Comcast sucks again
Over the last month or so my Comcast cable internet service has gone in and out regularly. I have service outages nearly everyday or every other day.
The 1st time I made an appointment for a tech to come to my house, the tech installed an amplifier on the cable line. That worked for two days then the random outages started again.
Next, I called again and made another appointment and was told the next available was three days away. Fine. The next day I called to reschedule the appointment due to a scheduling conflict and was told by the call center that I never had an appointment in the first place!
The third time I made an appointment for a tech to come to my house, they didn’t show up. No call or anything. That was last week.
I’m getting ready to call again. We’ll see what happens this time.
If Comcast sees this blog, please help me before I’m forced to switch to Knology. Maybe somebody can contact me who can actually do something and not just say, “Call Comcast and make an appointment”. I already tried that. Send me a message here.
UPDATE:
So we called and made an appointment for after 5pm on Wednesday. 10 minutes later we call again to double check the appointment time with the automated system and it says our appointment is Tuesday between 8 – 5pm. WTF. So either Comcast’s appointment system is a piece of junk or the call center staff is intentionally screwing up appointments. With 3 of our 4 appointments were scheduled incorrectly, I wager that Comcast staff is screwing up the appointments intentionally (or they just don’t care).
UPDATE AGAIN: Comcast tech came out Tuesday and ran a new cable from the pole to the house. Been working fine since. Comcast tech was super nice and seemed very competent.
Quicken 2009 Scheduled Transaction Bug
Last night, for the second time in less than a month my Quicken data file was hosed up by a bug in Quicken 2009 R6. The bug causes a single scheduled transaction to automatically keep entering itself into the register when starting Quicken. Quicken looks like it freezes but what’s actually happening is the scheduled transaction is being entered one after another on into the future until you kill Quicken.
The first time this happened, our monthly utility bill was entered every month up to the year 4800. This causes the QDF file to grow huge. Mine went from 12 MB to 120 MB. The second time this happened one of our scheduled deposits entered 300 years into the future before I realized what was happening and killed Quicken. The QDF file had grown to 30 MB this time.
The fix is to:
1. Backup your quicken data files!!!!!!!!!!!!
2. Set your system clock back to 12/31/2008.
3. Open quicken.
4. Delete the problem scheduled transaction.
5. Set your system clock back to current date.
6. Open quicken and run a verify on the data file.
7. Delete all the erroneously entered scheduled transaction – in the register, filter by date into the future ~300 years at a time (more than that and Quicken will crash), highlight them all and delete. Do that changing the date filter until all the bad transactions are gone.
8. Recreate the scheduled transaction you previously deleted.
9. Run verify again.
Your QDF file will still be huge so I did a File -> File Operations -> Copy. The new copy won’t have all the empty space from those hundreds/thousands of years of transactions you just deleted. Use the new copy as your active Quicken file.
Intuit has a support article on this issue with similar instructions but I can’t find it now.
We’ve changed all our scheduled transactions to be reminders, not automatically entered. This is a highly annoying bug. Intuit sucks.
I found the Intuit support article: Quicken freezes when attempting to open a data file created prior to 1/1/09
Open-source sucks?
Open-source in the corporate environment? My years in corporate IT have taught me that having a support contact from a major vendor is very desirable. Corporate wants/mandates the safety net of that vendor support contract.
Companies can employ the talent to develop and maintain open-source products. But that talent can leave at ANYTIME. That’s the problem with open-source in the corporate environment.
Moving Team Foundation to a new server
Good write up of steps here.
SPN, Service Principal Names, SetSPN, Kerberos
Recently migrated a webserver to a different domain and immediately started having trouble with Windows User authentication using IE.
Worked fine with Firefox or with IE if you used the IP address of the webserver. Just not with IE using the NetBIOS or FQDN of the webserver. Ended up being SPN and Kerberos issues.
Read this.
This is also useful.
Datson Ferrari
How to Troubleshoot Outlook
Learn Powershell
Windows Powershell Owner’s Manual
iSCSI
Aimed at VMWare users:
A “Multivendor Post” to help our mutual iSCSI customers using VMware
Conficker Worm
Get ready for April 1st.
Conficker Worm: Help Protect Windows from Conficker.A and Conficker.B
Save Wireless Profile to USB in XP
Royal TS
Royal TS is a tool for organizing multiple terminal services sessions.
“…a simple and easy way to organize, connect and switch between remote desktops.”
Comcast HD sucks? Not anymore.
A technician came out and fixed whatever the problem was. He had to go up the pole in front of the house. No idea what he did. Seems to be working fine now though.
Comcast seems to be prowling the web for unhappy customers, if you notice the comment on the previous post. Not a bad thing.
Comcast HD sucks?
Anybody else experiencing crappy HD on Comcast these days? Has been choppy video and sound for about the last month and a half for us. Only on the HD channels.
Send email from Ubuntu
Let’s say you have a home Ubuntu server behind router and you want to be able to send emails via a cron job or Nagios or something like that. Here is how to configure Exim4 to do that.
Loading Ubuntu Server on G4 Powerbook
Slightly tricky as Ubuntu 8.10 server doesn’t recognize the cd-rom drive.
First, the Ubuntu server download is available here.
Second, the fix so the install will recognize the cd-rom is here. The important part is this:
“The cd issue could be solved in my imac G3 slot-loading typing in the command prompt (switch to another virtual screen with Ctrl-Alt-F2):
modprobe ide-scsi
then when asked for a cd device answer /dev/scd0″
That worked on my 667 mhz G4 titanium DVI Powerbook also.
A Speech
Patton Oswalt’s speech to the graduating seniors at his former high school.
via metafilter
Rise in SQL Injection Attacks Exploiting Unverified User Data Input
Microsoft Security Advisory (954462)M
Found via Carpe Datum
Have fun.
A post to put your work life in perspective.
Tips for upgrading from TFS2005 to TFS2008
Great tips on this site.
