A Verizon tech came out yesterday morning and replaced a splitter on my cables. Poof! The TV guide is now working. I’ve had it for less than a day but the wiz bang factor is making the service look great.
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Publicity stunt, huh? I think the Balloon Boy’s Dad will be lucky if he can get elected dog catcher now. Likely will face a fine and be banned from any TV.
My Internet and TV viewing works well but for some reason the guide data is not being loaded onto the set top boxes. While I am waiting for the (hopefully) Monday morning fix to my TV guide data, here is what you get with FIOS.
1. A weather sealed FIOS box that performs the hand off from fiber to copper telephone line and cable TV. This was mounted on the outside of the house.
2. A battery backed UPS unit. This is solely for the Verizon FIOS box and it’s to maintain the phone line in the event of a power outage. The POTS lines are on a separate power circuit so when the town goes dark the phone lines still work. Since the fiber connection does not have electricity this is necessary so that the phones are always on.
3. A very cool cable modem with built in 802.11b/g wi-fi and 5 Ethernet ports (1 WAN and 4 internal LAN). This plugs into the cable line and provides a very complete turn-key solution. I turned off the wi-fi since I already have a wireless network and don’t feel like redesigning my setup. But for the non-technically savvy customers this is a good fire-and-forget solution.
4. And of course all the set top boxes.
Each of the set top boxes is assigned a DHCP address from this router on the 192.168.1.0/24 network. I connected my Internet gateway to an Ethernet port and was also assigned a 192.168.1.x address. I like to access my basement remotely so I setup TCP port forwarding on specific ports on the Verizon box to my gateway. Initially I had all ports forwarded but I narrowed it down to a few specific ports and it’s all working. I did have to change my ddclient.conf settings but that was very easy.
The setup boxes get their configuration data via the Internet router. If the router goes dead, the TV signals will still work but the guide data will stop updating. No guide data means that the DVR is kind of pointless.
The phone is flawless and the Internet connection is amazing. See the SPEEDTEST.NET results to the right.
I just have a small problem with my digital TV service. At the moment I have no picture at all. Earlier I had picture and all my channels but I did not have the channel guide. An hour later, no channel guide and no picture.
I’m not really worried and here’s why: everyone I have dealt with on the phone or in person has been polite and professional. The installer arrived around 11 AM and wrapped up the install before 3:30 PM. He did mention that the programming data might take as long as Monday morning, but all the channels worked and I could live without the guide for a weekend.
I just got off the phone with Verizon and they are working on getting my service back. I’ll see how it goes.
Since Verizon messed up my order yesterday, they informed me that my order was set for 8 AM – 12 noon today. That sucked but it was better than waiting till next week. And I have to dial into work around 10 AM today so what the heck, I’ll just go with it.
Before 8 AM I called and wanted to confirm that my installation was on track. The person I spoke with was polite and professional and informed me that someone would call me back. I just got that call and my appointment is still on for today.
All day today. They can come at anytime today and screw the 12 noon thing. Oh, but I’m not to worry since they “requested” that the install occur before noon. I informed the polite and professional lady that I’m not thrilled about being held hostage to Verizon’s schedule and that this is NOT what I was told yesterday.
This is how a solid service offering gets ruined. I’m assuming that once I have FIOS installed it will be rainbows and sunshine but getting there is really amateurish on their part. First impressions are important because they set the customers expectations going forward. If they continue to mess up, I lose nothing by just canceling the order. As I mentioned yesterday I don’t have an axe to grind with Cablevision and the money I save with Verizon is not that significant.
I’m hoping that this afternoon I’ll be able to post how fast my new connection is and how happy I am with the service.
Update: FIOS install delayed. Tomorrow is the new confirmed install date. Just like today was confirmed. Not a good way to start.
![593958304[1]](https://i0.wp.com/blog.dembowski.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/10/5939583041.png?resize=300%2C135 "593958304[1]")
I’m currently on Optimum Online and I’m having FIOS installed in my house today.
