InBerkeley

KPIX is reporting a decision by the Berkeley City Council to raise refuse collection fees by 20% starting next week, with annual 3% increases thereafter. The increase  follows the lopsided failure of an unusual protest process against the increase.

City staff members proposed the increase in April, but the increase had to face a so-called “majority protest” mail-in voting procedure because that’s what’s called for in state Proposition 218, also known as the Right to Vote on Taxes Act, which was passed by voters in 1996.

Although the city was following the law’s guidelines, many neighborhood and property owner groups were upset that under the process it is automatically assumed that property owners are in favor of the increase unless they cast “no” votes by mail or in person.

General

InBerkeley took part in a meeting of Bay Area hyperlocal bloggers at the UCB J-School this evening.

Blogs working in Oakland, Alameda, the Mission District in SF were represented.

A lively discussion took place over pizza, beer, Diet Coke and bottled water.

General

Get a free 8-oz. Tea Freddo beverage this Friday, July 10, from 2 to 3 p.m. only at all Peet’s retail locations. Flavors include Mango and Berry Pomegranate.

General

Derrick Schneider, one of the Berkeley bloggers and tweeters I follow, tweeted this today:

Bought a bunch of books from Powell’s. Because Berkeley no longer has a good new book bookstore.

I certainly sympathize. Look at what we’ve lost in the past few years. Cody’s on Telegraph closed. Then Cody’s moved from Fourth Street to a decidedly smaller location on Shattuck. That didn’t last long. Barnes & Noble on Shattuck also closed. And this year, Black Oak Books closed its store on Shattuck, although the owners are still selling books out of their warehouse on San Pablo.  So what’s a book lover to do in Berkeley, of all places?

I’ve resisted the lure of Amazon and Powell’s. I’m fortunately walking distance from an excellent new book bookstore, Mrs Dalloway’s, on College Avenue (photo above). They don’t have the largest stock — certainly nothing compared to what I could once find at Cody’s — but they choose well. For fiction, biography and current affairs, their selection is excellent. Most importantly, they can order anything I want and get it as rapidly as any Amazon or Powell’s package would reach Berkeley. I think a local bookstore deserves and needs support.

Where else would I look in Berkeley? There’s Moe’s, of course, but that’s more of a haven for used books. Moe’s is celebrating its 50th anniversary on Saturday with a DJ party, cake, balloons and hula dancers. More useful for new books are some of the specialist bookstores in Berkeley. I’ll pick out two, but I’m sure there are more hiding around town.

Dark Carnival is also walking distance for me, on Claremont.  It specializes in science fiction, fantasy and mystery, and is truly comprehensive in those categories. But it also has odds and ends in other genres. Dark Carnival runs an ambitious series of author talks through the year. For a new book store, it’s as warren-like and cluttered as you’ll ever find. It could serve as a set in some convoluted bookstore-based mystery.

University Press Books has a very different target. If you’re looking for an academic or scholarly work, its stock is as good as any physical bookstore I’ve seen.

So although I still lament the loss of Cody’s and Black Oak, the bookstore cause isn’t entirely lost in Berkeley.

Retail

Comcast needs to upgrade its customer service along with its infrastructure.

Last February I made a strategic decision to switch from the AT&T DSL service I had been using for many years to Comcast Business Class cable Internet service.  Really, these are the only two options people in the Berkeley area have for high-speed internet service.  (Yes, I know there are others, but they all piggyback on AT&T’s infrastructure.)  And only Comcast is able to deliver anything faster than 1.5-megabit service to my location, which is near the outer distance limits of DSL capabilities.

Everything had been going well with my service until about 11:45 the night of July 1, when suddenly everything came to a screeching halt.  After verifying that nothing was getting out of or into my local network to the Internet, I called Comcast technical support, only to learn from a recorded message that the service in my area was down for “maintenance.”  It wasn’t clear to me, however, if this was an unexpected outage, a downed router or other failure, or something that had been scheduled.

Another call to tech service the next day revealed a startling fact.  According to the support rep I spoke to, it is not Comcast policy to notify business customers in advance of scheduled maintenance.  Let me repeat that.  It is not Comcast policy to notify business customers in advance of scheduled maintenance. So if you’re planning an important call using Skype to your client in Singapore at midnight Pacific time, it just might not happen.  Transferring a huge file to someone in Europe at 1 a.m?  It may get interrupted.  Without warning.

I’ve been using the Internet since 1996. This is the first time anything like this has ever happened. Sure, service has been interrupted because of unexpected equipment failures.  That’s to be expected.  But to just pull the plug without any warning?  For business-class service?  That’s so outside standard industry practice, it’s hard to believe any ISP could be so stupid.

One of Comcast’s dirty little secrets is that Business Class service and Residential service both share exactly the same infrastructure.  They are not separated out at any point.  They both use the same head end, the same switches the same routers. There is no quality-of-service distinction between the two classes of service.

Unfortunately, that also carries over to the customer service arena, and this explains why Comcast does not warn Business Class customers of impending outages.

When you talk to the guys in the trenches, the tech service guys who get sent to customer sites, they’ll tell you that Comcast really needs to upgrade its approach to business customers, both on the customer service level as well as the physical infrastructure.  And Comcast doesn’t tell their service techs any more about these problems than their customers. But after getting the same kinds of service calls about the same kinds of problems from angry customers, these service techs have concluded these issues are related to mainly one thing.  The upgrade to DOCSIS3.

What I’ve learned is that Comcast is currently upgrading its service to what is known as DOCSIS3, the latest incarnation of the communications protocol cable providers use for their customer premises equipment.  DOCSIS3 will enable Comcast to offer 50 mbps service.  But while Comcast is upgrading their infrastructure, customers have been experiencing outages, and this will continue for some unknown period.  I’m still seeing multi-minute outages throughout the day, and got bounced off a Skype-based conference call just the other day.

Frank Eliason, a truly remarkable guy in facing one heck of an uphill battle to get Comcast customer service on track, has been very helpful in following up on this incident, and was appalled by the cavalier attitude Comcast seems to have towards its business customers. Anyone on Twitter can ping him at @ComcastCares, and he will respond relatively quickly.

Perhaps one day Comcast will learn how to treat its customers properly.  Until then, it’s anyone’s guess when these outages will stop.

General

Berkeley artist Eric Drooker (above), who is probably best known for his many wonderful New Yorker covers, has created an animated sequence for Howl, a movie about the Beat movement being released early next year.

Shot in and around San Francisco earlier this year, “Howl stars James Franco as Allen Ginsberg, author of the 1955 poem “Howl” which triggered an obscenity trial upon which the drama is centered.

[Photo credit: www.pmpress.org.]

Art, Arts, Movies Art, Arts, Movies