Singing Praises

What better reason to burst into song?

Of all things, I discovered the singing of hymns at our annual gathering of Quakers in Florida. This might sound unexpected, especially if you know how rare singing is in our kind of silent Quaker meetings. In contrast to some other churches where music and song are big parts of the Sunday service, we can go a whole year without piping up a single note until the annual Christmas season causes us to lift the lid on the piano and dust off those books of carols.

There are exceptions. We have one attender who often gives his spoken messages in the form of impromptu song. And there was the time when our visitor from Haiti, whose sister had been injured in the earthquake there, led us in the spontaneous singing of a hymn whose appropriate refrain was "Alleluiah!"

But at this annual gathering we happened to stumble into a workshop on "chanting." For an hour a group of us were led in singing some simple plainsong that more resembled Gregorian chants than traditional hymns. The tunes were easy to pick up, and the words simple enough to learn after hearing them once or twice. Each was repeated "until it was over," which happened by mutual consent. The substance of the text was basically Christian, but broad enough to appeal to a wider range of kindred spirits. The experience was deeply peaceful and surprisingly emotional. Not to mention auditorially pleasing. Even our untutored voices began to sound good in the small reverberant meditation chapel where it was held.

Encouraged by this experience, I later joined a group clustered around the piano in the dining hall to sing from a hymnal. We even did that same Alleluiah piece that I remembered our visitor leading us in. I had a good time and it was over too soon. But I had one more treat in store. Before our evening business meeting an a capella chorus performed a favorite of a recently departed friend. I haven't yet tracked it down by title, but it contained a "hook" that has stayed with me since, a particular phrase that repeated, "here I am, Lord, can you hear me?" Listening to this, I felt certain the singers were heard. Certainly by me.

Home again I felt led to download an entire collection of hymns. I found one called History of the Hymnal that contains 100 hymns -- count 'em, 100! -- for the bargain basement price of only 9.49. (You can use the link to hear samples courtesy of Amazon.) Not bad for the equivalent of 3 packed CD's. But what really drew me to this particular collection was the sound of the small vocal ensemble. They perfectly capture the flavor of a small congregation with a basic organ, or a group of friends gathered around a piano. Occasionally there is a soloist or duet for variety, but generally one tune leads gracefully to the next, with simple harmonies and a sound clear enough to make the words intelligible. There's no attempt to jazz things up with modern instruments, no gospel wailing, no Mormon Tabernacle Choir, just human voices lifted in songs of praise.

So I've been walking around listening to this collection, not tired of it yet, feeling it sink into me and have an effect. You don't even have to go along with all the theology in the lyrics to get the underlying message of peace, calm, and centeredness. It's written into the effortless phrasing, the solid chord progressions that have been with us for centuries, a liturgy that has grown by accumulation over the years. You can even sing along if you want to. Part of me is still singing.

You Want It WHEN?

We all know the feeling. We've packed everything for the trip, including the right number of socks and underwear, snacks, water bottles, reading material, chargers for the phone and tablet and computer. We even put out the cat and made sure the stove was off, the porch light on, and the neighbor knows to bring in the mail. Satisfied that all is ready, we gas up the car and hit the road. Then about a hundred miles later while merrily singing along with the radio, the moment of realization strikes, the one thing we forgot.

So, recently I found myself several hundred miles from home without two medications that I'm supposed to take every night. What to do? Call the doctor for a temporary prescription? Talk the drug store into selling me enough for a few days? What if instead it were possible to simply cause those two bottles parked on the shelf at home to transport themselves to my current location?

And of course, for some years now, that is exactly what is possible -- and in this case what was the easiest thing to do. All I needed was someone who could get into my house (thank you, you know who you are) and take them to the nearest Fedex shipping point, only a mile away. The following morning while sitting placidly in a meeting room in the rural boondocks I looked out the window to see the Fedex truck pass by, just for me.

