My neighbor told me that AT&T[1] had been working on their line at
about the same time as mine went dead, and I reported that to my
telephone company. They told me that because of the Xmas rush they
couldn't get to it until the 28th. When she later told me that her
husband said that it *was* verizon that messed with the lines, I
called my carrier, informed them of the fact and told them that under
the circumstances the 28th was unacceptable; at that point they
escalated the issue with verizon.
When verizon finally shows up, they knock at my door and disappear
before I have time to respond, leaving their truck. Silly me, I think
that they are going to repair the problem. I pick up my telephone and
there is a dial tone[2]. It doesn't last. I go downstairs and the
truck is gone.
I call my carrier again; verizon tells[3] them that they will be there
by 6:00 PM. They aren't, of course, so I call my carrier again and
request a further escalation.
Finally, on Thursday, someone shows up. He says that there is a signal
on the outside box and asks to see the inside box. He says that the
signal is on the wrong wire. After some further tests he goes to the
outside box and discovers a broken wire.
I know that there are issues with c*x. But I can promise you that if I
get broadband it will not involve Hell Atlantic. May all of their
servers be compromised and used to spam porn to the local police. May
they be simultaneously raided by DEA and BATF. May their entire
boardroom be listed in the files of the local bawdy house and
publicized in the wake of a police raid. May thier children disown
tham and their wives cheat with syphilitic camels. May they wake up in
bed with R*d*n* G*rst.
[1] was surprised, since AT&T does not own the local loop.
[2] Despair is so much more devasting when you first raise
false hopes.
[3] Thir lips are moving
--
Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz <http://patriot.net/~shmuel> ISO position
Reply to domain Patriot dot net user shmuel+bspfh to contact me.
We don't care. We don't have to care, we're Congress.
(S877: The Shut up and Eat Your spam act of 2003)
I had a somewhat similar experience with Bell South, the local branch of
AT&T, about 15 years ago. I was starting to notice more noise on my
landline, and then it started going dead every time there was a rain or a
morning with heavy dew. However, within a couple of hours after the sun
came out, the phone line would go back to working. I reported this to
Bell South one morning, and came home that evening to find that the phone
was working, and I had a computer-generated message on my answering
machine, saying "Your phone line has been remotely tested and is in
correct working order."
Next morning, the line was dead again. I called Bell South again, and
came home that evening to find the phone working. However, the following
morning, the phone was, once again, not working. I called Bell South
once more, and was told (by a human) that a technician had checked my
phone junction box the previous day and not found any problems. When I
told the operator that my phone was nevertheless not working, she said,
"Well, we will have a technician there during the hour." I called my
boss and explained why I would be late in arriving at work that day, and
then waited for the technician to arrive.
When the technician arrived, he removed the cover from the junction box
and found that the connectors inside were so corroded, it was a wonder
that the box worked even under low-humidity conditions. He said that the
box was the type used in the late 1950s, when my house had been built.
Apparently, the technician on the previous day had not bothered removing
the box cover to check the junction box, if he had even bothered to come
by the house. The new technician replaced the junction box, and my phone
has worked since then, without any problems. I called the phone company,
and told the maintenance supervisor about the situation, and about the
first technician's having apparently not checked the junction box. I
never heard anything further from the phone company, so I don't know what
repercussions there were for the first technician.
--
John F. Eldredge -- jo...@jfeldredge.com
"Reserve your right to think, for even to think wrongly
is better than not to think at all." -- Hypatia of Alexandria
> May they wake up in
> bed with R*d*n* G*rst.
May the TSA put their entire manglement on the Strip Search At Every Stop
list.
--
Joe Zeff -- The Guy With The Sideburns:
http://www.zeff.us http://www.lasfs.info
It was long ago, and far away; and besides, the wench is Fred.
> When the technician arrived, he removed the cover from the junction box
> and found that the connectors inside were so corroded, it was a wonder
> that the box worked even under low-humidity conditions. He said that the
> box was the type used in the late 1950s, when my house had been built.
> Apparently, the technician on the previous day had not bothered removing
> the box cover to check the junction box, if he had even bothered to come
> by the house. The new technician replaced the junction box, and my phone
> has worked since then, without any problems. I called the phone company,
> and told the maintenance supervisor about the situation, and about the
> first technician's having apparently not checked the junction box. I
> never heard anything further from the phone company, so I don't know what
> repercussions there were for the first technician.
