perldiver

...tastes like really tender beef.

That is all.

On Feb 25, Comcast lost points with me.
Later that day, they got most of them back.
Today, they have again lost all the goodwill points they started with, all the ones they earned back, and a whole lot more besides.

( Read more... )
So, here's my final question: Comcast,  if you've been hearing these complaints from multiple people, why aren't they fixed? All of this grief could have been averted by giving the initial installer a short checklist to run down. Had he asked me:  "do you also have phone service with us? Yes? Ok, let me set that up...ok, do you want call forwarding? Yes? Ok, let me set that up. [etc]", then none of this would have happened. 10-15 minutes of his time a week or so ago would have saved 1-2 hours of your customer support peoples' time since then. Multiply that out by lots of customers and it means you need fewer customer reps, fewer phone lines into the call center, etc.


Final wrap up: call forwarding finally ended up activated, so the buzzer is working. It's been such a negative experience, however, that I am seriously considering canceling the Comcast phone service and getting a TossableDigits number--it would also be significantly cheaper ($7/month as opposed to (IIRC) about $20), and the overall experience would be enormously better.  I'll wait until at least tomorrow though, after UPS delivers today.

Yesterday, I was grumbling about some communication problems with Comcast.  Imagine my surprise this morning to get a response from Mark Casem, National Customer Operations guy from Comcast. 

Simply by responding, Mark defused a lot of my irritation.  Yay for using the power of the Internet for good.

Furthermore, in my grumblings I had mentioned my discovery of WebPass, another ISP in SFran which offers 45Mbps up&down for $45/month--about 4x faster on the upload side and about 12x faster on the download than the cable modem service I have from Comcast, all for about the same price.  The way WebPass can do this is that they run their entire network on Ethernet, meaning they only support buildings that have cable drops into the units (which does not include mine)  Mark offered to find a package or promotion that would match WebPass.

Personally, I don't think this is physically possible; I suspect that Mark is a very nice guy who works in customer relations, not in tech.  I asked him about it anyway because I would LOVE to have a pipe that wide.  Even if it turns out to not be possible, let's see what comes back.

Below is the full text of the email I sent Mark.  Gotta give him props--just by sending one email, he earned a lot of goodwill back for Comcast.


( The letter I sent )

Grumble, grumble, whinge, moan, complain.

Nothing to see here, move along.
( Read more... )

I've been using a SmartBoard USB5000 ergonomic keyboard for about 7 years now...the same keyboard.  It is the best keyboard I've ever used; it is the magic "no more hand / wrist pain" bullet.  Needing to function without it for a long period is a non-starter; I actually carried in with me to San Fran in my luggage, because I wasn't willing to wait to have it shipped out later.

Problem:  it's starting to shed keycaps and sooner or later it's going to be non-func. 

Bigger problem:  DataDesk itself is...shaky.  Their online store is offline and has been for ages.  Their phone number gets answered by another company and then you hit an extension to get to DataDesk, which doesn't generally answer.  I've been trying to locate a vendor somewhere and I'm coming up empty.  Anyone got any pointers to companies that source hard-to-find electronics?

"At seven hundred freaking degrees, fluorine starts to dissociate into monoatomic radicals, thereby losing its gentle and forgiving nature."

From here--worth the read. (For non-chemists:  even at room temperature, elemental fluorine is the most pathologically reactive chemical in existence.  It requires special lab gear because it will bond to virtually anything, meaning it will strip the insides off glassware / stoppers / etc.)


Update:  Out of curiosity, was reading the comments on that blog (also worth reading!) and did some googling / link following as a result.  Found this chemistry book: 409 pages, costs $4,880!  (No, that is not a typo:  ~$12 per page!)  I knew that textbooks were expensive, but good lord!

Sunday evening someone unlocked my front door and walked in.

It was a young lady...late 20s, early 30s.  Dark hair, big sunglasses of the "hide my wildly dilated pupils" type, reasonably well dressed and attractive (albeit in a mildly skanky bar-scene way) if it weren't for the fact that she stank like a distillery and was clearly three sheets to the wind.

We had a bit of discussion about what she was doing in my apartment ("Oh...I guess...I'm in the the wrong apartment...."), why she had a key (no answer, blank hostile stare), what her name was (no answer, blank hostile stare), and then I put her out the door.  She went next door and started knocking.  After about 20 minutes of this, I went out to see what was going on.  She was still out there, still trying to unlock the door with a key that clearly didn't fit the lock, banging on the door, and calling out for "Adam" and "Kat".

Now, the guy who lives next door is named Mr. Singh.  He's 50ish, Indian-complected, works at an Indian restaurant, and wears a turban--so I'd give high odds that his first name is not "Adam" and he's not a friend of this drunk twit.  I talk to the twit a bit more, still get blank hostile stares when I ask for her name until I used the magic word ("police") at which point she shows me her license.  Michele Ochoa (Ochda?  Couldn't quite read it), you really should drink less--you don't have the judgement to know when to stop.  We talk a bit more, she comes up with a series of lame excuses ("I just want to get some water", "I'm just going to go inside and go to sleep") and then incants the spell of Slay Sympathy:  "I just want to get high and have a good time."

At about this point, she realizes that this conversation is not going well and I'm not inclined to let her stick around, at which point she tries to be more friendly, introducing herself and even trying to drape herself on me (ewww).  I told her she needed to leave.  She refused, I used the magic word again, she left.

After the fact, I found myself wondering if it was entirely ethical to let an intoxicated woman walk off like that.  Then I decided that I wasn't going to worry about it because (a) she made her bed and she can lie in it and (b) it had been about 30 mins since she stumbled into my apartment and she was clearly more sober than she had been.  Besides, this isn't exactly a bad neighborhood.

I can only chalk this one up to "Welcome to San Francisco, here's your bowl of nuts and flakes."

Anyway, I had my locks changed the next day.  Which leaves just one question:  what the hell was this woman doing with keys to my apartment?



In more positive news, I discovered this morning that cheddar cheese + spinach + blackberry jelly makes a delicious sweet-n-savory omlette.

Me:  Since moving to California, I have learned:  The warm is a LIE!!!!

Her:  Dave...even though you are living in San Francisco, land of gay unicorns and rainbows....IT'S STILL **WINTER**!


*snerk*

I've been pounding my head on an issue with a template for a goodly while now.  Couldn't figure out why the tabs were not appearing properly.  I was checking everything...was it the wrapper, the logic, a mis-setting, a mis-structuring of the data representation?

Nope.  I wrote "c.conf" instead of "c.config".  Repeatedly failed to notice it because I was looking for The Big Mistake.  Argh.

Anyway, it's working now and I'm very pleased.

Folks,

I have just discovered that I have leaked some of your real names and / or email addresses and linked them to your LJ names due to a misbehaving Firefox addon. I am very, very embarrassed about this, and apologize profusely. I've done what I can to eliminate the damage and it appears to have been minimal.

The problem was with the Firefox addon LJWho.  DO NOT use this addon in the future or you'll be writing your own similarly-embarrassed letter to friends!  The short answer is that some of your names and/or emails were displayed as "title" attributes in links in my posts.  I've removed them, removed LJWho, and the issue won't recur.

( What happened, what I've done, and more )