Commonplace, I know. But consider that those precious objects had flown from Miami to Orlando -- with a change of planes in Nashville, Tennessee! -- while I slept and ate my breakfast, then managed to hop on the right truck to get to me before lunch. And the fee for this was less than two hours wages. What a wonderful world.

The Post Office used to be known for its intrepid reliability, but for the past dozens of years the crown has surely passed to Federal Express and its imitators -- UPS, DHL, Airborne, et al. A niche market initially patronized by attorneys impatient for documents has grown into a household utility, moving everything from freight down to letters (or pills) that "absolutely, positively, have to get there overnight." In some locations, and for a premium, you can even get it delivered the same day. The project that began as an MBA masters thesis about efficient distribution networks has conquered the world.

Conquered is not too strong a word. Along with ubiquitous low cost transportation and cheap electronic communications, the existence of such revolutionary courier service was a hallmark of the free market countries who faced off against the centrally managed systems of their rivals in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. In fact, I remember reading about an experiment that was conducted not long after the USSR collapsed and Western companies were beginning to explore the novel possibility of doing business there.

The test was performed simultaneously in the USA and Russia. In America identical packages were sent by 3 rival services coast to coast to the same address. All three arrived the following morning within 30 minutes of each other. In Russia they tried to send a package from Moscow to the newly renamed St. Petersburg (nee Leningrad). I can't recall how long it took, but it was a l-o-o-n-g time, and its arrival was anything but certain. We're talking weeks, by which time whatever the package contained was no longer urgent.

Forget military applications; how could you even run a country that way in the modern world? The answer is, you couldn't, not successfully, and package delivery was only one more sign of the many failings of a system that was decaying and collapsing of its own weight. The experimenters described the act of taking something to be shipped to a government office during one of its few open hours, standing in long lines, perhaps to be told that the package was not wrapped properly and sent home to find some string. Here you don't even have to wrap it, they will wrap it for you and do a better job of it than you might yourself.

Did you know Fedex can even help you ship backwards in time? What? OK, it's only a rare example, but here's how it works. You know they have a cutoff time each day. It might be 6 pm if they're picking up, or 8 pm if you're taking it to one of their main shipping offices. But a company I used to work for was part of a nationwide chain. When one of our East coast customers needed to overnight some prints after hours, we sent a digital copy to another location in California where they had plenty of time to produce the prints and get them to Fedex before the cutoff there -- which of course was 3 hours later than in the East. One wonders what might be possible in modern day Russia, which spans 9 time zones.

So let's hear it for our overnight shippers, expediters of the modern age, who have made the likes of Amazon possible, and then enabled us all to provide the same service from every mom and pop shop in the land. It may not be sexy, it may not be high tech, but it gets there, absolutely, positively. And hey, I've got my pills.

Ready to POP

I've become a walking hotspot ...

Let's face it, we all hate to pay for stuff, especially when it feels like we're being overcharged. This happens especially in markets where pricing has not settled down yet, such as mobile data access plans. Rates on these things are nuts, obviously dictated by what some marketing department thinks the customer will bear rather than on the intrinsic value of the service.

Consider: I pay AT&T $20 a month for 300MB of data, and I usually use pretty close to that because I'm careful to do all my heavy downloading when I'm on WiFi. That works out to less than 7 cents per meg. But if I run a wee bit over I have to pay another $20 for another chunk of data I might not need. Effectively the price per meg could almost double. Make sense?

How about this: For an extra $10 a month I could get 3 gigabytes of data, or ten times the amount I get now. The price per meg then would be only 1 cent, or 1/7 what I pay for the smaller amount. This is intended to make the $30 plan hard to refuse, but sheesh, couldn't there be something in between? Or couldn't that low end be a bit more generous?

