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In My Holy Opinion

Cox High Speed Internet Leaves Even T3+ Lines in the Dust But Their Customer Service Is From Hell

Ok, COX customer service officially sucks. It happened more than once that our Internet access was suspended without warning due to file sharing. It looks like a few months ago, COX implemented this stupid policy which requires them to shut off Internet access to a customer if someone (i.e. the RIAA) complains about the user sharing a particular file in violation of the file’s copyright protections.

I think this policy is especially moronic because the customer service representatives at COX are completely in the dark about this; the first time our Internet access was suspended, I was sent to an alternate web page (instead of the web site I was trying to access) that was set up by COX, stating the reason my account is suspended, the number I need to call to get it reactivated, as well as the file name of the offending file, and even the MAC address of the computer that was sharing it. So far so good. I called the number on the screen and things were up and running again within minutes (I had to “remove” the offending file). The second time around, however, I didn’t get the screen, instead I got nothing. I checked all the router settings and everything was OK (except that I was assigned a different IP address). I figured there must be something wrong with COX’s routers, so I called customer service and explained what was going on. The rep that I talked to made me go through all this bullshit of course, he wouldn’t help me unless I restarted my router and modem. I hate being treated like a fucking moron by these people. Does this guy really think I didn’t take the time to restart the router before I decided to sit through 15 min of annoying automated phone menus and elevator music? This is insane. But I wasn’t in the mood to argue, so I did what he told me to do. I explained to him several times that the reason things aren’t working is because our account might have been suspended for file sharing (since that happened before). I obviously made sure beforehand that it’s not something on our end that was causing this, so I was certain that it was either that, or their routers were misconfigured. The customer service rep had me do some more bullshit and finally told me that my router was “picking up a bad IP”.

“Yes, I KNOW!” that’s the reason I called, dammit. I was assigned a non-pulic IP address, so basically I was connected to COX’s little private “Internet” that only had one site (or no sites). And, as I had suspected, this was intentional.

Now, get this: after all this, the COX douchebag told me to CALL LINKSYS! WTF! I’ve never heard anything more stupid! As a matter of fact, I’m going to complain to COX tomorrow. I even tried to explain to the guy that the router is ASSIGNED the IP by the COX network. THERE IS NOTHING WRONG WITH THE ROUTER! I’m not a fucking idiot, I didn’t somehow misconfigure it. Even if I did, he wouldn’t be able to see it, so he wouldn’t “know” that it’s picking up a “bad” IP. My God.

Anyways, enough of my rants. This wasn’t even my original topic. My original topic was that, in spite of all this, COX has really, really fast connections sometimes. I’ve never really experienced anything below 300K / sec max download speed, but the highest it’s ever gone before was 550K, or something close to that. Today (just now), COX has broken new ground with me. Take a look at the above picture. Notice anything unusual?

FUCK YEAH!

My total download speed was 900+K/sec!!! Sustained! (over 15+ min) That’s kiloBYTES, so over 7Mbps (megaBITS per second)! Their advertised max is 6Mbps, and that’s for premium accounts, I have regular. Granted this happened at 2 AM on a Wednesday morning, BUT this is WAY faster than my average connection at my datacenter, or even at work or school. COX officially kicks ass. because of this, I might not complain about the imbeciles who work there. (if they weren’t such dumbfucks, they would probably enforce bandwidth limits a little more, so this can be a good thing….)

Photo Friday

From: http://www.photofriday.com 

This week’s challenge theme: Brother


Me and Jon at the Hookah Bar

Unfortunate Domain Names

From http://blog.dreamhosters.com/2007/01/26/20-more-unfortunate-domain-names

  • The Royal Tit-Watching (Ornithological) Society Of Britain used the domain:
    www.Nice-Tits.org
    tit-watching

  • Manufacturer of instruments for monitoring temperature, humidity and pressure Dickson didn’t think twice when they choose:
    www.DicksOnWeb.com
  • A holiday rentals company in Spain is called Choose Spain. Hopefully the vacation won’t be a painful experience:
    www.ChoosesPain.com
     
  • A company selling CAD software and Learning CDs was called ViaGrafix - quite innocent until a blue pill hit the market. The company is now called Learn2.
    www.ViagraFix.com
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    I think with at least some of those sites, the choice of names might have been deliberate: with an ambiguous / provocative domain name, the company gets more exposure on the web (i.e. this blog post), without compromising the company’s professional image (too much).
    If I was head of marketing, I would probably try to pull something like this :)

    flickr top views

    this should set aside any doubts about who’s hotter…

    flickr top views

    picture / video of the day

    screenshot

    Tony Almeida is still alive!

