Posts Tagged ‘Comcast’

« Older Entries

2009: The Year Entropy Accelerated

By Chief Oddball on November 6th, 2009 at 2:51 pm

Filed under Journal, Rants ··· 3 Comments

As the ill-fated 2009 starts to wind itself down, it’s making it more clear than ever that it’s not going to let us forget how much pain and suffering it inflicted on us all. Some more than others, obviously, but by-and-large it’s been a pretty depressing year. My family in particular was hit harder by more cataclysmic events at once than at any point in my lifetime, with my dad losing his job due to the slowing economy, the deaths of two family members (just a month apart, no less) and a myriad of other problems besides.

Although Apple and I have fared pretty well in comparison to many other Americans — even other members of our families — we’ve still received a disproportionate amount of negative reinforcement from The Powers That Be. This week, in particular, was like a microcosm of that very idea, presenting us with one out-of-left-field event after another: breakdowns, unforeseen events, ridiculous instances of lightning striking twice. The Second Law of Thermodynamics seems to have conspired against us to accelerate entropy to an almost comical level.

I used to do a lot of bitching on this blog. Not so much anymore. But today is one of those days where I feel like if I don’t get it off my chest here, I’ll take it out on someone who doesn’t deserve it, so away we go with a little old-fashioned rant.

Forfeiting the Comcast Battle (But Not Quite the War)

My seemingly eternal struggle with Comcast over the billing and service for my TiVo HD came to an anti-climactic end early this week. (You can follow the history of the saga here.) After apparently getting a solution from corporate to the two HD service fees I was getting charged — one for each CableCARD in my TiVo — the celebration came to an abrupt halt last weekend when my second tuner lost all HD service. Again.

Sick and tired of it, I bypassed phone support altogether and filed another corporate complaint. This time, however, despite the corporate head office’s agreement with my position, the “corporate liaison officer” at our local Comcast department gave me a call to say there was nothing that can be done. In my area, she explained, the billing system requires that a separate HD service charge be assessed on each single-stream CableCARD. So, if I want HD service on both tuners of my DVR, I have to pay for it twice. And that’s that.

So I asked her, if Comcast would offer me a multi-stream CableCARD to replace my two single-stream cards, would I only pay one HD fee despite getting the exact same service? She said yes. Of course, Comcast still doesn’t have multi-stream CableCARDs here. As a result, I pay twice as much for the same service, because of their lack of equipment. Oh, that’s really nice; I’m so glad I could help. Is that extra money I’m paying you going to finance, say, acquisition of any fucking multi-stream CableCARDs, by any chance? (The woman did say that multi-stream cards were currently being tested and would be offered to us early next year, but I’ll believe that when I can hold one in my hands.)

As a consolation, the Comcast corporate liaison officer told me that they’re already crediting me for the extra $6.95 HD service charge by lowering our second CableCARD fee to $1.50, because it’s normally like 8 bucks. Huh? According to Comcast’s own CableCARD FAQ, the second card fee can be only “up to $2.05.” They’re saving me 55 cents, not $6.95. And if you check that same link, you’ll see that I wouldn’t even be paying a second card fee if I just had a multi-stream card. That’s another $1.50 I wouldn’t be paying if Comcast could offer current equipment.

But by this point I had had it. I’m sorry, I really had. I just can’t do this fucking song and dance anymore. I told the woman to just go ahead and restore service to my second CableCARD, and I’ll pay their extra $6.95 monthly fee. What else am I gonna do? At some point you have to recognize that it’s just seven fucking dollars. I will be hounding them next year to make sure I’m one of the first people to get a multi-stream card — assuming that wasn’t just a line of bull — but until then, I have more important things to deal with.

Speaking of which…I’m just getting started.

Continue Reading…

Comments (3)

That Got Their Attention

By Chief Oddball on October 23rd, 2009 at 4:41 pm

Filed under Journal ··· 2 Comments

I recently complained here about the problems we’ve been having with our Comcast service, both Internet and TV related. The gist of it is this: The underground line from the drop box to our home had degraded to the point where our service was being partially or completely interrupted. Almost three weeks ago I finally got a technician to identify the problem and schedule a line replacement, but I had been waiting for the work to be done ever since. Permits had to be pulled, utilities flagged, etc.

