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| Wednesday, January 30, 2002 |
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Rockin' to a hard place 
Lucky Virginia
| | Dig this, from Rich Boucher, who represents Virginia's 9th congressional district. |
Demand
Radiations
| | Speaking of Saltire, Steve MacLaughlin has a new blog on satellite radio. I think the whole category is too top-down to live in its current form. But still, I'm glad Steve is on the case. He's smart and knows his his shit. |
| | I also have an excuse to plug (or at least point to) a new blog of my own: Skywave: the end of radio as usual. It's my experimental Radio blog. I'll use it as a place to dump the output of my own obsession with radio (and Radio). |
| | There isn't much there yet, but stay tuned. |
Well, fuck me dead
| | That headline is one of my favorite Southern Expressions, right up there with "gooder'n shit" and "I was so scared my ass sucked five pounds of cotton outa the seat of the pickup." |
| | Anyway, it applies to this piece here, which waxes all positive about blogging, under the august heading of Fortune.com's Reader's Corner. I found it on yesterday's Saltire. |
El Problemo con Voce
Blating
| | That's dating a new blog. Falling in like. Hanging out a bit. Checking for chemistry. |
Ahhhhhh....
| | To feel a current of clean, fresh bits blowing at against my face. Says here my speed is 2799 kbps down and 210 kbps up. Not the best I've seen, but not bad at all. |
| | So I'm back editing in Radio, catching up on three days of lost work. And there's a lot of it. |
| | I  walked around with a cordless phone on my head from 10am to 1pm today. Most of that time all I heard was Music on Hold, interrupted by messages urging me to solve my problems by sending an email to the very same people who weren't answering the phone — over a Net connection that isn't working, or I wouldn't be on hold waiting to talk to somebody about it. At the other end was tech support at Cox Communications, which has surely been in tech support hell since it began converting its customers from CoxAtHome to Cox High Speed Internet. |
| | Somewhere in there a guy came on and shared my puzzlement about a system that required a DHCP ID when the whole idea of the new system was to not require an ID. So he told me to please hold for the Level 2 support guy to come on the phone. That was at about 11:45. Somewhere close to 1pm the Level 2 guy came on and we figured out this "solution": |
| | - Unplug the cable modem
- Unplug the router
- Wait several minutes while the cable modem forgets what it's not supposed to know
- Plug in the cable modem
- Plug in the router
- Use the browser interface of the router (put 191.168.1.1 in your location line and hit enter) to reset it for DHCP and no user ID, and apply the changes
- Check to see if the router has pulled down a new IP address, netmask and the rest of it
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| | I'm only listing those steps in case other Cox customers with Xsense router/hubs like mine are having the same problem (which apparently some have, or this page wouldn't be here). By the way, I did downloaded the new firmware for the router (recommended by the support page), but didn't put it in, so that wasn't the issue. |
| | Now get this: what worked in this case didn't work before, because I tried it, repeatedly, along with all kinds of other combinations of actions and settings. I think this time I just got lucky. |
| | Once again the real culprit here is Marketing as Usual, which believes the customer is a dumb "consumer" who needs to be romanced with glossy BS that puts a happy face on a potentially painful transition. That's what Cox did when they sent out the fancy box pictured above. It contained a bunch of glossy materials and a conversion CD that did exactly nothing to solve problems like the ones I experienced (and I was far from alone). Worse, it installed a whole bunch of new, unwelcome and unneeded software, adding a massive layer of high level complexity to problems that are about as low level as they come. (That software, which included Outlook Expresa and Cox own version of Internet Explorer, was basically just to help customers with Cox-hosted email and Web pages to convert them to new addresses and Web pages. They should have made that clear.) |
| | It would have cost them a lot less money and taken their users a lot less time if they had just sent out a small package with an FAQ and a troubleshooting table that covered low-level issues. |
| | Anyway, I'm done ranting on the subject. Back to work. |
Still sucking
| | Yes, we're still off the air. |
| | Right now I'm on a 26,400 bps dial-up line. I'd forgotten not only how slow that is, but how useless as well. It takes forever for some pages to come up. I'm using EditThisPage today just so I can write and post before the link gives out (which it does, repeatedly). If we can get back up on the cable again later, I'll re-edit in Radio. |
| | My wife's laptop is physically close enough to connect directly to the cable modem, and right now it's working for her, but only with the old DHCP ID, which Cox told us had been "reprovisioned" to oblivion. Clearly it hasn't. Calls to Cox today only reach busy signals. |
| | If I could make the router/hub authenticate the same way, we'd have no problem, but nothing seems to work. I see the maker of that device has some kind of help, so I'll try that out, but I'm not optimistic. It assumes that the user can get on with no ID, which is the way the system is supposed to work. But again, my wife's laptop only gets on with the old, supposedly now irrelevant, ID. |
| | Wish us luck. So far, we haven't had any. |
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