Terminally Incoherent

Ladies and gentlemen, we are currently in Day 5 of the Comcastic Saga. If you remember my post from yesterday, I had major internet connectivity issues since Monday. I had a Comcast technician on site every single day of the week.

Was my problem resolved? No!

Do we know when the problem will be resolved? No!

Can comcast give us an estimate on when we can have our internet connection back up? No!

Here is the rundown of Day 5:

1. When I arrived in the office around 9:30 today the internet connection was up
2. It went down within 2 hours since my arrival
3. Comcast technician arrived around noon, and he swapped our RCA modem for a Motorola one. Why? No clue, but the connection picked up again
4. Guy leaves, connection drops 20 minutes later
5. I get on the phone with Comcast and ask them about that whole pole repair business (see yesterday’s post). The lady on the other side claims that the maintenance crew checked the pole, fixed it and closed the ticket. I explain to her that they didn’t fix anything because I’m still down.
6. After 5 minutes she decides to transfer me to the department that deals with the line maintenance. She patches me through to Atlanta unit. Funny thing cause I’m in NJ.
7. The Atlanta lady is rude as hell, and tells me to call 973-COMCAST to get to my local office. Funny thing - that number is not in service.
8. I call the tech support back, and they inform me that the work order on the pole was not closed at all. It is still active, and scheduled for today. WTF?
9. In short they said the work order is scheduled but they can’t tell me when they are going to come in and they can’t promises that it will be fixed today. All they can do is send in a technician on Wednesday between 3 and 5 pm. Other than that we just need to wait for the pole maintenance crew to do their job.
10. It is currently 5pm and the internet is still down.

Is it going to get fixed by Monday? I wouldn’t count on it. They might get around to it Thursday or Friday - but that’s a big gamble too. At this point I don’t even know if we will ever get our connection back.

Thankfully, a neighboring company allowed us to plug ourselves into their Verizon DSL. So we got a new IP address, changed the DNS records and we are currently up and running.

I think on Monday we will start looking into a new ISP. Comcast sucks.

Comcast is driving me nuts! My workplace has been having major connectivity issues for the past week and we still don’t know it the problems will be resolved any time soon.

Here is my story:

Day 1

1. Our internet connection goes down in the morning. I put in a call to Comcast and they promise to send someone in between 1 and 5pm.
2. Internet connectivity resumes around 4:30 when most of the staff already went home
3. Comcast technician shows up at 7pm. He is lucky as hell to get into the building - I did not plan staying late that day but I had to do some maintenance on the servers and got held up.
4. Since I don’t have keys to the room with the cable box, we reschedule the appointment for the next day between 10am and 1pm.
5. The technician helps himself to the snacks in our cafeteria fridge, and chills out on one of the chairs stuffing his face and reading a magazine. I tell the graveyard shift to keep an eye on him and leave home

Day 2

1. We loose internet connectivity around 9 am
2. Connection comes back around 3pm
3. Comcast technician shows up around 4pm
4. He checks the modems, and they are working fine. He checks out the cable box, and he gets perfect reading. He informs that everything is working fine, and that there is nothing more he can do.
5. He leaves.. We loose connection around 5:30 and it never comes back

Day 3

1. I’m out of the office but I find out that they have zero internet connection.
2. Someone puts in another call in and gets informed that there is a problem in our area, and a crew was already dispatched to fix it
3. Internet connectivity resumes around noon and stays up for the rest of the day

Day 4

1. 8:30 am - early birds hit the office and find themselves with no internet
2. They put in another call and a technician is scheduled to come in between 1 and 5
3. The technician arrives around 2pm
4. He looks at the modem, looks at the cable box then tells us that it must be something with the pole. He promises to put in a special work order, and send the maintenance crew to fix it.
5. He leaves. My boss throws a fit.
6. Around 4pm I call Comcast to see if they can tell me when the pole will get fixed. They have no clue what am I talking about.
7. After an hour on the phone I finally find out that the technicians usually put in these work orders at the end of their day when they come back to the local office (some guys do this at the end of their work week). These orders then get processed and picked up by another department which actually schedule the maintenance. This is done internally and there is no way I can get any estimate on when it can be done through tech support.
8. Since tech support has no record of the special work order ever taking place they schedule another technician for the next day between 10 and 3pm.

