A Pilgrim’s Digression

Apparently, other folks on the East Coast have also been having issues with their “Comcastic” cable Internet service. Former Adelphia customers in Vermont, New Hampshire, and Massachusetts have also had to endure routine outages and the foolishness of Comcast customer no-service representatives.

In an article from November 25, High-speed to No-speed, a reporter for the Montpelier, Vermont, Times-Argus newspaper writes that after their switchover on November 15, “The Vermont Public Service Department, which oversees cable utilities, reported it was ’swamped’ with complaints from users who could not get online or do business on their Internet connection.”

One of those without service was a small business owner, Bo Muller-Moore, whose on-again, off-again relationship with his cable Internet sounds vaguely familiar to me:

“Last week I had no Internet access,” Muller-Moore said. “I got it back on Saturday, it was normal until Monday, and then things went screwy again.” Muller-Moore, though able to receive e-mail, couldn’t send outgoing mail from his Comcast account.

[...]

When Muller-Moore called Comcast to try to get the problem fixed on Monday he found that the help desk was anything but helpful.

“I was on the phone with Comcast for an hour, thinking the problem was just with my machine,” he said. “They said the problem was that I hadn’t changed all the settings on my e-mail account, but at the end of the hour is when the guy said ‘Whoops, there’s a problem in your whole area, let’s change the settings back.’ An enormous waste of time.”

Personally, I don’t think Comcast has any clue what outages there might be on a network formerly belonging to Adelphia. When I asked the first representative I talked to if there was an outage, he acted as if I had asked him the Final Jeopardy question, then he put me on hold for a few minutes while he went to the bathroom to pull an answer out of his ass.

I think it can be expected that during a period of changeover such as this, there are going to be glitches and outages. However, the problem I have is that Comcast has not provided consumers with any information regarding the switchover. I wouldn’t even have realized it was happening, if I hadn’t begun to have problems. In most cases, the representatives I’ve talked to cannot even tell me that there is an area-wide outage, unless I really press them on the subject. Even when they tell me “No, there is no outage,” they seem so unsure of themselves that I question whether they know what they are talking about.

Google News is replete with tales of woe from Comcast high-speed Internet customers in the North East, including this article about the trials of Martha’s Vineyard residents. All this leads me to suspect that before long, there will be a class action lawsuit, as there was in Los Angeles when Time Warner bought up Comcast and Adelphia’s customers.

Before I go the route of joining a lawsuit, however, I am going to give Adelphia a call and try to get a credit for my downtime on Monday. I will keep you posted.

For at least the past three or four weeks, I have been dealing with a really frustrating problem: Internet outages, sometimes for many hours at a time, and laggy connection speeds during those brief moments when I do have Internet service.

You may have heard, and promptly forgotten, that Comcast recently bought out Adelphia cable. For as long as I have lived in this area of Virginia, Adelphia was virtually our only choice for high speed internet service. DSL is the only other choice, but I have never really considered DSL as a viable option, primarily because Sprint bundles its DSL and phone service, and we do not use a land line phone. We have been a cell-phone only house for several years, now. At least with the cable company, I use both the cable TV and the cable Internet.

But even so, if my cable service does not improve dramatically, soon, I will consider ditching cable in favor of Satellite and a sluggish DSL connection. My neighbor has Sprint DSL, and his connection is always on.

How do I know my neighbors have uninterrupted Internet service? Because when my cable Internet is down, I connect to their open wireless network for slow, but available Internet.

What the hell is going on with my cable service? I called Comcast to find out.

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Before discovering World of Warcraft, I am not sure I knew the phrase ‘time sink,’ though I have always known of the concept.  A time sink in World of Warcraft is any activity that consumes inordinate amounts of time for little profit (with profit defined in terms of gaining experience towards leveling).  Some players believe professions and learning how to craft items to be time sinks.  Others, myself included, consider player versus player combat, in battlegrounds as well as in the streets of Goldshire (a popular dueling ground), to be a massive time sink.

Nevermind that practically speaking, World of Warcraft itself is one huge time sink.  I don’t know that there has ever been a game that requires something in the neighborhood of four to five hours of continuous play per day to advance a character.

Anyway, the discovery of this term ‘time sink’ has led me to ponder what other activities, outside the game, can be considered real-life time sinks.  I’ll begin a list here, which you can contribute towards if you feel like it:

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Avatar: 1. Hindu Mythology. The descent of a deity to the earth in an incarnate form; the manifest incarnation of a god. 2. Computers. The graphical representation of a person, as on the Internet.

