Tag: Meta-blog

Posted on

Status unchanged

Well, folks, I’m still offline at home. I may have opportunities to get online here and there over the next few days, but it’s starting to look like “New ISP shopping” time at Casa Jaquandor. EarthLink told me day before yesterday that a tech would be out “tomorrow” (yesterday, in real time) to check our phone lines. I have no way of knowing if that happened (they said he wouldn’t need access to our apartment at all, which is good because The Wife and I both worked yesterday), but when I got home, our DSL modem wasn’t even picking up the DSL line. At least before it would pick up the line but not connect to the Internet; now it wasn’t picking up the line at all.

So I called yet again, to be greeted by a recorded message that said, “According to our records, your issue has been resolved successfully. Would you still like to speak to a representative?” I said yes, and then proceeded to rip into the poor guy who answered. Oh well. The long-and-short of it is that another tech will be dispatched, yada yada yada. I’m not optimistic. I told the guy, this is EarthLink’s last chance, and believe me, it is: if we’re not reliably connected to the Internet by the time I get home from work tomorrow, I will cancel my EarthLink subscription and begin looking for a new ISP. The guy assured me that it would be resolved, but at this point, I have less than zero confidence in EarthLink’s ability to provide the bare minimum of technical support to a customer who has been giving them forty bucks a month for seven years.

So, I may have new posts up at times over the next indeterminate period. I hope to, anyway. Keep checking back, and thanks for checking in anyway!

(Oh, and for my Buffalo region readers, what’s a good ISP in these parts if all I want is Internet — no phone and no cable teevee?)

Share This Post

Posted on

Holding Pattern Omega

Well, a tech should be coming out this morning to look at the phone lines here at Casa Jaquandor, in an effort to determine why our Internet service from EarthLink has been so calamitously bad this last week. So I suppose by this time tomorrow I’ll know if we will still be EarthLink customers or not. Their options are: fix our DSL, or wish us well as we take our money to FIOS. Ugh!

And there’s lots of stuff I want to blog, but for now, it all has to wait.

Share This Post

Posted on

Holding Pattern Eta

AAAGGGGHHHHH!!!!!

OK, now that’s out of my system. For now, anyway. Yes, the Saga of the Awful Internet Connection here at Casa Jaquandor continues, with my connectivity woes now reaching Day Five. Oh it makes me mad.

Now, there’s the whole “blessing in disguise” thing, yada yada yada, I’ve been reading a bit more the last few days and I’ve been writing a bit more too, but still: I like the Internet and I expect it to work, which since last Wednesday it has not. Which annoys me greatly.

Today I finally knuckled under when I got home from work and got EarthLink on the phone. What’s happened for days is that the connection is only available for a few minutes at a time (at most), with long periods of connectionlessness in between. Today the “no connection” period lasted, as far as I can tell, overnight and through just about all of today. This sort of thing has happened before, but not in quite a long time, and it’s finally become annoying to the point where I’m genuinely considering switching to Verizon FIOS if it’s not fixed.

I spent almost two hours on the phone with a service rep with EarthLink, who was very polite and very willing to repeat himself a lot (a necessity, given his very thick Indian accent). He did a good job, although clearly my problem did not get resolved. But it was clear that he was following scripts and decision trees, as there were several times when I tried to offer information that he hadn’t asked for, only to have him basically ignore what I had said and plow on to the next point. First we did the “usual” stuff (unplug the modem, wait ten seconds, plug it back in; describe for him my configuration of phone and data cords; et cetera), and when we seemed to have exhausted all of those alternatives, he talked me through some stuff that I didn’t know anything about, which seems to have consisted of accessing setup screens and configuration menus and other things I had never seen before.

To his credit, my rep guy at no point sounded at all frustrated as the “Internet” light on the modem refused to come on and stay on, no matter what we did. But it was interesting how obvious it was when we finally reached the final item in his particular bag of tricks, because at that moment, he said “Here’s your case reference number, someone will call you within twenty-four hours, have a nice night.” And the call ended right then and there. I’m not sure what that means – at one point it sounded as if he was arranging for a tech to pay us a visit to get things figured out, but he didn’t say that outright and as of right now I have no idea what the problem here is. I do know that it can’t be anything that we did, as we have made zero changes in our Internet setup at home, with no ill effects on the DSL until now.

So here, I am trying to write posts in OpenOffice, paste them into a Blogger window, and “publish” them in the few brief seconds of being connected that I get here and there, once in a while. Hopefully this ends soon….

Share This Post

Posted on

Been good to know you….

A long-favorite blog of mine, “Mental Multivitamin”, has gone “Read by invitation only” after being around for quite a long time. I know I’ve been reading M-MV for at least four years and probably longer. I have no idea what led “Mrs. M-MV” to take that step, but I do find it a shame. (Her blog never had comments at all, so I can only assume she’s been the recipient of nasty e-mails, or maybe she just felt it necessary to “close the door” now for some reason.)

