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802.11g vs 802.11n

When I got my new laptop, (the other one I think the logic board died in it), I decided that I needed to upgrade the wireless in the house. I was using a Linksys WRT54G router, which I had been using for about 6 or 7 years now. It worked well, however the wireless was a little slow. So I decided to get a new 802.11N router, to “speed up” the wireless stuff in my house. I kept the Linksys running for those devices that don’t support 802.11N. Some people may ask why, well I locked the new router (Buffalo Technology Nfiniti Wireless-N High Power Router & Access Point WZR-HP-G300NH) so that it would only let 802.11N devices connect to it. That is so it would remain the fastest wireless since when you have it in mixed mode, it may step down to lower speeds.

So just how much faster is the N over the G? I did a FTP test from one of my servers that has a Gig ethernet connection. (The new router also has a gig switch in it, whereas the old Linksys only had a 100mb switch in it.)

Using the old Linksys WRT54G router/wireless I transferred a 378Mb file, the result: 397,127,468 bytes received in 04:40 (1.34 MiB/s).

Then I switched to the new Buffalo router and transferred the same file: 397,127,468 bytes received in 01:13 (5.14 MiB/s

As you can see it is almost 4 times faster than the 802.11G router.  I think it was well worth it. As now I can stream video wirelessly and it doesn’t cut out and have to buffer like it did on the G router. Another nice thing was the Buffalo router came with DD-WRT already installed as the “Professional Firmware”. Most people who are not technically inclined would find DD-WRT probably way more complicated than is needed for their simple network. But for me, it is awesome that  you can customize it, and do a lot more stuff than the “user friendly” firmware supports.

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XMRadio pricing

Having been a customer of XMRadio since about 2000, I have liked the service, however their customer service hasn’t been the greatest. 2+ years ago when I bought a new car, I transferred my XMRadio subscription from the previous car to the new one. They were upset that the dealership didn’t take care of it, but ended up doing it. Well that subscription was set to expire in 2009. I renewed it in February of 2009 because they had a deal, whereas if you renewed it then, you also got the online service for free for the duration of that renewal. (They were going to start charging for the online stuff the month after I renewed it.) I decided that I would do the 2 year option as I knew I would have the car for at least 2 more years (since I had had it for less than a year).

Well I got my renewal notice in the mail a couple of weeks ago, saying it was going to automatically renew in February of 2011. I didn’t pay close attention to it, till a couple of nights later when I was going through the bills. This is when I got pissed. See when I renewed the service in 2009 for 2 years, it was around $251. Well this renewal noticed said that a 2 year subscription was going to be over $313. Yup $62 more than 2 years ago. Now I bitch about Comcast raising their prices but this was ludicrous. I only listen to it for about 30+ minutes on my drive home every night as I usually listen to Lex and Terry on WCLG on the morning drive to work. This seemed like an excessive amount of money to pay for a service that I usually listen to about 5 songs a day on. So I started contemplating just dropping the service and using the iPod or CD’s instead.

After a while I started looking around and found some sites on the Interweb that said, that Sirrius/XM is so desperate to keep subscribers that if you “threaten” to leave, then they will give you a special deal to keep you as a listener. Well considering that I was considering on leaving them, I decided to see what they would do. So I called them up, and said that I didn’t understand why my bill had gone up so much. Well, part of it is the Online fee, and then there is this little XM Music Royalty Fee. Basically because you get to listen to music with out commercials, you have to pay EXTRA for it? Well this fee on my 2 year bill was over $40. So I told the person on the phone, unless they have a cheaper package, I will have to cancel as this is just getting ridiculous. After a little talking back and forth, she offered up a $77 a year package, which after taxes and this “music royalty fee” would be $79. I told her that was a much better price and that I would take it. She told me that I wouldn’t get the online stuff unless I paid like $20 for it. I told her I didn’t want it as, I did not really have access to use it where I would want to use it.

Then came the funniest part, she asked if she could charge it to the credit card that was on file. I told her “No, I want an invoice in the mail, as you (xm) always try to charge an expired credit card and then proceed to harass me for weeks about not being able to bill me, even after I had paid the bill.” She then replied, “Well we have to charge you $2.00 for sending you a invoice.” WTF is that about? Why should you charge some one $2 to send them a bill? I told her that was fine, as I would rather pay the $2 now then be harassed for days. Then as she is clicking a way on the computer, she said “Oh your radio says you get the internet stuff for free..” I was like “ok, if I don’t have to pay for it.” So I have yet to try to see if I can get the online listening stuff yet. But they did kill my old online account right after I got off the phone with her.

So if you havn’t renewed your Sirius/XM since before June of 2009, be on the look out for the BIG change in pricing.

