Three Gee Yes!

I’ve had my iPhone 3GS for one week now (yes, I did buy one on the first day they were available, but I didn’t wait in line for it – the AT&T store here in east-nowhere had plenty) and I’d like to share with you my impressions.

Now I’m not going to go on and on about the faster response due to the hardware, although that is impressive, or the fact that upgrading from a first generation iPhone to anything with 3G and GPS is awesome. Nor will I sing the praises of Copy and Paste, although the inclusion of them is of course the long-awaited cherry on the top of the iPhone Sundae.

No, better people than me have written about all these things.

What I want to talk about are some of the lesser publicized benefits of drinking the 3GS Kool-Aid.

Play It Again

On the Edge version of the iPhone (not sure how this worked on the 3G) if you were listening to music (or, more likely in my case, a podcast) and paused it, probably using the button on the earbuds, there was some period of time during with clicking the earbud button again would un-pause the audio.

I never figured out how long this was, but if you waited too long (definitely 10 or 15 minutes was too long) nothing would happen and you would have to dig the phone out of your pocket, unlock it, go back to the iPod application and hit the play icon to start it up.

With the 3GS, the play/pause functionality on the earbuds seems to have no timeout. This, to me, is the equivalent of your car stereo starting up at the same spot every time you turn on the car, versus resetting to some idle state if the car is off for more than fifteen minutes.

Jam and Edge

It was almost comical, a few months after the iPhone came out, everybody suddently became specifically aware of the noise that GSM signals caused when interfering with audio equipment. I remember sitting in the meeting room at work, with severn or eight people packing iPhones and the conference call speaker phone sputtering the whole time.

The worst part, though, was that I had to put my phone into Airplane Mode whenever hooking it up to the radio in my car. This is probably because the radio (and the car) is somewhat old and doesn’t have the shielding necessary to deal with today’s electronic interference. But still it was a pain.

With the 3GS (and I assume the 3G), this all went away. Sure, I still get some interference, but a) it happens so infrequently and has such short duration that it is easily ignorable and b) the 3G interference noise is so much less offensive than the Edge noise.

The Edge interference noise was usually louder than the volume coming out of the stereo and, at least in the areas I tend to drive through, was “on” more than it was “off”. It was so bad that driving the 3 minutes to my allergy shots from work, I couldn’t leave the phone’s GSM radio on because I wouldn’t be able to listen to anything without the interference killing it.

The 3G interference noise is much quieter, and on some level, it also just sounds like the data is being passed so much quicker, which is probably why it doesn’t last as long. It’s like listening to a 9600KBaud modem connection noise versus a 2400 Kbaud.

I’ve driven to and from work and all around town this week with the 3GS plugged into the car stereo, and the noise has been on the order of a few seconds per day, versus 30+ seconds for every minute on Edge.

And lest you think that I’m an anomaly, I don’t live in a major metropolitan area (proof: right down my street is a place that, until recently, had a sign outside that said “Taxidermist/Beauty Salon”) so my 3G coverage should not be any better than most places around the country.

I’m Ready For My Close-Up Mr. Damille

But the most surprising, and coolest, thing about the 3GS is the camera.

Of course this was a major weakness of the original (and 3G) iPhone. Even though it had 2.0 Megapixels (which, coincidentally, is the same as my decrepit point-and-shoot Canon camera) the tiny optics and lack of exposure and focus control made it only useful because it was the one camera you always had on you. My pictures were consistently blurry and lint-covered. Not to mention over/under-exposed.

The 3GS not only has a 3.0 Megapixel camera, with focus and exposure controls (to some degree) which actually work pretty well, but it adds video capability.

You all knew this already. But there is one feature of the video camera that deserves special mention.

How many of us have, when we first got hold of a digital camera that shot video, rotated the camera 90 degrees to capture something in portrait aspect ratio, only to find, upon importing it into the computer, that neither the camera nor the computer could compensate for that, and now you’re stuck with either fixing it in some high-end software like Final Cut or Adobe Premiere, or watching what you recorded with your head tilted at a painful angle?

