Feels like Summer!

Here’s a collection (click on the picture) of phony vintage ads for modern products

It appears that there are dozens of photos for many locations. My guess is they include as many pictures as possible, less for illustrating their guide and more for getting the people they include to spam their site around.

As I’ve just done: My Schmap Entry

I talked to a really nice lady who asked one suspicious sounding question which I must have answered correctly because she gave me a whole stack, some pointers about the registration deadlines and then also gave me a bunch of applications for absentee ballots. Finally she thanked me for going out of my way to do this.

So I’m heading off to a bar where a bunch of progressively minded people are gathering to watch Super Tuesday results roll in.

Maybe I’ll score a few new voters.

Or robots dancing like humans:

Instead I was connected to a guy who decided to test my line again, from India, and who told me my speed looked fine. This is after I went through all these speed tests on Sunday, with a different guy. This new guy asked me to run a speed test on my side again just to make sure. I went to the speakeasy speed test site but got quickly exasperated when the test page stalled half rendered because of my slow speed. I told the guy this was ridiculous, that my service is so poor the speed test won’t even come up and how can he seriously tell me that my speed is OK.

He said he’d escalate this to local support and I asked why that wasn’t done Sunday when we had established there was a problem. He reiterated that he’d escalate this to local support. I asked for the number of local support so I can make sure they don’t just sit on the escalation for another 48 hours. He explained that he can’t give me their number, that they would do the work and then report back to Earthlink and then Earthlink would report back to me.

I asked, then, when can I expect a response. He said 4 hours. Then he said, but we close in 2 hours, so call back at 11 or 12 tomorrow (my time). So that’s more than 12 hours.

I hung up but I was still angry that I had been waiting patiently for a response for 48 hours while they did nothing. So I called back and told them I didn’t want to pay for the 2 days during which they neither delivered the proper service nor worked on the problem. The woman I talked to told me that, at the rate I was paying, that would only come to about $5.00. I told them to do it anyway. I then complained that I wanted something done to assure that this problem would be worked on tomorrow and wouldn’t just sit is a queue for several more days. She transfered me to someone else and a friendly recorded voice informed me that the wait time would be about 33 minutes. I hung up and went to bed.

In the morning I checked out a couple sites and they seemed to come up fine. I then ran a speed test and got just a hair under 5Mbps. Ahhhhh…. it was like being able to breath again.

I still don’t know what the problem was or whether Earthlink (actually probably Covad at this point) fixed it or did a squirrel family that had been gnawing on a cable somewhere move on to gnaw on something else?

I’ve generally not had problems with Earthlink’s (or Covad’s) service but I don’t want to praise them just for doing what I pay them to do, which is deliver problem free dsl, and I haven’t decided yet whether to pursue this further and find out whether they fixed a problem or did the problem just mysteriously stop on it’s own with the danger of returning again just as mysteriously.

Now I’ve got to go through the headache of reconfiguring my system for use with the router to get all my PC’s back online.

I use a program called FolderShare to automatically sync a directory on all my machines. Then to transfer something from, say, my work computer to home I just drop it into my synced directory and eventually, all my other computers have it.

I happened to notice that FolderShare was busy and so I checked what it was doing. It was streaming an album (I had downloaded yesterday) to my home PC (the only one online since I can’t use the router until this problem is resolved). It gives the rate at which the file was being transfered

572bps – yes, bits per second.

So, it seems they still haven’t resolved the issue.

I was optimistic because as I left for work this morning I noticed guys with hard hats and ladders wandering through a neighbor’s backyard. I actually thought that was a quick response, but I guess it could have been unrelated.

I did a test this evening and got a down speed of LESS than 100kbps. It’s approaching dialup speed. I wonder if the problem is progressive and my speed has been dropping for some time.

If you don’t hear from me for a few days send a rescue team with spools of Cat5 and a crimping tool.

I tried shutting off all the computers in the house but the one I was testing with. I tried the speed test on multiple computers. I tried shutting down the modem and router for several minutes and restarting. Finally I needed to call Earthlink technical support.

They had me strip down the situation to one computer connected directly to the modem – no router – and, seeing that the speeds were still slow, now admit that the problem is on their end.

They say a technician will be contacting us within 24 hours and seeing that it’s now Sunday, I expect that they’ll be calling tomorrow while we are both at work. I’m taking bets…. anybody?

In the meantime they don’t want me to reconfigure the system back to using the router which means only one computer online at a time. Luckily I ran Ethernet around the house last summer and so I’m not dependant on the wireless from the router but we will have to take turns using the Internet, manually switching cables to route the signal to my office or her office.

Ugh.