08.21.10
Posted in Media & Internet at 9.16 pm by Caitlin
We FINALLY have internet up and running at our new home. This has been a major saga!
We had an awesome cable internet provider in San Francisco but unfortunately they don’t serve our new area. So we were in the market for a new internet company.
I consulted DSL Reports to see if I could find another small cable or DSL provider with good customer reviews. That’s how I found Astound in the first place. Unfortunately this only led to dead ends, such as business wireless providers that would charge north of $100 per month.
I knew that as a last resort I could go to Comcast for cable. However, I was trying to avoid this if at all possible. Firstly, I checked out their pricing and it was quite expensive. Secondly, I have never heard anyone say a good word about Comcast – they seem to be one of the most-hated companies in America.
There were no other cable companies in my area so I started looking into DSL. Every DSL company I spoke to said that I would need to get an AT&T phone line and switch it over. They couldn’t confirm DSL availability for my address without a phone number. Since you can get a phone line through cable, I clearly didn’t want to order a phone number for the purposes of DSL if I was going to end up with cable anyway.
The only company that could confirm DSL availability for my address was AT&T. And unfortunately our address was coming up in the system as NOT served by DSL. Given that we are in the middle of a Silicon Valley town, I was shocked! -1 to AT&T.
Just as we were on the verge of ordering Comcast cable, I found out from a neighbour downstairs that she was an AT&T DSL customer. There are only four apartments in the building and AT&T was saying that apartments 1 and 3 could get DSL but apartments 2 and 4 could not, despite the fact that 2 and 4 are closer to the phone line. She was in the process of moving apartments within the same building and stood to lose her service. -1 to AT&T.
Fortunately my neighbour managed to talk to an engineer who confirmed that this was an error and if there was DSL to the building it would be to the entire building. +1 to AT&T. He said that he would update the addresses in the system but it would take a week before it would update for the sales and customer service departments. -1 to At&T.
Once this process was complete, I tried to order DSL from AT&T. I looked at other DSL providers but AT&T offered a discount for bundling phone and internet and had a pretty sweet special that would give me a very high speed for a year at a much cheaper price. +1 to AT&T. The downside was that I was locked into a contract for a year even though I wasn’t yet sure about the quality of service. -1 to AT&T.
I decided to go with it anyway on the basis of my neighbor’s experience but when I tried to order the phone and internet online, the system wouldn’t let me select internet as an option, despite confirming the availability of DSL to my home. -1 to AT&T.
AT&T’s website has a system where you can chat to help/sales agents, which is a great facility when you really don’t want to spend lots of time and money on the phone. +1 to AT&T. The online chat agent told me to put through an order for home phone and an order for DSL without home phone separately and then call to merge the orders. I did so but when I called to merge the orders I was told this was incorrect advice and they would have to cancel the order for DSL without home phone and do a new one, attaching it to the phone line. -1 to AT&T.
I ordered the DSL line to be attached to the home phone order but I was unable to cancel the order for DSL without home phone until 24 hours had gone by. -1 to AT&T. I waited until the time had passed then phoned back and cancelled the order. I was very clear about which order to keep alive and which order to cancel and thankfully AT&T got this right. +1 to AT&T.
We bought a modem through AT&T because we didn’t have one (we had returned the previous one to Astound) and we wanted to ensure compatibility. It was expensive – $75 including postage just for a modem (we already had a wireless router). -1 to AT&T. When it showed up, it was without voice filters and there was a message saying “this compartment intentionally left empty (filters not required for customers without AT&T voice service)”. Since we had ordered voice services, we did need filters. -1 to AT&T.
I called AT&T and explained the situation. They said they would send me voice filters and it should take two days to get to me. +1 to AT&T. At my request, they credited my account for an extra week since I was yet to start getting service. +1 to AT&T.
When the voice filters arrived on Thursday, we plugged everything in but the DSL still did not work. -1 to AT&T. I called the help desk on Friday and they eventually confirmed a fault on the line. They said they could send an engineer that day. +1 to AT&T. But they said the engineer’s slot was between 10am and 8pm. -1 to AT&T.
Fortunately, the engineer showed up at midday. +1 to AT&T. The fault was not in our house but further down the line. He managed to fix it. +1 to AT&T.
