🎉 Canceling Comcast

In 2016, I was paying Comcast $150 a month for their top-tier (at the time) 100Mbps speeds. I could usually eke out a little more than 30Mbps on a good day.

I lept at the chance for gigabit internet. I signed up for NextLight as a charter member—locking in $49.95/mo for life (the current price is only $69.95 last I checked). And I took the opportunity to upgrade my $20 router from 2008 at the same time.

And when I returned my cable box to Comcast to cancel my service, the representative felt compelled to counsel me: “NextLight, huh? you know,” he said, leaning in, “if you miss even a single payment, they’ll raise your price?”

“I’ll take my chances.”

I’ve been automatically billed $49.95 every month since, and this is what my speed looks like this morning:

🥺 Why can’t we have nice things?

Big cable companies suck. Big cable companies burned hundreds of thousands of dollars to stop Longmont’s municipal broadband.

In 2005, Comcast and CenturyLink rammed through the egregious Colorado SB-05-152, prohibiting municipalities in the state of Colorado from offering telecommunication services.

Longmont had to hold two referendums on the measure—one in 2009, which failed, and another in 2011, which passed:

In 2009, “No Blank Check Longmont” (Comcast/CenturyLink) spent $250,000 to dash our dreams of municipal broadband. They framed it as a choice between fast internet vs. police and firefighters.

In 2011, “Look Before You Leap Longmont” (Comcast/CenturyLink) spent $300,000 urging us to rethink our municipal broadband plans. They stood in lone opposition to our unanimous city council and our local paper.

Comcast spent $500,000 in a tiny city of less than 100,000 people. You can be sure, Comcast will do all this again in a heartbeat.

📓 Lessons

Rather than use their vast resources to improve their service, Comcast will spend big to ensure they never have to compete.

Let Longmont be a lesson. In 2011, Longmont won because it formed an honest citizens’ advisory group: Longmont’s Future. Longmont’s Future got the word out about the vote on Facebook, its website, and the local press.

And ever since, Longmonsters (that’s right—Longmont’s demonym is “Longmonster”) have chosen NextLight over competing services.

Real competition won. Fuck Comcast. Long live municipal broadband.

Why take notes

During meetings I race to note what’s being said. I don’t often refer back to what I’ve written—I get value from doing the writing itself.

I’m not writing it down to remember it later, I’m writing it down to remember it now

– Field Notes credo

Here’s a bad and sweeping summary of how educational psychologists categorize the purposes of taking notes:

1. Storage – you write things down so you can remember them. Birthdays, websites, movies recommendations—you can refer back to your notes and “remember” with perfect fidelity.
2. Encoding – you write things down to write things down.

Writing things down without ever reading them again can still have value. In a much cited 2014 paper titled, “the Pen is Mightier than the Keyboard,” authors Muller and Oppenheimer concluded students taking notes in physical notebooks had a better understanding of lecture material vs. their laptop-tapping counterparts. The act of writing helped them solidify complicated ideas.

How to take notes

I’ve perused innumerable books and blogs on notetaking, but my system emerged independently. I do a small number of things consistently:

• dates
• lists
• todos
• marginalia

It’s also just a great habit to date every thing you handwrite

– David Allen, Getting Things Done

I start every note with an underlined, left-aligned date in ISO-8601 format. I follow this with a space and a title for the note. Something like “GitLab meeting” or “Hiring roundup” or “Gratitude”—anything I can mentally cling to later.

[The list] has an irresistible magic.

– Umberto Eco, via Der Spiegel

Most of my notes are lists. Lists capture fleeting thought quickly, but are unfit for conveying new and complex ideas—perfect for notetaking.

If I’m noting something I’ll have to do later, I’ll write TODO in all caps and put a square box around it. If I have a highlighter handy, I’ll highlight it, too. Later, I’ll transpose this list item into whatever todo list app I’m using at the moment.

Marginalia describes short notes in the margins, often in the margins of books. I provide ample margins in my notes to jot down questions and thoughts. This is handy in meetings to structure what I’m about to say.

I’ve endeavoured to strip my process until its as simple as I can make it. Complicated systems yield inconsistency—it’s not a system; it’s a mess. I always start with the dumbest system that could work—often it works forever.

Notebooks

I accumulate notebooks I enjoy holding. I get a little thrill when I find a notebook that’s well made.

Notebooks I’ve tried:

My go-to notebook is the Leuchtturm1917 A5, dot-grid, 80g/sqm paper. It’s got an index, page numbers, a little pocket in the back.

But I’d love it if it were more disposable; maybe not quite as disposable as Field Notes, something like the Endless Storyboard Standard notebook with sewn binding.

I’d also love to find any notebook offering the grid pattern of the old SparkFun SFE Project Notebook—reverse grid with a thicker gridline every 8 squares.

I’ve been playing with the idea of making my own notebook. With a UUID for every notebook, page numbers, and a QR code that will let me jump from the page to some digital system.

Here’s what I’ve got so far (it’s a work in progress):