And not overly impressed so far. During April of 2007 Comcast purchased Patriot Media, my locally owned and operated cable provider. Patriot Media’s service has been outstanding, their customer support has been quick, polite and they resolved issues in a quick and timely manner. Including the cable trimming incident. Since about December we knew that Comcast would begin taking over services and support and I personally celebrated each day things remained under the control of Patriot Media.

In either late February or early March we learned that the Patriot Media services would roll into Comcast control and operation shortly. At first we were told it would occur sometime in March and then we received printed literature that stated April 18th 2008. While a change in internet provider for most people is not a terrible issue for me it is a big deal because: 1) I work from home, 2) I run multiple personal services including my photos site and some sites for my father and 3) I am a geek; speed is important. I had previously due to a server failure moved my mail hosting to Google’s domain hosting services and have recently in anticipation of service changes moved this site. A good friend Brian K. has been very kind in offering me hosting on his co-located box.

At some point in the middle of the night last night my service became Comcast. My IP address has changed and most unfortunately my network speed has become piss poor. I’ve run six or seven bandwidth speed tests through the internet and each one has reported my speed as being well below acceptable, let alone the 12mbit/1.5mbit I had received from Patriot Media. The better of the tests reported my speed at 2.5Mbit/500KB/s. Very disappointed and all my outbound connections are sluggish. With my work VPN up (which it is for about 10+ hours a day) internet surfing is slow and my VOIP is pretty much unusable.

Thankfully at this point they have not blocked all incoming ports and my services are still operational; albeit slowly.

Update: I’ve been told that people can’t reach either the photos link or the trimming video.  This is caused by your internet provider having old DNS records for my home server cached.  Most ISPs will recycle these values within 24 – 48 hours.

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Today I finally took the plunge and upgraded to WordPress 2.5.  WordPress is the engine behind waxman.org, every page you see on this site is generated from WordPress.  The upgrade went amazingly well and the new features seem to be pretty amazing.  Almost everything is “behind the scenes” but should you notice anything not working well please let me know ASAP so I can fix it!

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As we all know, Microsoft Outlook (I am currently using 2003 11.8169.8172 SP3) is not one of my favorite applications.  While I know better than to think there is a way to escape its clutches in an Microsoft Exchange environment, I am still at a loss as to why some things in this application are so horribly done.  Here are some examples I face almost daily:

1. Open a new email, hit the “To” button to bring up an address book dialog.  Select one of your address books (Personal Contacts for example) and then click on the first name in the list.  Hit CTRL + A the universal select all.  Wow, imagine that, it DOESN’T SELECT ALL?!
2. While connected to an Exchange server, lose network connection for 30 seconds or more; just enough time for it to realize it is not connected.  Reconnect to the network (this happens to me when my VPN goes dead).  Watch the epic fail as it takes upwards of 5 minutes to re-connect and check your mailbox
3. Try to determine a message is sent from an official source.  This requires checking the “full message headers”.  Open the message, go to the view menu.  No headers listed?!  Ok, try options a completely odd place for such things to be.  There at the bottom in a horrible text box with a background color the same as the rest of the window in a non-adjustable font size is the internet headers.  Try following the message path.
4. Open your calendar, go to month view.  Double click on a day (not an event).  It opens a new event dialog which is quite logical.  Why it decides to set it to an ALL DAY event is beyond me in a business tool.  How often do we schedule full day events as opposed to an hour meeting etc?

I am sure there are others, but these are just the ones I’ve dealt with in the past 1.5 hours.

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Or are you?  I have once again done a clean out of my buddy lists.  Beyond that I am no longer going to use Yahoo or LiveJournal messenger systems.  If you want to be on my buddy list again (meaning we’ll actually speak on it) just IM me.

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What RSS browser / reader are you using and how much of your daily surfing have you converted to RSS browsing?

I personally am currently using Google Reader and have limited my daily hits to my Google Reader page and a forum site I am a member of.  News, Entertainment (comics etc), LiveJournal friends (including friends only) and the what not are all fed through my Google Reader account.

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So today is Tuesday, November 13th and it is currently 1:58 PM. I opened the Tivo Online Scheduling web page to schedule some stuff Kate requested. Unfortunately the Tivo site is completely hosed and has provided this channel / show lineup:

You can click to make it bigger.

Guess I wont be attempting online scheduling, eh?

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Today Tremor, the server that runs waxman.org and all our many other hosted projects, was unexpectedly rebooted.  One of my system administrators, our cat Dexter, wanted to test the resilience of the power connection.  He determined that the power connector is indeed strong; but not strong enough.  This disconnect of power caused the server to reboot.

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Dear Microsoft,

Thank you for providing me with the excitement that is Microsoft in my workplace.  My job is stressful, however it is sometimes routine.  I find the random crashes and reboots my Windows work computer does to be a surprise and new challenge to each work day.  Just this morning while working on a very important draft email to send to all of the field offices working on my account Windows surprised me by randomly closing Outlook; but that’s not all it had in store for me!  The machine then became completely unresponsive and I was forced to reboot.

That reboot sure did break up the tedium of my work day.  Sorry to say that it was the shortest nine and half minute reboot I have every had.  This meant that I was able to enter my user name and password in just under  eleven minutes after spending 45 minutes on that pesky draft.  After hitting enter just a short 3 minutes left I was logged in and re-loading Outlook.

Outlook … Whenever I think of the name of this specific product I can’t help but remember my Magic 8Ball as a child.  The Magic 8Ball had a response for questions, “Outlook not so good.”  This childhood toy had pegged this product long before Microsoft was even incorporated.  Outlook is a business tool and I don’t think I am alone in the workplace in the fact that I am often composing multiple emails at a single time.  These emails are called Drafts; and I see a cute little Drafts folder on my folder list.  What I am wondering is why none of these emails are automatically saved to said folder and why when Outlook surprises me as it does so often none of these drafts are recoverable?  Is that just more of the Microsoft excitement?

While I was appreciating the fifteen minute break this surprise afforded me I looked over to my trusty Macintosh to check my personal email.  For shits and giggles I looked at the Unix uptime command to see how long this machine has been running without a reboot.  Would you believe Apple’s lack of creativity?  This machine has been running for, 26 days, 14:32 hours.  How boring is that?  No little surprise reboots, no excitement of lost data and no breaks from productivity. No wonder Apple has not made it as far in the workplace as Microsoft.  After all, variety is the spice of life and nothing provides more variety than the unique ways Microsoft products can behave!

In conclusion, Microsoft I’d like to thank you for providing me with these unexpected surprises, some excitement and the unique chance to rewrite something I spent forty five minutes writing to perfect it.  I also appreciate the fifteen minute break in the middle of very busy morning.

Sincerely,

Dave Waxman, Apple Macintosh user enjoying the spontaneity of Windows and Outlook

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So today I went to open Photo Booth a webcam application that comes with any Macintosh equipped with an iSight camera.  This is what I got:

Pretty odd that a laptop that came with said application and camera now doesn’t have the right video card.

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