Is this thing on?

[greatbear]

I was hoping my weekend away from the intarweb would have given Comcast a chance to fix my intermittent connection. Two modems and a few calls later, it's still flaky at best. It's my guess that someone's connected equipment is splattering RFI in the particular band used for the modem communications, and this noise happens to not be anywhere around while the techs are trying to sort things out. Oh well, they'll get it, sooner or later. In the meantime Verizon is about to start digging up the neighborhood for the new FiOS fiber-to-the-premises do-everything service. Not sure if this will be in the cards for me in the future (it's possible though, since higher bandwidth is available for less than I am currently paying). With my luck, though, my cable will end up getting cut by the digging and laying of the fiber. I'm to the point of getting both cable and fiber for redundancy.

Good weekend playing gay uncle with the kids up in PA. Poor little pico-pooch Bear is glad to be away from the constant 'attention' given him by the little house-apes. Cool double-score of the weekend was coming across free firewood in the form of a tree that had fallen across the road which was cut up and bucked into woodstove-sized logs and left in the ditch/shoulder. That find will have to be tossed off the truck after I post this.

I'm going to be busy this coming week, and with the expected lame connectivity, I doubt I will be able to keep up with LJ posting from friends much less do anything in the way of my own entries. Consider this a hiatus. I'll be in NYC on Feb 5,6 and 7, but being that this is during the week, I doubt if anyone in and around the city would be up to doing anything. I could be wrong (as usual), so if this is the case, let me know. I'd love to see y'all.

Gonna hit the 'Update' button now. Wish me luck.

Comments

[faghatesgods.livejournal.com]

read my most recent post about monday the 6th.

If you'd like to come to the show let me know!

-E

[greatbearmd.livejournal.com]

Hmmm... that looks like it would be fun. Why should mom have all the culture and music to herself? lol

[in-fin-i-ty.livejournal.com]

*waves hand* I should be done with a bunch of the insane gigs by then.

[greatbearmd.livejournal.com]

Whatcha wanna do?

[in-fin-i-ty.livejournal.com]

anything, really. I have an open mic I'll hit on Monday so if you're going to the show with Ernie that's cool. Otherwise catching a coffee and chatting (OMG. Liek in person!) or hitting a bar (Dugout on Sunday or BigLug on Tuesday). General low-stress kinds of things are cool these days. LOL

[danlmarmot.livejournal.com]

Highly unlikely that there's RFI interference from your house to your local cable-modem node, and then upstream to the headend CMTS. More likely it's some software misconfiguration, or some flaky piece of equipment like an amp somewhere along the line.

Cable modems just use a standard 6MHz channel for downstream communication... just think of it as Comcast deciding not to carry VH1 Classic, but deciding to carry cable modem service on that channel. Though who knows where Comcast puts the downstream channels on your system, or how new your plant is (older plants have 400MHz of bandwidth, some 60 channels), new ones go up to 850MHz. Ask your service tech if you're curious.

It's an interesting field; but one I don't want to ever work in again. Cable companies are very constrained businesses, with angry customers on one hand :-), angry city councils on the other--and on the third hand you have content providers like, oh, Disney demanding that they must carry the Family Channel along with ESPN--and then charging $1.50 per subscriber per month for ESPN (which you never see because it's part of your basic cable bill.) Yuck.

[greatbearmd.livejournal.com]

Everything out this way is fairly new. With all that is acrried on the cable service (on-demand, 'net, digital channels, etc) I would assume it's an expanded bw setup.

When I was talking to the tech, he said it could be anything, and he did mention that there is even a chance of someone's gnarly junk putting out noise as well, since it had already happened in the area (but sadly, it was not on my node so I am still stuck). He and I both agreed that it's probably just a distribution amp or similar. Tonight it's reasonably solid. *knock on particle board*

I am with you though... I'd never want to work in cable infrastructure. It's the thing that everyone loves to hate (including me). lol

[notdefined.livejournal.com]

Okay, we need a freaking central scheduling facility! I'm going to miss you by less than two weeks! Arrrgh! Well maybe in the summertime, I really need to pay a visit to Richmond/D.C. this year.

[greatbearmd.livejournal.com]

Yeah, it's definitely frustrating that I just miss out on others' arrivals. Let me know when you are out this way though, mebbe we can plan something!