jameswharris

Comcast–Customer Service

Comcast does try to fix things, but they aren’t persistent until the problem is solved. I have internet and telephone service with Comcast. Months ago my phone started acting up after many months of perfect use upon switching from AT&T. I was also experiencing outages with my internet too. The phone service is voice over IP, so it’s dependent on the internet. The trouble was the outages were intermittent, the worse kind of technical failures for customer service.

When I’d call Comcast they’d run tests and tell me everything was fine. I complained enough they sent a tech guy out and he tested stuff. He checked my lines out to the pole and declared that everything was fine and I should call when the outage was happening so they could run a test. The trouble is my phone doesn’t work when the outages happen, and my damn cell phone doesn’t work in my house.

Just when I was researching returning to AT&T my phone started working again. It then worked without any problems for several months. I assumed Comcast fixed something in their system and nothing had been wrong at my house.

Well, the problem is back and my friends are again tired of trying to chat with me on the phone.

The outages are fleeting. I’ll be talking on the phone and I’ll have random moments, seconds or even minutes, when the people I’m talking to can’t hear me. I can hear them fine, they just can’t hear me. My wife works out of town, so I like to talk to her, or other friends in town. But my phone service is so annoying people don’t want to talk to me.

And I just don’t want to go through the same customer service rigmarole as before to get it fixed, when customer service didn’t fix it the last time.

Concurrent with the phone outages my Netflix is giving me trouble – and I’ve become quite addicted on streaming Netflix. My daily life has become dependent on Comcast technology – for socializing on the Internet, talking on the phone, and watching old TV shows late at night. I wish I could just pack it in and be content with reading books in the evening and live without the aggravation of fighting with Comcast customer service. And it’s not that Comcast isn’t pleasant to deal with on the phone, they are very nice, but like I said, they are quick to get rid of me when they don’t have something to work on directly.

I wonder why they don’t build modems that automatically monitor uptime and just inform the central office when their service is out or deteriorating. There’s no reason why they can’t build self-healing networks. In fact, they should be able to build networks that notice the trouble, inform the central computer, email me an apologetic note saying there is a problem and they are working on it, and then send the technicians a diagnosis of the problem to be fixed. Now that would be great customer service.

So what are my options?

Install my own monitoring tools and try to decipher the problem myself? Even if I could provide event logs I doubt if Comcast customer service will want to study them. It’s out of their work routine.
Wait for the system to fix itself like before?
Call AT&T and ask them to install U-verse?
Split my services so I go back to a AT&T land line but keep Comcast for internet (assuming things get fixed) and not have all my communication needs provided by one supplier?
Get a dual WAN router and pay for two internet services hoping one will always back up the other. I could get a land line and keep the VoIP, so I had dual phone systems too.

Notice, none of my options expects Comcast customer service to solve the problem. I sent Comcast an email and got a nice email back with several suggestions. The same tips they give you to try when you talk over the phone. Because my system works great most of the time, it shouldn’t be my system at all, unless it’s a flaky modem, and they claim they have run tests on it. The email was much more apologetic than the phone person, but the results are the same. They are rid of me until I try again. But I’m tired of calling. And I’m frustrated I can’t talk on the phone. And I’m annoyed that Netflix has stopped working like it did. And I’m depressed that my Rhapsody music stops and starts.

Ah, the woes of internet life.

JWH 12/14/10

Starman Jones, Then and Now

Memory is a peculiar attribute of consciousness. Who we are, and what we know, is based on memory, but our memories are so damn faulty. I first read Robert A. Heinlein’s Starman Jones back in the 8th grade, which was 1964-65, making me about twelve or thirteen. That’s as good as my memory gets. I wish I was one of those people like Isaac Asimov, who could say, on November 17th, 1964, a Tuesday, I was visiting my school library when I discovered a green book called Starman Jones – and it changed my life. Well, I can’t. I do know I discovered Red Planet first among the Heinlein juveniles, but I haven’t the slightest idea in what order I read the next eleven. I doesn’t matter, but I wish I knew. I think remembering all the details would have saved me from a life of absentminded existence.