Online, we all become gods of a sort. Quarrelsome, arrogant, belligerent, profane, and lecherous gods, but gods nonetheless…at least in our own minds.

So perhaps “demigod” is the better term for what technology has made us. A demigod is the bastard child of a god and a mortal, possessing some of the god’s powers and some of the mortal’s flaws.

One has only to spend an hour’s time browsing blogs and various online forums–especially forums devoted to hardcore computer gaming–to discover the extent to which our powers have gone to our head. Our human flaws, which ought to keep our egos in check, are veiled from our eyes by our arrogant boasting of our knowledge and prowess.

Far from the Information Age we were promised two decades ago, at the advent of the personal computer, we have entered an age in which in place of knowledge and information, the self-righteous dumb are empowered to foist their ignorant opinions upon the rest of us in the form of blogs and anonymous postings to websites.

Several recent events have combined to remind me of the ultimate tragedy of the modern predicament: that the more we come to rely upon our technology to empower us, the weaker we become.

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My frequent criticism of the Bush administration, particularly on the subject of Iraq, probably gives the impression that I favor an immediate withdraw of troops. Indeed, I often waver on the issue of withdraw, sometimes feeling that the situation is hopeless, at other times feeling that to leave the Iraqis to the the vicious mercies of the terror we unleashed in that country would be unchristian and immoral. The latter feeling usually prevails.

Iraq is not just about American interests, American deaths, or American “treasure,” as the pundits so drily refer to the billions, if not trillions, spent on Iraq. Iraq is about the Iraqis: what are their lives worth? What is their freedom worth? Far more Iraqis die brutal deaths every day than Americans, yet all we hear is a drum beat of grief over American deaths. No other conclusion can be reached except that but for our actions, our invasion and our failure to secure the country following the invasion, fewer Iraqis would be dying today. So then what then do we do to correct this travesty of a mistake?

I don’t think a Christian can adopt any other position but that any action we take must be judged by what is right by the Iraqis, because so far we have only done wrong by them. The initial invasion was wrong and immoral, no matter what rationalizations the President thinks up at this late date to justify his war of choice. And the occupation and “reconstruction” has been a total disaster, more destructive than reconstructive. So what do we do now, in order to correct our mistakes and leave the Iraqis marginally better off than they are today?

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One bit of wisdom I learned from the Poli Sci classes I took in High School and College is that America is a self-correcting, centrist democracy. We don’t like extremism, or too much power concentrated in one political party.

My reading of yesterday’s election results–Democrats picked up 28 House seats, 13 more than they needed–is that Americans felt their country was adrift on the road. And they corrected that drift by voting.

Despite the bromides spouted by politicians, Americans actually like a divided government. A government in which power is more evenly distributed between parties is a government that is not likely to infringe with impunity on the rights of the people. Thus finally, after all these years, Americans decided to divide the power within their government between Democrats and Republicans.

I was starting to have my doubts, there for awhile. Since at least 2001, Republicans had overturned the conventional wisdom I believed that if one party controlled the Executive, Americans would vote so as to give control of the Legislative branch to the opposite party. Republican power increased, in those years, but effectiveness in governing decreased. A counter-reaction was probably inevitable.

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I am someone for whom politics replaces the usual male interest in sports, so November 7th of an election year is one of my favorite days.  I have written very little about politics in the last few months, but I did pay close attention as I decided how I was going to vote.

For the most part, there wasn’t much to decide.  I’ve realized for a long time that Republicans need a good kick in the crotch.  I hope they get it today.

Up until about 2000, I was a pretty staunch Republican voter.  I’ve written elsewhere about my change of heart, so I won’t go into that here.  The story in short is that from the very beginning of the 2000-2001 Presidential campaign, I disliked George Bush and resented his appointment to be the party nominee.  That campaign was an eye-opener for me, as I saw my party and its surrogates on talk radio thoroughly savage a good man, a combat wounded veteran and prisoner of war, John McCain.  Instead of a true man, Republicans picked the phony, brush-clearing Texan, the fortunate son, George W. Bush.

It’s a tired story, but that’s how I felt.  Still, even though I voted for McCain, and then Gore, in ensuing elections I voted Republican.  I helped elect Republicans in Virginia, such as Bob Goodlatte.  I even voted for the last Republican Governor of Virginia, Jim Gilmore.  I also voted for John Warner.  Going back even further, throughout the nineties, I was a good soldier.  Republicans could have nominated Pat Robertson for President, and once Limbaugh had explained to me why Robertson was absolutely the best man living, I would have voted for him.

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