As my father pointed out on Facebook (“You think Comcast was bad…”) my Internet connection is no where near as slow as S. Africa’s. My internet is, however, Comcast bad.

To prove this, let’s replicate this wonderful experiment using my connection instead of S. Africa’s 3rd-world connection speeds. Using the same 4 GB flash drive (presumably glued) to the pigeon, and the same 50 miles distance to, say, my parents house in Highlands Ranch, and then assuming it’s a ‘average day’ and I’m getting a solid ~4 Mbps connection, I could realistically expect (taking into account latency, packet loss, etc) about 300 kb/s average transfer rate between my apartment and their house, and then assuming we’re using an “average” homing pigeon with a flight speed of about 30 MPH. The result?

Comcast: 4 Gb / 300 kb/s = 2.4 Hours
Pigeon: 50 miles / 30 MPH = 1.6 Hours

The pigeon still beats Comcast by almost 50 minutes.

Comcast proves not just 50 minutes slower over 50 miles – but about 10 MPH slower overall. Given pigeons can easily travel hundreds of miles (over mountain ranges and through storms mind you), you would probably be better off sending a pigeon across the country with a 10GB flash drive than ever using my Comcast connection.

Hmm, I smell an untapped business opportunity – the world’s first dedicated pigeon-based data transfer service! I mean, the wizards at Hogwarts have realized this for years:

I had gone a whole month without TV. And honestly - it really showed me that the mediocre offering from Comcast wasn't at all worth $110+ a month. Not by a long shot. Don't get me wrong - I love TV. I normally watch a ton of it, and even if I'm not sitting right in front of it, it's always great background noise. But I really staunchly disliked Comcast. I talked to Jennie - and she really had the same sentiment - it had become Satellite TV or bust. So we decided to just not have TV.

We'd rather have no TV than Comcast TV.

I've used a lot of space on this site talking about companies I don't like, but I'm not that negative about everything and everyone. I am, however, appropriately critical. When I exchange money for services I expect them to be delivered. It's not a complex equation to me. Frankly, if I don't receive things I pay for, then I'm simply being cheated. Banks convolute the process a bit, in that you're not paying for a service in the traditional sense of the word. You give them money openly and freely, expecting only one thing in return: that you can get it back someday. If they want to give me interest, fine, I really don't care one way or another. I just want to be able to spend a paycheck without having to step into a CheckIn2Cash-type establishment.

Enter a bank like INGDirect. It might seem odd to put your money in a bank that doesn't actually have banks (they are 100% online and by phone), but in this day and age the brick-and-mortar stores are really just annoyances. If you still need cash (a situation which for me is becoming increasingly rare), you're welcome to use an ATM. The beauty of ING is that they seem to genuinely care about your business, no matter how small. They don't use fees as tools to sap money from you – in fact there practically feeless. They don't even have overdraft fees – if you run over, they loan the money to you at a competitive rate (~17%, better than the average credit card). It gives you a couple of days to shift some funds, with the total end cost to you maybe a couple of pennies. That -$30 of overdraft from our example above? If you payed it off the next day you'd literally be down a cent. Not too shabby.