As of July 1st 2008, BendBroadBand (my ISP) now limits their customers monthly usage to 100GB. Should you go over this amount, they will charge you $1.50 per GB. In order to monitor this, BendBroadBand allows you to login to their website to track your usage. I was getting sick of logging in everyday, so I decided to tackle the problem with some OOP (object oriented programming) using PHP5, PEAR::Mail, and some regular expressions. I ended up creating bbbUM, as in “Dude, I have to monitor my internet usage and I’m totally bbbUM’ed”. This sweet little program runs once a day as a cron job and sends a text message to my cell phone that contains my current usage.

The file that needs to be executed (should it not be obvious) is the bbbMail.php. For the sake of clarity, I have written the 3 variables that you will need to change in bold.

bbbUM Version 1.0

<php
 
//you need PEAR::Mail installed for this to work
require_once('Mail.php');
 
//path to the bbbClass.inc.php file
require_once('bbbClass.inc.php');
 
//create new bbb object
$obj = new bbbUM;
 
//email where you wish the message sent
$obj->setEmail('5415551212@vtext.com‘);
 
//bbb username/email
$obj->setUserName(’jdoe@bendbroadband.com‘);
 
//password
$obj->setPassword(’123456‘);
 
//method that sends mail
$obj->bbbSend();
 
?>
 


I have to say, I can actually feel the slowdown happening. Truly feel it. In 2005 I thought Bend,OR would never take a breath. Now though, this city is gasping for air. It bums me out.

Here is just a list of ancedotal stuff.

•  Getting my hair cut by the same barber I have gone to for over 3 years, I ask “How is business?”. He says that he has only cut one person’s hair that is a tourist. Usually he does 20x-30x that amount ($400-$600) .
• On July fourth we went out on our friend’s boat. We got to Billy Chinook at 12:10pm and had no problem parking. Also, the lake didn’t seem any where close to as busy as last year.
• Wal-Mart’s parking lot has few or no RVs parked in it for over night stays.
• Craigslist car adds. The asking prices are way down. I have been keeping my eyes on the SUV market for about 2 years speculating that it would take a fall. Boy am I glad I didn’t buy one.
• Downtown Bend seems like a ghost town. I am down there every day at the school admin building. Again just a feeling statement.

Yet we are still trying to prop this town up on pipe dreams.

It makes me realize how lucky the District is. If you have never met Brad Henry (Fiscal Service Director:Bend La Pine Schools) he is a helluva guy. I have heard him on several occasions talk about “controlled growth”.  Taking the money from the boom or growth years and using it to cover you during the tough ones. Brad is a very smart and incredibly gracious person and I have learned a lot from his example. I just hope that he can keep the District on the road to financial success while many local entities are having to issue reductions in their work force.

So I started telling people about my little data scraping website. It is cool that something I have been devoting my free time towards for 9 months, is now finally coming to light. I am really excited to see what feature requests I receive from users and where that leads the development of the site.

http://www.redb.org

-peace