I mean, the cameras are smart enough to rotate still photos 90 degrees, but they don’t seem to understand how to do that with video.

Engineers at Apple must have run into this because they hooked the video camera into the tilt sensor of the phone, so that if you turn it, it still plays back right-side up. This is one of the many touches that make me think that Apple could dominate the camera market if they a) wanted to, and b) hired enough optics experts away from Canon and/or Nikon.

All Is Not Well

There are, however, a few missteps, as there always are, even with Apple.

First of all, the iPhone 3GS does not come with a dock to set it in while charging/syncing. I don’t know if the 3G came with one, but the Edge one did, and I used it daily. Apple charges $29 for one. Is anyone going to pay that much? I’m not.

The next one is probably a fluke, but the power adapter that came with my phone doesn’t work. I did the whole combinatorial testing suite (old adapter, new cable; new adapter, old cable; etc) and came to the undeniable conclusion that my power adapter does not charge.

So I called up the AT&T store, and using the imperfect choices on their menu, got shunted over to Apple’s support line. Apple’s tech support guy took fifteen minutes and a consultation with a “technical specialist” to tell me to go to the AT&T store for a replacement part.

You’re probably smart enought to predict that when I got to the AT&T store, they said I had to go to the Apple store, since AT&T doesn’t stock replacement parts. So now I need to trek over to the Apple store, which is much farther than the AT&T store, to get it replaced.

I haven’t heard any other reports of anyone’s adapter being DOA, so like I said, this is probably just a fluke.

My third complaint is about the shape. The rounded back of the 3GS (and 3G) is problematic. The Edge phone had a nice flat back that remained stable when you pushed the home button while it was on a tabletop.

Not so with the 3G varieties. I understand that they had to increase the thickness of the middle part of the phone due to increased hardware so the tapered the ends give the illusion of thinness, but I’d rather have a slightly thicker phone all the way down than try to type on a weeble-wobble.

My last complaint is perhaps not unique to the 3GS, but I haven’t tested it on any other platform. And it’s sort of one of those “problems you’d love to have” kind of things.

You see, my company operates a Wifi network. I’ve had my Edge iPhone connected to it for at least the past year. It’s nice because when I’m in part of the building where reception is good, bandwidth was noticeably better than Edge speeds.

Now that I have access to the 3G network (such that it is on AT&T), my throughput on 3G anywhere in the building is faster than the best throughput on the corporate Wifi. So, I told my phone to ignore that Wifi network. Done and done.

Or so I thought.

Every time I open up Mail, Safari, or any other net-enabled application, it asks me if I want to join the very network that I told it to ignore. What was the point of ignoring it?

If anyone knows how to stop the phone from asking me to join this network, please let me know. It’s kind of annoying.

Until then, I’ll keep hitting “Cancel” every time it comes up and enjoying my 3GS speed demon.

TV == Home

When we moved in here, we owned one television. We decided to put it upstairs in the workout room, since it’s an older, but high-quality 36″ Sony CRT, and we would probably want to get a nice big flat screen TV for the family room.

This worked well enough, since, with Anne living in Europe, I could watch TV sitting in the bean bag chair in the workout room and didn’t really need anything in the family room.

Then, what with the divorce and everything, we decided to try to sell the house, and so the big-screen TV plans kind of went out the window. I continued to use the TV in the workout room, but I really wanted something in the family room, since that’s where the couch is.

Also, since I started dating Karen, I now have more reason to have a flickering picture box near the couch – the bean bag is just not made for two people.

For the past few months I’ve made do with my old, circa-2001, swing-arm iMac as a “media PC”. But with its 17″ screen, it’s not much of an experience.

The final straw was the Wii. I got myself a Wii and Guitar Hero World Tour as a little birthday/Christmas present and, well, it’s pretty lame rocking out on a rickety folding chair crammed in-between the Bowflex, the bean bag chair and the elliptical machine.

Yesterday, my brother-in-law came over and helped me move the entertainment center and the TV into the family room. Finally I was able to hook up my sweet Bose surround-sound speaker system and I can honestly call it a media room.