    I think that Tony Almeida (24) is still alive and well… maybe not well, but he’s definetely still alive.
    My theory is based on several observations that I have made, but I can’t be 100% sure:

    • When Tony dies in Season 5, he didn’t get a silent clock; Edgar Styles on the other hand did get a silent clock; Tony had been on the show since season 1, so if he was actually dead, he would definitely have gotten a silent clock.
    • (Jack didn’t get a silent clock when he supposedly died at the end of Season 4.)
    • The director John Cassar referred to Tony’s death as “alleged”
    • When Carlos Bernard was asked in a FOX interview if Tony was still alive, he did not comment
    • Right before Tony is injected with a lethal dose of whatever it is that he tried to give to Henderson, Tony thinks Henderson is already dead, since the substance that the doctor had given him had “shut down his nervous system”. This indicates that whatever substance it was can cause a person to appear dead…
    • According to my (very superficial) research, Carlos Bernard isn’t currently involved in any other acting roles, suggesting that he might be working on season 7.
    • There is an interview with Carlos Bernard on the Official 24 Web Site regarding him being sad that he wasn’t in season 6, possibly suggesting that he might be in subsequent seasons. If he’s off the show for good, why would FOX feature an interview with him on their prime time website?
    • The substance that Tony was injected with was originally intended for Henderson; Tony had made it clear that he wanted revenge on Henderson, which indicates that he would not have given him a lethal dose the first time
    • Tony has survived far more lethal attacks than Henderson’s
    • If his character is indeed killed, it would be far more spectacular than it was

      If you think you can prove me wrong, let me know, hehe!

    leet


    Alright, now that you’re here, a couple of things:

    • First, check out the new design of my site. (you can change the background with the boxes on top)
    • Second, I’ve started a new thing, as you can see, picture of the week/day. The first one is a picture of Toaster at the Manchester House:
      toaster.jpg It so happens that I have herewith declared Toaster to be the official face of In My Holy Opinion. SMILE! :-)

    • Good. Now, watch this video:

    • Still with me? Now read the rest of my blog, bookmark it, and leave me a comment.
    • Cheers!

    My New Year’s Resolution

    2048×2007

    (sorry for the title, it’s a nerdy inside joke)

    • 2
    • x the 2ex

    • 0
    • x the dr0ma

    • 4
    • x the m0ney

    • 8
    • x the bli7s

    Windows LiveWriter prevails over Firefox for easy image uploads

    LiveWriter Image Upload  I have been looking around for a solution for quite some time, that would allow me to quickly add pictures to my online posts… now I can. Instead of having to manually resize, upload, and link each image that I want to include, like the one below that I took on my upstairs balcony one night while hanging out with Alex and Toaster, I can just drag and drop it into the post. As long as I’m using Windows Live Writer to post to my blog, this isn’t a problem; the text formatting, and other option of Live Writer are also quite impressive. The program resizes the image for you, to the size that you specify, and gives you the option to add a link to a larger version.

    What I find most cool about this is that it works independently of photo hosting sites like photobucket or imageshack. In fact, automatically uploads the auto-generated image files via the blog’s API, in this case wordpress. I like this a lot better, because I like hosting my own images. After all, I’ve been in the hosting business before, and I have ample space to do this. I also don’t like being dependent on third-party services. I like having control over the content that I publish. I also like the flexibility to be able to later on change the scheme to something else, let’s say, for instance, integration with the Gallery2 application.toaster flower lightshow

    I was disappointed to see that I could not find a plugin for Firefox that was suitable for doing all this by simply dragging them into a textarea. Yes, I’m THAT lazy, but it’s really convenient: definetely try Windows Live Writer, even if you don’t post pictures often. The only plugin I found for Firefox that could do this is the ImageShack toolbar, which does exactly what I want (i.e. drag an image from your hard drive directly into the post in your web browser, and have the plugin auto-insert the link to the image, incl. thumbnail, as the file is uploaded from your computer to imageshack (after resizing on the client). Yes, it’s very, very cool, but in god’s name, I cannot find a plugin that does this for my own site, not just imageshack. I like it so much that I might even go so far as to hack the plugin for my own purposes… I don’t think it’s open source… hmm, any ideas?

     

     

    Link to Uploadr for Flickr | Firefox Add-ons | Mozilla Corporation

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