Hawk's Babble-Log

After I canceled my cell phone with AT&T, they sent me a bill for zero dollars and zero cents. Check this out:

And it’s due by Jul 26. 2011! Should I write a check for $0.00 and send it to them?

A good read, by Dan Ferris in Extreme Value:

What could really happen if Congress doesn’t raise the debt ceiling
http://www.thedailycrux.com/content/8195/Dan_Ferris

In the meantime, in the weeks and months that follow August 2, something unexpected would happen… something nobody in government wants you to know. You’d find out how much you don’t need the government.

It seems to me, networks (in general) are getting worse.

My network here at home, AT&T U-verse, sucks in general. It works enough of the time that I don’t bother looking for another. But it’s not good.

Example: I was downloading a radio show from one of my favorite DJ’s, S.A.M.E. Radio (Steve Anderson Music), and the file gets to about 60% or so and then just stalls out. My downloader (wget in this case) eventually times out and then automatically re-tries with resume, and gets the rest of the file. This happens every week.

Example: I help a local non-profit down the street with their networking needs. Almost every day, their network fails completely, for no apparent reason. We’ve tried changing routers, other networking equipment, testing for zombie machines hogging network, etc. We’ve called the guys out there to check the line; they say all is well. But I don’t think so. No one seems to be able to find out the cause and fix the issue. It’s an ongoing issue.

Example: Recently, I needed to transfer a huge file (about 30G) from a remote server to my own machine or one of the servers that I control. It was basically a backup. It took me about a week to finally get this friggin’ file. I tried transferring with gFTP (Linux) but that timed-out. I tried transferring with scp from the command-line, but that timed-out too. I tried using wget/browser via Apache, but that also timed-out. I tried initiating the transfer from the server to me, and from me to the server. Nothing worked; the transfer started off great and fast, but then just fell to nothing and eventually timed out. The only thing that finally worked was this: I sent the file to another linux server I control (which happened relatively quickly but still took all night), then transfered the file to my work computer, then broke it up in to 1.5G pieces so that it would fit in a FAT32 filesystem, then put it on my 32G USB drive, then brought it home and copied all that into my home linux machine, then cat’ed it all back together again. All because of crappy networks.

Example: I was downloading some software from SourceForge with wget on the command-line (of course). It got 80% done, then just timed out. I let it sit there for a while and it finally re-started, resumed, and finished the file.

Failures like this didn’t used to happen. Seems like they are happening a lot more these days. What’s the world comin’ to?!?

I remember when someone’s word meant something. If someone said, “I’ll be there at 6pm,” then they were there at 6pm. They were not “fashionably late”. They didn’t show up at 6:30pm. If they said that they would be there at 6pm, then they were there at 6pm.

These days, not so much. If someone tells me that they’ll be there at 6pm, then I take along a good book (or my Kindle), so that I have something to do while I wait for them at 6pm. I arrived at 5:55pm. That’s the secret to being on-time, by the way: get there early. If you target yourself to get there at 6pm, you’re going to be late.

These days, I have to hound people to get them to keep their agreements. I have to call people to make sure they’re coming, or are on their way, or whatever. Repeatedly!

Well, I don’t let things like that slide. If someone breaks their word with me, I let them know it. Then I don’t trust them after that.

This is sooo awesome!!!

http://www.shtfplan.com/headline-news/sweet-justice-how-to-foreclose-on-your-bank_06062011

I’ve been shopping around for cell phones lately. It’s quite a research project to compare all these various cell phone plans, what they include, what they don’t include… very confusing.

Some plans include unlimited network. Some plans include “unlimited” network which include 2000M of network (notice the quotes). I guess that’s good; I wouldn’t want the “unlimited” plan which didn’t include 2000M of net.

Some give you x number of minutes plus x number of other kinds of minutes plus x number of weekend minutes plus x number of evening minutes… screw that!

It’s like charging someone more for a “long-distance” call. The equipment is distance-insensitive. It always has been. Charging more for a call to a switching station more miles away is just evil (and profitable, apparently).

I want an unlimited plan which has no quotes around it. And I want unlimited voice, unlimited text, and unlimited net. And I want to pay the price on the ad. With AT&T, T-Mobile, Sprint, etc., you’re going to pay the price on the ad, plus taxes, plus fees, plus some more taxes, plus some more fees, and then your bill will be much bigger than you thought it would be.

I also don’t want to pay a “phone tax”. With Sprint, you do get a truly unlimited plan (I think), but you pay a “phone tax” if you have what they consider a “smart phone”. It’s $10 / month extra. I just can’t support a company that does that. Plus they have a mandatory 2-year contract when you sign up; there is no option to not get a new 2-year contract. Screw that! I’m never going to be under another contract again. Ever!

