tony - weblog

So a very nice and knowledgeable Comcast tech came out and mostly fixed things.  Apparently a splitter in the apartments cable box died.  The connection speeds are still kind of jumpy, and bog down during peak hours (not too badly though), and he said that they would be monitoring things and try to shift the load on the routers around to better balance things if necessary.  Aparently they are in the process of adding more capacity as well.

Obviously many people dislike Comcast as they made it to the finals in The Consumerist’s worst companies competition. I want to explain my personal dislike for the company. My cable and Internet provider use to be through this great company called Insight. My downstream was 10 megabits like clockwork. Pretty darn constant whether it was peak or off peak hours. The HD channels, although a little limited were clear as a bell. Enter Comcast. When they took over Insight in the region, first thing I noticed almost the day my IP changed from Insight’s service to Comcast’s is almost always significantly slower at all times but the wee hours. I just did a speed test and got 6 Megabits, about half what was promised. Several HD channels also appear over-compressed and pixelated. Ok I can deal with that I guess. Then this month they cancel my incentive to purchase Internet and cable together. They want me to get a phone service I have no use for to get a bundled discount. To my knowledge new Comcast customers can still get a discount for getting Internet and cable together. I guess retaining their existing user base is not important. FiOS is comming (rhetorically), Comcast. Better rethink your position. Without any incentive to bundle services, I will not have any reason to stay with Comcast with comparable choices available. I really don’t want to ditch cable if I don’t have to. I just wish it worked considering how expensive it is.

With the various router upgrades, and reconfiguring of the server, reliability of Halcyon should be on par, in respect to uptime and basic speed  with any other server in the network.  Halcyon is currently running Ubuntu Server 8.04, and the router is now running DD-WRT.  I’ll be interesed in seeing if wordpress puts any meaningful amount of a load increase on the server.

DBS was looking a little dated, and code wise was pretty 90’s.  So welcome to the new blog.

DBS was sort of that busted up Camero that you were going to make in to a wicked awesome ride, but you’re too lazy to put in the effort to make it bitchin’.  Instead, it just sits in your drivway, crappy and broken, making you look goofy.  Its time to put it out to pasture for now.