It took me a while to hook everything back up, but I now have my DVD player, Wii, PS2 and iMac* all hooked up through the receiver and TV and Bose speakers. The iMac basically acts as a music streaming client since my music library is on the Macbook Pro upstairs. An Airport Express or AppleTV (or Roku, or Squeeze box) would probably be better, but that would involve spending money.

I was struck today by how much having a TV/entertaiment system in the family room really makes it a home to me. Even though I do not have cable, and thus don’t ever watch “live” TV, just being able to relax on the couch and watch a DVD or listen to music on the good system makes my life measurably better.

*Just a few years ago, the list of components in my entertainment system was vastly different – DVD, VCR, 200 CD changer, MiniDisc deck (and before that, actual cassette tape!).**

**Now that I come to think of it, everything in my entertainment center right now (DVD, Wii, PS2, iMac) plays CDs and DVDs (and probably MP3’s, WAVs, etc.)

Stupid Midnight

There should be a handful of people out there that will get a kick out this one:

I’ve figuratively banged my head against the wall for the past 20 minutes trying to figure out a coding problem that wasn’t a coding problem.

After working all weekend and several night’s straight on a project, I’m one tiny detail from finally being able to pull everything together. That tiny detail to convert the datestamp from a form entry in the date seconds of the Unix Epoch of which several calendar elements are generated from in the rest of the project.

Should be a simple line of code, take like 2 minutes to type it in and test it.

Huh. It’s giving me tomorrow’s date.

Okay, somehow I through in a stray “-“ somewhere or something stupid.

No, that’s not it.

Okay, let me start isolating each section of the code.

Nothing.

I finally isolate the 7 lines for the 400 on that file – that actual code that converts the date. I add a simple echo to see what it’s converting the date to and see what’s going on.

WTF?! It still say tomorrow?

“Honey,” I yell, “What’s the date?”

“The 25th” she answers.

“That’s what I thought.”

Damn it, it’s still giving me one day out!

Oh, wait. What time is it? Ohhhhhh. 12:36am.

Stupid Unix Epoch – it should know I haven’t gone to bed yet so as far and I’m concerned it’s still 2008-25-11, or 1227589200 seconds from 1970-1-1!

I hate windows and the things that run it!

Okay, yeah – that’s not earth shattering, nor original. But dammit, I’ve really had enough already!

Last night, once again, my machine wouldn’t boot up because the NTLDR got corrupted. To make matters worse, I guess I pushed the crappy western digital drive it was loaded on past its limits in the recovery console because once I repaired everything, the drive sorta failed after the 2nd reboot. I say sorta failed in the sense that though it was physically fine, the bios would not longer recognize it. Oddly enough, one of my SATA controller cards recognized it just fine!

Luckily, having been screwed by Windoze about 18 times this year alone, I was prepared. I had a spare hard drive on hand and an image of a fairly recent copy of the failed drive on an external HD ready – a practice I got into the past 4 months because I knew Windows with eventually **beep** me in the **beep** with a **beep** **beep** **beep** **beep** Orange **beep** **beep** **beep** **beep** tin **beep** **beep** **beep** **beep** **beep** **beep**  ruler!

The best and I mean BEST part of all this is that this always manages to happen when I’m in the middle of something with a deadline. It NEVER happens when I’m screwing around. I was simply coding some PHP – in TXT editor no less when it happened. But yet, let me render a 27 GB MAX9 project, or a 43 layer After Effects project, while watching YouTube as I’m video chatting on Skype and downloading fifteen Fan films, and nothing ever goes wrong!

So yeah, average day for a windows user – nothing new.

I need a Mac, I know, you don’t have to remind me. Maybe one month this GD windows machine will stay up long enough that I don’t have to sink any more money into to fix something and I’ll saved enough for one.

I hate windows.

A lot.

**beep** **beep** **beep** **beep** Bill Gates.

100 meters in 2 1/2 hours

Somebody went and wrote (intentionally) the worst possible user interface for a video game, and it’s pretty hilarious. It’s called, simply, QWOP.