Sometimes, they DO get it right.
When I moved into an apartment at Randolph, Massachusetts in 1989, there
was a strike going on at NYNEX. But I wanted my two lines for
phone/modem! They sent out a manager and an accountant who was learning
the technical side. They got it done. The accountant was really into
it, too. Gave him a chance to see bits of the business he'd not had the
chance to see previously.
Around 2002, I had DSL with Verizon in Westfield, Massachusetts. I
wanted faster service, but they tried and couldn't do it. After several
tries, they sent out a team of something like three or four people to
figure out what was happening. The problem had to do with the way my
apartment building had been wired for telephone, with a 24-unit building
having a single 25-pair cable wired sequentially around the building.
It had been built in the early 1960s at the latest, which explained it.
They had to give up, but damn it, they TRIED.
--
Don't bother with piddly crap like "gun control".
Life is 100% fatal. Ban it.
Most likely: promoted to management.
> May the TSA put their entire manglement on the Strip Search At Every Stop
> list.
I don't know if that's more of a curse for the TSA or the manglement.
But not enough of a curse for either.
--
Steve VanDevender "I ride the big iron" http://hexadecimal.uoregon.edu/
ste...@hexadecimal.uoregon.edu PGP keyprint 4AD7AF61F0B9DE87 522902969C0A7EE8
Little things break, circuitry burns / Time flies while my little world turns
Every day comes, every day goes / 100 years and nobody shows -- Happy Rhodes
May every gift anyone ever buys them be "delivered" by CityLink
--
Richard Gadsden ric...@gadsden.name
"I disagree with what you say but I will defend to
the death your right to say it" - Attributed to Voltaire
> May they wake up in bed with R*d*n* G*rst.
And I had almost purged the memory of having seen her image from my
mind.
--
Paul the Legacy Server
Full Recovery reached May 30, 2008
"People can be educated beyond their intelligence"
-- Marilyn vos Savant
>I had a somewhat similar experience with Bell South, the local branch
>of AT&T,
Actually, bull souse owns AT&T.
>so I don't know what
>repercussions there were for the first technician.
Promotion.
The first one was given a bonus for increasing productivty, and the second
one was sacked for revealing the problem to you?
--
David Taylor
>Sometimes, they DO get it right.
Without penalty?
> In <howard-E5FBA5....@d90-136-209-74.cust.tele2.de>, on
> 12/31/2010
> at 03:52 PM, Howard S Shubs <how...@shubs.net> said:
>
> >Sometimes, they DO get it right.
>
> Without penalty?
Well, they were dealing with a strike in the first case. <shrug>
>>> May they wake up in bed with R*d*n* G*rst.
>> And I had almost purged the memory of having seen her image from my
>> mind.
> The one thing I'm quite sure you CAN take with you is that image...
The awesome thing being, I have no idea at all what you're talking about.
<nelson>ha ha</nelson>
-s
--
Copyright 2010, all wrongs reversed. Peter Seebach / usenet...@seebs.net
http://www.seebs.net/log/ <-- lawsuits, religion, and funny pictures
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_Game_(Scientology) <-- get educated!
I am not speaking for my employer, although they do rent some of my opinions.
If your customer service inspires your customers to hate you enough
that you have to change the name of your company (nee GTE), this should
be some kind of hint.
> I know that there are issues with c*x.
So far, my approximately 1 year of C*mc*st service [0] has not gone as
well as my approximately 8 years of C*x service. In those eight years
with C*x, there were maybe two or three instances of unexplained
outages. There were more outages, but they had explanations, such as
1) the ice storm that also killed the power for a week and 2) one night
I couldn't sleep, was screwing around on the computer, 'net connection
quit, I took a walk and saw a C*x tech up on a ladder messing with
something, when I got back to the house all was fine.
I bought a V*rg*n USB wireless modem in late 2009 for a business trip.
I used it for less than an hour on that trip, but have used it for
several hours so far as a backup during C*mc*st failures. The initial
purchase cost was high and the airtime isn't that cheap; I partly
justify it on the basis that Mr. Branson gives a little of the money
to cool people like Mr. Rutan.