When I tried to register, I couldn’t do this in Firefox or Chrome. -1 to AT&T. The website claimed to support Safari, but this didn’t work either, even though I had the latest version. -1 to AT&T. The engineer brought his Windows laptop upstairs and I used that to register. +1 to AT&T
When my husband came home, he tried to set up the wireless router. AT&T wouldn’t authenticate the router and after an hour of fiddling with the configurations, everything was broken. -1 to AT&T.
I called the help desk again this morning, though I eventually shunted them over to talk to my husband. They said they didn’t support Linksys routers and seemed to want to put everything back so we could only connect via an ethernet cable one machine at a time. -1 to AT&T. Eventually, after a lot of arguing and questions, it turned out that the password for configuring modems and routers was different to the password that I had set up when I registered. I had never been given this password so presumably it was embedded in the modem. -1 to AT&T.
Once we had the correct password, we were able to get everything working relatively quickly. The speed so far seems fine. +1 to AT&T.
I’m so grateful to finally have internet at home as I’ve been spending a lot of time going to the library, Starbucks and borrowing the neighbour’s wifi (with her permission but it’s been a patchy service). However, I’m cranky that it’s taken seven weeks since we moved into the new place to get to this point! -1 to AT&T.
That’s 17 negative points to AT&T and 11 positive points. That makes a net score of negative 6 and I think I was being generous! Hmmm….
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Posted in Environment, San Francisco at 2.46 pm by Caitlin
Here is something to take your mind off the Australian election, which still doesn’t have a result!
Spotting hummingbirds is one the great joys of living in California. They are just so darn cute! We have hung a hummingbird feeder on our balcony and the little birds have been coming to visit. They usually announce themselves with the loud whir of wings and sometimes they tweet.
In the wild, they usually hover while they drink from flowers. However, our feeder has a ring that they can perch on so we often see them quite still. Sometimes they stop feeding and have a little sing.
They’re territorial and I have seen one bird chase away another before. We had a cardboard hummingbird hanging off the feeder for a while but I removed it as I was worried it might be scaring some of the less assertive birds away.
They’re really hoeing into the syrup water – we’ll have to refill after just a few days!
This is a pretty good selection – you can see that we are getting a few different species of hummingbird. Some have iridescent blue-green colouring, other ones are red like a robin redbreast. Lovely! For more photos see the Flickr set.
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05.14.10
Posted in Arts & Culture, Media & Internet, Travel, Writing at 9.35 pm by Caitlin
We have been back in San Francisco for a week. My husband has started his new job and is liking it so far, apart from the mammoth commute. I’m discussing an interesting work opportunity myself, but it’s early days.
I’ve also started an advanced fiction writing workshop with Linda Watanabe McFerrin, who I first met at the Book Passage Travel Writing & Photography Conference last August. That’s once a week until the end of June with one-to-one work outside the group meetings as well. I’ve been trying to write a novel for some time and I’m hoping this could get me on track.
Meanwhile, I’m expecting to go to New York at the end of June for TBEX10, the Travel Blog Exchange conference. I’ve raised money through a site called Kickstarter, which is about funding creative projects by raising money from the public. A few face-to-face friends have contributed but mostly it’s been online friends – readers of my food and travel blog Roaming Tales and Twitter followers. I still need to book my airline ticket and arrange a hotel but I’m excited by the trip – it’ll let me meet a lot of fellow bloggers face to face, plus I’ll get to see friends in New York and hang out in the city for a few days.
I’ve updated my travel blog quite a bit lately, so please do check it out or become a fan on Facebook. This week’s posts have mostly been about Hearst Castle on the California Coast.
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05.09.10
Posted in Career, Media & Internet, Travel at 2.13 pm by Caitlin
I’ve been keeping my eye out for jobs but mostly been freelancing since moving to San Francisco. Here are a few of the things I’ve been up to on the work front.
LA Times | 2 May 2010: San Francisco: The rolling transit museum known as the F line
Travel article on San Francisco’s historic trams, which come from all around the world, including Melbourne.
Galavanting | 2 May 2010: Behind the Veil
Travel essay on spending a week living with an Iraqi family in Syria and my experience as a woman in this part of the world.
The Australian | 15 March 2010: Home invasion of 3D’s visual power
Feature for Media section on 3D television.
The Australian | 1 March 2010: Faceless no more – Facebook admits errors
Feature for Media section on Facebook’s response to cyber-vandalism of tribute sites for dead children.
