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I spend a large amount of time listening to podcasts. In the past, I suspected the amount of time was immense, but I never knew exactly what the number was. Now, thanks to the listening statistics in Pocket Casts I know exactly how much time I spend listening to podcasts.

I captured the image below on June 16, 2018, exactly 365 days after switching over to the Pocket Casts app:

Sixty seven days is 1,608 hours or 96,480 minutes. If I did absolutely nothing except listen to podcasts 24 hours a day beginning on January 1st, I would have to keep my headphones on until March 18th to equal the amount of listening I do over the course of a year.

However, 67 days is not a truly accurate representation of the amount of podcasts I have listened to because I do not listen to most podcasts at their regular speed. Given that my subscription count stands at 249 podcasts, it is not humanly possible to listen in realtime to all of the content they produce. Instead, I listen to most podcasts at two times their realtime speed. Additionally, I use Pocket Casts features such as silence trimming and intro skipping to further increase the amount of podcasts I can consume. This means that in reality, I actually listen to well over 120 days worth of podcasts every year.

The piece of this situation that strikes me as remarkable is not my total listening time or the amount of time I save by speeding up audio. Rather, what I find remarkable is that every single second of every podcast is 100% completely free. I did not need to spend even a single penny to obtain any of the programming I listened to. Try to do that with television, movies, or even books. In most mediums, it is not possible to consume content for free. Yet, with podcasts I can stay up-to-date with current events, explore various facets of the designed world, study important events in history, gain understandings of viewpoints which are not my own, follow local stories about the SF Bay Area, listen to music from bands across the musical spectrum, and a whole lot more without opening my wallet.

This morning I wondered whether I was getting close to hitting the monthly Comcast bandwidth limit. Glad I checked.

Comcast gave me another reason to hate the company last week.

Up until last week, I was paying $150 per month for internet service at 250 Mbps down, 30 Mbps up. That’s a preposterous amount of money to pay for relatively weak internet service, but it’s the only reasonable speed Comcast offered at the time I moved into my apartment. If Comcast decided to release a gigabit speed internet connection for less money per month, you’d think they would automatically sign me up for the new service, discount my current monthly bill, or at the very least advertise the new service to me. Did Comcast perform any of those actions? Nope!

Instead of discounting my 250 Mbps service, upgrading my speed, or alerting me to the new service, Comcast continued to bill me $150/month for 250 Mbps without saying anything. Only months later through a chance browsing of Xfinity’s internet service packages did I discover the gigabit option.

This new gigabit internet service gives me about 900 Mbps down and 40 Mbps up for $127 per month, about $25 cheaper than the previous service that was 300% slower.

Comcast, I will forever hate you, especially if you keep treating your customers like this.

Every so often I head outside to do some photography using a drone. It can be a difficult hobby to engage with in the San Francisco Bay Area because drones cannot be flown within 5 miles of an airport. This causes most of the Bay Area to be off limits.

Given this situation, I’ve been scouting in the hills on the west side of the SF peninsula for interesting locations to fly. The wind finally died down today so I headed up Old La Honda Road to see what I could find.
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The air was full of haze and the sun’s position was not great, but with Adobe’s Lightroom program it’s possible to make nearly any image look okay. Here are a few photos:

 

Towards the end of every month I have to watch my bandwidth usage very carefully to make sure I don’t go over the 1 TB limit Comcast imposes.