I was doing OK, right up until the first hurdle:

Of course, by “doing OK”, I mean I figured out how to hobble along in a front split position while not falling over. It took me a few minutes to reach 50 meters.

The Slog post where I found that also had a link to this, which I saw a while ago, but still cracks me up:

I, For One, Welcome Our New Google Overlords

I’ve been using Google’s new Chrome browser for a couple days now (mainly at work where I’m forced to use Windows), and I have to say I’m very impressed.

Firefox has been my browser of choice since it came out, and before that I used Netscape Navigator. I’ve never been able to get used to IE or Safari. IE, because it’s swill, and Safari because it’s missing a few key UI elements that I’m really used to having in Firefox. Otherwise it’s a great browser, and I use it for the sites that Firefox doesn’t render correctly.

While I am a UI geek, I’m not a graphic designer or typography nerd, so my focus tends to be on everyday interaction and not so much the nit-picky details like font choice, anti-aliasing or things like that. Not that there’s anything wrong with that – we need people to obsess over those things to get quality products like the Mac OS and the iPhone. It’s just not my thing.

So, while I understand there are some anti-aliasing problems in Google Chrome, I would be hard-pressed to notice them.

What impressed me about Chrome is how easy it was to switch from Firefox. All the keyboard shortcuts do exactly what I expect; the controls that I use are available and prominent; and the things that are different or surprising are minimal and pleasantly so.

‘Minimal’ is really the key word here. As the cartoon says, Google really wanted to minimize the ‘chrome’ of the app – just get out of the way of the content. This has been one of my biggest frustrations with browsers, starting with Netscape 3: more buttons, more toolbars, more cruft.

Remember the little grab-handles on Netscape 3 that would allow you to move or collapse individual toolbars? What is the ratio of times that you actually wanted to use that feature vs. the number of times you hit it by accident and went “WTF? Where did all my buttons go?”

That’s the kind of stuff that gets in the way of a good browsing experience, and Chrome has none of it.

Other things I like:

• The download interface is pleasant. For some reason, which is probably more to do with Windows than Firefox, I get interrupted by the download interface no matter what I have the preferences set to. Google does a nice little animation which makes it clear where to go to get the downloaded files and then gets out of your way.
• Text completion in the “omnibar” works nicely. Except that I’m used to typing “domain” in Firefox’s URL bar and having it just tack on the “.com” automatically. Google performs a search, which usually nets the site at the top of the list, but it’s an extra click. The history memory, though, is rather smooth.
• Tab resizing when adding/removing tabs is slick.
• Showing common locations on a New Tab. I’m starting to get very used to this feature.
• Application shortcuts. I’ve already started using this for some internal work web apps that I want opened at a different size than my browser. Very nice.
• Incognito Browsing. Finally. I’m surprised Apple didn’t come out with this already. Kudos to the Google folks.

It’s not all sunshine and roses, however. There are some areas that could (and I’m sure will) be improved:

• Java WebStart support. Haven’t figured out how to get this to work. Anyone know? I’ve tried installing the latest Java SDK, which usually installs the browser plug-in, but it didn’t seem to work. (I need it for work.)
• Performance. One of the tradeoffs Google made was to make each tab its own process, rather than merely a thread. This was done for all sorts of security and stability reasons, but the drawback is that it uses more resources. Normally, I wouldn’t care, as I have 4GB of RAM in my MacBook Pro and hardly even notice when Firefox is bloating up. But, I have noticed that when Chrome is running, my XP PC gets periodically hung up for 10-20 seconds at a time. The CPU is not pegged, so I’m not sure what’s going on, but it’s definitely having an effect on the system.
• No Mac port yet. There’s only so much I want to do with a browser at work. But at home I’d really wring it out.

When it comes to browsers (and email clients), I tend to be very conservative – just give me something that works the way I’m used to and I’m happy. I learned how to work the Internet back in the mid-90’s and my brain still works mostly that way. I was devastated during the dark times between Netscape’s downfall and the rise of Firefox/Thunderbird, and only recently switched to using Apple Mail, which is clearly a superior product to TBird, because it was different enough.