I do have a few artifacts from the past that help verify my memory. Below is a scan of a hardback copy I bought with my first paycheck of my first hourly job. The book is signed by me 2/8/68. I had gotten a job at the Winn-Dixie Kwik-Chek in Coconut Grove, Florida in November of 1967, when I turned 16. I ordered all twelve Heinlein juvenile titles directly from the publishers and it took about six weeks to get them. Next to my signature in this edition are three tick marks, meaning I had read it three times, but I stopped making those tick marks decades ago.

I am sure I discovered Heinlein in the 8th grade because my 8th grade English teacher had put Heinlein on an approved reading list we could use for extra credit. I had discovered a few classic science fiction books by then on my own, like H. G. Wells and Jules Verne, but I had not yet discovered the genre of science fiction. I am 59 now and it’s extremely hard to imagine my 12 year-old self. I’d give anything to have perfect memory of being 12 and reading this book for the first time. I do know I was seriously into Heinlein by the Gemini space mission years and dreamed of growing up and becoming an astronaut.

I bring all this up because I recently listened to an audiobook edition of Starman Jones. This is the second time I listened to the story, and I’m quite confident I read Starman Jones at least four times between 1964 and 1992. For me, the book holds up extremely well. And in the Classic Science Fiction book club I’m in, we’re reading it for our December selection. Several people are reading it for the first time, and I get the impression they like it. [Here’s Carl’s review.]

Maybe Starman Jones will become a science fiction classic. It’s among my Top 10 favorite Heinlein stories, and I consider it one of the Top 25 science fiction books of all time – but that’s my prejudice nostalgia talking.

Can I make an objective case why I think Starman Jones is a great science fiction novel? Why does a book first published in 1953 for boys deserved to still be read by people of all ages in 2010? Does it have qualities like Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice or Great Expectations by Charles Dickens that make them readable and loved so long after they were first published? Austen and Dickens wrote two of the greatest love stories of all time, and I’m afraid Max and Ellie are no Pip and Estella. Max Jones is more like Jim Hawkins in Treasure Island, a young man who gets to travel very far from home.

Starman Jones is for anyone who daydreams of exotic adventures. Starman Jones is for readers who want to escape their mundane life and see the universe. That’s the key, I didn’t say, “See the world.” The quintessential science fiction novel is about going to the planets or the stars. Max Jones is an Ozark farm boy in the future that has an eidetic memory and has memorized his Uncle’s astrogation manuals – the mathematics for navigating in space. Many of the book club members got into science fiction because of seeing Star Wars when they were nine. Luke Skywalker was also a farm boy that wanted to go into space, and he had his own special hidden talent too.

I think those overlapping story aspects reveal qualities that go into great science fiction.

I wish I could remember what being Jimmy Harris was like in 1964 – because being Jim Harris of 2010 isn’t the same. Back then I was naïve enough to believe I would actually go into space like Max. Now, I can only read books and judge them for their ability to help me forget that I didn’t grow up to live the life of the romantic fiction of my youth. Why has the Harry Potter books become so successful with young and old alike? I think we all want to be 11 again, and live in a world where we can find Platform 9 3/4. Kid readers don’t know that magic doesn’t exist – us old farts don’t care that it doesn’t.

Starman Jones has that quality that makes readers believe in the magic of space travel. At 59 I know I would hate being an astronaut, so I’m not reading Starman Jones for the same reason I loved it as age 12. But this revelation might point to why Pride and Prejudice and Great Expectations are great books in the same way. When we’re young, reading those books make us want to find love and romance in our real lives, but when we’re older, we read those books differently. We know we’re too old for new love and romance, travel and adventure, except through books. We understand why Dickens made up the story about Pip and Estella. (Dickens wrote Great Expectations while he was an old man chasing a very young woman chaperoned by her mother.)