After some time went by, I started calling Comcast to see if they could tell me when the repairs would be happening. After all, when the line gets replaced, my Internet is going down. Since I telecommute, this could mean that I’d need to pack up and go work elsewhere for the day, and I wanted to be prepared. Each time I’d call in, they’d tell me that the job was scheduled for sometime in the next few days. So I’d copy my work files to a portable hard drive and get ready to leave on a moment’s notice. But when those days went by with no results, I’d call again, and they’d give me another date which was magically a few more days away. Meanwhile, my wife Apple and I were starting to miss our shows because we were getting no digital or HD channels whatsoever (and the analogs were so snowy as to be unwatchable).

Then, this week, yet another Comcast problem arose. We got our latest bill, and found we were once again getting mis-charged for our TiVo HD. The billing for the TiVo and its two CableCARDs has always been unnecessarily complicated in this area, requiring that manual discount codes and other crap be applied to our bill to make the charges come out right. But this month those credits were gone, and we saw we were being billed two HDTV service fees — one for each CableCARD — despite the fact that both cards are in a single box.

This has happened before, and fixing it is never fun. I have to call Comcast’s customer service number and try to explain the whole situation until they work whatever magic is necessary to sort it out. I never know exactly what steps they take to fix it, which is maddening because I can’t give them guidance on how to do it right. Which I’d love to do, because they often fix it wrong (by simply removing one of my CableCARDs from the account, thereby deleting all service access on one of the TiVo’s two tuners), screwing up the level of service I get on my other standard-def TV, and a host of other possible outcomes. But I’ve always managed to — eventually — get things sorted.

Not this time. Despite calling in on several occasions and talking to different people each time, Comcast’s support folks continually assured me that their billing me two HDTV service charges was correct. One guy even said that his notes on TiVo customers indicated that this was how the account should be set up, and that he was required to bill me for HDTV service on each CableCARD because I was getting all the HD channels on each tuner.

Continue Reading…

Comments (2)

Comedycast

By Chief Oddball on September 28th, 2009 at 9:57 pm

Filed under Journal ··· Leave a Comment

About two weeks ago, shortly after we returned from our trip to Michigan, disaster struck. Our Internet connection started going down every morning, sometimes for more than an hour, and suffering from flaky speeds on a seemingly random basis.

Now, I realize that this is a pretty generous definition of “disaster” when you get right down to it. You’re probably thinking that I must live a pretty cushioned life for this to even register on my “holy shit” meter. And to be frank, you’d be right. I’d be lying if I said that I’ve spent much of my life enduring hardship of great or small import. But given that I work from home in an IT position that requires frequent (if not constant) use of the Internet, and that in today’s economy you don’t want to give your boss any excuse to discontinue your services as an employee, perhaps that will help put this in perspective.

I’ve spoken to Comcast support four or five times already, each on different mornings in the last week as I’ve tried to get some resolution to this problem. Every time, they ask me to reboot my modem while they send it a reset signal, and usually if we do that once, twice or three times, it will start working, the Tier 1 support person will say “Whew, glad that’s settled” and that will be that. Until the next morning, when the entire cycle would always repeat itself.

Eventually I got them to send me a technician, and on Sunday morning no less, right at the time when the connection is always going out. Except, as if to spite me, it didn’t go out that morning. A rather surly tech showed up, watched video news stories on my computer for a while and then swapped out my modem just in case that might have had anything at all to do with it. It didn’t, because an hour after he left, our connection went to shit — barely more than dialup speed again — and didn’t fully recover for the rest of the day.

In the course of my work, naturally, the situation has been even more untenable. I’ve already endured one embarrassing VoIP meeting, during which my Internet connection spent the entire call making it nigh-impossible to hear the other parties before finally going out right when my boss asked me to present a report. This morning I got up early to prepare for the Monday morning ops meeting and discovered as soon as I walked into my room that the Internet was out again. The cable modem’s network sync light was blinking in its usual, brain-dead manner, endlessly searching for a connection and finding none.