Matt Roberds
[0] If your customer service inspires your customers to visit your
premises with a hammer and start smashing things, this should be
some kind of hint.
... Especially if it results in a substantial improvement to the
quality of service.
The part of Verizon that Shmuel deals with is the old Chesapeake &
Potomac Telephone Co., not the Great Telephone Experiment.
-GAWollman
--
Garrett A. Wollman | What intellectual phenomenon can be older, or more oft
wol...@bimajority.org| repeated, than the story of a large research program
Opinions not shared by| that impaled itself upon a false central assumption
my employers. | accepted by all practitioners? - S.J. Gould, 1993
"Knowing where to smash with the hammer .............. $2000"
Dave "will do memetic adjustments for food" DeLaney
--
\/David DeLaney posting from d...@vic.com "It's not the pot that grows the flower
It's not the clock that slows the hour The definition's plain for anyone to see
Love is all it takes to make a family" - R&P. VISUALIZE HAPPYNET VRbeable<BLINK>
http://www.vic.com/~dbd/ - net.legends FAQ & Magic / I WUV you in all CAPS! --K.
>If your customer service inspires your customers to hate you enough
>that you have to change the name of your company (nee GTE), this
>should be some kind of hint.
It wasn't a simple name change, it was a pair of mergers. First C&P
became part of Hell Atlantic, then Hell Atlantic and GTE merged.
>So far, my approximately 1 year of C*mc*st service [0] has not gone
>as well as my approximately 8 years of C*x service.
Fortunately scamcast is not an option in Fairfax County, or at least
not in my section of it. I've got a friend who is enjoying their
service, and if he's ever had a good word for them I can't recall it.
Out here in Wild, Wonderful West Virginia (or at least our part of it)
the choice is between Comcast cable Internet, Frontier DSL, and Dish
satellite with dialup for the outbound. Comcast is pretty universally
agreed to be the least-worst option.
Frontier has especially failed to impress me, as when their broadband
was criticized recently they insisted they have fiber in "95% of the
county". This apparently means "we have a fiber ring and eventually,
maybe if we feel like it, 95% of the county will be inside a line drawn
on a service map." -- Joe
--
Joe Thompson -
E-mail addresses in headers are valid. | http://www.orion-com.com/
"...the FDA takes a dim view of exploding pharmaceuticals..." -- Derek Lowe
The US phone and data system amuses me. Here, most people use ADSL,
unless they're so far from civilsation that satellite is the only
option, and as long as you stay away from the 2 big providers and
bunch of shonky littler ones that nevertheless have a very large
advertising budget, you'll do fine.
The phone system was built thousands of years ago by a government
telco, which was then privatised when the profit margin became too
large. So now the essential but near obsolescent service
infrastructure is owned by a private company whose share price is
dropping surprisingly rapidly, to much detriment of those who invested
their life savings in said company when it was floated, and to much
laughter of those of us who always suspected it was a bad idea to put
all of one's eggs in the one rotting basket. The use of this
privatised infrastructure is rented out to the public by the same
privatised company who have farmed out most of the service to India,
but fortunately are required by law to wholesale to competant third
parties as well.
I recently saw an advertisement from them that started to make me
think that perhaps they had finally made their plans half decent, so I
investigated further. But once you actually look at the speeds
associated with those data limits, and look past the first 6 months
(no idea how they get that past the Competition Consumer Commission,
but the fine print shows the rest of the 18 month period is charged at
twice the rate shown in bold lettering in any given advertisement;
they are the most complained about company afterall) and see the full
quoted offer that you're stuck with for 24 months, you start to
wonder. I offered to change Mum's plan for her, but her husband
decided it was just too complicated. I'm currently typing on the end
of one of these connections at my grapefruit's house, and the
unexplained dropouts, "interesting" DNS behaviour and treatment of non
HTTP traffic is rather trying.
--
TimC
> Time is nature's way of making sure that everything doesn't happen at once.
And space is so that it doesn't all happen to you.
-- Matthew L. Martin and John D Salt in ARK
>In <ifrv0u$7te$2...@news.eternal-september.org>, on 01/03/2011
> at 07:48 AM, mrob...@att.net said:
>>So far, my approximately 1 year of C*mc*st service [0] has not gone
>>as well as my approximately 8 years of C*x service.
