Archive for the 'Rants' Category

These guys are incredibly incompetent at maintaining their network.  It spent most of the day offline today, then came back on at around 6:30 PM, only go go off again at 8:30 for about an hour and a half.

My connection watcher needs tweaking still — it senses the occasional dropped packet and treats it the same as a real outage.  I need to change it to only consider it an outage if the drop rate spikes, even if not every packet is dropped.

Tomorrow I’ll go somewhere that has more reliable Internet access to work, and let Sarah fight with Charter over this thing.  Probably my mother in law’s house again.

This has now been going on for three weeks.

As a dad, one thing that really bugs me is how mom-centric the world tends to be. Now, don’t get me wrong, moms rock, and they do so much!

But picking up a magazine on parenting that has the slogan “The best resource for moms” or rubbing lotion into your baby’s tushie from a tube labeled “Favorite of mothers everywhere” is kind of like saying, “Dad, you don’t count at all.”

In this day and age when dads are trying hard to be more involved and are spending more and more time with their kids, isn’t it time for that kind of stereotype of mom being the one to take care of the kids to go away?

I don’t spend as much time with my daughter as my wife does, but I’m the one that gets her out of bed in the morning, changes her, fixes and feeds her breakfast, and so forth. I change her clothes fairly often, change her diapers, brush her teeth and gums, and sometimes I’m the one to put her into her pajamas, read her a couple of books, and put her to bed.

It’s frustrating to feel like a second-class citizen in the world of parenting. Parents magazine has a whopping one page in most issues that’s devoted to dad issues. And those are usually about how to get your tired wife to get it on with you. What’s up with that?

I certainly don’t want to take away from all the hard work moms do; I know Sarah does the majority of the work of taking care of Sophie. I just feel like the world needs to grow up a little and realize that dads are trying hard to pitch in too.

My cable service has been out on and off for the last three days. I just called them this morning after waiting around because of a notice on their phone system about outages in my area, and discovered that my cable modem’s logs are full of critical errors that appear to indicate that the modem itself has croaked.

This is particularly interesting since this is the third modem that I’ve had here that’s died in only three years or so. I wonder if the signal strength problems have been hurting the modem in some way. They say they’ll get one someone out here to fix it “as soon as we can,” which could be later today, or could be Monday.

The word “frustrating” doesn’t begin to cover it. At any rate, these problems and the resulting need to resort to dialup are slowing my work down a great deal. I still hope to get the localization article and sample posted soon, although I doubt it will be sooner than Monday at this point.

This is a new word I’ve invented. Here’s the definition:

connegativity (n.) A state of unreliable Internet connectivity.

My cable modem has been going on and offline every few minutes all day, and for some reason, my Treo is refusing to keep a connection for even that long for some reason.

The symptoms really make me suspect that this is once again related to Charter’s ongoing and very distruptive upgrading of their network to support cable telephony. But I’m going to give them a call here in a minute to confirm it.

Anyway, I’m trying to work on redoing the stock watcher samples to be more consistent with the later versions, by making them use objects. Of course, it’s tricky to test the code when your cable modem is alternately up and down.

Once I get that retwiddling done, I can finish up my localization sample, which is mostly finished, except it needs to incorporate a few improvements I came up with while reworking the previous samples.

A guy from Charter called this morning to let me know they were on their way. “Great,” I think to myself, “they’re coming to finish repairing all the problems with our wiring.”

When they showed up, I opened the door, and there’s a guy with a DVR. He’s been told to install it. He was quite confused when I said that was done yesterday and that we were waiting for someone to finish other repairs.

Him and his partner putzed around the house for over an hour before my wife got fed up with them being completely clueless and threw them out. They were clearly in way over their heads.

The guy that was here yesterday called about half an hour ago and says he’s still coming today, although it might be late. Apparently all Charter’s techs have been called out to do a repair on a fiber conduit that some yahoo shot. With a gun.

Life in the South. Gotta love it.

Cable guys left after a couple of hours. They’ve grounded our cable line now, but there’s still a resistance problem on the line, which is causing cable modem dropouts and serious problems with our digital channels.

That also means that our brand new Charter DVR can’t sync up to grab channel and program guides, so I’m steering the TV blind.

Anyway, the cable guys are coming back tomorrow to finish the job — they need to find and fix the resistance problem, then possibly install an amplifier. There’s so much cable draped around our house due to its layout and where all the boxes and whatnot are, that there may be some serious signal loss.

They seem pretty confident that they’ll be able to get everything fixed tomorrow. I’m not holding my breath; I’ve had pretty much nothing but trouble with Charter. For example, about two years ago, I called them to get a billing adjustment because we had been getting the wrong cable modem speed for the amount we were paying. Derek, the support goon of the day, told me that it was obvious I was using multiple computers on the line, that nobody has more than one computer in their home, and therefore I was running a business on the cable modem connection, and he started spewing quite a number of threats about cutting me off or charging me hundreds of dollars.

Man, that really got me angry. I explained that I was paying for a DSL line at another location to run my servers off of, paying $175/mo for them, because I didn’t want to violate the terms of use of my home connection, and that he could basically stuff it. In the end, I had to fax them a copy of my latest invoice for that service. Never heard from Derek again. But my friends and I still wonder, any time any of us have any kind of problem with customer service, if Derek’s on the job.

Also discovered today that ReplayTV doesn’t support the serial connection to our cable box — I’d hoped to sling the Replay to another TV with that instead of having to use the IR blaster, which only marginally works. So I guess if we’re going to use the old ReplayTV still, it’s back to infrared. OTOH, this makes me more inclined to sell off the ReplayTV box. Assuming of course that the Charter DVR works out.

Twiddled the old ReplayTV so I could record Lost tonight. My wife’s out for a while tonight, so we’ll watch it when she gets home. Can’t wait to see what happens next!