So when I say I could easily switch to using Google Chrome as my default browser (once a few things are fixed), it’s a huge compliment. I realize that lots of people have tons of Firefox add-ons that aren’t in Chrome, or they’re used to Safari’s interface, but for me Chrome could be my new browser.

Since I’ve already switched to Apple Mail, this may be the first time my computer is Mozilla/Netscape-free since, well, ever.

Security Fail

Why is it, that when you put a site into your “trusted site” list in Internet Explorer, that somehow causes IE to start asking you if you are sure you want to go there?

I put it in the trusted site list so you wouldn’t ask me that. Why start now?

Or is it unfair to bash an eight year old operating system? I don’t care. I’m going to do it anyway.

I Just Feel So Dirty

Virtualizing operating systems is certainly one of the most obvious benefits of Apple switching to Intel CPUs. Those of us who choose to use Macs in our personal life can now use them for business purposes that were heretofore unavailable due to little incompatibilities, simply by installing Parallels or VMWare, or even Boot Camp, although rebooting just to open a spreadsheet or run IE sounds like a bit of a pain.

It just so happens I have to open and interpret a couple of fairly complex spreadsheets, with lots of formulas and macros, for some work I’m doing. Since Mac Office dropped VB support in the latest version, I needed to run it on Windows, which runs rather well under VMWare Fusion.

I figured that, being one of Microsoft’s flagship products (the other being “Microsoft Bob”, of course), it would be fairly easy to purchase or demo a copy of MS Office for Windows.

Microsoft, being a pure software company (not counting the keyboards and mice, which I believe are outsourced, and the XBox, which is essentially a cheap PC running stripped-down Windows, and certainly not counting the Zune, which is a rebadged Toshiba mp3 player, and hardly counts as a product) makes the overwhelming majority of their profits by selling countless copies of Windows and Office, which, after a certain point, are pure profit. You’d think they’d make it as smooth as possible. You’d also think you’d be able to move an empty text file to the Recycle bin in under four minutes. In both cases, you’d be wrong.

Once you find the Trial Download page, you need to jump through a few hoops about creating a Windows Live account (why would I want that? I just want a copy of Office) and giving them all of your pertinent information (I’m certainly not giving them a valid phone number for this) before you get to the actual download page.

OK, so you’ve finally made it. You have a Download button and are ready to go. Well, not quite:

Impressive – that one bullet point contains two sentences, and two lies.

• There is no “Download Now” button, and there are certainly not two “Download Now” buttons.
• You do not need to click both buttons to download the product, which I will get to in a moment.

Assuming you need to click both Download buttons, which do you suppose you should click first?

If you guessed “Download 1″, you might think you made some sort of mistake by the dialog that pops up:

I still have no idea what that’s for, even after encountering it three times.

But the important question is: If it automatically does the second download for you when you click “OK”, why does it need to yell at you in the first place?

I know that picking on Microsoft user interfaces is like shooting blind, comatose, fat fish in a barrel with an IED, and the barrel is wrapped with TNT, but with all the money they spend on pushing their products, you’d think they would catch these high-profile gaffes that are right in their profit stream.

Rule number 1 of commerce (e- or brick & mortar): Do not confuse your customers when they’re trying to give you money*.

*Actually, since this was the free trial site, I wasn’t actually trying to give them money, but I probably will after the 60 days is up, as I’ll need to keep using it.

Sometimes Tech Support Scripts Do Work

As computer professionals, or even amateur geeks, well know, calling Tech Support can be a nightmare of “Did you plug it in” and “Have you turned it on” and on and on until you finally, after days of plodding through the front line tech’s script, you finally get to talk to someone who understands what an IP address is.

Which is why we generally avoid calling tech support whenever possible and just hit the online forums instead.

Well, once in a while, you need to talk to someone, and this happened to me today.

