Author Archives: brad

Comcast? Never showed up today.

Comcast? Never showed up today. “We’ll be there between 11:00 and 1:00.” Never showed up. But here’s the funny part: I never dropped the connection today, so I really didn’t need them today. Weird. I wonder if there was something wrong on their end which they fixed, and then didn’t need to send anyone out to my place for. Still, a phone call or something would have been nice.

Mammoth PostgreSQL. Sweet. Solaris, Red

Mammoth PostgreSQL. Sweet. Solaris, Red Hat Linux, and Mac OS X. Nice.

Comcast will be here tomorrow to check why I seem to lose synch every day. Hopefully it’s something easy and fixable. If it’s going to be a daily occurence, I may as well go back to dial-up [shudder]. But I must say that every tech support person I’ve dealt with at Comcast has been very friendly and as helpful as possible.

The Google API. Interesting. I love Google as a search engine. Now it can be embedded in other applications. That’s pretty cool.

Jen is feeling better. She spent some time sitting outside and reading today. I’ll be staying home with her again tomorrow since her recovery is still going pretty slowly. But I guess that’s to be expected after 5 1/2 hours of surgery. The doctor had predicted two to four hours, but apparently the work that needed to be done was pretty extensive. More on that later, though.

Well, the surgery is over.

Well, the surgery is over. Jen is home recovering. She’s pretty tired and very sore, but I suppose that’s to be expected after 5 1/2 hours of surgery. The doctor said that hers was the second worst case of uterine scarring that he had ever seen.

The good news is that this should take care of her pain.

The other news is that we’re pretty much done having children. That’s out of our hands now.

By the way, I’m posting this over my cable modem. It’s very, very fast. I got 140k/sec last night.

It’s the Bill and Steve

It’s the Bill and Steve show.

This guy is an absolute hoser.

So far, Comcast gets a thumbs up. Everything is working great. I had a brief outage this morning, but I called tech support and immediately talked to an intelligent and friendly rep who listened to what I had tried and gave me a case number within a few minutes. He said I did everything right, and he passed me up to the higher level tech support. The higher level tech told me that would push the synch out to me again (although I don’t honestly know what that means) and that it would working again within an hour. She also said to leave the power to the modem unplugged in the meantime. One hour later, I was back online. Nice.

When Elephants Dance. Interesting article.

When Elephants Dance. Interesting article.

eSchoolNews Report: Some web filters might reflect bias. Unbelievable. I can’t believe how many people seem to have enough free time to research this kind of stuff. Here’s the point of the report: because many companies that provide Internet filtering to schools also provide Internet filtering to conservative Christian groups, the filtering companies are obviously showing bias toward Christian and conservative things. Nice use of logic, there. I should point out that eSchoolNews is not making those claims, but a report, entitled “Filtering Software: The Religious Connection” and written by Nancy Willard does. eSchoolNews is just reporting on the report, so to speak.

The massive network problems at work seem to be over, as evidenced by the fact that I can post this over my lunch break, when traffic has usually been at its heaviest over the last few weeks.

By Monday, April 8, I

By Monday, April 8, I should part of the Comcast network. Finally. After four years of waiting, calling, listening to excuses and evasive answers, and more waiting, my cable modem is actually in the mail.

And this isn’t an April Fool’s Joke, either!

But, it wasn’t without its wrinkles. When I called Comcast, the very friendly rep (their reps have always been friendly, even when contradicting each other) told me there were three ways to get online: wait for a self-install kit, wait for a technician to come out and hook me up, or go to Circuit City and buy the kit and modem, in which case I could be up and running today. Hey, I’ve been waiting four years already, so I went out to Circuit City.

The nice fellow at Circuit City took my info and then told me that I wasn’t able to sign up for service because it wasn’t available for me (despite my having been told just the opposite by Comcast thirty minutes earlier). Then, he offered to sell me the cable modem anyway, but said he couldn’t sell me the self-install kit. I just looked at him. I said, “Well, this won’t do me any good without the install kit, now will it?”

“Well, no,” he said. I placed both items back on the shelf and left. It’s one thing to tell me I can’t get the service when I can, but then to try to sell me a $100 cable modem that would be useless to me without the service . . . unbelievable.

So, anyway, another call to Comcast and I’m waiting for my self-install kit to arrive via UPS. They said it will arrive by Monday.