A great classic has to sell the future as a possibly reality to fuel our youthful dreams, but it is also has to satisfy us late in life as a substitute for waning love and adventure as a dying fantasy we embrace to fuel our wilting spirits. I wish I could perfectly remember who I wanted to be when I was young, but then I wish my younger self could have experienced what I became – in other words, if I could have only known then what I know now. If I did, would I have known when I first read Starman Jones what it would eventually mean to the 59 year old me? Could a wise young me have thought, “This is the fantasy of my life.”

JWH – 12/7/10

JCPenney–Customer Service

The other day I saw a story on the news about how angry people get over customer service. It was about how unhappy people are over what they feel is a major decline in customer service. Now I understand that companies and their employees can make simple mistakes, so I’m not talking about how often we get bad service. What I’m talking about is how companies go about fixing their mistakes once they make them. How I rate a company’s customer service is by how they solve problems that they caused themselves.

I’m a guy that doesn’t like to shop, so I buy online. Buying online is convenient unless you have to send something back, and I hate to send things back. So I try to always order exactly what I want. I’m not one of those people who order three different digital cameras and send the two back they don’t like. I especially hate buying something and then discovering it’s a returned item. When I pay for new I expect new.

If I do take a chance on ordering something sight unseen and I don’t like it, I’ll just give it to Goodwill rather than take it back. With clothes I tend to find brands and styles that don’t change and order them time and again, expecting that what I buy online will be just like what I’ve bought before.

I like undershirts with long tails, so I buy Stafford Vneck Tees that are X-Large Tall from JCPenney. I like to get them in a six pack. Recently I ordered another six pack but I received three tees in a plain plastic bag with a computer label slapped on it. The three tees looked new, but I was grossed out by the idea that someone probably bought a bag of six and returned them and some flunky in shipping threw the three shirts in a plastic bag without counting and sealed it with a computer label which clearly says Pk6. There wasn’t even a cardboard photo of a guy modeling a tee shirt like you’d expect with a new package.

You’d think they’d have a law against selling returned underwear?

But anyway, I believe it’s obvious that JCPenney made a mistake. I called them up and my options are to send the shirts back at my expense or return them to a JCPenney store. They offered to immediately send out new shirts, but to bill my credit card. I would only get credit when the others were returned. I believe that is horrible customer service!

At best I would have been impressed if they had said, sorry, we shouldn’t have sent you returned underwear, so throw those away, and we’ll send you an unopened new package right away. Next best, because I understand they can’t trust customers not to cheat them, would be to send me shipping bag with automatic postage so I could just leave it for my mailman or UPS guy to pick up.

It’s their mistake, why should I pay for it?

I can understand telling customers to pay for return shipping for items the customer didn’t like. That’s not JCPenney’s fault. But when a company makes a mistake they should do everything to fix it at no cost to the customer. That’s good customer service. Evidently JCPenney feels that it’s more profitable to have a certain level of customer dissatisfaction over bad customer service than to spend the money for good customer service.

My final choices are:

Throw the shirts away and never shop with JCPenney again and lose my money
Assume the three shirts are okay and wear them and actually pay twice as much
Take them back to a store and get credit and quit shopping at JCPenney

In none of the three options does JCPenney end up paying for its mistake. I either let JCPenny rip me off, or spend the money and time driving out to the mall to take the shirts back, or wrap them up, drive to the post office and pay to send the shirts back. I got 90 days, so the easiest thing to do that would get my money back would be to wait until I need to go to Best Buy and then run the shirts back to JCPenney.

JWH – 12/5/10

Optimizing a Windows 7 HTPC

This year I built a Windows 7 HTPC and cancelled my Comcast cable. My wife hates living without the Comcast DVR and bitterly complains that the HTPC with Windows Media Center doesn’t offer the same level of functionality as the DVR. She’s right, the Comcast DVR worked almost flawlessly, and it was nearly instantaneous performing all its duties. My Windows 7 machine, with a AMD Athlon X2 240 and 4gb of fast memory, should be nimble enough to handle the job, but it often acts sluggish, or even freezes up. So I went on a quest to improve my HTPC setup.

