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Oh yes…..thats right. Too bad it was too rainy today to ride it in…

Okay. So, i can’t let things rest. Got home yesterday, and started playing with the cab;e modem again. Brought it into the bedroom, where 2 cab;es lines come out of the wall. One is on a 3-way split, the other was unused. Hooked cable modem up to the unused line directly (no split, no splice, right there on the wall), and it connected right away. okay. Got a short cable to put between the modem and the wall, and it connected again. Okay. Plugged the line running the the 2nd bedroom/office into this line from the wall, and plugged the cable modem into the other end. Nope, no connection. So, its the line. So, i run another long piece of coax. Same deal. Both of there were previously used, with no problems (well, the first one was left by the previous renters, but it was the nice high grade coax…). So, I take out the brand new coax that came with the modem, don’t both unraveling it, and hook it up. Success. So, I run this, through the wall to the office/2nd bedroom, and boom, everything works. Took it a step further and threw a splitter on the end of this line, and ran a short coax to the modem, and we’re still good. Yay. So, now i have to call and cancel that service appointment on Friday morning…wooo

No, my issue(s) are the following: I have a few short peices of coax, and a few really, really long peices. The shrot ones are about 6 inches too short to reach the tuner on the PC where I want to have it. The longer ones are about 15.5 feet too long. Sigh. I had a short one hooked up for a while last night, but something ate shit with my mythtv setup. tried some reinstalls, but it was never really clean. Mythweb was giving my issues, and mythfrontend kept crashing when I would tune to live-tv. Add onto that the fact that us-cable frequency table doesn’t seem to be right for comcast (us-cable-hrc seems to be however…). …

So, right now, got internet working, but not mythtv. With the release of Ubuntu 8.04 today, I might reinstall the whoel system sometime real soon, so I can have a clean mythtv install. Luckilyl all my media on on seperate drives, and backed-up, so a reisntall should be fast, and I’ll simply have to rebuild the samba shares (I can backup my smb.conf) and setup mythtv again, but, thats the point. But, I’m not sure how worth it this will be. not much comes in without a cable box, and getting another on and using an external channel changer is a bit of a hastle it sounds like. Realistically I record mostly from CBS/NBC, so, the cable box shouldn’t be much of an issues (Comdey central doesn’t come it really). Of course, instead of messing with mythtv at all again, I can just rock the BT, but its more fun to record/transcode your own.

Anyone have any mythtv on comcast experiance? Ping if so.

yep, lots of crap. lots and lots.

So, Sarah and I moved back (well, back for me) to Boston this past weekend. We’ve been wanting to for a while. I loved living in Shrewsbury with Sarah, and it was nice to be sorta-kindof back home (but 2 small towns away) and near all the friends and stuff, but, the moment I left the city I missed it. You know, the ability to go get some drinks and not worry about driving. Being able to head into work whenever, not when the train schedule dictated, getting home at 5/5:30 instead of 6:30/7, all those things.

Luckily we found an awesome place right in Brighton center, about a 10 minute bus ride from work. Its a sweet 2 bed (we’ll use it as an office/etc) with a huge kitchen, awesome everything and good rent price.  I’ll be getting a new bike (single/fixed gear street bike me thinks) to ride over during these most wonderful summer months, which will speed up the commute a tiny bit more, and just be fun in general.

Anyways, the move went well. we had enough help and got everything done on time. Weather couldn’t have been better. So, wheres the bitching? Here it is:

Comcast. I had an install (read: Dude plugging in my cable box for me and handing my the cable modem) scheduled for Monday. Yes, Marathon Monday. Big surprise they called and canceled after I waited two hours saying their guy couldn’t make it over to me cause of all the street closings. Werird part was, they were asking ME how/if he could get around. Now, I know the city, but I would imagine the normal person moving in and getting cable hooked up doesn’t. Also, you are the dispatch, you figure it out. Third, when I asked, “Okay, where is the guy/where is he coming from?” I got an  “I don’t know”. Sigh. Finally, you are coming to hook up my net access. How am I supposed to figure out how to get you here? Whatever. Rescheduled for first thing the next day, yesterday. Okay. Guy shows up, cable gets hooked up, he leaves, I start hooking up the cable modem. Took forever and multiple reboot to get the cable modem to get a signal over the coax. Not unusual. Had to use the macbook, as you need to run their shitty ass setup software to get an IP for the first time, before you can move the connection to you router/whatever else you want. Okay, so I did that, things worked, a bit touch and go, but worked.