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Comcast, TiVO and Frontier Communications

I have been a Comcast customer for a while now, and have not really had problems with their service until recently. It has all started with the switch to the “full digital” cable system. I had problems with their dta’s (here and here). Now I am having problems with their Billing department and cable card “services”.  Back in June I decided to get a TiVO to be an “hd tuner” for the bedroom HDTV. This is when the fiasco with their cable card started. I was told by Comcast reps online that the Cable Card was free, since it would be the first one on the account. This was awesome, till I got the bill and found out they were charging me for it. I talked to them again, and they removed the charge.

Well in November when I got the 2 dta’s, something happened and they started charging me $6.99 a month for the cable card, that was supposed to be free. So I contacted Comcast, and they said “sorry” and took the charge off. Well December rolled around and the charge was back. Since then I have been having a fight with Comcast over false advertising and the failure to properly document their prices in public view. It has gone back and forth about 11 times. Just recently they sent me the Morgantown Price sheet, which is not available any where online that I could find, so here it is Rate Card Morgantown. What they fail to tell you is that if you have ANY of their cable boxes (hd, sd, hd/dvr) you can NOT get a cable card for free, contrary to what I was told in June which lead to the decision to buy the TiVO. So now I am stuck paying $3.00 a month for a cable card. Which means my cable bill is now even more expensive than it was before. I am going to file an FCC complaint over all of this as well, to say that the order of “devices” dictates the price of the service is pure bull shit.

Then while I am bitching to them about the prices, it appears that either something changed on the TiVO side or the Comcast side and I started having problems with about 24 digital channels. When I would tune to say  BBC America, it would be normal for a couple of seconds and then freeze for a couple seconds, then be normal, ad nauseam. So I spent a couple of hours on a friday night clicking through all 250+ channels that I get. Out of them I found out which ones had the problems. I then went and mapped every channel to the QAM / RF channel it was allotted. And guess what they were all around the same general area. What is weird, was BBC America was one that I was having problems with, then all of the sudden they turned off The Weather Channel on the analog side, BBC America started working and The Weather Channel started having problems. For those interested, here is the list that I and some other people are having problems with:

I ended up calling Comcast to come out and replace the cable card, because I thought that was the problem. Well the guy showed up, and was not exactly the friendliest person I have met from Comcast. He seemed like it was a “stupid call”. So he started looking around and I showed him what was happening with the TiVO. He then said he would be back. When he came back in the house, he had some new cable and some tools. He proceeded to cut every end off of every cable in my bedroom and pull out all the cable and replace it with his “new” cable. Well that did not work. So he asked where the cable came in to the house. I took him to where every cable home run’s back to. He got so confused that I had to explain what was going on. It then seemed like he was pissed for some reason. Once again pulled out the snips and cut every end off of every cable and the put new ones on. Still didn’t fix the problem. So I asked if he had brought a cable card to replace the one in the TiVO. He hadn’t brought one. He left and went back to the local office and picked up a card and came out and replaced it. Well the channels are still messed up. So he said it had to be  the TiVO’s problem because the Comcast boxes “were working fine” and took off.

So now I was like hmm, this freaking sucks as I know the finger pointing game is going to start, but I got on TiVO’s chat and started talking to them. They had me reboot the TiVO a couple of times, but that did not fix any of the problems. He suggested that I call their phone support as they would have some better things to have me try. I did and they had me read off some signal levels and look at the “RS Uncorrected” and “RS Corrected” counters. He did not like the numbers on there and basicly said that it was a Comcast problem and the signal was dirty coming in to the house. But he also said he was going to go talk to some one else and call me back in an hour. An hour went by and he did call me back. This time he said he talked to some supervisors and they would like to replace my TiVO because they thought one of the tuners may be bad in it. He told me he would ship me a new TiVO since mine was only a few months old and that they would leave my current one active until I made the swap so that I could get all the shows off of my current one and on to the new one. I thought that is good, at least they aren’t like Comcast and just replace it and you lose everything.

Well today, I got stuck at home because of 3/4 inch of ice all of the driveway, and UPS showed up with the “new” TiVO. To my surprise it wasn’t new, it was a refurb. Not only that there were no cables in the box, so I could not power it on and the current one on at the same time to copy any thing over. This made me extremely pissed. Not only had they lied to me (the tech guy stressed more than once that he was going to make sure I got a new TiVO and not a refurb) but now I couldn’t even test it.

Well here is where the power of Social networking comes to help. One little bitch, and with in a couple of minutes some one from TiVO is asking for details. Then about 3 hours later, I got a call from the Executive relations people. He said he was sorry for the confusion and would be sending me a cable pack to get the current refurb one running. He also said that if the refurb that was sent did not work, he would send me a brand new one.

Fast forward about 40 minutes, and I was talking to Justin and found out that he is having problems on his TiVO with the exact same channels that I am. So now it is definitely a Comcast or TiVO problem and not a problem with my box, unless his which is a different model also developed the same problems at the same time.  Needless to say, I called the TiVo guy back and left a message that I think there is a bigger problem than just my box.

