I haven't been happy with Comcast. Well, duh. In this JE, I'll list some thoughts, and then explain them later.

Back in May, a Comcast salesperson cold-called me, trying to pitch their VoIP solution. I said I'd more likely just cancel Comcast altogether, because of Sandvine. I went looking on the DirectTV web site to see if they had a solution that works with my ReplayTVs. DirectTV recently bought ReplayTV - so if anyone had a compatible system, it should be them. No joy. A few days later, a salesperson from AT&T Yahoo! cold-called me, asking if I wanted to save money on my monthly bill.

Okie dokie.

Explanations:

The DSL will be $25 per month less, with a slower connection. That's fine, I hardly ever needed max speed anyway. $24 per month comes from stopping service on the ReplayTVs. My wife wanted the local OTA channels, so that lowers the savings $5.

Comcast took away the Hallmark channel and C-SPAN2 to try to pressure us into upgrading to digital cable. My ReplayTVs are analog, and tune directly to the analog signal. Putting a box in between means an ugly infrared remote spoofer, and a delay in changing channels as the set-top box syncs, then decodes. It also means Comcast can harvest my channel changing behaviors for their marketing department. For this, they want to increase my monthly price? Goodbye. The conversion to digital is supposed to free up bandwidth for them - they should be giving me a discount to put up with the inferior system, instead of charging me money for it. And of course, the whole Sandvine thing ticks me off.

I bought one thing from Crutchfield, and man did I get a ton of spam from them. I've clicked their unsubscribe link - but that should just be a link to a .wav file of Nelson from The Simpsons. I don't know how, but Bloomingdales got a hold of a different email address - one I would never use for e-commerce - and they regularly spam me there. Thunderbird doesn't understand that 100 * Junk should equal "Yes, it's junk". So I'll just let those old email addresses take care of the problem with 550 No such recipient.

As per my JE listed at the top - I like the idea of helping my Linux provider by using my paid subscription to subsidize the distribution of the .iso files. My Cisco 800 router isn't particularly good at it, but still, that should be my choice, not my ISP's. Who is paying whom?

So the DSL modem comes with a CD that SBC / AT&T / Yahoo! wants me to run. Of course, I have zero idea of what sort of programs are on it, and what sort of toolbars and spyware and junk are on there. I don't trust it. I'm impressed though, that the root of the CD (opened in Linux of course!) is a file title "ManualSetup.html". It says that manual installation is easy. Cool!

Well, not. The documentation does not match reality. I'm a fan of the Share The Pain, so if you can't give me correct instructions, I'm going to make you pay for it. In this case, a telephone call to a human being, who explains that the IP address is no longer 192.168.0.1 per the manual, but 192.168.1.254 per who the heck knows, but we weren't about to discard a couple hundred obsolete CDs, because you know, telephone agents are so cheap now-a-days, and having something just work isn't going to impress the new customers.

It gets a little weirder though. I get the DSL modem connected to their registration server. Now I need to create my user account. Wizard next next... eventually, the web page fails with an error in the middle, referring to failed java server code. Well, I am using Firefox on Linux. Maybe that's just too far out in left field. I try Firefox on Windows. Same error. OK, I create a new Windows user on the laptop (intended lifespan: ten minutes) that is directly connected to the DSL modem. I crank up IE on Windows. Wizard next next... and the web page fails at the same place, with the same error. Looking at the web page source code, I see it is generated by Websphere. We have a large Websphere app at work. Reliable is not it's middle name. I give up for the night - maybe they will fix it by morning. Next morning, I use my Comcast connected main Linux box, and the web page works fine. My account is created, using Firefox on Linux, from outside their network. Have to go to work now, but things are looking better - maybe they fixed their Websphere.

Back from work, I hook up the DSL modem. It doesn't connect yet. Hit the web page again. It fails again, with the same error in the same place.

