Every good story need some pictures, this story was about a whirlwind service experience with America’s largest cable company…the girl?, we don’t know for sure, we call her ‘Julie’, say hello to Julie… because I couldn’t figure out how to sell the shirts at cost, I will be donated proceeds to ‘Hope for the Animals’ a no-kill animal shelter in Langhorne, PA. Buy merch here.
Tagged: merch
So stop me if you’ve heard this one before, Everynight at 5:45 — 6:30 my Comcast Broadband internet connection drops, it doesn’t just drop a little, it doesn’t just drop now and then – it drops to 0kbps [I suppose it doesn’t matter what unit of measure I use to communicate zero does it], it drops everyday - after a handful of laughable calls to tech support [unplug modem, reset router, die a little more inside] and troubleshooting on my own I’m fairly certain the issue is twofold:
I’ve been twittering with a gentleman named frank [@comcastcares] who works for customer relations for Comcast, he has a thankless job - he’s basically doing damage control to the twittering community - but the interesting side effect of following frank on twitter is that I can read the issues everyone else is having - and my issue is fairly typical, lots of folks with a near identical problem. That being the case, you would think Comcast would have some type of handle on the issue, or at the very least their techs would acknowledge it.
IMHO if Comcast would public admit they have a problem would be an excellent first step, but to help them along I may print a few 1000 [unplug modem, reset router, die a little more inside] t-shirts, let me know what size you need.
This is purely conjecture, but 800lb Gorilla Comcast has been pushing their ‘triple pack’ very hard in the northeast, it’s success is putting additional strain on their network, and that strain is exposing flaws in the coaxial/splitter networking that’s been in most of their customers homes for 15 years - how do they react, they announce a ‘wiring protection plan’ only $3.95 a month - and pimp it heavy on every tech call - lovely, aren’t I already paying for service I’m not getting? Wasn’t it your technicians who originally wired this crap originally? Isn’t my/our continued patronage worth 50 feet of coaxial and a two dollar splitter? Needless to say, Hearing service plan offers when I’m not getting service is not an effective sales technique, at least on me.
Obviously the first thing that comes to mind as a solution is switch providers, FIOS is readily available in my area, and the pricing even without bundles is fairly competitive. I could just go to Radio Shack and buy myself a handful of splitters, and replace them one by one as needed, Honestly they are $1.49 this is costing me 1000 times that in lost productivity and found aggravation.
I think it’s significant to mention that I have chosen to use what little bandwidth I currently have to write this post, so are you having issues with Comcast and your broadband connection? let me hear about it.
Tagged: comcast
So courtesy of the auto update plugin - I have a brand new wordpress (really it feel’s like that) - I must say that aside from a few things (most notably the location of the categories list in Publish) I like it, and that the boys and girls at Happy Cog did an admirable job on the facelift.
I’ve posted before about how my original 40GB ipod died, and lived, and died - and how I eventually excepted it’s death and moved on. Well I couldn’t just throw it out, ‘T’ had it engraved and gave it to me for our anniversary - and even non-functional that means something to me. So it sat on a shelf for 8 months, dead, but I guess I’m far too OCD to let it just sit there, so I made a snap judgement to try changing the battery - a quick visit to ipodjuice.com for a $30 battery and a bit or surprisingly simple fiddling (I would say that opening the ipod case and removing the old battery is no harder than putting RAM in a laptop) - my 40GB ipod is once again in fine working condition, as a matter of fact I’m listening to it right now.
Tagged: Ipod Battery, Ipod Repair, Ipod Repair Success Story
In case you missed it Endeavour launches at 2:28am this morning. Something about a shuttle launch that makes me feel all giddy - not quite as awe inspiring as the original NASA Apollo launches (which where true media events) watching the shuttle depart is still an awesome thing.
Space shuttle Endeavour thundered into orbit early Tuesday morning carrying seven astronauts and Japan’s dreams for a space-based laboratory at the International Space Station.
I don’t hide the fact that I’m a geek, for a designer, I think I hold my own with most webdev programmers - In most regards I know my shit, but until recently I haven’t spent anytime learning regex (regular-expressions) and let me tell you, if you don’t know regex - simply put, you’re working too hard.
Regex is a way to filter strings that match a pattern out of text from a file or from standard input. Regular expressions (or RegExs) can be used with a big choice of programs, most notably grep (the global regular expression parser) and sed (the stream editor).
I know, even the definition is somewhat intimidating, but the power of regex is worth the pain I promise - let’s look at an example, take a look at the following list of fish (assuming that the number was a quantity).
I recently just finished a project that included a day-by-day itinerary, and an hour-by-hour speakers schedule, I really wanted to highlight the current days events, and emphasis the current speakers bio - not a daunting task by any means - but always looking to skin the cat differently, I used a single line of php, and a two generated css selectors.
here’s an item from the event list
<ol id="3070812">
<li>Effective Sales via email</li>
<li>Time: 12pm</li>
<li>Date: March 7th, 2008</li>
<li>Location: Green Room Loungue</li>
</ol>
Read More »
I like Math, I like Broccoli and I like Cauliflower - I think the odds are high that I’d like Romanesco broccoli aka fractal broccoli, although I do realize that the mathematical appearance has little to do with it’s taste.
I read about Definr yesterday on DownloadSquad.com, Definr is a web 2.0 online dictionary - it’s fast, it’s minimal, it has autocomplete — and it works - took me about 30 seconds to determine that I can get a definition equally as fast from definr, as I can from the mac dictionary (since I almost always have a browser open anyway) - but to cut my search time down even further I showed it some launchbar love - just add the search template
'http://www.definr.com/*'
and your done.
I’d love to see an API for definr - it seems to have excellent speed, and I do love API’s.
In order to give other online dictionaries equal time, don’t miss the Urban Dictionary, a handy (and hilarious) community driven dictionary - that features slang to english - perfect for translating that top 40 rap track (note: The Urban Dictionary is generally not safe for work).
It’s launchbar search template would be:
http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=*
Brand new OS’s are cool, Leopard is pretty neat, Vista blows, but has unrealized potential, the GUI seems to get all the media focus, but functionality is really the key, I propose a simple functionality addition that IMHO will greatly improve users life, workflow, computer experience.
User while working in Microsoft Word clicks SAVE, dialog comes up, preferred location is chosen, filename complete with extension is typed in, the OS/Software should be aware of four things;
I can hear purists whining now, but I’m not asking for a change, I’m asking for an addition, one I feel is long overdue. Image how simple this would make media creation apps - like Photoshop/After effects/Illustrator/any damn media creation software that supports 1000’s of formats.
Now just to get Bill & Steve together for a conference call.