>Fortunately scamcast is not an option in Fairfax County, or at least
>not in my section of it. I've got a friend who is enjoying their
>service, and if he's ever had a good word for them I can't recall it.
Scamcast isn't an option in my neck of the woods.us, but they love to
randomly drop their DNS entries for my employer's b2b web servers for
multi-state sections of the country. Their name is in my checklist of
trouble-shooting questions when customers call our HelpMe! HelpMe! desk.
Kevin Goebel
> I've got a friend who is enjoying their service, and if he's ever had a
> good word for them I can't recall it.
I gather from what you say that he doesn't enjoy it very much.
--
Joe Zeff -- The Guy With The Sideburns:
http://www.zeff.us http://www.lasfs.info
*Sigh* It's almost as if they interpret the Bible as Microsoft does
RFCs.
They are actually doing some reasonably intelligent things, but you
wouldn't know it from dealing with their customer-disservice side.
They had a persistent problem with two (just two!) of their DNS
servers for most of December, and the only way we could get them to do
anything about it was by asking one of our faculty who happens to be
on a committee with one of their high muckity-mucks to try to drive
resolution from top of the pyramid down. All too often their phone
firewall doesn't even know what their own Web pages tell customers to
do.
Meanwhile, I am paying for a fairly expensive tier of their video
service which includes a bunch of expensive sports channels but
inexplicably doesn't include the dirt-cheap C-SPAN2 and C-SPAN3.
> Seebs <usenet...@seebs.net> wrote:
>>mrob...@att.net <mrob...@att.net> wrote:
>>> [0] If your customer service inspires your customers to visit your
>>> premises with a hammer and start smashing things, this should be
>>> some kind of hint.
>>
>>... Especially if it results in a substantial improvement to the
>>quality of service.
>
> "Knowing where to smash with the hammer .............. $2000"
Why am I reminded of "I'll pound your balls flat with a wooden mallet"?
> Dave "will do memetic adjustments for food" DeLaney
--
> and as long as you stay away from the 2 big providers and bunch of
> shonky littler ones that nevertheless have a very large advertising
> budget, you'll do fine.
#2's cable options aren't that bad IME. ISTR a few other denizens not
complaining loudly as well.
--
Dave Hughes - da...@hired-goons.net
Where there's a flame-thrower, there's a way - Earl Grey
>I gather from what you say that he doesn't enjoy it very much.
Almost as much as root canal.
Just lately they seem to be s/entries for my employer's b2b web
servers // rather a lot. OpenDNS got very popular very fast. -- Joe
Today is the last day that big-dish satellite TV service is available to
the lowly home consumer. As a result, I've been forced into subscribing
to a bunch of tripe channels that I've no desire to watch in order to
get the three that I do want. It's T*m*-W*rn*r cable.
The installer (from the signage on the truck, a contractor) was a nice
guy and only arrived a hour late, but was somewhat clueless - apparently
"prewired live outlet" isn't part of his vocabulary, as even after being
told that, he insisted he had to go up on the roof, where my dish isn't,
in order to disconnect it. I think it was seeing that the cable entered
the house alongside the six-inch bundle of coax from all the ham radio
antennas that finally persuaded him to listen to me say "just plug it
in and it'll work".
OTOH, the picture quality isn't too bad, not near as sharp as direct
C-band reception and some of the expected digital artifacts, but the
added quality of the few HD channels almost makes up for that.
I wonder how long the hard drive in the cable box will last. I hope
they put a new drive in when they refurbed it after the last customer
was through with it. I haven't bothered to open it up and look yet.
All the damn anti-copying technology makes audio/video switching a bitch;
evey time you change sources everything has to renegotiate keys and
you get a silent blank screen for an annoyingly long time.
Adding video service doesn't seem to have affected the cable modem
internet service. It's only been a week and the modem hasn't crashed yet.
It only does so about once or twice a month, typically right in the
middle of a vi editing session. Often it comes back up in less than
an hour. Unless their DHCP/DNS service is down again.
At least it's not the phone company.
- Brian
> As a result, I've been forced into subscribing to a bunch of tripe
> channels that I've no desire to watch in order to get the three that I
> do want. It's T*m*-W*rn*r cable.
I too get TV service from The Eye Of Horus. Every now and then Marcia
and I get bored with what's on and start wandering around the channels.