Time to share the pain again. Telephone support on hold music (blather really) had some sort of beat frequency going on that I could only hear one half second of spoken voice for every three seconds of time. Anyway, the person is courteous, and very carefully walks me through all the steps I went through before. Then was stymied when it failed exactly the same way as before. Thankfully, she knew what the results were supposed to be: change the login string the DSL modem will use to authenticate. We manually do this, which is apparently what the whole IE browser launched code was supposed to configure, if we had ever gotten that far.

So to recap: Firefox on Linux from Comcast did handle the page OK, but IE on Windows from inside the AT&T network barfed all over itself. Anything inside the AT&T network barfed all over itself.

o_0

Well, at least it works now.

Over the next five days, I get six telemarketing calls from AT&T, asking if I want to upgrade the speed of my DSL.

On the seventh day, I get a phone call from AT&T, asking if I want to convert to AT&T DSL - because it's so much better than whatever I'm using now, don't you know. At least the girl is nice about it, and promises to take me off the list. She must have, because I haven't gotten another call from them. I did get a call from Comcast though. It ticks me off, when the sales rep starts the call with "We want to know why you left", but at the first opportunity switches to "have we got a sweet deal for you (to return)."

DSL speed: started out pretty darn slow. DSL Reports says I have 256 Kbps up and down. The salesman said I was signing up for 768 up / 1540 down. A call to AT&T technical support changed nothing - and they shifted the blame to my inside wiring. That might be fair - my house is old, and the phone wire is not twisted pair. I did find that the wires in my MPOE were curled into a loop about the size of my thumb. Once I uncurled them, (running them around the edge of the box), my DSL speeds increased to ~ 1,200 Kbps down (but still only 250 Kbps up). I think I'd need to run Cat5 from the MPOE to the DSL modem to get the full speed. But 1,200 Kbps is enough.

Glasnost reports that they are not interfering with my bittorrent traffic. Good for them. They're a keeper.

The down side to the slow speed is that my morning routine is the 'open in tabs' all the bookmarks in my morning comics bookmarks folder. It's 50-60 different sites. On Comcast, they always came up. With the slow speed DSL, some of them time out, and I have to manually refresh them. For $300 per year, I'll live with it. ;-)

Dish Network PVR 625. Bleh. This deserves a journal entry itself. It's the worst thing about the transition.

And to pour a little salt on the wound, AT&T announced that their U-verse service just became available in my area a week ago. Damn them for not telling me to wait two months for it.

This time, my grub menu did not get wiped out - that was nice. Adding the nvidia driver was effortless, and getting compiz to work was a breeze. Sound hardware was recognized properly without any interaction on my part. :-)

ktorrent lost it's settings, as the prefs file is now located under .kde4

There isn't built-in support for the extra buttons on my mouse, and I use the side buttons for the 'forward' and 'back' buttons a LOT.

The biggest annoyance is that it 'upgraded' me to Firefox 3, which broke three plugins I like, and declared the theme I have unusable. The selection of themes that are compatible are not appealing to me.

But all in all, it's probably the easiest upgrade I've gone through.

I knew we had a lot a Hmong people here, as a part of their refugee status from the Viet Nam war. But I didn't know we were quite this close.

I really like the LOL cats sites. We have a chat room at work, where the help desk can ask the servers or networks groups real-time questions; and we can warn them of upcoming 'events'. They can ask us stuff while they are on the phone. It's very customer friendly.

Of course, as with any chat room, there can be some wise-cracking. I've found some LOL cat pictures that would crack people up - so I bookmark them. Using a bookmark sync program, I can find links at home, and use them at work.

This morning, I found this one: Your document could not finish printing. There is a cat in the way.

What is particularly funny about this photo (to me) is that I took it.

It's my mom's cat, Tony, who had a fascination with the moving parts inside the printer. I have another picture taken from the side, where you can see that his head is 100% inside the printer.

I had these photos up on my Comcast home page (which is no more - a JE coming soon). Someone grabbed it and made a LOL cat from it.

