My personable cable fixer guy showed up at 8 AM as promised. Pablo no habla ingles, let alone knows a single thing about cable modems and has no idea what Linux is.
Wish me well!
Now I understand why Comcast in Chicago had bulletproof glass and blast proof package window thingy.
He talked to someone else in Spanish who is now telling him what to do…
Figuring I needed to go into assertive mode, I demanded that he repair the two loose coax connectors. He informed me that the signal strength is a problem. There is some problem with the tap or the internal wiring. It had been working for three days and stopped when I made the mistake of trying to move the modem to another jack, then the original one stopped working.
Cable guy #2 is going to come at noon. Hopefully he is a good old boy. The first guy satisfied the metric that he showed up. That appeared to be his only purpose.
If I wind up in Tijuana with my head severed, you know what to do.
Guy # 2 was a no show – rescheduled tomorrow at 9 am. Aren’t government monopolies a wonderful thing? They should try doing that in the radio business – handing out perpetual exclusive rights to broadcast
Interesting – maybe offer Pablo a glass of “ICE” next time you see him.
This type of work is done by contract labor these days. I suspect the person on the other end of the phone was the actual “employee” and Pablo was a fake standin – he was that bad. He didn’t know the ssid and encryption password were printed on the bottom of the router. Saying to him “I reset the modem to the factory defaults” just got me a blank stare. I fully expected any installer type person to be confused by a PC running Ubuntu Linux. He was going to bluff his way. I just told him to get away from the PC. The admin menu was sitting on the screen logged in with the status and settings showing, and the first thing he tried to do was close the browser.
Because I bought the modem rather than renting it, I would expect a little confusion, like knowing which subnet range the router uses as a default, but I know all that stuff. Once we have an RF signal, I hope to have no further dealings with them. The Netgear modem/router (made in Vietnam!) is a model that has been available since 2011 and on every major cable company’s list of compatible gear. The box even has a Time Warner logo on it
“person on the other end of the phone was the actual “employee” and Pablo was a fake standin – he was that bad. He didn’t know the ssid and encryption password were printed on the bottom of the router. ”
L_O_L That is Killer. Ask him if he has any of those ‘Mexican jumping beans’ in his truck ? I wasted a lot of money on them dam things when I was on vacation as a kid.
Good Luck on getting your cable fixed.
parrott
So I’m satisfied with the explanation that I damaged my modem trying to move it. The resolution is I’m going to rent my modem from Spectrum (Time Warner). The modem they gave me is newer ($200 retail) and supports 16/4 Channel bonding which will support 300 Mbps, 250,000 times faster than my “fast” 1200 baud acoustic coupler. Nobody will ever need more than 640k of RAM and nobody will ever need more than 300 Mbps of Internet speed
Damn, this web site is fast! ?
That old $400 emachine has a gigabit Ethernet adapter wired now to the Spectrum modem/router which has 58 Mbps down and 6 Mbps up. If you were here a long time ago, the first year in Charlotte I was running the web site from my residential Ethernet connection that mostly worked, but it is still worth having linode housing the site in a well connected secure data center in the Republic of Texas
SRG is ‘Screaming High Tech ‘ : )
cool
I like when an old machine finds new life,
I’m old , so that makes me feel better
parrott
Well the emachine might make an emergency backup if something really bad happens in Texas, but mostly if will just be a PC that’s a little more productive than typing on an iPad screen
The day my world changed: My specialty / niche / dinosaur skill was on Tandem. Really useful stuff in 1980ish. Because it was anal retentive about not ever losing an update, you were fairly much constrained to the latency of spinning hard drives. Unless you got clever, that meant maxing out at maybe 30 inserts a second, slower with alternate keys. So what one day, an ISP in California lent me a demo intel server with fairly mediocre stats. It was probably a $1500 machine (1999). I grabbed data from somewhere to load a database (probably census data) and MySQL loaded something like 10,000 rows a second. The Tandems cost a $million. That’s when I knew my skill was a dead end. Being a dinosaur has advantages if you accept you are a dinosaur.
Reminds me of my first time using FoxPro to insert and select rows (expecting it to take 20-30 minutes like dBase III)… it kept prompting me after 2 secs. I thought it was not accepting my commands when, in fact, it was done.