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.