That's fine by me - I hadn't marked them copyright, and didn't intend that those pictures would be copyrighted. I'm glad they got used to make people chuckle.

So the question is: do you think it's a funny picture? If the help desk asked if the print server was down, and you shot back with this URL, would that make you laugh?

:-)

Learners take a literal leap

Nowhere in the article is there any mention of jumping, hopping, cantering, galloping, skipping, hurdling, vaulting, or ... leaping.

No, this is an article extolling the virtues of literacy.

Professionals... producing a product... made of English spelling and grammar... selling the benefits of proper spelling and grammar... but they failed it.

They failed it in the Subject Line. The one thing I see in my RSS feed. "Hmmm, maybe its about students combining language games and sports". Nope. The copy editors are merely stupid.

I tell my friends that in an age of Craigslist, the only thing that's going to save the local newspaper is the quality of it's reporting.

<rolls eyes>

http://freeonlinesurveys.com/rendersurvey.asp?sid=ltz1hktlwdgovzb428400

:-)

Here's the back story: Three departments are joining, and the question came up: what should we call ourselves?

Problem is, two of the existing department names are in this poll. If either of those win the poll, then the other department gets its nose rubbed in it forever.

IMO, that was a mistake. This identification shouldn't be about winners and losers, it should be about building a new (larger) team, with a new identity.

Of course, being computer literate, it's almost trivial to clear the cookie and vote early and often. ;-)

Ultimately, I (and a few others) are hoping we get three times the number of votes as there are people in the combined department. Then maybe we'll get the poll re-done, sans the Schadenfreude entries.

Edited 2008-04-23 21:17 PDT

Fwiw, if I had more time, I'd prefer to have worked with the web programmers to set up a poll with: a) one person = one vote, and b) a weekly vote, with the lowest candidate dropped off the ballot.

I'm actually getting somewhere with InfoCards, to make the web sign-up easy. And I found something that shows how to easily integrate it with a PHP website. But I'm not proficient enough a programmer to (quickly) build something to help with this particular project. sigh.

Arrived in Salt Lake City just fine. This time I'm staying at a Radisson. I had forgotten that their commercials mentioned that they feature Sleep Number beds. So I get to try one out for a week. :-) They also have the type of chair with the mesh seat and back, like the Aero chairs. I don't think it's the Aero brand, but it's a nice touch.

The other thing that is unusual for me is that I got to see snow swirling around in the air for a brief moment. I don't recall ever actually having seen airborne snow in real life. I've seen it on the ground several times, but never in the air (well, other than on video).

Yes, as a matter of fact, it is cool. ;-)

And this was a nice bit of news.

Yes, it's that time again: BrainShare 2008, Salt Lake City, Utah (sessions)

This will be my fifth BrainShare. In the great old day's I would have gotten an alumni jacket. ;-)

This year, I'm focusing on the Linux, Xen, and Clustering sessions. I've done GroupWise every time I've been to BrainShare - and I'm pretty sure I know GroupWise inside and out now.

I wish my schedule had more time for Teaming + Conferencing, (which is really SiteScape / ICEcore) but the County hasn't seen it to buy it, and I don't even have the time to set up the demo for our management. It's Novell's answer to SharePoint. We already have a document management solution - so what we really need is workflow and the conferencing part. But I can't really justify going to T+C sessions if I don't know that we will be implementing it.

We are on the track of retiring our NetWare servers and replacing them with Suse Linux servers. So far, it all works great - the Windows workstations don't know they aren't talking to a NetWare box. I just need to get a little better with the BASH shell, so that I can automate stuff. I'm afraid this is going to lead me regex, so now I'll have two problems.... ;-) But I am taking a few Linux courses so I can back up our Linux expert in case he gets hit by a bus. We're going to be doing more migrations as time goes on, so I want to know what the best practices are.

The other sessions I'm signing up for are mostly for Xen virtual machines. We're using that now too, and it's working great. Rebooting an entire server takes 16 seconds, total. But I need to get a better handle on how the pieces fit together when used in a cluster.