So you are probably thinking by now, if you have read this far, what the hell does this post have to do with Frontier Communications? Well not really anything, other than something weird happened last night and they are a “service provider” in the area, not that I am a client. I have not had a land line phone in the house since about October 2007 when I canceled the Verizon line in favor of using Packet 8 VOIP, which I have been using since June of 2004. Well I had left the phone in the kitchen hooked up to the old “Verizon” line even though it was dead. Don’t know why, just did. Well while I was putting memory in my laptop last night, the kitchen phone started ringing. It took me a minute to figure out what it was, because I hadn’t heard that phone ring in probably 4 years. I went in and picked it up and there was some one on the other side asking for some one who obviously doesn’t live here. After saying “sorry wrong number”, I hung up and then picked the phone up again. Freaking weird to hear a dial tone on it. So I called my self and my other phones rang. Now I had the phone number of this new “phantom” line. This was pretty weird. So I disconnected the phone from the line, as I didn’t want to hear it ring again if I had some one elses phone mapped to my house.

Once again a little Social networking and with in a few minutes I had a contact at Frontier Communications who was asking for information. I gave her the details and told her that the dial tone is a “weird” dial tone type. Needless to say I have not heard back from her yet, but last time I checked, the dial tone still exists, so I bet they are trying to figure out where the “wires” got crossed.  Some friends suggested I make some overseas calls, and some 900 number calls, or act like I am the people they are calling. But the weird part is the phone has not ringed at all today. So maybe they just assigned a phone to my house and the number is not assigned to any one and the other night was just a fluke?

All in all, I hope TiVO and Comcast get their system/signals worked out as it sucks to be paying such a high price for a service and not be able to use it completely.

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Comcast line up for morgantown

I hadn’t done this in a while, and since I was having problems with some channels on the tivo, I needed to get the exact frequency that was having the problem. So for those who care, here are the current Comcast Channels in the Morgantown Area with their Frequency allotments, Comcast Channel, real RF channel, and if ClearQAM that as well. Each file is sorted by either Comcast Channel number, RF channel number or frequency.

Channels By Comcast Channel Number

Channels by Frequency

Channels by RF Channel Number

The current ClearQAM channels are:

QAM Channel Comcast Channel Station
5.1 705 WDTV HD – CBS
5.2 192 WDTV Weather
7.12 ??? Comcast PPB Barker Channel
8.2 16 WPCB
8.3 2 KDKA – CBS
8.4 6 WPGH – FOX
8.5 4 WTAE – ABC
8.6 13 WQED – PBS
8.7 9 WPMY – MyNetwork
8.8 11 WPXI – NBC
8.9 22 WPCW – CW
10.1 714 WVFX HD – FOX
10.2 None WVFX – CW
18.6 5 WDTV – CBS
18.7 12 WBOY – NBC
18.8 14 WVFX – FOX
18.10 15 Local Government
18.11 3 Local announcements
19.1 710 / 808 WPCW HD – CW
20.1 25 C-SPAN
20.11 198 T.K.M.I.
21.3 8 WNPB – PBS
21.5 699 WNPB2 – Create
21.6 712/810 WNPB HD – PBS
85.111 300 PPV Barker
91.2101 704/804 WTAE HD – ABC
91.2102 188 this
91.2103 713/813 WQED HD – PBS
91.2104 194 WQED – Create
91.2105 195 WQED – Neighborhood
92.2201 711/811 WPXI HD – NBC
92.2203 702/802 KDKA HD – CBS
92.2204 190 retro
103.707 501 ESPNPPV1
103.708 502 ESPNPPV2
103.709 503 ESPNPPV3
103.710 504 ESPNPPV4
103.711 505 ESPNPPV5
103.712 506 ESPNPPV6
109.2301 706/803 WPGH HD – FOX
109.2302 707/812 WPMY HD – MyNetwork
109.2303 196 CoolTV
109.2304 189 WPGH Secondary channel
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Final post of 2010

Well 2010 has been good and bad for me. On  the good side I lost over 20 pounds, and I intend to lose another 20 in 2011, and hope to get in shape a little more. I did a lot of work on the house this year, some of it was “emergency” and I had not intended to spend that much money, but in the long run it only raises the value of the house. I plan on doing more work in 2011, adding the deck back, repainting some rooms, maybe some more stuff as well. Hopefully I will get all of the work I did this year, paid off in 2011 as well.

2011 should bring hopefully some new challenges and a lot of accomplishment on some work I am doing. I also want to get in to some more photography stuff, and use some of the new equipment that I had purchased in the last couple of weeks. Photography has always been a hobby of mine, but I want to “kick it up a notch” and try to do some new stuff that makes it stand out from the “normal” stuff I do. In addition to the photography, I want to try to do some more traveling in the upcoming year. I miss seeing new places, as I haven’t traveled much in the last year. Hopefully that will change a little this upcoming year.

So with that, I am going to say:

Happy New Year! Godt nytår! Feliz año nuevo! Bonne année! Gott nytt år!