damn it, comcast
comcast is enhancing services in abq..which is great, because that means better speed or whatever the hell it is that they’re changing. unfortunately, it also means that while they’re swapping stuff out, they have less capacity which means hideous congestion during “peak hours” (i.e. when kids get home from school to when their parents go to bed) unfortunately for me, this means that 1. i can only play PC or PS3 games between the hours of 0100 and like 1500, and most of that time i spend sleeping. and 2. when i’m off from work, my typical game-playing times don’t work out because there’s so much loss/latency on my line that it’s impossible to play.
so, unless i get my game playing in early in the day, (which isn’t ideal because other than phil, the other people i play with aren’t around til the evening.)
what i’ve decided to do is give qwest a shot and see if maybe i can cope with a lack of speed (7 mbit or less vs 8 mbit) if it means my line is more stable and less prone to congestion issues. i’ve never had qwest service. previously, i had earthlink dsl (’01) covad dsl (03) and speakeasy dsl (03-07) and all were furnished by the clec (covad in all three cases) and latency sucked but reliability was relatively good. hopefully, cutting out the middle-man and going straight with the ILEC will make my life easier. i guess i’ll find out on 4/1/09 when the circuit is scheduled to be activated.
i’ve already been kind of disappointed with the ordering process, as qwest doesn’t offer a way to check order status easily like the other 3 providers i’ve used. whereas all 3 clecs give detailed status including provisioning, hand-offs for stuff, installation @ the co, etc. qwest told me to register on their my account site which isn’t available to me until the install date. i had to speak to three separate reps before i was even able to confirm that they had my order in the system and that it was being processed. so..that kind of sucks. the last rep i spoke to suggested that i call them or use their online chat system tomorrow or monday to get the tracking number for the modem.
i’m a complete and utter dork
so, i decided i wanted a yoke and pedals (and soon, a throttle quadrant) for flight simulation stuff. i bought myself a ch products yoke and “pro pedals” (both built in the USA!) my other setup is a saitek x52 hotas (hands on stick and throttle) configuration which has served me well over the last couple of years of simming.
getting used to steering aircraft on the ground with pedals is going to take a while. i’m so used to regular flight sticks with twist rudder that at first, i ended up trying to drive the plane like a car. after messing around for a bit, i got much better. well, marginally better, at least.
i’ve also been debating whether i want to buy a tivo hd or not. at present, we’ve got a buggy, slow, hot-running, unreliable dvr that we rent from comcast for like $15 (soon to be $20) a month. initial purchase of a tivo would be $200, but it would be my hardware and the total cost of renting the multistream cablecard from comcast + tivo service would be roughly $14. that’s $6 a month (and some taxes) that i wouldn’t be spending. on the other hand, however, we wouldn’t have access to on-demand (which rarely works correctly anyway) and getting cablecards from comcast is a big fucking hassle. damn it.
comcast = dumb
i went to comcast.com to pay my cable bill for this month and i noticed that the prices went up (again). i bring up the bill for june to see where the increases were (DVR rental + tv package) par for the course, i suppose..then i noticed it: “blah blah blah enhancing our network, blah blah, our prices will change on June 1, 2008″. this bill was for june 12, 2008. i looked at the previous months’ bills (march, april, may) and there was no such notification.
isn’t that nice of them to tell me 12 days after a change that there is going to be a change? what’s sad is that the alternative (qwest) is worse. boo.
SOCIAL MEDIA EXPLOOOOSION
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