Unfortunately, this may be the last BrainShare I get to attend. Seems that someone at Novell thinks that the educational voucher program is a dinosaur to be eliminated. Of course, it's pretty much the only way we get to go. Step 1) requisition the training vouchers we know we need early. Step 2) With whatever money is left over in the training budget at the end of the fiscal year, buy more vouchers. Step 3) present the projected travel costs for BrainShare in December, which isn't a whole lot of money. Step 4) Get permission to go, and the funding for travel and hotel.

The basic problem is that when we are requesting out budget money, in April, we have no idea of how much BrainShare (and travel and hotel) is going to cost the following March. Heck, we don't even know how many people are going to go.

It was easier when we had a stack of vouchers. If a class popped up in Fresno, we just signed up, and got funding for mileage (tens of dollars). If the training was in Sacramento or Los Angeles, then the additional costs were mileage and hotel. Those additional costs look like small numbers, because the course cost was already spent way back when. It's easier for the decision makers to decide in favor of training when the expense looks small.

Similarly, if we send a whole lot of people to local* training, we may only have enough vouchers left to send one person to BrainShare. But that's all good, because everyone got some training in their area of specialization already. Without vouchers, we're completely at the mercy of Novell Training Partners to publish course schedules a year in advance. Doesn't happen. The courses come and go on a monthly basis - the software business is a nimble business.

Our Purchasing department is taking six weeks to send out P.O.s - if a new training course shows up with "only" five weeks notice, we're screwed**. The training vouchers were a solution to that - but Novell isn't going to sell them any more. It's a bummer.

But I am happy that I get to go to BrainShare this year. :-)

*Well in this part of California, "local" is 80 miles.

**Yes - I know - six weeks is a ridiculous amount of time to issue a P.O.. We're in the middle of moving from a mainframe/COBOL/CICS finance system to a PC server/Java/WebSphere system. I certainly hope it gets better. I'm not taking any bets though.

smitty_one_each snared me in this trap, so I'm caught! ;-)

Post a comment to this thread, and I will:

1. Tell you why I befriended you.
2. Associate you with something - fandom, a song, a color, a photo, etc..
3. Tell you something I like about you.
4. Tell you a memory I have of you.
5. Ask something I've always wanted to know about you.
6. Tell you my favorite user pic of yours. Um, no I won't. Like floor thirteen in a hotel, #6 does not exist.
7. In return, you must post this in your Journal/Blag/whatever.

At work, we have a Novell Master License Agreement (MLA), where we pay a per seat cost for the software we use. Every June, we do a "true-up" where we find out how many accounts are in place, and pay full price on the new ones, and pay maintenance on the existing ones.

Last year (or was it the year before?) our Novell salesman said they had a promotion going, where we could pay the same amount of money we always did, but license the NOWS bundle instead. NOWS = Novell Open Workgroup Suite. Essentially, they were giving us everything we always had, and adding in SLED and OpenOffice (SLED = Suse Linux Enterprise Desktop).

Primarily, what this gets us, is: technical support on everything in the MLA.

Because really, we could just download OpenOffice and some distribution of Linux and put it on our desktops, right?

The Novell-branded OpenOffice does come with a nifty extra: scripting support. A lot of people that try to convert from Excel to OO Calc find that their macros no longer run. Heck, Novell found this when they converted. So they gave a programmer or two the task of implementing macros in OpenOffice.

Yes, Novell has submitted the scripting support code to the main OO team, so that they can include this functionality in future versions of OpenOffice.

But I'm getting a little off-track. The real value for us, is that Novell will support us (tech support) using OpenOffice on Windows and Linux, for as many seats as we have in the organization.

Today, our first OpenOffice desktop went into production. Yay!

We've been using it in I.T. for a while now. But we hadn't deployed it to other departments, because, well... our desktop support manager didn't want to. He is also in charge of the Help Desk, and he didn't want to give his people that additional burden*.