Day 5 is tomorrow. Is it going to get fixed? I don’t know. Comcast doesn’t know either. Maybe the maintenance crew will fix the pole situation. Maybe the lazy technician never scheduled that special work order. Maybe there is no problem on the pole.

No one knows anything, there is no plan and no solution in sight. What the hell are we paying for?

Fortunately the building has a T1 line coming. The neighboring office was nice enough to offer to plug us into that pipe until we can get our ISP crap worked out. Tomorrow we will have to reconfigure the firewall, and change the DNS records to point to a new IP… But at least we will be back online.

Comcast sucks.

I have been using co.mments for few days now, and I love it. I allows you to track all the comments you post on other blogs in one place.

I read allot of blogs, and I comment often. But if a given page does not have some sort of email notification mechanism, I almost never go back to check if someone replied to my comment. This is why I installed this feature in my blog - to let people know that I read their responses, and that I reply to them.

I have yet to find a site that would not work with this little web service. I highly recommend it.

Spider-Man was horrible…

Spider-Man 2 sucked so bad it me nauseous…

Spider-Man 3… Actually it doesn’t look that bad. I just watched the trailer, and the scenes with the symbiont look awesome. Chances are that this movie will be much darker than the previous two, and that can possibly be a good thing.

Venom is one of my favorite villains of all time, so naturally I will have to go to see it. If nothing else, just to see how badly are they going to rape the great character and storyline from the comic. I have only one question. Can someone please explain to me why the hell did they pick Tohper Grace to play Eddie Brock? WTF?

Let me explain this. Eddie Brock was a steroid freak, who spent a large part of his life pumping iron and plotting revenge on Spiderman. The symbiont does not give him super-human abilities - it only slightly enhances his natural strength, heightens his reflexes and allows him to stick to walls, and shoot webs like Spiderman. That, and it can mimic any clothes and make him invisible like predator. Eddie is kinda like batman with a cool living costume - no powers, just superior skills, strength, endurance and few costume based skills.

Eddie was always portrayed as this hulking beast of a man with a ridiculously broad shoulders, square jaw and football player/night club bouncer look about him. Tohper Grace is none of that. He is the wimpy Foreman dude from That 70’s show! I think that Kathy Driscoll and Francine Maisler were doing crack when they were casting the role of Venom!

Don’t you love when someone posts a piece of really, really bad, clueless advice on a popular blog, all the cool kids repeat it over and over again? Instructables made a silly suggestion that you should keep your pait brushes in your paint cans. Make, picked it up and reposted it on their blog. Cory Doctorow found it there and then reposted it on Boingboing. By the evening it will probably hit hundreds of other blogs.

To bad that this is a horrible advice. You will most likely completely destroy your brush like this. Here are the reasons why:

1. You should never store brushes with the bristles down. The weight of the tool will bend them and you will end up with a spoon, forked or an octopus brush that will be unusable
2. You should never allow paint to hit the base of the bristles. It will gather there and dry into small globs that are nearly impossible to get out. These globs will push your bristles appart creating gaps in the bristle edge eventually leading to forking and “crazy hair” that will simply stick out at random angles.
3. Paint left on a shelf separates. The dense pigment and adhesive substances deposit on the bottom while the semi-transparent liquid thiner floats on top. This is why painters shake the can, or mix the paint before starting to work. Otherwise you end up with a glue that is too dense to paint with, and water which has no pigment. The most important part of your brush - the bristle line will slowly be encased in that densest, most glue like paint on the bottom of the can. You will have to wash it anyway before you sart painting

So why do these alleged professional painters store brushes this way? Most likely because they will come back the next day and finish the job. Or perhaps they will toss both the can, and the chepo brush they already charged you for on their way home. Who the hell knows. I can tell you one thing - they do not do that to the good brushes.

