forward to visiting family again late this summer or this Christmas (and with a little one in tow with any luck).

Cheers!

Adventures in Remodeling - Part 3: Come Together (right now...over me)

Day 4: October 15th, 2009

Now that the walls, floor, and ceiling were devoid of any plaster or concrete it was time to insulate and run the new electrical. While unfortunately the mess of 8 wires in the ceiling junction box could only be feasibly reduced to a mess of 6 wires, the reduction of those two wires made a noticeable difference. Two new outlet boxes were installed on the north-facing wall where the sink was - one for a outlet/switch combo and one for the vanity light.

Previously we had blown insulation on the outside wall only. This time we insulated with roll insulation which was quite a bit less messy. Just for good measure the entire room was insulated both for thermal properties and for noise-canceling properties.

Lastly we needed a sub-floor not only as a base for the cement backer board for the tile that will eventually be laid, but also for a more traversable surface on which to work. Unfortunately the dimensions of the floor to be surfaced were just slightly too big to fit on a single 4x8 sheet of plywood, so we used two 4x8 sheets of 1/4" plywood. It had to be so thin in order to fit under the edge of the existing tub and I didn't want to bury the toilet pipe in the floor by making the floor too deep.

Day 5: October 16th, 2009

After all the demolition and some light reconstruction it was finally time to pass the baton to our drywaller, Ty. His crew of three guys came to the house to hang the green board in the bathroom and hang some normal drywall in the bedroom. They made fairly quick work of it taking only two hours or so to complete the job. Wham bam thank you ma'am and they were gone.

Days 6,7,8: October 17th, 18th, and 19th, 2009

The next few days Ty stopped over to begin the process of mudding the drywall and making all those minor defects and gaps disappear. Ty didn't take very long either to mud all five walls and the ceiling. He did relate a fun fact to me however. Did you know that up until around 1980 drywall cement contained asbestos as an additive to keep it from shrinking? Apparently with asbestos added, drywall cement could be applied and it would dry exactly as applied in one day. Naturally, asbestos was removed as an additive from concerns about its health impact and no non-carcinogenic substitute has been found to keep drywall cement from shrinking which is why it's always a multi-day process of mudding, sanding and re-applying.

The magic of drywall cement and a skilled hand made several gaps and holes disappear. Unfortunately when the first team hung the drywall the completely missed one of the outlet boxes (I guess it was flush with the stud instead of standing out from it) so Ty had to do some exploratory cutting on the north (sink) wall to find it. And find it we did. A little more mudding and you could hardly tell there was ever a problem.

Days 9,10,11: October 20th, 21st, and 22nd

Once the drywall was done it was time to prime the inside of the bathroom and paint the ceiling so we wouldn't need to worry about dripping paint into the brand new tub and enclosure. Since priming isn't all that interesting I'll just skip to the tub installation.

Day 12: October 23rd

At last the fruits of our labor were about to pay off in something a bit more aesthetically pleasing than drywall (apologies to Ty) - a new tub and surround. For this job we hired Bath Fitter to break up and remove our old porcelain-covered cast iron tub and replace it with an acrylic tub and one-piece custom-fitted surround enclosure. The enclosure runs all the way to the ceiling. In addition, they were to frame the bathroom window on the west side wall, replace all the existing bath hardware, and install a new anti-scald valve in the plumbing behind the tub.

The two-man crew arrived at 8:30am, about 30 minutes earlier than I had expected, and worked all day until about 6pm. Bath Fitter's claim is they will do everything they're contracted to do in one day and clean up after themselves when they leave. They did hold up that claim and there was very little evidence remaining of their presence aside from the new tub and surround.

However, not everything went as smoothly as one would hope. In the process of installing the anti-scald valve a pipe was twisted and broken in the wall between the basement and the second floor. This resulting in two more people showing up to the house - a plumber and a Bath Fitter supervisor.

They asked Dawn for permission to cut a hole in our downstairs front room wall, just under the thermostat, in order to access the break and repair it. She gave them permission of course because frankly it wasn't likely to be fixed any other way and that's a better place to cut a hole than the dining room side of the same wall.