New Statesman | 14 January 2010: Our friends electric
Article on renewable energy – wind, wave and tidal – in the Orkney Islands of Scotland. (I made a trip to Orkney to research this right before leaving Britain, in June 2009).
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09.30.09
Posted in Society & Politics at 12.15 am by Caitlin
I’ve put together a comparison of religious demographics in Australia, the United Kingdom, the United States and Canada. It’s not done to prove any kind of point – it’s for no reason other than the fact that I think it’s fascinating. If you do too, then enjoy…
One of my blogging friends Pam recently tweeted about the large percentage of people identifying with no religion in the Pacific North-West of the United States.
This got me curious about a comparison of religion around the world. We all know that Saudi Arabia is Muslim and Thailand is Buddhist and Spain or Costa Rica are Catholic, but I wanted to compare English-speaking countries. We share a language but not always a culture.
I compared the US, UK, Canada and Australia. I just used Wikipedia as a quick and ready source – I know it’s not an absolute authority but this isn’t an academic treatise. I would have looked at New Zealand and the Republic of Ireland as well but Wikipedia didn’t list the percentages in a readily accessible form.
In all four countries Christianity is the majority religion. There’s no surprises there, but what did surprise me is how Christianity is far less dominant in Australia than elsewhere. I knew Christianity was strong in North America but it’s also stronger in the UK than Australia – possibly since it’s the state religion. I was also intrigued by the differing make-up of the minority religions, reflecting immigration patterns and social change.
Percentage of population identifying as Christian in 2001
- Canada: 77%
- USA*: 76.7%
- UK: 71.6%
- Australia: 68%
* This is based on the 2001 Census in Australia, Canada and the UK. However, the US Census does not collect information on religious affiliation. For the US it’s based on the ARIS survey (but this only covers the contiguous states, not Alaska and Hawaii).
Australia does its Census every five rather than 10 years, like the UK and Canada. By 2006, the percentage of Australians identifying as Christian had dropped to 63.9%. That’s quite a significant change – a drop of 4.1 percentage points between 2001 and 2006.
By contrast, in the United States, Christianity held relatively steady – the 2008 ARIS survey shows 76% of Americans identified as Christian. That’s a decline of only 0.7 percentage points – practically a rounding error. The change over time is more dramatic – in the 1990 survey, the figure was 86.2%.
Other religions
Australia [2006 census]
- Christian: 63.9%
- No religion: 18.7%
- Not stated: 11.2%
- Buddhist: 2.1%
- Muslim: 1.7%
- Other : 1.2%
- Hindu: 0.7%
- Jewish: 0.5%
United Kingdom [2001 census]
- Christian: 71.6%
- No religion : 15.5%
- Not Answered: 7.3%
- Muslim: 2.7%
- Hindu: 1%
- Sikh: 0.6%
- Jewish: 0.5%
- Buddhist: 0.3%
- Other: 0.3%
United States [2007 survey*]
- Christianity: 78.4%
- Unaffiliated, including atheist or agnostic: 16.1%
- Judaism: 1.7%
- Other: 1.2%
- Buddhist: 0.7%
- Islam: 0.6%
- Hinduism: 0.4%
* This is now a different survey, done by the PEW Forum. I went with this one because the ARIS survey just had a generic category for “Eastern religions”. The statistics are pretty similar otherwise. (I wish I had Census data though!).
Canada – 2001 Census
- Christian: 77%
- No religion: 16.2%
- Muslim: 2%
- Jewish: 1.1%
- Buddhist: 1%
- Hindu: 1%
- Sikh: 0.9%
- Other: 0.8%
Australia is the most secular with 18.7% stating they have no religion and a further 11.2% not answering the question.
The biggest minority religions are Buddhism in Australia, Islam in Canada and the UK and Judaism in the US.
The smallest minority religions are Judaism in Australia, Buddhism in the UK, Hinduism in the US and Sikhism in Canada. (However, Sikhism is not broken out as a separate religion in the Australian or US survey results – presumably it is so small it is part of the ‘other’ category).
(As an aside, I once met a UK religious studies teacher who said she taught comparative religion in high school about the world’s six major world religions. I asked her what they were because I could only think of five that I would class as ‘major’ – was it Taoism perhaps, or maybe atheism, or maybe animism and nature worship? No, her six were: Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Hinduism, Buddhism and Sikhism. Not to dismiss Sikhism in any way, but I suspect that had more to do with Britain’s demographics than anything else).