I had 45 minutes until the meeting, so rather than eat breakfast, I spent it doing diagnostics, fiddling around with possible remedies (none of which worked) and waiting on hold at the Comcast support center (which I eventually abandoned when it became clear that no one was going to pick up before the meeting started). Thanking my lucky stars for my iPhone 3GS and AT&T’s reliable 3G network here in south Florida — which I’m convinced is the only AT&T market in the country which can actually be called “reliable,” or at least I have yet to find another — I sent an email to my boss and asked if they could conference me in on my cell number instead of through Skype.

Long story short, I made it to the meeting. But come 11:00 our Internet was still out, and I was getting annoyed.

Continue Reading…

Comments (0)

Gearing Up

By Chief Oddball on November 1st, 2008 at 10:46 pm

Filed under Journal, Rants ··· Leave a Comment

Our travel date nears, and so, as you might expect, preparations for said trip have just about reached fever pitch around here. Not that I’m spending 24/7 packing — I usually plan things far too elaborately to get caught in a flurry of last-minute prep work. Rather, a little bit of planning has been going into every day, woven inexorably into the fabric of the day’s events. A phone call here, a purchase there, a list made today and a schedule made tomorrow.

So far, everything is on track.

I’ve had a lot of things I’ve wanted to post about, but every time I’ve thought about sitting down to craft an entry about one of them, I decided that I would much rather leave the room instead. Absurdly, some days, temperature is one of the biggest deciding factors. After spending 8 or 10 hours working in this room, the combined heat of body temperature, dual-core computer, three widescreen monitors and related equipment is enough to send me scurrying for the relative cool of the opposite end of the house. (It’s no accident that said opposite end is home to my 57″ TV and bevy of game consoles.)

Speaking of games, we are almost upon the video game publisher’s favorite time of year: the Christmas season. After an almost completely dry year, in which I purchased only one video game (Grand Theft Auto IV, back in June), the fourth quarter has started to become home to a whole gaggle of extremely hot releases. To name but a few from my wish list:

Mirror's Edge: Faith overlooks the flow of the city

Mirror's Edge: Faith overlooks the flow of the city

  • Mirror’s Edge
  • Gears of War 2
  • Fallout 3
  • Silent Hill: Homecoming
  • Left 4 Dead
  • Tomb Raider: Underworld
  • Rock Band 2
  • Midnight Club: Los Angeles
  • Need For Speed Undercover
  • Resistance 2 (PS3)
  • CUBE! (Kidding.)

Mirror’s Edge is perhaps my personal favorite of the bunch. It’s an action game played from the first-person perspective, but takes the genre to a completely different place. Rather than playing the role of a muscle-bound guy with an over-the-top arsenal battling aliens or zombies, your character is Faith — a spry young woman whose proportions are actually realistic — ahem — and whose job it is to deliver covert information by hand. She’s called a “Runner.”

In the futuristic city setting of Mirror’s Edge, “Big Brother” government has come to fruition. All communications channels are monitored by the State. Faith and the other Runners exist as a human conduit of information, transporting hardcopied packets of data from one interested party to another via rooftops, tunnels and other roads less traveled. The game combines parkour, the French-originated extreme sport of free running, with urban exploration and political intrigue. And it does it all with a refreshingly bright and colorful style that takes the place of a typical game’s dark and gritty presentation.

Having played the “teaser” demo of Mirror’s Edge just this week, I can confidently say that this game has catapulted to the top of my “must-have” list for the year.

Oh, but I’m not done yet…not hardly. Klicken Sie hier:

Continue Reading…

Comments (0)

Comcast Does a Nice Thing

By Chief Oddball on June 14th, 2008 at 2:45 am

Filed under Journal ··· Leave a Comment

I complained about their mishandling of my TiVo’s CableCARDs, but I can’t fault them for this. In fact, I can only thank them — profusely. Comcast has upgraded all broadband customers to 1 megabit upload (if you were on the 6/384 tier, like me), or 2 megabits (if you were on the 8/768 tier) — at no additional charge. Finally, the dad-blasted 384k upload cap is gone.

Not only that, but I’m actually getting closer to 2 megabits in real-world speed on FTP uploads, even though I should be getting 1. Now that’s service! (Actually, that’s PowerBoost – a Comcast feature wherein you get double your cap for the first 10-30 seconds of an upload or download.)

