This music video was making the rounds at my office last week. The music is OK (nothing spectacular), but there is nothing like seeing Christopher Walken dancing around a hotel lobby to make your day.
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As I was walking through Home Depot this morning, I heard the familiar chirping of birds coming from overhead. It is very common for a bird to get trapped inside of Home Depot, especially when the weather is nice and they leave the doors open. But this more than just the chirping of a single bird. It sounded like an entire family of birds had moved in. Looking down on the floor I could see why. I was in the bird food section and (as usual for Home Depot) some of the bags of bird food had been broken open either by careless workers or consumers. If you were a bird, what more could you want? You’ve got a roof over your head and plenty of food.
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It’s about time that the Daily Pennsylvania (Penn’s Student Newspaper) has an RSS Feed feed. I looked into it over a year ago and actually went to the effort to write my own script to generate an RSS feed from their HTML. Of course my script broke as soon as they changed their layout and I gave up trying to keep it up to date.
So check it out, subscribe to it, keep up to date on Penn Happenings (of course they wait until after Football and Basketball season, but at least it will be around for next year).
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It’s getting close to April 29 and the long anticipated release of the Hitchhikers Guide movie. So I’ve been checking Fandango and MovieFone to see when tickets were going to come out. So far, no tickets are available yet. I’m hopeful that they will be available tomorrow (by my calculations they should be). But I did notice that my local theater is have a 12:01 am showing of Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith and those tickets (along with the entire opening weekend) are already available. Talk about anticipating some hype…
In further Star Wars news, check out this picture of the new Pope as the emperor from Star Wars…
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Why do people get so excited when The Wave starts at a ball game? If you are paying attention to The Wave it means you aren’t paying attention to the game.
Case in point. Margaret and I were in Pittsburgh this weekend to see the Cubs. It is Saturday night and they are playing to an almost sold out crowd. It is 2-2 in the top of the 6th, the Cubs have a runner on second and a chance to take the lead. And The Wave starts.
Now I know that baseball isn’t a very fast moving game. It has been compared to watching paint dry. But there are plenty of boring parts during the game in which you can do The Wave. But not during what may be the most exciting part of the game…. Sigh….
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Well, my internet connectivity is back, and the blog is back to being hosted from my house again. After quite a long time…
So after I made my last blog post, I sent it off (with some touchups) to the Montgomery County Cable Office. Unlike other utilities, Cable Franchises are given our on the municipality level, so we have a local Cable Office. Within 3 hours of contact their office electronically, I got a call back. They were kind enough to inform me that my complaint would be logged and forwarded on to Comcast. They also informed me of the rebate policy for days without service. At least here, it is not a true pro-rated refund, but better. They get 24 hours to fix it, and then it is 10% of your montly bill per day that you are without service. I wish I had known that when Comcast screwed my service before…
But all was not good. They were scheduled to come out and fix my cable on Tuesday night between 5 and 8. I told the Customer Service Person that I would most likely not be home at that time, and she indicated that is not a problem. The tech will check the outside stuff and I would only need to be there if there was a problem inside the house. Since I was positive that it was a problem in their plant, I was happy with the response.
Arrived at home on Tuesday evening to find out that the Tech hadn’t shown up because they called before coming and no one was home. Time to make yet another phone call to Comcast (I had the number memorized by this point…). After some screwing around with first level support, I got my call elevated to a Supervisor. This person (Cliff) was the first of the 3 people that I had talked to about my problem that actually listened to what I had to say, took action to make the customer (me) happy, and got things done. It was the happiest experience I’ve had dealing with Comcast. Cliff was able to set me up with an 8-11 appointment the next day, and also give me a $20 service credit for the tech not showing up. He explained to me that someone does have to be home, and the Rep I spoke to on Monday night was wrong.
Moving forward to Wednesday morning, the tech arrived a 8:08 AM, as Margaret and I were about to head out to work (running a little late that morning…). Since I saw his truck pull up, we decided to just wait until the work was done.