Islam is the biggest minority religion in Canada (2%) and the UK (2.7%) and and it is also a significant demographic in Australia (1.7%). However, both this PEW Forum survey and the ARIS one put the US Muslim population at 0.6% of the nation. I do wonder if this is accurate or if many Muslim-Americans prefer not to state their religion when taking a survey. There is no way for me to know but it seems plausible this might be a factor in the post 9/11 climate.
Types of Christianity
It gets messy when you look at brands of Christianity because denominations are defined and established differently in various countries. There are a few things I’ve been able to glean from the data.
Roman Catholicism as percentage of population
Canada [2001]: 43.6%
Australia [2006]: 25.8%
Australia [2001]: 26.6%
USA [2008]: 25.1%
USA [2001]: 24.5%
Great Britain (England, Scotland and Wales) [2007 survey]: 9%
Northern Ireland [2001]: 40.3%
Interesting that the percentage of Catholics in the US actually went up between 2001 and 2008. I’m guessing this might be due to immigration from Latin America.
Biggest Protestant denominations
The remaining Christians are mostly Protestant, with small numbers of Eastern Orthodox or Coptic Christians, and some that identify as “generically Christian”.
Here is the biggest Protestant denomination in each country:
Australia: Anglican | 18.7% of overall population [2006]
United States: Baptist | 15.8% of overall population [2008]
Great Britain: Church of England (Anglican church in England) | 20.9%
Canada: United Church of Canada | 9.6%
The Church of England is the established state religion in England and there are equivalents elsewhere in Great Britain. The Anglican Church of Australia is part of the worldwide Anglican communion and affiliated with the Church of England but it is not a state religion – Australia has separation of church and state.
The Anglican Church and the United Church of Canada (consisting of Presbyterians, Methodists and such like, similar to the Uniting Church in Australia) are both fairly liberal churches in their stances on things like ordination of women and gay marriage. (Though not without controversy, I might add!).
I’ve always thought of American Baptists as being conservative but according to Wikipedia there are varying types of Baptist and schisms between the Northern Baptists and the Southern Baptists and so on. I profess blissful ignorance about the differences.
In Australia, only 1.6% of the population is Baptist and another 1.1% identify as Pentecostal, according to the 2006 census.
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09.06.09
Posted in Twitter at 11.42 am by Caitlin
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08.30.09
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08.23.09
Posted in Twitter at 11.42 am by Caitlin
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08.16.09
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08.11.09
Posted in Environment, Family & Friends, Travel at 3.38 am by Caitlin
In the month before I left the UK for San Francisco, I went up to Scotland for work followed by some pleasure travel through the Highlands. I spent a few days visiting my uncle Jeff and aunt Judith and my cousin Jenny came down from Glasgow.
Jeff and Judith are now living in a mobile home next to their cottage up the glen (valley) from Inveraray, while they get building works done on the cottage. The work was three-quarters complete when I was there and it’s going to be very nice, with a lovely big kitchen and more bedrooms, but still keeping the charm of the old cottage.
Jenny (left) and I went for a hill walk directly behind the cottage on the first full day I was there. We didn’t go to the mountain peak a bit to our left, but went to the highest point in a straight line behind the cottage. We saw a family of red deer (sadly, I didn’t have my zoom lens with me so the photograph fails to do it justice), which was very exciting. It was pretty steep going and a lot of it was really scrambling or climbing rather than hiking but it was lots of fun. We called Judith when we reached the top so she could see our silhouettes waving from the ridge line. At the top the ground was flat and boggy – the treacherous peat bog sucked Jenny down to her knees at one point! It was pretty though, scattered with fluffy white bog cotton flowers and patches of red moss and 100 metres or so in from the ridge line, there’s a beautiful little freshwater tarn (lake).
Red deer
The tarn
While I was at the cottage, I also found time to go chanterelle-hunting with Judith (slim pickings though as we were a few weeks early and it had been quite dry) and hang out with my uncle Jeff and talk about the meaning of life. We had my other uncle Steven and Jenny’s cousin (and my friend) Andrew come to dinner on the Saturday night and Jenny and I drove back to Glasgow with Andrew. I stayed at Andrew’s place that night, then it was back to London by train on Sunday, and into the US Embassy for my visa appointment the following day.
Sunset at the cottage
***
See more photos from the hike on Flickr.
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