Most of the time, nothing. Every now and then, however, we luck into
something. And, of course, the more channels included, the better the
chance that one of them will have something watchable when you need it.
--
Joe Zeff -- The Guy With The Sideburns:
http://www.zeff.us http://www.lasfs.info
I mean, if it was an obscenity filter, I could understand
it rejecting on, say, 'Windows'.
> All too often their phone
> firewall doesn't even know what their own Web pages tell customers to
> do.
Well, of course not. Phone firewalls run on cheat-sheets, and if they're
not in sync with the external web pages, the average droid won't even be
aware of it because checking such things isn't in *their* job description
and they're not paid to care.
--
Joe Zeff -- The Guy With The Sideburns:
http://www.zeff.us http://www.lasfs.info
I'll have to try and get an item written into the DR plan specifying a
run to Krispy Kreme for sysadmin fuel, since it'd no doubt be a long
night ahead.
I use a reseller of #2, who also have a lot of their own equipment in
the mix, and who have been uniformly good. Cheap,
competent, and I can't complain about the speed and reliability.
Which is more than I can say for #1 who when I changed to #2 for my
phone system promptly broke said phone system for 6 weeks. They
*say* it was because the (badly maintained no doubt) copper
infrastructure needed work, I suspect they have a field in their
database which turns your service off as punishment....
Zebee
> And, of course, the more channels included, the better the
> chance that one of them will have something watchable when you need it.
This is not, in my experience, true in the general case. The additional
channels all seem to have something which at best is not attractive, and
more often appeals to depraved tastes. Think Jerry Springer, one of the
"People's Court"-style shows, "Hoarders", "Intervention", "Dog the Bounty
Hunter", etc.
Newton Minow's vast wasteland has only grown even vaster and more wasted.
--
What should be written on the point end of a claymore?
- - -
"This end tae enemy."
Don't believe them. There's nothing wrong with her image, and (her fantasy
of) her bedtime activities (unless, maybe, you expect to share beds with
teenagers for the next 50 years, maybe). The objectionable part is what
her mind does.
-is
--
seal your e-mail: http://www.gnupg.org/
Being farmed out to disservice providers, the actual phone firewall operator
is most probably not *allowed* to do anything not in the cheat sheet.
>>>>> May they wake up in bed with R*d*n* G*rst.
>> The awesome thing being, I have no idea at all what you're talking about.
> Don't believe them. There's nothing wrong with her image, and (her fantasy
> of) her bedtime activities (unless, maybe, you expect to share beds with
> teenagers for the next 50 years, maybe). The objectionable part is what
> her mind does.
Ahh, but:
% ls R*d*n*\ G*rst
ls: No match.
I continue to maintain that this is possibly one of the most misleading
error messages I've ever seen. However, I have now seen a worse one;
a buggy perl build script which was invoked by make, and thus chose
to emit the message: "make: No rule to make target 'foo'" when the perl
script failed.
Not the most frustrating debugging experience I've ever had, but certainly
a contender.
OK, I give up. EXPN?
--
Richard Gadsden ric...@gadsden.name
"I disagree with what you say but I will defend to
the death your right to say it" - Attributed to Voltaire
--
Stevo st...@madcelt.org
> OK, I give up. EXPN?
There's a character in the Simpsons TV show, named "Nelson", whose running
joke is that when something horrible happens, he points and says "ha ha" in
a distinctive way. Generally applicable to any circumstance in which others
are suffering and you do not share in their suffering.
I find it bizarre how lousy the DNS service from typical home-oriented ISPs
is. It really isn't hard to run a caching resolver. I suspect that they use
buggy and slow DNS software for ideological reasons.
It boggles the mind, and "a boggled mind is of no use to anyone". (loose quote)
Fortunately, there are public DNS servers out there. The fact that using
a DNS server out over the big bad internet can be an improvement on DNS
servers on your ISP's internal network is severe evidence of lossage.
There is a solution to this conundrum which, unusually for such
things, is cheap, simple, and *correct*.
OK, I give up.
Who in $DEITY's name are you all talking about?
--
David Cameron Staples | staples AT unimelb DOT edu DOT au
Melbourne University | ITS | Hosting | Unix Operations
Scooby-doo. Reason enough to *never* get your pets high, especially on weed.
