50Micron.com

It’s funny, but I always get this funny look when I talk about technology being alive, evolving, and maybe even slightly sentient.

This is a non-storage post, but I never claimed to write only about storage, just mostly.

We dumped cable TV today.  And it got me to thinking on how certain technologies just become obsolete after a while.

We did it because the only ones who watched TV in our house were our kids, and they only watched two channels.  Nickelodeon, and Nick Jr, and becaue Nick Jr was a part of the “premium” cable package we ended up spending $100 a month or more so that my 5 year old could learn Spanish from a diminutive latina with a talking backpack and an oddly-dressed monkey for a friend.

Now they get that same education from the same shows, but they get it from Netflix streaming through the Sony Playstation.  Net cost $16.99/month.

But the cost savings are only part of it.  My kids are no longer assaulted by endless advertising, commercials for shows that are NOT on their age level, and are no longer scheduling their lives around what shows come on at what times.

It really is an amazing freedom when you think about it.  And it definitely signifies a technology that is finally moving away from “the way it’s always been done” to ways that may, finally, make more sense and put the consumer in control.

In a world where bandwidth is cheaper and cheaper, it really surprises me that more people aren’t making this change.

They screwed it up again.  Verizon has already been called.

Not so much for the “the system is down” but for the “i really dont care when you get it back up or how much business you’re losing in the meantime.”

 

Got the new firewall in – Bought a used Juniper Netscreen 5XP of Ebay for $139., and it is working WONDERFULLY. 

It only took about 4 hours to set it up, but as I’m a storage wonk and not a network wonk, I consider that to be a success in the grand scheme of things.

Comcast seems to have *FINALLY* fixed the connection.  They called me last week to tell me that, after 8 trouble tickets and more outages than I can count, they discovered the the signal-to-noise ratio on the upstream was 28db, and that the minimum was 35db so that might be what was causing the problem.  They tweaked something on their end and now my downstream power is *WAY* over what it used to be and the connection is stable.

Funny, seems like that was something they could have figured out after the first or second call, no?

Ok, this one was my fault.  I messed with the cable companies careful organizational system.

I paid my bill.

I went in there today to pay my bill.  While I was in there I asked them for an adjustment, because when they set up the business service, they neglected to stop charging me for the residential service I used to have.

While she was removing the residential service, she noticed that my old modem was still associated with the account, and proceeded to remove it.

The warning bells should have gone off in my head there, but they didn’t until I was sitting at the auto service center getting the oil changed in my wife’s car, she called me and told me that the internet connection was down again, and this time rebooting the modem didn’t fix it.

Didn’t take me more than 8 seconds to put 2+2 together and figure out that the dim-wit behind the counter at the local Comcast office had disconnected the wrong modem.

It did however take me more than 6 hours of repeated calls before I got someone on the phone who actually had half a clue and got the connection back up, with my IP addresses in tact.

Hat’s off to Comcast’s one good tech. 

I’ve got Verizon’s business services number on speed dial.  If it goes down one more time, they’re up.

They’re getting their last chance.  Morons took me down with their last config fix by re-enabling the blocking of port-80 when they uploaded the most recent “cure-all” config to the modem.

Mental note:  If anyone ever tries to hand you an SMC 8013 or SMC8014 cable modem, run, don’t walk, in the opposite direction.  They are complete crap and can’t handle a simple, single-threaded ISO image download from Microsoft.  (god forbid I do anything in a peer-to-peer network, where downloads are coming in from multiple sources….)

Tomorrow they’re bringing a new NetGear modem out.  if this doesn’t work, I’m going to buy my own (after some careful consulting with one who knows much more about these things than I do) and yell and scream until they provision it for me.

If that doesn’t work, they can go spit, I’ll go back to Verizon.  It was slow, but at least it bloody-well worked.

the state of mind when the mind over-rides the body’s basic desire to choke the living crap out of someone who desparately needs it.

Anyway, enough about my day.

Some of you may have noticed the site going up and down lately.

if you’d like, you can blame the nice folks at Comcast Communications, whose “business” DSL is not quite ready for prime time.

After my fourth call to them in a week this morning, a nice sounding young man GUARANTEED ME that the problem with my router was fixed and that I wouldn’t be having any more problems.

LOL – have you ever heard of someone in technical support making that kind of guarantee?

Nope – neither have I.