It was a hard road getting here, though. The upgrades supposedly went out to all areas a few days ago, but by this afternoon I still hadn’t seen them and was starting to become concerned. I discovered that Comcast has tech support guys on Twitter who actually respond to questions and problems with your service, so I actually got a Twitter account just so I could message them and ask when we were gonna get the upload speed bump. They responded with an email address to send my account info to so they could look into it.

To my surprise, a Comcast “Digital Media Outreach” executive actually called me personally not 30 minutes later and told me he had actually looked at my modem and confirmed that my signal levels are good and that I have the upgraded speeds. This was great customer service, but it still didn’t explain why I wasn’t seeing those speeds. The Comcast exec suggested a few things to try and told me to give him a call on Monday if I still hadn’t resolved the issue, and he’d get the local Florida techs involved.

I remained thoroughly perplexed throughout the rest of the day. I was too busy to deal with the problem further, but it remained stuck firmly in the back of my mind until I could no longer take it. Already feeling a surge of energy and industriousness after some other events that occurred today, I laid around in bed tonight for a while, thinking about the problem, before I decided to get up and try some experiments.

In the end, I solved the problem and learned it had been my own fault from the very beginning. I run a custom firmware on my wireless router that does QoS; this ensures that important data packets from my VoIP phone and Skype aways receive priority over things like BitTorrent and FTP. At some point in the distant past, I had manually set my connection’s upload bandwidth limit at 330k for QoS purposes — which actually limits throughput at the router level. What an idiot!

Long story short, the self-imposed cap has been removed, my router firmware has been upgraded for good measure, and I am now flying along at 1.5-2 megabit upload speeds. Fantastic!

This, I suspect, will provide the catalyst I’ve been needing to convert and upload the videos we shot in Thailand, so our family there can see them. I can also toss some more photos up on my Flickr account, enjoy far greater responsiveness when working remotely with terminal services at my office, and, of course, treat my peers to faster shares of Torrents if the need arises. ;)

Now I can go to bed satisfied.

Comments (0)

End of Another Weekend

By Chief Oddball on March 31st, 2008 at 12:51 am

Filed under Journal ··· Leave a Comment

Another weekend come and gone. Felt like one day instead of two. That’s what can happen when you sleep till noon on your days off.

I’m rather pissed off at Comcast. I played a three-player game of Forza with Pooch and Reaper today over Xbox Live and kept getting disconnected. Then this evening, Apple was trying to talk to her sister via Skype, and she kept getting disconnected too. I have a hard time believing that this is a coincidence.

Today I actually felt like doing some writing, and actually DID some writing. This doesn’t happen much anymore, so that was cool. In fact I would like to still be writing (my story) right now, but it’s nearly 1 a.m. and I have a morning meeting tomorrow, so I guess I’ll be good and go to sleep instead.

My sister in law is helping us get a DSL connection set up at the house we’ll be staying in when we go to Thailand next. I am really getting excited for this trip. Going to be a good time, and so many wonderful people.

Incidentally, I just posted this from my iPhone. Not a bad little virtual keyboard!

Well, good night.

Comments (0)

TiVolution!

By Chief Oddball on January 9th, 2008 at 6:49 pm

Filed under Journal ··· 2 Comments

Today was Comcast’s third (and last) chance at sending a technician out to put working CableCARDs in my TiVo HD — last chance, that is, before I escalated it up to a supervisor. Fortunately, with about 15 minutes left to spare before the expiration of the appointment window, the tech appeared at the door.

The only problem was, I was in the middle of a 3-hour conference call at work, wherein we were training the sales and support staff on how to use the new online store and CRM system we’ve built. The meeting was important enough that I didn’t dare leave, but after waiting this long for a Comcast tech to show up, I didn’t dare send the guy away, either. So, what ensued for the next 45 minutes was a ridiculous series of events: Listening into a cell phone with one ear, the Comcast guy with the other ear. Manipulating the GoToMeeting on my laptop screen with one hand, and the TiVo remote with my other hand. All-in-all, more dexterity than I’ve been called upon to muster since I last picked up a pair of drum sticks.