On top of this there is an arbitrary restriction on my service that prevents me from sharing my cellular data with another device through tethering (where the cell phone becomes a mobile hotspot). Now, if they're charging me by how much I consume, and if I'm already using as much as I'm paying for, why should they care if I divided my usage between two or more devices? Obviously, it's just a way to force me to buy a separate data plan for each device, or to upgrade my service.

How much more? Turns out it is a minimum of $40 for a 1 gig shared data plan, PLUS an extra $55 for each additional device. So instead of $20 or $30 per month I'd be paying $95 just for the ability to share access with my tablet. That's 9.5 cents per megabyte, or 35% more than my current plan, and 850% more than an individual 3 gig plan. Any rhyme or reason there?

Alternatively I could buy a separate data plan just for my tablet (assuming it had 4G built in, which it doesn't) for $50 per month for 5 gigs, or a penny per megabyte. But that would be in addition to the data plan for my phone, so I'd still be paying a total of $70 a month. And it might be way more data than I would need or use. Any wonder why it makes me crazy? Any wonder why people jailbreak their phones and install software that bypasses the restrictions? (Not me, of course.)

But hey, this is Capitalism, and market forces are beginning to work. When I heard about FreedomPOP's plan to give out 500 megs per month of free 4G mobile data I jumped all over it. All you do is send them a "refundable deposit" for one of their access devices and agree to pay reasonable overage charges of 1 or 2 cents per megabyte. If you want more you can buy it for amounts that make sense rather than nonsense, and use it with any number of other devices. Now we're talking!

I paid about $100 for a tiny (2.5in/6.5cm square) mobile access point that you can slip in a pocket and which will support up to 8 WiFi connections. I wouldn't expect very good performance with a maximum load, but it works just fine for my phone and tablet. If I use it for a year with no overages I will have paid about $8 per month for my 500 megs, or about 1.7 cents per meg. If I use it for three years the price will fall to less than half a cent per meg, or less than 10 cents per day. At prices like that I will gladly pay overages if only to encourage them to keep up the good work!

Got data leftover? FreedomPOP even lets you share it with friends who have their own FreedomPOP accounts. An inspired piece of viral marketing, but generous nonetheless. Try giving away your unused megabytes on [insert vendor of your choice].

The only drawback to the service is the spotty coverage map in my area, because FreedomPOP uses the Clearwire cellular network, but in the corridor between my home and office I'm gold. Clearwire has now been bought up by Sprint Nextel, so assuming they don't decide to drop FreedomPOP altogether, the coverage is likely to improve.

My only other concern is that the access point is so small it would be easy to lose. I misplaced it once already, forgetting that I had plugged it into my USB port to charge. But on the road it's easy to tuck away into a pocket of my computer bag where it's pretty secure. Now I just have to remember to turn it off when I'm not using it to preserve the battery. I did a dry run the first week, leaving it on during my commute to and from work even if I wasn't using it, and the charge lasted nearly 5 days.

Time will tell if this new "freemium" price model will hold up or will be imitated. It seems to be doing all right for services like Dropbox. And with both Google and the government talking about free super-WiFi over the whole country, I think it's safe to say that eventually the current draconian price structures of the phone companies will go the way of Compuserve dialup rates.

Remember those? It cost $6 per hour for a 300 baud connection, at which speed you could read text as fast as it downloaded across the screen. For $12 an hour you could upgrade to 1200 baud -- 4x the data for 2x the price. Now we get 3MB download speeds for as little as a dollar a day. And what ever happened to Compuserve anyway?

[Yet another price model is offered by Karma using similar hardware. They offer flat pricing per megabyte with no contract and no monthly allotment. Just pay as you go for what you use. The advantage there is that you never leave unused data on the table -- it just rolls over. A good fit if you need lots of time one month and little the next.]

[In the short time since this was posted, FreedomPOP has added a new level of service, possibly in response to the Karma plan. For 3.49 per month you can now get data rollover, accumulating up to 20 gigs from months where you use less than your allotment and using it when you need it. Obviously prices are still in a state of flux.]