Somewhere in all this pipe fixing it was deemed necessary (without asking permission) to cut into my new subfloor in the bathroom. I cannot fathom why they needed to do this since there are only two pipes covered by the floor - the toilet drain and the sink drain - neither of which would be involved in fixing this breakage. If they were exploring under the floor I would have preferred a call or text from Dawn and I could tell them exactly what was under there. As such, I was left with a somewhat structurally unsound floor on the right side because they cut it in a way that the newly-unsecured piece was free to bob up and down as people walked across it.

I also found my cold water shut-off valve broken for no adequately explained reason and no mention of it to either Dawn or myself, just like the floor cut. The wood cover I had crafted to go over the toilet train was missing (and found stuffed under a pipe under the floor section they had cut) and one of the bolts for the toilet base was lost in the process as well (it had been fairly well attached to the toilet drain pipe head and provided a stop for the wood on top of the pipe).

When I got home I was left with a lovely new bath tub that worked, a lovely new surround and bath hardware, a cut up sub-floor, a broken valve handle, a hole in my downstairs wall, mysteriously low water pressure in the basement sink from the level it had been at in the morning, and no idea if Bath Fitter intended to pay for the repairs to my wall and/or stick me with the bill for the plumber. I called and left a message that night and am waiting to hear back from them. Hopefully we can sort this all out and I can still recommend them to others. At this point however, I would not recommend Bath Fitter if you have an older home with less than good condition pipes.

Days 13 and 14: October 24th and 25th, 2009

It's starting to look a bit more like a bathroom again after adding new lighting fixtures on the ceiling and the vanity. Ty is coming back on Monday to patch up some nicks and dents in the wall caused by the Bath Fitter installation crew.

Dawn seems to be pleased with the new tub after she took a relaxing bath in it on Sunday. No more stupid shelf in the back of the tub keeping her from being able to lie down almost completely (it is a 5 ½' tub). Spooks our cat also appears to like the new tub because there more room to sit and walk around on the edges now.

Update: Bath Fitter returned my call and the supervisor who was at my house explained why the floor had been cut, apologized for the cold water valve and offered to at least provide me the replacement part (because I said I can do the replacement myself), and made some tentative offer to possibly split the cost of the plumber based on how much it cost. Normally plumbing-related costs due to poor existing infrastructure is on the homeowner, which I can understand. He also asked if we needed someone to come repair the marks in the wall. This makes me feel a little better about Bath Fitter though I would have rather not had to call and ask why things were damaged or broken.

Here are a few more pictures...

Adventures in Remodeling - Part 2: Man vs. Floor

Day 2: October, 12th, 2009

With the bedroom wall down, it was time to put some plastic up in its place to help contain the dust from the remainder of the bathroom demolition. Dawn was wise enough to cover our bedroom furniture with various items to protect them from terrible terrible plaster dust. Alas, the carpet in the bedroom may have met its match this year - we'll see when it's all said and done (but I'm not holding out much hope).

Today the task was primarily removing the remainder of everything in bathroom except the floor. The lessons learned from the previous day's adventure suggested a bit more caution and a bit less sledge hammer. Suffice it to say no other walls collapsed in the demolition of the remaining three sides.

As you can see from the photos, the dust was abundant as it stuck to the plastic in the very hot and humid room (ewww sweat!). Fortunately the removal of all the rest of the tile and plaster was without event.

Day 3: October 13th, 2009

With all the walls down only the tile floor remained. Plaster, once again my nemesis, prevented me from using the sledge hammer full force lest I wish to redo my entire dining room ceiling.

For this task, my friend Ray stopped over to give me a hand (I called in a favor owed) and together we set about cracking into this floor.

What I was expecting was tile and concrete. What I was not expecting was tile and 2 - 2 ½ inches of concrete interwoven with more razor wire mesh! I was also expecting under the tile and concrete there would be a sub-floor, but no such luck just thicker and thinner areas of concrete.

At first getting the tile out was like pulling teeth...healthy teeth. That is to say it was very slow going and took a lot of energy. But with some luck (and very careful, light sledge hammering) we were able to pull up larger and larger sections of concrete until one 2' x 2' corner of tile and concrete remained.

With a great heave and some very heavy lifting we carried this last section down the stairs and out to the dumpster.My guess is this single section of tile and concrete was easily 120 pounds. It was quite a lump to carry between the two of us. Unfortunately I did not get any photos of the floor's demolition, but Dawn was kind enough to snap a few shots the next morning of a segment of the behemoth in the dumpster and resulting "floor".