However, the financial argument is compelling. This particular department is new, and that means a large number of new PC's. So should they buy MS Office for an extra $300 per seat? Or should they use the office suite we already pay for in our standard license cost?

Heh.

The manager for desktop and help desk support relented. We trained the help desk staff. We trained the desktop techs. And today, we deployed our first officially supported OpenOffice user.

One down, 4,999 more to go. ;-)

At some point, I'd like to find some program code to generate OpenOffice Write documents from a script. I know that the files are just XML stuffed inside a .zip - so I'm sure someone has already written these scripts. I can see a couple database applications that would benefit from direct document generation.

*That's the stated reason. They have some pretty Windows-centric people in the Help Desk. Our Help Desk app is I.E. only (for zero good reason) and it sucks. They have invested their time and experience in it, and no matter how bad it is, they aren't going to ditch it. So the excuse was that they didn't want to incur the extra training and support.

Storms uncover mystery shipwreck

I happen to read the website of the Coos Bay newspaper, and this story popped up. The picture of the ship is interesting - and there is a another set of pictures linked. At this time, no-one knows which ship this was.

I sent it already.

I shaved 20% off it - although I know most of you wanted 60% shaved off. What can I say?

Well... apparently... too much.

<rimshot>

Anyway - I did want to get it out the door, in case something comes up that might take away all my time.

For the record:

Technically, I'm in Del Mar, which is a smidge north of San Diego. GWAVACon Americas Sessions

A co-worker and I get to go. The drive down here was easy - what with the storms in California this week, we were worried that snow might have closed the grapevine. But nope. Last night we ate at Saigon Restaurant on El Cajon boulevard, and wow was the food good! Cooked to perfection.

Well, the T1 from the hotel seems to be overloaded - I got an email saying that the GWAVA people were going to do streaming video from the site - but WebAccess is taking forever....

Looks like the link is GWAVA TV. It's a short conference - only Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday. But the last one I went to, in Dallas TX, was really quite good.

Although the best thing about the Dallas conference was meeting Johndiii in person. :-)

OK - the second best thing was that I did learn how to completely install and troubleshoot our anti-virus / anti-spam software, and it's been a complete success. Lots of happy users.

This time, I'm supposed to learn the e-discovery product. I hope I learn it all.

This hotel room has the first TV I've ever seen that comes with a keyboard. Trippy

[edited 2008-01-27-06-45 pst]

So the 'dot ran this article: FCC Seeks Comment In Comcast P2P Investigation which struck near and dear to my heart (as explained below). So I'm thinking of sending the following comment to the FCC.

Thoughts?

Thank you for your time reading this.

I am a Comcast customer, and have been for a long time. I happen to also work in the Information Technology field, and know that a (somewhat) new operating system, Linux, is the next wave in computer OS innovation. It's in my best interest to keep up with the technology to keep my job.

Two years ago, I installed a BitTorrent client on one of my PCs, specifically to download an .iso of the OpenSuse Linux operating system. I only run BitTorrent when I want the latest version of OpenSuse. Thus, I've only run this software thrice.

An .iso is a whole DVD of data contained in a single file. The particular format of this file enables it to be burned to blank media, with the result being a disc the computer can actually boot from. An .iso file that fills a DVD is close to 4 Gigabytes in size.

Two years ago, more than 25,000 OpenSuse installations were performed.

As you might imagine, that many installations times a 4 GB file is a LOT of data.

OpenSuse is Free Software - which means that it can be installed and used by anyone for free. Even Wal*Mart has started selling PCs with Linux on them, so that they can offer the PC at a cost lower than if they included a for-pay OS. Because the software is free, the people who make it available bear the distribution cost. They pay for their internet connection, just as I pay Comcast for my internet connection.

Like I said before, these downloads are a LOT of data.

For the latest version of OpenSuse, more than 100 Terabytes (40,000 installations) were downloaded.

I, and many computer people, understand that the OpenSuse people would have to pay ENORMOUS amounts of money if they couldn't share the .iso files out.