-- bash.org/?10992
It hasn't been _a_ system for just a tiny bit over 27 years now. It
currently works only through the miracle of modern capitalism.
> Here, most people use ADSL, unless they're so far from civilsation
> that satellite is the only option,
One factor here is that our main campus is just about the same size as
yours, but we have around 14 or 15 times the population, and they don't
all live around the edges.
> I recently saw an advertisement from them that started to make me
> think that perhaps they had finally made their plans half decent, so I
> investigated further.
In the US, it is not possible to determine, a priori, how much you will
pay for telephone service (landline or mobile) or airline tickets. It
is only possible to guess, pay, and look at the bill later. I am sure
this applies in other countries as well, although the goods or services
it applies to may differ.
Matt Roberds
>In the US, it is not possible to determine, a priori, how much you will
>pay for telephone service (landline or mobile) or airline tickets. It
>is only possible to guess, pay, and look at the bill later. I am sure
>this applies in other countries as well, although the goods or services
>it applies to may differ.
I believe most countries require that the advertised price be the
actual price you are charged. (They do the same thing for sales
taxes.) We only do that at the gas pump.[1] (Shows where our
priorities are, I suppose.)
-GAWollman
[1] In fact, there are all sorts of incredibly strict laws governing
how filling stations and their suppliers can operate, above and beyond
the tax thing. For example, it is illegal in some states for stations
(or distributors) to change the price of any grade of fuel more than
once per twenty-four hours.
> TimC <tcon...@rather.puzzling.no-spam-accepted-here.org> wrote:
>> The US phone and data system amuses me.
>
> It hasn't been _a_ system for just a tiny bit over 27 years now. It
> currently works only through the miracle of modern capitalism.
"Miracle" in that no-one knows how it works, everyone who knows anything
about it is astonished that it works, and the more you know about it, the
deeper your certainty that it shouldn't work at all, and the only
remaining explanation for why it works is supernatural forces.
Having pondered this assertion more, it is not true for airline
tickets. Most fare engines will tell you exactly what the total bill
comes to and what fraction of that constitutes taxes -- of which there
are four: transportation tax (ad valorem on the fare), security tax
($2.50 per departure), flight segment tax ($3.70 per segment), and
passenger facility charge. The PFC is collected by each departure
airport, so it's also known in advance but different for every route;
there's a national limit on how much the PFC can be and what it can be
spent on. The FAA gets the segment tax, the TSA gets the security
tax[1], and I think the transportation excise tax just goes into
general government coffers.[2]
The airline advertisements, on the other hand, are intended to
deceive, and leave all of the taxes unstated. Unlike retail sales
taxes, organizations which are normally exempt from taxation are not
exempt from paying any of these taxes.
-GAWollman
[1] Referred to, somewhat disingenuously, as the "September 11th
Security Fee".
[2] Well, it all -- except for the PFC -- ends up in the Treasury.
The difference is that the agencies with dedicated taxes can spend
these funds on authorized activities without an explicit annual
appropriation.
Substitute the first two *s with 'o', the second two with 'a'.
She was a spammer a few years back.
Tony.
It is beyond my understanding why someone would think this is a good
idea. It's somehow worse that this particular atrocity was perpetrated
by someone who really should know better.
Kristof
Never noticed anything of the sort. But then, I've been running my own
local caching resolver ever since I had to rely on @ISPs for
connectivity. It isn't exactly hard ...
> Fortunately, there are public DNS servers out there. The fact that using
> a DNS server out over the big bad internet can be an improvement on DNS
> servers on your ISP's internal network is severe evidence of lossage.
Why would one need a caching resolver outside ones home network to begin
with? I prefer to only rely on $ISP for connectivity and prefer to
handly everything else (DNS, mail, web proxies, ...) myself. The less
of their services I use, the less they can annoy me by screwing it up.
Kind regards,
Alex.
--
"Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and
looks like work." -- Thomas A. Edison
She also took pics of herself in her undies, some of which were on one
of her puters when it got pwn3d and the contents thereof made rather
more public than she had expected. She's not quite in the "mirrors turn
green and curl at their edges" category. Not *quite*.
--
From RFC 1925: "(3) With sufficient thrust, pigs fly just fine. However,
this is not necessarily a good idea. It is hard to be sure where they are
going to land, and it could be dangerous sitting under them as they fly
overhead."