Here are a few more pictures:



Next: Part 3 - Come Together (right now...over me)

Adventures in Remodeling - Part 1

What do you do when you have a small water pipe leak in your bathroom ceiling that destroys part of the ceiling and wall? Step 1: turn off the water to those pipes and then ignore it for two years.

Eventually however, that large hole with the raggedy plaster and lathe edge staring down at you from above the toilet must be fixed and so this year we decided to embark on one of the most ambitious do-it-yourself home improvements we've ever attempted: complete remodeling of the upstairs bathroom.

Our bathroom, a 7' wide x 9' long x 9' tall room with a toilet, 5 ½' cast iron bathtub coated in porcelain, and a long single-paned window in the tub wall is not a large room. How hard could it be?

Day 1: Saturday, Oct. 10th

The dumpster arrives in our driveway and I head upstairs to remove the toilet, dismantle the vanity and disconnect our shower head before attempting to pummel the tile walls to bits.

Dawn kicked off the festivities by taking a hammer to all the protruding ceramic wall attachments such as the cup holders in the wall above the sink, the two towel bars, and soap dish above the tub, and the toilet paper holder in the wall near the toilet. She then proceeded to hammer down some plaster on the right side of the door.

Our first surprise came when I wrestled the old recessed medicine cabinet out of the wall and discovered a pile of old, used disposable razor blades in a pile behind the vanity. Gillette, Schick, some unreadable - there must have been about four dozen of these razor blades. It all made sense now, the small slit in the back of the medicine cabinet with a small black arrow pointing down in to the slit, sort of like a biohazard sharps unit, but much too narrow for anything that size.

The blades themselves seemed to be too new to be original to the house, so they probably came about much later with the introduction of the vanity. Then again, the recess in the wall appears to be built specifically for this vanity so I'm not sure what the actual time line of this travesty is.

Suffice it to say we were put off a bit by the rather careless design of this medicine cabinet. With the removal of the medicine cabinet, the major demolition could start.

Gentlemen, start your sledgehammers!

It should be noted at this point that my house was built in 1922. What that means in a practical sense is that my house is not built of the lightweight sorts of materials you find in homes today. Quite the contrary. My house is built from solid hardwoods, plaster, and concrete (we'll get to the concrete in a bit). Plaster is not fun to work with. Nay, I think one does not work with plaster so much as curse it because it has a tendency to crack when stressed and create a holy unbreathable mess (also wholly unbreathable).

Armed with goggles, a head wrap, gloves, a respirator mask and a sledge I took to the south side wall (the one with the toilet) to see what lay in wait for me under the acres of tile. After a few good whack and bits of porcelain sailing about I realize the tile is adhered to the wall using about and inch of concrete smeared over some viciously sharp slitted metal mesh which is nailed to the lathe on the studs of the wall. Fun.

After some time messing about with various ways to remove this incredibly resilient concoction, I found the best way to take it off was in large, extremely heavy chunks. First I'd smash the tile straight on with the sledge to loosen the concrete, and then using a pry-bar I'd pry the mesh from the lathe. When I was lucky a 30 lb. slab of tile, concrete, and what can really only be described as razor wire would come crashing down at (or sometimes on) my feet.

Finally after a couple hours of this I was finally able to see the light. Literally, I saw the light from my bedroom window shining through my bathroom lathe. It took a few seconds to dawn on me that I should not be seeing any light shining through my bedroom wall.

Uh oh! The drywallers just got a little more business. Nothing left to do but tear the whole wall down so it can be replaced with new drywall and painted. Don't you just love these little project "expanders"?

That pretty much sums up the first day of remodeling. Here are a few more pictures to enjoy.





Tomorrow: Part 2 - Man vs. Floor

For a tech-savvy president, Obama doesn't get it

Today the Obama administration's Trade Representative, Ron Kirk, put Canada on the U.S. "Priority Watch List" of nations in need of copyright reform as the administration sees it.

It's been troubling to see a president who claims to "get it", who is addicted to his Blackberry, and who has harnessed the power of the Internet and free services such as Twitter to win a campaign turn around and appoint not one or two, but five Department of Justice positions to RIAA-friendly lawyers. He has also sided with the RIAA in upholding the notion that $150,000 penalty per infringement is not an excessive penalty....for a $1 song.....right.