Optimizing a Home Theater PC (HTPC) means four things:

Ease of use
Functionality
Performance
Features

Pitifully, my more powerful computer comes up short against the Comcast DVR box. Of course this is competing a general purpose operating system, Windows, against dedicated hardware. With hundreds of thousands of people cancelling their cable and satellite TV plans there is a big push for a home brew solution and many are turning to the HTPC concept. Right now HTPCs are a pain in the ass to setup and use, but will that always be the case?

If you haven’t gotten addicted to the DVR way of TV watching, I’d recommend just getting an Internet TV or a Roku box and call it quits. But if you want to record shows then you’ll want to get to know Windows Media Center and Windows 7. There are many other solutions but you need to be a hardcore hacker to love them.

Googling seems to suggest that Windows 7 shouldn’t need any performance tweaking or services pruning if you have a dual processor with 4 gigabytes of memory, which I do. However, I do have a 1.5 terabyte drive and it had gotten almost full with recorded shows. So I deleted about 400 gigabytes of recordings and things picked up quite a bit.

Then I saw a sale at NewEgg for a MSI R5570 ATI graphics card with 1gb of memory. I was using the built-in AMD785G chipset and figured this 5500 level ATI card should be a lot better than their old 4200 level graphics. I bought and installed the card and got these results in the Performance Index:

	4200	5570
Processor	6.3	6.3
Memory	5.9	7.2
Business Graphics	4.4	6.7
Gaming Graphics	5.5	6.7
Hard Drive	5.9	5.9

From these numbers I thought I would see a dramatic improvement in using Windows Media Center, but I didn’t. It was slightly better, and that might have been perceptual, especially because I cleaned out so many files.

However, the new video did make one dazzling change – sound. For some reason the built-in graphics and HDMI cable on the motherboard wouldn’t play sound through the HDMI cable. The new card does, and the sound, after updating all the drivers, sounds dramatically better. And it’s allowed me to simplify my setup.

Before I had a HDMI cable going to the TV for video and a optical S/PDIF cable going to the Pioneer receiver for sound. And on my LG Blu-Ray player I had a HDMI cable going to the TV for video and an another optical cable going to the Pioneer for sound. This tended to confuse the LG at times. If I’d play a CD and then switch to a Blu-Ray it wouldn’t always automatically use the appropriate cable.

Now, for both the HTPC and Blu-Ray, I have one HDMI cable each for both video and sound. I have one S/PDIF optical cable passing sound from the TV to the receiver. Much more elegant wiring. I couldn’t do this before because the motherboard graphics wouldn’t pass sound over the HDMI cable.

And I can keep both the Blu-Ray and HTPC on the same sound source (TV). That’s less confusing for my wife. All she has to do is turn on the receiver without worrying about which channel to use for audio – all devices now play through the TV sound channel. The HTPC now sounds wonderful, getting multichannel sound from the HTPC, but I don’t know why. Why did a new video card help the sound? I’m wondering if the HDMI driver I have now is just way better than the S/PDIF driver???

Also, this new setup means we don’t have to use the receiver if we don’t want to. All sound goes through the TV, which can optionally be boosted by the receiver. My wife hates turning on extra devices and using three remotes. She’s gotten used to controlling the TV with the wireless keyboard which is a big stumbling block to using a HTPC. If we can do everything within Windows Media Center then all we have to do is power up the TV and receiver and tap any key on the wireless keyboard to wake up the computer and then everything can be controlled from it. It’s not as convenient as the DVR remote, but then we get a lot more functionality from using the computer with a 1920×1080 screen. She can browse the web and play Farmville is she wants.

Probably if I keep the number of recorded shows down to a smaller list, performance within Windows Media Center will be better, but using the HTPC doesn’t snap like using the DVR. Plus Windows Media Center doesn’t work like the DVR. The Comcast DVR would always start recording whatever show you tuned to in case you wanted to pause or rewind. Window Media Center doesn’t do that. Now, that feature could be added to a future version of Windows Media Center and that sure would be nice.