It’s not that I have any real problem with Cablevision (I don’t) or have had support problems (Cablevision has always fixed any problems I had) I just feel like trying a new offering. And I do save a few dollars each month even with the install. The contract time period doesn’t bother me so I’m a good candidate for moving to FIOS.
The graphic is from the SPEEDTEST.NET website. When I have FIOS working I’ll post another test results.
Auto-tune the news never gets old. Here’s #9.
Auto-Tune the News #6 is pretty good too.
We picked the pool company (again) and finally signed the contract last night to build a pool in the yard.
It’s funny how this worked out. We were ready to sign the contract with a different pool company on Monday then something happened… I was ticked and didn’t want to use this company. You see, we picked this first company because the day before we discussed with them and agreed on a price with discount. Being a finance person, I put all the numbers onto a spreadsheet and expect the total to be X. The guy started to put all the numbers down on his contract sheet but didn’t bother with the discount that we agreed to the day before. When I pointed out to him that he missed the discount, he started by telling me ‘but I included this and that for free’ and wanted to see what the other company is giving me in the pool package. He also made a math mistake by somehow tagging on an extra 10K to the total price. He did realize his own mistake and fixed it. By then, I was soooo ticked that I didn’t want to deal with this anymore. So we called it a day.
Then, I called the other company and spoke to the sales guy and asked him to give me a better price and throw in some of the options that the first company was giving for “free”. Of course nothing is free, you are paying for it one way or the other. It’s included in the price. Free is when you don’t need to pay anything and they still give it to you.
That was Monday Columbus day where we were all taking a day off. My plan was to sign a contract on Monday so we can start the process of getting a permit from the town while I am away for 10 days starting on Wednesday. Well, things didn’t quite work out on Monday so it leaves only Tuesday.
Tuesday morning before 8:30, the first guy called a few times but I was still upset and didn’t want to talk to him. Work was busy and didn’t get to speak to the second guy until afternoon. Finally got the numbers and they looked OK but 10% more than the first guy. The truth is we can’t really compare the two companies solely base on the total cost because they are providing two different options. Since our house is on a slope, we need to have retaining wall built for the pool. The first company suggested using a lot of boulders for retaining wall (turns out the guy bought a lot of them and need to use them somehow) so the price is cheaper by more than 10% for the wall. The second company suggests building retaining wall using interlocking block system and won’t even suggest using boulders.
From the beginning, I was not comfortable with boulders and kept asking if they may roll down the hill. I am also not too crazy about the natural unfinished look of using boulders. I much prefer retaining wall with the finished look. So I got what I wanted (as always).
The funny thing was I got what I wanted only because the first guy didn’t give me the discount (it was less than 5% of the total price). I ended up paying 10% more but got what I wanted.
I rebuilt my Acer Aspire 1 with the factory provided DVDs. Mainly, I did this because I want to use the soon to be released Ubuntu 9.10 UNR. By installing and using the netbook’s version of XP I can get a good idea of a best case scenario as my baseline. With my newly purchased USB DVD drive I got to work.
Removing Ubuntu was a simple matter of logging into the netbook, becoming root, and then running fdisk. I deleted the existing partition and began installing XP. Which refused to boot because I did not delete grub properly.
I ended up booting fron another XP install CD. I selected recovery and ran fixmbr. I spent the whole afternoon getting updates from Microsoft. Once I was up to date I deleted McAfee and installed AVG Free.
The netbook is behaving remarkably fast. On a lark I installed FlashFire but haven’t looked to see if that’s what’s causing the netbook to be noticeably faster. Even Youtube is displaying quickly. If this continues to work so reliably then maybe I’ll leave XP on this machine.
The anime Darker than Black has started a new season and it’s set 2 years after the end of the first season. So far with the exception of April and July (and of course Hei) the settings are totally different. The story starts of a bit slow but as usual the action and the soundtrack make the whole episode work.
There has to be a back story here that will be fleshed out; Hei looks like a homeless superhero. This should be a fun one to watch.
Oh, and there was one thing that made me laugh. One of the main characters of this episode was shooting with a Nekon D201.
