Tag: cable

Miscellaneous

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Just a few miscellaneous items. The cable went out tonight for the first time since I’ve been a Comcast subscriber, which is now several months. It was out for a little more than an hour and a half, and it was mostly annoying because the Internet connection was out with it. I called Comcast and they said that a crew had already been dispatched to resolve the problem, and sure enough things are working again.

I also decided to change my return flight from Florida next weekend. I was scheduled to fly out of Orlando on Sunday morning at 7:44 AM. I would have had to been up really darn early and that’s after being out for the wedding. So I logged onto United’s website and changed my return flight. I now fly home at 1:40 PM, which means I can sleep in if I want and still have plenty of time to get to the airport.

I found the last of my papers that I need to send my tax information to my new tax person and so I’ll get all of that put together tomorrow so that I can send it out early next week.

Results of cable speed test

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Whoa! Okay, here are the results. I compared 2 files of similar size, although they may be off by +/- a few megabytes:

DSL: 43 minute long episode of Battlestar Galactica: 54 minutes to download.
Cable: 45 minute long episode of Battlestar Galactica: 13 minutes to download.

That is pretty damn impressive!

All of this cobbling together of cables and wireless network has made me hungry. I think I’m going to treat myself to Outback tonight!

Cable and Internet access is done! (Almost!)

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The Comcast guy got here at about 10:30 and it was surprising how easy it was for him to get my cable setup. There were two minor snags, one of which is resolved, the other of which is pending.

I couldn’t get my computers connected to the internet unless I was directly connected to the cable modem. The cable guy “hated” Macs and furthermore, he didn’t know anything about them. He stuck around for about 45 minutes while I tried getting it working, but no luck. He had to go on another call. I spent the next two hours trying myself. I could get a connection if I was directly connected to the modem, but not if I wasn’t. On the other hand, if I plugged the Airport Extreme base station back into the DSL line, it worked fine. I called Comcast tech support. No help there. Finally, on a whim, I thought that perhaps the base station was retaining the mac address assigned by the DSL modem. I performed a manual reset of the base station, reconstructed my network–and everything worked!

I hooked my TiVo up to the new cable box and got it configured for the new channel line up. One nice feature was that all of my Season Passes were updated with the correct channel automatically. TiVo recently provided an upgrade which allows WPA2 encryption, so I was able to convert my wireless network back to WPA2 encryption. That is working great now too.

The final snag was that I was supposed to get a Digital DVR for the bedroom. There were none in the warehouse at the time the service guy went out there. So I have only “basic” cable in my bedroom right now. (That’s fine because I don’t watch much TV in there.) He said he’d keep checking the warehouse today and if they got one in, he’d bring it out. Otherwise, I’ll probably have to wait until next week. Once I have that, however, I’ll have DVR capabilities in both rooms (meaning I can record Gray’s Anatomy and Scrubs since they are on at the same time.)

I was frustrated by the Internet connection issue, but I’m glad that I got it all fixed. On initial glance, I think the cable connection is faster than my DSL. I noticed download speeds of just about 1 MB/second earlier. I’m going to confirm my downloading the most recent episode of Battlestar Galactica from the iTunes store. In the past, it takes about an hour to download. We’ll see how it goes over cable.