However, the NUMBER ONE improvement Windows Media Player could offer is built-in Blu-Ray playback support. All the Blu-Ray software I’ve tried or studied just doesn’t do the job – and it’s just plain inconvenient to leave Windows Media Player once you’ve standardized on it for your HTPC. If Windows Media Center offered Blu-Ray support I could ditch my LG Blu-Ray player and simplify my setup even more.

Hulu should be integrated into Windows Media Player too, like Netflix. However, I prefer the Netflix interface in my LG Blu-Ray player over the one in Windows Media Player. Hell, I prefer the Netflix web interface to the one inside Windows Media Player, but if I’m watching a recorded show and then wanted to watch an episode of TV from Netflix, switching to the LG is extra work. It would be far more elegant to just click on Netflix within Windows Media Center.

I really hope the next version of Windows Media Center is a quantum leap forward. Right now using a HTPC is fine for guys like me who don’t mind goofing around with technology, but it annoys the hell out of my wife, and she’s more of a typical TV user. Windows Media Center needs to be optimized for her.

JWH – 11/29/10

Science Fiction Immortality

Everyone wants to live as long as they can, and that’s true of books too. A writer sells a book to a publisher and they print up a bunch of copies. As long as the book keeps selling they keep printing. Most books never sell out their original print run and go out of print. Some books are popular enough that they stay in print – that’s a sign of a great book.

I’m in an online science fiction book club called Classic Science Fiction. We have just voted on the 24 books we want to read in 2011 and I thought it would be interesting to see how many are in print, and whether or not they have an ebook edition available, or even an audio edition. Real classics should be available in all formats.

As a rule, if a book isn’t easily available, it doesn’t get read by many members in the book club. Some members won’t read the book unless they already own it, can find a cheap copy at a local used bookstore or get it from the library. Used bookstores and libraries are very important for keeping a book alive. I’m hoping ebooks will catch on as a new form of literary life extension.

The prices I used below are from Amazon, and I used the cheapest edition in each category. As can quickly be seen, some books are out of print in all formats, not a good sign. The book title is linked to the Internet Science Fiction Database to reveal it’s publication history. Finally, I decided to see if the book is at my public library. It’s wonderful to think that libraries are Heaven for books, where they never die and will be protected and preserved for all time. Sadly, that’s not true. Modern public libraries routinely purge uncirculated titles.

Title	Print	Ebook	Audio	Library
Midnight at the Well of Souls Jack Chalker				Yes
Monument Lloyd Biggle, Jr	$15.00			Yes
Brain Wave Poul Anderson		$3.99
Rite of Passage Alexei Panshin	$12.74	$4.79		Yes
Restoree Anne McCaffrey	$7.99	$6.29		Yes
The Mote in God’s Eye Niven and Pournelle	$7.99		$17.24	Yes
The Cosmic Puppets Philip K. Dick	$11.07
Earthlight Arthur C. Clarke				Yes
The Man Who Folded Himself David Gerrold	$11.86
Tau Zero Poul Anderson		$3.99		Yes
Galactic Patrol E.E. Smith			$14.17	Yes
Empire Star Samuel R. Delany	$10.20			Yes
Earth David Brin	$7.99	$6.29		Yes
Flashforward Robert J. Sawyer	$7.79	$7.99	$15.73	Yes
Brasyl Ian McDonald	$12.46	$9.99
Beggars in Spain Nancy Kress	$11.16	$9.99	$9.44	Yes
Primary Inversion Catherine Asaro	$13.99	Free	$14.68	Yes
Risen Empire Scott Westerfield	$10.17
Calculating God Robert J. Sawyer	$5.98	$9.99	$18.71	Yes
The Life of Pi Yann Martel	$8.30	$7.78	$19.40	Yes
The Barsoom Project Niven and Barnes	$10.87	$9.99		Yes
Replay Ken Grimwood	$10.97		$18.99
Spin Robert Charles Wilson	$7.99	$7.99	$30.95
On Basilisk Station David Weber	$7.99	Free	$18.71	Yes

JWH – 11/27/10