My initial enthusiasm for candidate and president-elect Obama to create and appoint the nation's first Technology secretary cabinet position has now turned to horror. While Obama's choice for CTO of the nation was lauded by some I remain leery, especially given his choice in technology-related lawyers.

For a man surrounded in tech he's surprisingly ignorant of the futility of "intellectual property" (IP) and its enforcement. Do people have a right to their work? Absolutely. Should IP be protected and enforced? Sure, why not? Are we doing it right? NO WAY!

IP is a fancy way of saying "something I thought up that I don't want you to copy." We already have laws in place governing copying written works known as copyright laws. Some, including myself, think they are overly generous for the copyright owner and do not encourage ongoing creativity because a single solid gold idea that is copyrightable can become a cash cow for the rest of one's life (or longer). Additionally thanks to current copyright laws, that material will likely never make it into the public domain for future generations to enjoy once it is no longer profitable.

The biggest problem with IP as I see it in the U.S. is that there are generally two ways to protect it: copyright and patents. For the purposes of this article, I'm going to focus on copyright.

These days in the U.S. copyright is given to everyone and anyone the instant they put a thought into a medium, such as paper, canvas, marble, or a computer file. Copyright can also be registered with the U.S. Copyright Office (USCO) which provides a little better leverage in a dispute between two copyright holders about who came up with what first.

Originally copyright was not automatically granted and you had to pay for it annually with a limit on the number of years you could renew the copyright protection. The purpose of copyright as stated in the U.S. constitution is:

The Congress shall have Power ... To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries

Key in that passage are the words "promote" and "limited". Since those words were penned the United States Code including the Copyright Act of 1976 which laid the foundation for today's laws has been modified dozens of times. The current incarnation of the copyright portions of the United States Code include the following:

• piracy and counterfeiting provisions
• provisions for computer code
• protections for records (music recordings)
  
• protections for semiconductor chip designs
• protections for vessel hull designs
• extensions of protection both in scope and duration (such as the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act or CTEA which extends copyright to the artists lifetime plus 70 years)
  
• perpetually auto-renewing registrations
• transfer of copyright, involuntarily in some cases
• protections for tv programming transmissions
• provisions for satellite providers
• large monetary remedies for infractions
• computer software rental protections
• criminal punishment for gross violations of an otherwise civil nature
• exemptions for dining establishments
• provisions making circumvention of copyright protection devices illegal (Digital Millennium Copyright Act - DMCA)
• protections for business who hire for creative works
• protections for movies and rentals

It's clear that copyright has grown wild and unwieldy since its inception. Unfortunately as we have progressed through the years we have not progressed our common sense.

What purpose does an extensive copyright provide for the copyright owner? It seems it may provide unending wealth. While this may be good for the owner, is it good for our culture? If culture does not have access to these collected works over time our culture is lost in cobwebs and dimly lit corners of warehouses and collector's cellars.

Long copyright extensions do not promote creation of more than a few financially rewarding works. What it does promote is a lot of legal wrangling over who created something first and who copies whom. It neither promotes science or the useful arts nor is a limited amount of time.

Some argue that life plus 70 years is a limited amount of time for a copyright until you realize that the copyright can be transfered and renewed from the author's death to descendants or to his estate which may not end.

Where would we be today if we did not have any of the works of Shakespere, Bach, Bethooven, DaVinci, or any number of other artists and creative people whose works have moved into the public domain? No one person or entity owns all the rights to those works, and because of it everyone is free to use them to create new works (called derivitive works).

What does all this have to do with Obama? With his actions and with his support of the RIAA and all they stand for, President Obama is making a statement that the profits and interests of a few individuals are more valuable than the collected American culture. His actions show that he believes capitalism and profit come before heritage and creation of new works based on old.

I recommend reading more on copyright at the Creative Commons website - a website devoted to only restricting creative works to the minimum amount necessary to protect the author from financial harm without all the heavy restrictions of U.S. copyright law. Just for fun, here's a really good winning video in a competition Creative Commons held to promote the site and the idea.

American Cable Association says tier broadband is the future

Surprised? I'm not. The American Cable Association (ACA) is as you expect a cable industry group that supports the notion of tiered, consumption-based broadband billing.