I might have tried Boost Mobile, because it sounds cheaper, but their phones don’t take SIM cards, so I’d have to buy new phones for use on their network.

So I ended up going with Simple Mobile. http://mysimplemobile.com

Simple Mobile has a no-contract plan which is unlimited everything for $60 / month. And it’s really just $60 / month. Not $60 plus taxes plus fees, etc. I’ve also signed up my dad on their $40 / month plan (unlimited voice/text). Both of these plans together is less than what I was paying AT&T for their “Family Plan”.

Additionally, Simple Mobile can use any phone that takes a SIM card. A cell phone network which locks their phones sucks! Simple Mobile has no “smartphone tax”, no day/night restrictions, no limits on text messages, no limits on how much bandwidth I use… and so on. So for me, it’s all good!

I tried, on several occasions, to buy a phone from people on craigslist.org. The first time I tried this, it worked wonderfully. The guy showed up with the phone, I tried my sim card in it. Everything worked so I paid cash and it was a done deal. That was years ago and I was still using that phone up until recently.

It seems things have changed. I’ve sent about a dozen emails to various ads, never had one single response.

I’ve set up two meets, no one showed up.

I’m afraid to set up another meet, and I have no desire to email another ad. I’ve spent much time on this (days) and have no desire to continue. Does Craigslist now only have ads from people with no honor?

In contrast, I bought my phone on Ebay. It was easy, quick, and it arrived in no time at all. As an added bonus, I ended up paying less than I would have meeting the first two guys (with free shipping)! So it turned out better in all ways!

Craigslist: not recommended. The sellers don’t respond to you if you email, and if you text those who post their phone number, they don’t follow through on their agreements (no honor).

Ebay: recommended. The sellers want your good feedback, and ebay guarantees the transaction anyway.

I arranged to meet with Kevin, 818-306-0306, to buy a new cell phone, but he never showed. He did, however, text me and get me to wait around another hour. For nothing. Boo, Kevin! You suuck!

I arranged to meet with Joe, 818-612-7370, to buy a new cell phone, but he never showed. Boo, Joe! You stood me up!

If you are in the LA area and are looking to buy a phone off one of these guys, you’re going to be disappointed. You will set up an appointment and a meeting place, but they will not show up. You’ll find you have wasted a great deal of time.

Apparently, they do not want your money. They just want to waste your time (and your gas).

I’d like to make you a business offer.

Seriously. This is a real offer. In fact, you really can’t turn me down, as you’ll come to understand in a moment…

Here’s the deal. You’re going to start a business or expand the one you’ve got now. It doesn’t really matter what you do or what you’re going to do. I’ll partner with you no matter what business you’re in – as long as it’s legal.

But I can’t give you any capital – you have to come up with that on your own. I won’t give you any labor – that’s definitely up to you. What I will do, however, is demand you follow all sorts of rules about what products and services you can offer, how much (and how often) you pay your employees, and where and when you’re allowed to operate your business. That’s my role in the affair – to tell you what to do.

Now in return for my rules, I’m going to take roughly half of whatever you make in the business each year. Half seems fair, doesn’t it? I think so. Of course, that’s half of your profits.

You’re also going to have to pay me about 12% of whatever you decide to pay your employees because you’ve got to cover my expenses for promulgating all the rules about who you can employ, when, where, and how. Come on, you’re my partner. It’s only “fair.”

Now… after you’ve put your hard-earned savings at risk to start this business, and after you’ve worked hard at it for a few decades (paying me my 50% or a bit more along the way each year), you might decide you’d like to cash out – to finally live the good life.

Whether or not this is “fair” – some people never can afford to retire – is a different argument. As your partner, I’m happy for you to sell whenever you’d like… because our agreement says if you sell, you have to pay me an additional 20% of whatever the capitalized value of the business is at that time.

I know… I know… you put up all the original capital. You took all the risks. You put in all the labor. That’s all true. But I’ve done my part, too. I’ve collected 50% of the profits each year. And I’ve always come up with more rules for you to follow each year. Therefore, I deserve another, final 20% slice of the business.

Oh… and one more thing…

Even after you’ve sold the business and paid all my fees… I’d recommend buying lots of life insurance. You see, even after you’ve been retired for years, when you die, you’ll have to pay me 50% of whatever your estate is worth.

After all, I’ve got lots of partners and not all of them are as successful as you and your family. We don’t think it’s “fair” for your kids to have such a big advantage. But if you buy enough life insurance, you can finance this expense for your children.