Today’s cable technician knew nothing, repeat nothing, about CableCARDs, which was the first thing he admitted to me when he came in. He was an amiable fellow, but he possessed only the bare minimum knowledge of the job. Thus, I must thank the very helpful folks at the TiVo Community Forums for teaching me practically everything I know — for without that knowledge, today’s experiment would surely have ended in another failure. As the tech himself complained about how they send him out to do jobs that the customer could easily do himself by phone (yeah — assuming your employer would deign to let me talk to someone who’s actually trained properly!), I ran through the diagnostics screens and gave him instructions on what to do next.

We replaced both CableCARDs and started fresh. The first card worked pretty much straight away. The second one did not, but unlike my last installation appointment, this time I knew it wasn’t going to magically start functioning on its own. I prodded the tech to call back into the head-end and ask the woman there to read back the Card ID and Host ID numbers to verify they were correct. Sure enough, the Host ID had been miskeyed. So we got that fixed, and sent a re-initialization hit to CableCARD 2.

The init signal didn’t take, so the woman at the head-end (who was now talking to me directly through the tech’s cellphone, while he simply held it up) told me to take the card out and put it back in. After which, she repeated the initial setup on that card. This time, it started to work. I ran the channel test and confirmed I was getting everything I was supposed to, on both tuners.

At last! The CableCARDs are working!

Continue Reading…

Comments (2)

Komcast Kops

By Chief Oddball on January 5th, 2008 at 10:46 pm ··· 2 Comments

Comcast missed my third CableCARD service call today. This is the second appointment in a row where the tech just plain hasn’t shown up, despite assurances to the contrary. Last time I had the 5pm-9pm window. Today I had the 1pm-5pm window. For my newly-rescheduled appointment, set for Wednesday the 9th, I got the 10am-12pm window.

I’m beginning to think that the guy is seeing “CableCARD” on the work order and just skipping me. These bums.


TiVo Bliss Postponed Again…

By Chief Oddball on January 3rd, 2008 at 11:19 am ··· Leave a Comment

The cable guy never showed up for my CableCARD reinstallation appointment yesterday, so I had to call up and reschedule for later. The soonest I could get was Saturday. At first they offered me the damned 5pm-9pm slot again, but I demanded something else and they immediately gave me 1pm-5pm on the same day. Why do they start by offering that useless evening timeslot when they know they have something else?

Anyway, I’ll hopefully have more TiVo news to post as the weekend winds down.


TiVo HD, Comcast and CableCARDs

By Chief Oddball on January 1st, 2008 at 11:12 pm

Filed under Journal ··· 2 Comments

First off, welcome to 2008. I mostly don’t do New Year’s resolutions, but if I were to make one, it would be “post on Oddball Update more often.” I seem to have mostly gotten the rest of my house in order, at least in terms of no longer working myself to death, trying not to get upset about petty things, and having a positive outlook toward the future that life may bring me. I have, however, been rather neglectful of this site lately, so I’ll see if I can do something to change that. It’s the first day of the new year and I’m posting, so that’s a start. I hesitate to pledge to post once a day or anything like that, since that’s largely just setting myself up to fail, but more than once a week would at least be nice.

TiVo HD

With 2008 barely a day old, I’m already surrounded by technology aplenty. We celebrated a somewhat laid-back Christmas this year, but were joined by my parents here in Florida for the occasion, which was great. They generously gifted Apple and I with a new TiVo HD and a lifetime service subscription, which was beyond awesome. It didn’t take long before I had it set up, with both tuners resolving the full slate of analog channels with absolutely no problem.

However, in order to receive digital and HD channels — the TiVo HD’s raison d’être — it needs to be equipped with CableCARDs. These small devices, which are very similar to PCMCIA cards, essentially do all the heavy lifting that your cable box does: receiving and decrypting digital, HD and premium channels from your cable company. In fact, they serve the same purpose as a cable box, without the “box” part. By placing two of them in a TiVo, one for each tuner, you activate the TiVo’s ability to access your full channel lineup directly.

It sounds simple enough, but like so much else about technology, it oftentimes isn’t. I am now experiencing one of those “not so simple” times.

Continue Reading…

Comments (2)

« Older Entries