Free Candy For Everyone

Herein lies the final chapter of my Comcast woes, or at least I hope so! I had another service appointment last week to deal with my inconsistent connection. This time they sent an actual Comcast employee as opposed to a contractor. It was immediately clear that this guy knew way more than the contractors I’d seen before - he had at least twice as many doodads hooked onto his belt.

He took some real time to run diagnostics and try everything out inside. And when that didn’t yield results he went outside and spent 15 minutes there looking at stuff. When he came back in, he shared the news that the wire running from the pole to the building was at least 20 years old and not meant to carry all the services they were running over it. Finally! Someone who admitted there was a real problem! He told me they needed to send out a truck with a bucket to replace the wire but I’d have service by Monday. I thanked him profusely for actually trying to be helpful and he topped it all off by giving me his supervisor’s actual direct phone number!

By the time I got home the next evening, the wire was replaced and I’ve had internet service ever since! I’m still not a fan of Comcast. They treat their customers shoddily and have a terrible customer service system. But individuals, some individuals are good people who do care and see how frustrating the whole system is. So thanks, Jaime the Comcast guy. I have no faith in your employer, but at least I still have some faith in people.

My small love of Apple has ended. It’s a little thing, but I feel like a chump. I fell for their “Free Engraving!” scam. I bought an iPod nano a few weeks ago. I had been waiting and waiting because I knew Apple was overdue for an announcement, but I figured, “Hey, it’s not like they’re gonna announce tomorrow and I can’t wait forever.”

So I ordered a 4 GB nano. And ooh, engraving was free! So I got it engraved. Hey, why not? I’ll tell you why not! You can’t return it if it’s been engraved. Well, they announced the new iPods yesterday. And now I’m just stuck with my 4 GB iPod even though an 8GB one costs what I paid for mine!

I shouldn’t be as frustrated as I am. They have a 14 day return policy and I got my iPod … 18 days ago. Ha! So that wouldn’t have helped. But the fact that I had it engraved makes it worse. Somehow. Anyway. Do not accept that “free” custom engraving, because then you have less options and cannot return it. It’s just a chump ploy to screw chumpy-chumps like you and me. Don’t do it!

Reason number two why I’m a chump? Because I still haven’t given up on Comcast. They came out this weekend and “fixed” my problem. I had internet! For all of … an afternoon! But then it got intermittent again. And now it’s worse. I usually manage to get some connectivity in the late evening, but now I’m without internet at all (except for my friendly neighborhood wireless, of course). Sad. Very sad.

http://www.zatznotfunny.com/2006-09/tivo-series3-reference/

It’s here, it’s here!

The other night I had internet access, but there was no WoW to be played. My server was down for a hardware upgrade. So I watched some TV and read a bit. But I wanted to game! I booted up my Xbox 360 and decided to download Uno from Xbox Marketplace. One of my co-workers has been talking about how great it is, and since it only cost $5 I thought, “Why not?”

I ended up playing for over an hour. It’s a simple little game, but the implementation is clean, you can choose from many popular different variants of the rules, and it’s quick.

Up until recently, I had a long-in-the-tooth receiver that used a custom RF controller. What all that means is that I couldn’t get another remote to control it because it had a proprietary RF format. So I’ve never had a universal remote. I just got used to switching between the many inputs on my tv and receiver, swapping out between the giant pile of remotes that lived on my couch.

As part of my move, I got rid of the old receiver. My aunt and uncle very generously got my the receiver I’d been dreaming about, Denon’s AVR-2807. It’s been really lovely. And I could finally get myself a nifty universal remote!

I’d been wanting to get Logitech’s Harmony 880 - it’s got a wishbone shape like the TiVo controller I love so much, and it’s programmable. I’d read some decent reviews and Amazon had it at the right price. I ordered it last week and have been enjoying it ever since.

Just the ability to do everything I need with only one remote is such a novely for me. It’s been great. So, I don’t have much to compare it to. But it was super easy to program. You hook it up to your computer and go to a website. Enter in all your components and then organize by activity like “Watch TiVo”, “Watch DVD”, “Play Xbox”. It took just about no time at all and I’ve been enjoying it ever since.