All in all, if you’re a very successful entrepreneur… if you’re one of the rare, lucky, and hard-working people who can create a new company, employ lots of people, and satisfy the public… you’ll end up paying me more than 75% of your income over your life. Thanks so much.

I’m sure you’ll think my offer is reasonable and happily partner with me… But it doesn’t really matter how you feel about it because if you ever try to stiff me – or cheat me on any of my fees or rules – I’ll break down your door in the middle of the night, threaten you and your family with heavy, automatic weapons, and throw you in jail.

That’s how civil society is supposed to work, right? This is Amerika, isn’t it?

That’s the offer Amerika gives its entrepreneurs. And the idiots in Washington wonder why there are no new jobs…

Regards,

Porter Stansberry
http://www.stansberryresearch.com/

Look at this ad:

What’s the message here? To me, it seems like they are trying to tell me something about their network. Something like how much bandwidth I can use on their network. The word “UNLIMITED”, for example, tells me that I might be able to use their network as much as I want.

Now let’s look at the fine print:

Oh, look! The “UNLIMITED” plan includes 2000 Megs / month!

Wait a second here… it’s an “UNLIMITED” plan… and it includes 2000 Megs / month? How, exactly, does that make sense?

Seems like it’s an “UNLIMITED” plan with limits. But if it’s an “UNLIMITED” plan with limits, then it’s not UNLIMITED! I call false advertising!

It all started when I decided to shop around for other DSL providers.

Was I dissatisfied with my current DSL provider? Yes, I was. My DSL provider at the time was DSL Extreme. They had been ripping me off for some time, charging me more than the advertised price on their homepage. They will rip you off if they get the chance, and don’t even bother calling them up to talk about it as you won’t be able to talk to anyone at the office. Instead, your call will go to India or somewhere else. If you decide to cancel, you can’t just call ‘em up and cancel. There is no “Cancel my Account” link on their website, either. No, you have to write a letter and mail it to the head office (the one without a phone number). DSL Extreme is the worst company I’ve ever had to deal with.

Anyway, AT&T decided to cut off my current provider. Why did they do this? That’s a long story. Let me see if I can sum it up briefly:
1) Called up AT&T to ask about static IPs on their DSLs, spoke with a guy who said he could add a static IP on my account for $15 extra / month. I decided to go with that. He had to hang up and said he would call me back. He never called me back.
2) Next day, spoke to someone else who said that no, I could not have static IPs on my account unless I switch my order to a business DSL for over double the cost. I canceled the order. The next day I verified that the order had been canceled and that no one was going to cut off my existing DSL.
3) AT&T cut off my existing DSL anyway (on the “activation date”).
4) I tried to get DSL Extreme to turn me back on, but they wouldn’t talk to me. This is documented in my blog. It’s actually about twice as bad as what is currently documented in my blog as I decided to not write up every call. I burned through most of my 1,100 rollover minutes with DSL Extreme and got nowhere.
5) I realized DSL Extreme wasn’t going to do anything, so I signed up on the original account with AT&T, called U-verse Internet (no static IPs).
6) Had to wait another week for a new “activation date” before service was turned on. This is a silly arbitrary. They could have turned me on way before that. And I was ready way before that, too. But they wouldn’t do it. Even when I called and asked.
7) When the activation date finally rolled around, it still didn’t work. Had to call a tech to go out there and “check the line” and all that stuff. He installed another terminal outlet (said I was sharing my line with another apartment) and gave me a new DSL modem.
Now I’m online, but with a really crappy connection.

From day one with AT&T U-verse Internet, the connection was crappy. Sometimes, pages loaded. Sometimes, the site was not found at all (DNS failure). Sometimes, half the page would load. Sometimes, the page HTML would load, but then the CSS would not load. Sometimes, the images wouldn’t load. Sometimes the javascript wouldn’t load. In short, a really crappy network connection.

And this crappy network was 24/7. For weeks!

I thought maybe it was my new gigabit switch, so I swapped it out with an older switch, but that didn’t help. I swapped out cables in the hope it was a bad cable, but that didn’t help either. I swapped out AT&T’s shiny new Linksys with my old one, but that didn’t help either. I called AT&T support, but they had no clue what to do about it, so they sent a tech out to fix it.

The tech thought it was because I was on a different internal IP set, 10.x.x.x instead of 192.168.x.x. No, that wasn’t it. But the guy wouldn’t help me if I didn’t do it his way, so I re-set all my internal IPs to 192.168.1.x with DHCP. Still a crappy connection. We tried plugging my laptop directly in to the DSL modem, but it was still crappy. It worked well for a while, but then it reverted back to the same degraded performance.