At about 8:38 AM, our cable service was restored. It was a problem with their plant. The tech didn’t even need to come into the house. Once everything came back on, we went to go out to work. At this point the tech was coming around to have us sign verifing that the problem was fixed, which we happily did.
In closing, we’re back. At least until someone else in my neighborhood gets cable installed…
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At work yesterday I found out that my website was down. It happens every once in a while, usually just need to re-boot the cable modem. When I get home I do that. It doesn’t come back. I turn on the TV. Nothing but static. I’m in the middle of a cable outage!
So I do what I normally do in this situation, call Comcast. The front-line support guy I spoke to was most unhelpful. He said the first appointment they have is on Wednesday (2 days!). I then complain that I have to wait 2 days to fix something they messed up, at which point he stressed to me that it has to be something wrong in the house. I told him that this level of service is unacceptable when I am having a cable outage. The work “outage” must have a special meaning in the cable industry, because he vehemently denied that I was having an “outage” and that it was just something wrong inside my house. At this point, I asked to speak to his manager. After a 10 minute wait, he said the manager would call me back.
2.5 hours later, no callback. So I call in again. But I had more ammo with me this time. I knew that somebody nearby was getting cable today, because Miss Utility came around and marked where all the underground pipes and stuff were. So when I took the dog out, I looked for the tell-tale thin ditch that they leave when they pull the line out to the house, and sure enough it was there.
I thought I had them this time, since I knew somebody had been out to my block today. I mentioned that to the second person I spoke with and the fact that it had worked before this person had been out in my neighborhood, but not after. No dice, still nothing until Wednesday. I was tired and quite a bit frustrated, so I just took the appointment and hung up in disgust.
In the mean time, I’ve moved my site to a new home until my cable is hooked up again (optimistically Wednesday, realistically next week…). With this current arraignment, there are a few things that are broken (like RSS syndication…), so please hand tight until this all gets straightened out. Now, back to my rant.
I don’t understand how a utility can treat people like this and not get into any trouble. One of two things happened yesterday in my neighborhood. 1. The new installer didn’t have any more taps available in the pedestal and randomly chose someone to disconnect. 2. They cut the line to my house while installing the new cable line.
No other utility has problems like this. In my 20-some years of using a telephone, I can’t think of a time that I picked up that receiver and didn’t hear a dial tone. Or when I turned on the gas range and didn’t get gas. And they have to do the same number of connects/disconnects that the cable company does. They must just hire better trained workers.
There are some things that cable companies don’t get. Since they have only had to deal with non-essential video service, they don’t rush out to fix problems. “So you can’t watch TV for a day or two, read a book instead, it is probably better for you”. And that may have worked in the past. But they are the number one provider of broadband internet access into the home. That service is much more like the other utility services that I described. I can go without TV, but I need internet. I sell things on ebay and need to be able to e-mail. Both my wife and I do work from home where we need internet access to do the work.
And to think that the cable operators want to sell you phone service! If I had Comcast phone service yesterday, due to their stupidity, I wouldn’t have even been able to call them to tell them about it! I think the FCC and local cable offices need to crack down on the cable operators. They need to stop treating Data service like video service, because it is not. And I certainly hope they don’t start treating Voice service like Video, or else I may be unable to make a call the next time my neighbor gets new service.
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I made some delicious Guacamole to go with dinner tonight and wanted to share the recipe with all of you.
Cut up the avocados. Remove the skin and the pit. Place them into a bowl. Now comes the fun part: Mash them up. I used a potato masher, but a fork would work just as well. I like my guacamole pretty chunky, so I only mashed them a little. Cut up the tomato and onion and place them into the bowl. Make sure the onion chunks aren’t too big, nobody wants a big piece of onion on their chip! Add a dash of pepper and a few dashes of salt. If you like, add the lime juice. If you don’t have it or don’t like it, don’t add it. It is really there more to act as a preservative then to really lend that much flavor to it. Stir it all up and serve it with a bowl of tortilla chips!
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Their new sports drink: Google Gulp.
An addition to their mapping service that shows you the location of cabs in your area: Ride Finder.
I also heard that Gmail is updating their storage amounts to infinity + 1. Now you will never have to delete mail…
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