Good brushes need to be washed with soap and water (and a paint thinner for oil based crap) and cleaned with a brush comb. How do I know this? I used to do contracor work with my dad for a long time. I painted allot of walls, and cleaned allot of brushes.

So remember kids - not everything you find on BoingBoing or Make is good advice.

Update Sat, July 01 2006, 07:32 PM

Fixed spelling and grammatical mistakes. Thanks, Henke.

I just popped over to the US Games Workshop site to try to figure out when will I be able to pre-order the Codex Eldar and this is what I saw:

Ooops! The whole site, including the online store. Judging from the vague error message, I’m guessing there is something wrong with the way they connect to the database. Either it is down, or someone did something to the code that prevents if from connecting correctly.

I’m glad I was not placing an order when that shit went down. I would be really pissed off if this would happen to me in mid order. I’m wondering if anyone is there to diagnose and fix this. Theoretically a big site like that should have 24h support - but who the hell knows.

I think the first thing they need to do is to mask these error messages. I mean, you just look at that thing, and you can plainly see they are using ADO connection which implies SQL server on a windows box with ASP. You can also see the path to the includes folder which may contain all kinds of juicy bits. If you do a portscan and OS fingerprint on that server you have a very solid base to start poking around.

Let’s see how long will it take them to get the site up.

Update Tue, June 27 2006, 12:00 AM

It seems that as I was typing this the main site went back up. The online store is still acting flaky though.

This cracked me up:

This is from Sinfest - I love that comic.

Lately I noticed that every time people find some niche topic in which they can specialize they develop their own jargon. This seems to be a natural process that occurs because when such specialization occurs, there is an increased need to facilitate better communication. Acronyms and buzzwords are born to avoid explaining the same things over and over again, and allow to streamline the exchange of ideas. These jargon terms introduce standard baseline of communication between experts.

As a side effect, it makes the conversations between experienced gurus inaccessible to general public, and newbies due to the artificial jargon barrier. People using technical intricate jargon also may often sound sophisticated and knowledgeable.

For example, you have the technical jargon used by most computer scientists and technology professionals. You have the business jargon used by the marketroids and pointy haired lower primates in managerial roles. They usually talk about things like synergy and paradigm - and we usually ignore them completely. You have MMOG jargon used by people who like to “aggro ftw” or go “leeroy jenkins”

Recently I was surprised to find that “players” or “pick up artists” also have a very complex and technical jargon. For example, I found out that apparently I am AFC prone to oneitis, or that when you talk with a woman you should do allot of kino, anchor positive feelings on yourself and elicit values so you can mirror them back to her.

Seriously, check out the whole website. It is a fascinating insight into a mind of a pick up artist. I don’t think I have ever seen such in depth explanation of pick up techniques, and methodologies. Some of these things actually read like actual tech related manuals. After browsing through some of of the articles there, I realized that what these guys are doing is taking classic social engineering techniques, expanding them, and applying them to dating scenarios.

I might be wrong, but I think some of the advice on the site is actually good, sound advice like being confident, positive, avoiding downer topics and etc… Some of it probably should be taken with a grain (sometimes a big grain) of salt. All in all, it is quite an interesting read.

Now I’m interested to see what other niche topics have such highly developed jargon vocabularies. I’m now on the lookout for those mysterious and elusive fields of expertise that I never knew, or heard about before.

I think that what I plan to say now, accurately mirrors the feelings of all the men in the world named Luke. That one line from Star Wars, that everyone is so fond of quoting when they meet us, stopped being cute around the time we were 8.

Do you really think this is original? Do you really think this is funny? Wow dude, you must be the first person ever, who has figured out that it was witty to inform a Luke that you are his father! There is no way in hell that someone before could have made this association! No, all those other people lack your sheer comedic genius that allows you to make lame pop culture references!

The fact that we politely smile when you do your Vader shtick does not mean we are amused by it. No, we smile because you are making a complete idiot out of yourself. So here is a tip: if you meet a Luke in the future, and you feel like making a Star Wars joke - don’t.

This was a public announcement brought to you by the “No, You are NOT my Father Foundation”.

Hehehe! This is priceless!

If you don’t get it, read this.