Oh well. I wish her, and her family, well.

Share This Post

Posted on

Holding Pattern Epsilon

Sorry for the lack of posting, folks, but again, the DSL here at Casa Jaquandor has been in and out, all weekend long. It’s been enormously frustrating. I was willing to grant that the weather we had several days ago was behind the outages at first, but that excuse is getting harder to accept.

Now, our ISP is EarthLink, and has been since 2003. But I’ve noticed that since we switched from dial-up to DSL, when I view the blog from home, it shows up on my SiteMeter as a hit from Verizon.net. So my supposition is that EarthLink’s DSL is simply Verizon’s, rebranded in the same way that a lot of the store-brand merchandise at big stores like Target or Wal-Mart is name-brand stuff with a new label slapped on. If that’s the case, then I wonder if Verizon is purposely letting their DSL go to hell in hopes that enough people will sign up for FIOS.

If that’s the case, well…it may end up working. We have no interest in a cable teevee plan, so if we decide to ditch the DSL, our best option is to go with FIOS Internet on its own (perhaps also ditching our landline telephone). For now, I’ve been posting lots of nasty things about EarthLink on Twitter, to see if they pay attention to that. Calling their service number isn’t an appealing option; I’ve gone that route before only to end up talking to a call center employee in Mumbai who very nicely talks me through the steps in power-cycling my modem. Which I’ve already done. Multiple times. Each day.

Oh well. We’ve had this problem with our DSL before, and it’s always turned out OK after a few days. Hopefully that happens again now, but if it doesn’t, I’m prepared to pull the trigger.

Share This Post

Posted on

Holding Pattern Delta!

Wow, are we ever getting hit with snow in the regions surrounding Casa Jaquandor. Lots and lots of snow, that wonderful lake-effect stuff that beats the hell out of a region about five to ten miles wide and leaves folks half-a-mile outside of the snow band scratching their heads and saying things like, “What in tarnation do you suppose the fuss is all about!”

I assume it’s weather related, but our DSL connection at home has been extremely spotty over the last day and if it is weather related I expect it to remain spotty, so I’m not likely to be online a whole lot. But don’t just say “Well, screw him!” and click Back on your browsers! I’ve posted some good stuff lately (also on Flickr), or at least I like to think so. Hang out, leave a comment or two, yada yada yada. Meantime, new content will show up, oh, sometime when I can actually post new content. Cheerio, folks!

(I’m posting this from work, which is something I don’t like to do, but duty calls.)

Share This Post

Posted on

A quick “by the way”

If any newer readers want to read more about Little Quinn’s life, you can find links to posts I wrote during his days on Earth in my “Notable Dispatches” page, accessible by the tab link at the top of the main body of this blog.

On the “Saga’s End” post — the post I wrote on the day he died — there was an outpouring of support in comments, but those comments are now gone because they were left on an old commenting system that I no longer use here. I did save them all on my hard drive(s), however. But the general lack of condolence on the post as it exists now does not reflect what happened at the time.

Share This Post

Posted on

Kind words, freely given

I’d just like to thank everyone who has weighed in either here, or on Facebook, or in e-mail about today’s anniversary of Little Quinn’s passing. It really doesn’t feel like it’s been five years, sometimes; other times, it seems like it’s been longer. Maybe some time I’ll write more about the various strategies The Wife and I used to cope and get through all of the challenges that Little Quinn posed, from the moment of his birth to the moment of his death. (Keep that in mind, all you regular readers — we’re two months away from the next edition of Ask Me Anything!) Those challenges were many, and they went on a long time even after he was gone — a longer time than I had even thought likely. The passing of a child is a long-haul kind of thing.

Some of you seem to worry — and this is perfectly normal — about the inadequacy of the words you have to offer. Believe me when I tell you, any words of support and love and understanding are the right words. As long as they’re from the heart, they’re the right words, and I value each word that anyone has ever said to me about him.

So anyway, now back to regular content, huzzah! (But I’ll probably be skipping Sentential Links for this week. I just haven’t been online much, and judging from my traffic numbers, none of you have, either!)

Share This Post

Posted on

Eight years in

Sheila O’Malley has been blogging for eight years. I was actually blogging before she was — this February I’m coming up on nine years — but on the occasions when I get a horrible case of “blog envy”, the awful feeling one gets after reading someone else’s blog post of “Ah, so that’s how it’s done and I’ll never figure out how to do it myself”, the cause is almost always one of Sheila’s posts. Her blog is one of the marvels of the Interweb, and I’ll have words with anyone says otherwise!

Share This Post

Posted on

Tinkering under the hood….

In general I’ve liked the changes I made to this blog’s appearance a while back, but there were two things that bugged me: my ragged right-margins, and the fact that text offset using the blockquote tag didn’t stand out as much as a block-quote as it did in my previous template. I have now fixed both problems.

See? Here’s my new style of blockquote! Huzzah!!!

OK, back to my normal blathering. Carry on!

Share This Post