Came home from work with the goal of splitting the cable line to the cable modem to I could get the PC hooked up and start my DVR’ing. Cable modem didn’t like it, and couldn’t connect. So, I went back to the way it was. Nope. No connection. Tried every (read about 20+) permutation of connections (there are 2 lines comming out of the wall in the bed room. 3 palces to go: Living room, Bedroom TV, and Office. So, I had started with a 3-way split on one line, and everything worked fine. Tried going straight to the modem. Tried using the other line. Tried a 2 way split for less noise.  tried everything. No signal. Digital cable works on both lines regardless of # splits. Sigh.)  So I calle dup comcast. 3rd time in as many days being on the phone with them. I must say, everyone I talked to was nice at least. Guy walks me though all the things I already did plus the normal crap (are there three lights lit up? are they blinking? Flashes of last week south park). I ask if I can just get a new modem, guy insists someone has to come test the cables. Okay. Soonest they can do that? Friday, 9-11am. Sigh. Another (3rd this week morning I’ll be going into work late while waiting for Comcast).

So, right now, no net access at the Apt. Now, what really pisses me off, is this: At each on of these junctions (rescheduling, not net, waiting till friday) I made it clear I was unhappy, that I expected this to be setup by now, that its important for me to have this for work, etc. Problem is, what can I do, other than bitch? Nothing. There is no one else to go through. You want cable in boston? Comcast. You want high speed internet? Comcast. Verizon FiOS =  a no go in the city. DSL requires a phone line, and since we use a, wait for it… internet phone, that wouldn’t work (plus dsl is crap). So, I can’t even threaten to cancel comcast. There is no where else to go. Its them or nothing. If I want net before Friday, I can’t get someone else in. If I’m pissed about my service, all I can do it complain, but I can’t do anything. They have me, and everyone else around here by the balls.

On to the next gripe: Logitech Harmony remotes, or rather, their setup software. I got one of these after Sara bought me a surround sound system a while back for Xmas. Its really nice, cause you program it with your computer (Windows/Mac only, of course), so there are no codes to deal with. I press one button to have everythign turn on and on the right input, and when I want to play the wii, or use the XBMC, its one more button press, all the inputs are switched, aand everything is niec and happy. Now, since we moved, and got a new cable box, I need to reprogram it. It should be as simple as swapping the old cable box device for the new one in the config, and maybe making a few changes wince things are hooked up a little bit different. Right? Well, their software, on OSX, first of all, needs net access. Well, we already established I do not have any. Sigh. So, I hop on the barly usable neighbors wifi (I’m impressed, only one, barly usable unprotected wifi signal, everything else has WEP/WPA…time to crack some tonite…), but the setup app won’t let me enter any text into teh feild where I sepcify the type of new cable box. So, i look for updates. Nope. Old version? Yes, but ti upgrades to the newest automatically. Some searching reveals that the newest version simply doesn’t work on OSX on intel systems right now. At all. Right. So, what am I doing now? Nuking my Ubuntu dual boot on the macbook so I can install XP, and run the remote setup while here at work, where i have net access.

Needless complications.

yep. back to wordpress. wanted to try out new features. now that i’ve moved back into the city, maybe i’ll get back into writing a bit? maybes. anyways, mroe on that in another post. and, another one shall be comming shortly on everyones favorite topic…..comcast…..