The solution is to share the .iso file out via BitTorrent.

This shifts a large portion of that data transfer from the OpenSuse people, to every internet service provider with paying customers (which includes Comcast). I (and the 40,000 other people who downloaded this file via BitTorrent) paid our ISP to (essentially) subsidize the distribution of this file.

I pay a lot of money for my Comcast internet service. Between my cable television and internet service, Comcast charges me almost $100 per month - $1,200 per year. The high speed data portion of my bill is over $50 per month.

For that kind of money, I should get internet service that isn't deliberately sabotaged by my provider.

In late September 2007, the latest version of OpenSuse was released. I figured out how to start up my BitTorrent client again (like I said, I only do this every few months). I began the process of getting the OpenSuse 10.3 DVD .iso; but, after a few minutes, my BitTorrent client told me that the download would take two months.

An hour later, the status screen said that the download would finish in twenty-one days.

I called Comcast technical support. Some months earlier, when I used BitTorrent to download OpenSuse 10.2, it was finished within a couple hours.

The Comcast technician ran a diagnostic test against my cable modem and told me that nothing was wrong - everything was fine. I explained that the last time I downloaded an .iso it didn't take this long. He said he didn't know what to tell me. He suggested I examine my PC for some misconfiguration - shifting the blame to me.

Of course, later it comes to light that Comcast had implemented the Sandvine software to impersonate the 'other' end of the BitTorrent client, which allowed them to forge reset packets to break the current session. I was looking at a twenty-one day download because Comcast was deliberately interfering with my expensive service.

I didn't know that at the time. I left the BitTorrent client running while I was at work. By late evening (about fourteen hours after the start), the download was done.

However, my 'sharing' ratio was zero.

That is to say, although 4 GB of packets came into my home, I didn't return the favor and send 4 GB of packets back out to like minded people who wanted the same file.

Ideally, I would get to a share ratio of one. I would get a copy of the file sent by the OpenSuse people; but they wouldn't have to pay their ISP that particular 4 GB-of-data charge. Someone else would get the file too - as I used my expensive Comcast service to provide the pieces they didn't have.

I did finally figure out a way to share out the .iso; giving back to the community that made it available to me. However, Comcast still hurt me, as I tried to do it.

I have a small Cisco router here at home that I bought to teach myself what I needed for Cisco certification. The software that Comcast uses deliberately breaks established connections. My little Cisco router still tried to keep those connections open, in case the problem was just a glitch. However, the router wasn't designed to handle thousands of 'glitches' per hour. Every few hours (for six or seven days) my Cisco router would run out of memory and lock up. I had to power off the router to get my internet connection back (every morning and evening). Of course, once I shared the .iso out (got my share ratio to one), I turned off the BitTorrent client. And magically, my Cisco router has been running perfectly since then. My point is that Comcast may try to tell you that their Sandvine software doesn't actually hurt anything. If they tell you that, they are lying to you.

Instead of allowing me to use my expensive internet connection to share the burden of distributing this file, Comcast shifted the burden to (all) other internet service providers who don't mess with their customer's connections.

Further, for me to download the .iso directly from a FTP server, the Comcast network would get hammered as a huge file clogs it's network (if only for a few minutes). By using BitTorrent, the same file dribbles in over an hour or two (assuming no interference), allowing the Comcast network to smoothly handle it's traffic load.

To summarize: I occasionally use BitTorrent to relieve people who make Free Software onerous download costs. I pay for expensive service, and occasionally put that service to mild use above email and surfing the web. Comcast implemented software to deliberately sabotage my use of BitTorrent. When I called their technical support, they lied to me and tried to tell me that it was my equipment that was faulty.

I know this was long. Thank you very much for your patience.

May this year be filled with better times than last.

And if any of you all happen to visit Cow Country California, PLEASE let me know. I'd love to play host (schedules permitting). We do happen to have a national park which is invariably the sixth or seventh item on people's Things To See In California list - so they never see it. ;-)