Several months ago, I bought a Roomba vacuuming robot. You see, I have a big house, with lots of carpeting, and can’t be bothered to vacuum it as much as I should, so when I saw a Roomba on sale for $99, I figured it was worth a shot.

For those of you who do not own a Roomba, let me put it like this: It’s like Tivo. For those of you who don’t have Tivo, let me put it like this: Remember that whole “sliced bread” thing? That’s absolute pants compared to Roomba.

It actually vacuums for you, without you having to do it yourself! Now, I have a very primitive model (4000 series), which means it doesn’t automatically find its charger when it needs it, and it doesn’t have any laser-guided border sensors or anything. It basically ambles around the floor until it hits something, then turns. Very inefficient.

But, even though it takes much longer to do a room than it would for you do it yourself, it does it without you. I just set it loose while I’m working out, or making dinner, or whatever, and give it a nudge if it gets stuck on something. As far as time-savers go, it’s right up there with the microwave oven.

So you can imagine my distress when it started malfunctioning last week.

My poor little circular servant droid would move pitifully in fits and starts for several minutes, and then stop altogether with a sad little beep.

(Sidenote: One of the best things about the design of the Roomba is that it is so easily anthropomorphized. It makes a cute little “doo-doo-de-doo” noise when it starts up, and a sad little “doo-dooo” when it runs out of juice or gets stuck. Makes it very easy to use personal pronouns.)

In case some of you Roomba owners out there are wondering, I clean out it’s brushes and parts after every use, so I didn’t think it was getting clogged with anything.

I didn’t find anything useful on iRobot’s forums, so I went to the last resort – tech support.

I was connected with a nice woman whose name I forget, and after taking all of my information (name, address, phone number, email address, model, serial number, date of purchase, etc.) she asked about the symptoms.

When I explained that my poor little guy was just sputtering around and then giving up altogether, she got really apologetic. Now, I’m all for apologizing when you’re in the wrong, and sympathizing when someone has a problem (especially if it’s with a product that you sell or support), but her apologies sounded very scripted and unnecessary. Just solve my problem and stop apologizing for it, already, mmkay?

The next thing she said was, “Can you get a small phillips screwdriver and remove the side brush?” Being a geek, I do have a varied selection of small screwdrivers at hand at all times (phillips and flat), and so promptly removed the side brush, revealing a small, but non-trivial amount of cat hair and carpet fibers taking up residence in the general vicinity.

I removed as much as I could and put the side brush back on and voila! It works perfectly again.

You know that the whole side-brush thing is the first item on the tech-support script (once they enter a few key symptoms into the computer, I’m sure). And for once, that was the trick.

I don’t think I would have thought to look there, given the behavior of the Roomba – I wouldn’t have thought that the side brush being clogged up with hair would have had much to do with the behavior of the rest of the unit.

Maybe I should look at the source code.

The Internet is not my House

I just need a moment to vent the frustrations I’ve had with my internet service provider.

Later, as in the past 2 months, I have experienced long down times and service outages with my cable internet. The first phone call to support, naturally, the internet came back up while I was on hold.

Then, a week later, I placed another phone call for the same issue. Of course during the whole troubleshooting process the internet magically sprung to life without any intervention on anyone’s part, meaning neither mine nor the service provider.

At this point, I thought it very well could be some of my equipment. I do live in the lightening capital of the world, and I’m willing to do my part on my end to help expedite a resolution. Plus, I can take this opportunity to set up a Gigabit internal network to boot.

So I replace all my nic cards, replace the router, and change out all the cabling. And, you guessed it, the problem continued.
So, I’m on the phone again. By this point, I have a log of the time and lengths of the outages that I observed. These statistics of course don’t include when I’m at work or otherwise away from the computer.

At this point, I know the drill and the call goes something like this.