The article written on Tuesday doesn't really give any facts or metrics upon which to base such a claim and they used the tired and false analogy of utilities to get their point across.

[I] would like to pay the same price for heating bills all year round, but [I have] to pay more in those Pittsburgh winters when [I use] more. -- AC President Matt Polka

Do we really have to go over this again? Fine.

If my water service were like my Internet service, every time I turned on a faucet or took a shower or washed my clothes my water meter would leak a little bit of water that would be counted toward my usage. Also my meter would leak (from my 'used' side, not the supply side) constantly and slowly every day.

Why is my water meter leaking you say? Why can't I fix it? Because that's how my Internet usage behaves today, and we're modeling my water usage after my Internet usage. Even when I'm not online, my modem flashes and flickers away constantly talking with Time Warner and constantly being barraged by network bots and viruses trying to break into my system. This is real traffic even though I have no control over it. Additionally, when I do use the Internet for web browsing I get pop-up ads, flashing ads, streaming music and video ads -- none of which I want but all of which incur additional usage. That's why my meter leaks and I can't stop it -- I'm being charged for things I have no control over.

This is why Internet cannot be metered, at least not until there's a way for me to absolutely control my usage. At home, I can turn off every water-using device, every electrical device not on batteries, and every gas-using device and I won't get charged. I cannot do that with the Internet short of unplugging the cable modem every time I stop using the Internet (which is a ludicrous proposal for anyone, especially people with a family in case you're wondering).

I'm still waiting to hear from anyone in the industry as to what is so untenable about the current model. Given that rates always increase, why can't the cost of upgrade simply be included in the standard rate increases?

Why can't users pay for the speeds they want without having a limit on the data they transfer?

Why aren't businesses (one of the heaviest users of bandwidth) subject to this metered model?

Why must residential subscribers subsidize the business pricing model of all-you-can-eat?

Until these questions are thoroughly answered I will be a strong and vocal opponent of any metered data billing plan for Internet use.

Monday morning picture time

At first, this weekend's outage had me thinking they shut me off for "abuse" of their network primarily because of a lot of uploading I had done on one particular day - the Ubuntu Jaunty Jackalope Linux release. So I took a snapshot of my usage graph courtesy of DD-WRT and marked it up with descriptions of my spikes in usage. I thought you might appreciate what "moderate" usage looks like.


As you can see, for not even the full month of April I've used about 23 GB of downloaded content including:

• watching 2 hours of TV online a few times
• downloading a couple Linux ISOs
• uploading those ISOs via BitTorrent for 1 day
• downloading software updates after installing the new Linux version

The rest of the days represent normal day-to-day usage:

• VoIP phone calls (sent and received)
• Web browsing (facebook, Stop the Cap!, Google Reader, etc.)
• Watching online videos (YouTube.com, break.com, collegehumor.com)
• Sending / receiving emails

While 23 GB is under Time Warner's proposed caps, it's easy to see that with a full month's worth of activity I could easily reach 30 GB under normal usage. I know what you're thinking, Linux releases aren't normal and don't happen every month, and you're right. But they are part of my normal online behavior and there will always been days now and again when I download and/or upload a lot of data. In networking terms it's a burst of usage over the month and residental customers don't usually pay for bursts, only sustained usage (actually they don't pay for usage at all and that's the point of Stop the Cap!).

This graph does not include any online gaming, serious amounts of downloading or frequent online TV / movie watching. The video streaming will probably eat up data faster than any other activity online short of downloading games from online stores like Valve's Steam.

Consider my usage if I watched 2 hours of TV online a day for a month. That means the video alone would be 60 GB of usage (1 GB /hour * 2 hrs / day * 30 days). Added to my other usage would put me (this month) at almost 80 GB of data usage.

Under Time Warner's plan that gives me two options: pay $75/month for the 100 GB tier, or pay what I do now ($55/month) and get charged an additional $20 in overage fees (bringing me back up to $75/month). So clearly, I have no choice under the new tier and it would cost me an additional $20/month from what I pay now (which is $20 more than standard service because I don't have cable and I have Turbo).

Just some food for thought. Compare your usage to mine and you'll get an idea of how you fare even without a "gas gauge".