Finally, he gets some help from someone who knows more than he does and we go in to the DSL modem’s advanced config screen and change one setting from the default “Yes” to “No”. Or was it “No” to “Yes”? Anyway…

BAM! Perfect internet access! When I say “perfect”, I mean solid, no errors, and good response times. Websites load fully, all CSS, all javascript, all images, etc. It’s still not as fast as the advertised speed, but at least I’m back online!!! Yayyy!

I put all my internal IPs back to 10.x.x.x. Next will be to plug in all the cables and connections like they were.

Now if only I could get my static IP back. Then I could get back in through the firewall at work.

Boo! AT&T, you suuuck!

It seems that, starting this month, AT&T will start imposing limits on bandwidth usage:
http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2011/04/att-broadband-caps/

But to make matters worse, AT&T can’t even keep track! They’ve been caught red-handed over-billing! Check out this report:
http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/113442

Now that I have AT&T U-verse Internet, I’ll be watching this like a hawk! (pun intended)

As previously mentioned, DNS requests often fail on my new AT&T U-verse connection. This is the most annoying thing about AT&T’s U-verse internet account. When hitting a site such as ebay, or yahoo, or google, or amazon, sometimes the page fails to load at all and the browser reports DNS failure (cannot find the site). Or the page will start to load, but then other DNS requests fail for things like images, .js files, .css files, etc.

Unfortunately, I cannot recommend AT&T U-verse internet service.

Since being online with AT&T U-verse, I’ve noticed two more annoyances:

• DNS queries often fail for no apparent reason. I notice this in two different operating systems (Linux & Windows) across four machines (including my roommate’s). This can happen in the middle of loading a page which then stalls the rest of the page from loading, or upon loading an image within a page, or before contacting the site at all. Stopping the request and then re-trying usually works. This happens often and is very annoying.
• Connection timeouts. When connecting to my home computers from work, if left idle for a little while, the connection silently drops. This happens on SSH connections as well as VNC. Looks like I’ll have to starting using spinner again.

Internet service with AT&T U-verse is not looking good.

I got back online with AT&T U-verse.

Here’s the bad:

• The speeds I’m getting are not what I should be getting. That’s probably because of the building I’m in and distance from central switching station.
• Needed to buy new hardware, both a new DSL modem, and a new Cisco Linksys router. Technically, I did not need the new router (already had one).
• AT&T sets the “activation date” seven days past whenever you make the order. When you don’t have net but you have all the equipment and everything, waiting those last few days for an arbitrary “activation date” really sucks.
• No static IP. Boo!

Here’s the good:

• I’m back online!

So… it’s not all bad.

There was no place on their website to cancel the account, and they wouldn’t cancel over the phone. I had to mail them a letter. So I did. And I certified it so I’ll get a receipt once they receive it.

Again I ask, “Can you believe this?”

I also asked for a refund on this months service, because there hasn’t been any.

DSL Extreme has got to be the worst company I’ve ever dealt with.

From my roommate:

Back in the late eighties, I used to get a Tuna Melt from the Subway across the street.  The tuna was fresh, there were slices of cheese, just a little mayo, real good.

I had one this week. There was more mayo than tuna, shredded cheese instead of sliced, and the whole thing tasted cheap.

From my roommate:

Let’s say you make $100,000 per year.  You spend $1,000,000 per year.  This makes your deficit $900,000.

How long can you continue to do this?

My answer:  If you are the government, indefinitely.

The Democrats want to take $100 per year out of your deficit.  The Republicans want to take $50,000 out of your deficit.

Does this make sense to you?

When I do my finances, I do not spend more than I make.  Perhaps the government should not spend more than they make.

I finally found someone who would talk to me at DSL Extreme! Unfortunately, she could not help me.

Here’s what happened: I called DSL Extreme, hit 3 for Billing, 4 to speak to a person, then did not enter anything for my phone number / account number. That worked and I sat on hold listening to horrid muzak while my phone sat on my desk in speakerphone mode.

Less than 10 minutes later, I spoke to a nice lady who could do nothing for me at all. I explained that I wanted to cancel my service. She verified me by getting my address, phone number, email address, etc. Then she told me that she couldn’t cancel my account but that I had to fax in a letter to the “main office”.

I told her I did not have a fax machine. She put me on hold while she asked what to do about that. Amazingly, she came back on the line after only a minute or two. She told me that I had to mail in a letter to the “main office” to cancel my account.

Can you believe this?

Still in DSL Hell.