Tech: Thank you for calling ::service provider:: this John how can I help you?
(By the way, every tech seems to be named “John” at this place, regardless of accent or gender)
Me: My internet is out again. There’s a history on this.
Tech: Okay sir, did you…
Me: I’ve unplugged my cable modem and waited 60 seconds. There’s a history on file about this.
Tech: Alright, is the…
Me: The Computer is connected directly to the modem. Seriously, there’s an open ticket and history file under my customer number.
Tech: Have you called technical support sir?
Me: Yes.
Tech: Is this an ongoing issue.
Me: Yes. There’s an open ticket and history file on this issue. There’s an open ticket and history file on this issue. (I actually said it twice).
Tech: Okay sir, let me see if there’s any information regarding this, hold for me please.
Me: Okay
At the copa, copa cabana, there was music everywhere and flowers in her hair, she wore a…
Tech: Sir?
Me: Yes.
Tech: Hold on for me please.
…she lost her love. At the coooopaaa. Copa Cabaaaabaaaaanaaaaaa. His name was Rico…
Tech: Sir?
Me: Yeah.
Tech: I see there is a history on this issue, and I’ll need to connect you to the local service provider office.
Me: Okay.
Tech: Is there anything else I can help you with today?
Me: No.
Tech: Thank you for choosing ::service provider:: and please hold while I connect you.

The second tech I talked to was quite a bit smarter. I told him there was history, told him I replaced everything on the physical layer I could which only left 3 things: The cable modem, the actually cable it’s self, and the service. That tech placed an order of a replacement cable modem that I could pick up just down the street at anytime.
Great, I thought. Now at least everything I can replace will be replaced, that should make things easier if the problem still exist.

Uh, yeah – not so much.

As you probably guessed at this point, the problem still existed after replacing the cable modem. So I called my buddy John at the support center. This John was a little more on the ball and got me to the next tier/local support pretty quick.
I don’t know that happened to the last guy I talked to at the local support center, but he was not the one that took my call this time. So take the transcript I put above, replace “John” with “Scott” and that’s pretty much how the conversation started.
The end is where it gets fun. It’s a Tuesday night; Scott tells me the next available technician can’t be out until Sunday to check the cable. Here goes the conversation.

Me: Okay, what time.
Scott: Between 10 and 1 and between 1 and 4.
Me: Huh?
Scott: What time.
Me: What?
Scott: Which of those times would you like to schedule sir?
Me: Oh, 1 and 4.
Scott: Okay, I have the tech scheduled to come out to your house between 1 and 4. Is this just the internet service?
Me: Primarily, yes. I have VoIP service too but that’s obviously down because of the internet service being down.
Scott: I see. And is this number on your account a good number to reach you at?
Me: No. That’s my VoIP number – through you – which is not working – because of the internet service being down.
Scott: What number can the tech call you at?
Me: 407-XXX-XXXX
Scott: Thank you sir. The Technician will be there between 1 and 4 on Sunday.
Me: Great. Will you contact me if you find the problem before that?
Scott: I’m sorry sir?
Me: Will you contact me if you find the problem before that. I’ve explained I replaced every bit of the physical layer I could, there could be some other problem than the cable, surely in 5 days other options will be investigated.
Scott: I’m not sure what you mean sir.
Me: There’s a lot of factor in the service, it’s not all in my house.
Scott: I’m sorry sir?
Me: The internet is not my house. I don’t walk out my door, follow the cable to the junction box on my wall, and boom – there’s the internet.
Scott: ::silence::
Me: Hello?
Scott: Yes sir, I’m here. I don’t think I follow you.
Me: Okay, let me ask you this. If the technician doesn’t find anything wrong with the cable, then what next?
Scott: The ticket will remain open for further investigation.
Me: So I expect that investigation to occur while we wait these 5 days for the tech to come to my place. Or else that’d be a wait for nothing and what exactly am I paying for?
Scott: Hold please
…Shot doooooooowwwnnnn, in blaze of Glory………
Scott: Sir?
Matt: Hmmm?
Scott: I’m going to forward this ticket to my supervisor with my notes. He isn’t in until 10 tomorrow but here is the number to the local support center if you don’t hear anything…

So, 3:00pm and the 3 message I’ve left in this supervisors voice mail remain unanswered.
I’m going to the copa, the copa cabana

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