and just needed to share it.
Monthly Archive for December, 2009
The only agent who has ever signed any of my stuff just rejected the new book.
It’s very hard not to want to just pack it in now and call it a failure.
I thought you’d like to know I’ve managed to catch you and your company in your lies about throttling my internet service.
As I’ve documented before, these problems have been taking place for over two years. During that time I have either independently or, at your direction, replaced every single piece of equipment in my home network. Some pieces have even been replaced twice, at great expense.
When the problems grew acute your company first insisted that nothing was wrong.
Then when caught and forced to admit that there was a problem, your guys tried to claim that it was caused by a contractor of yours giving me the wrong power supply for the modem you forced me to rent instead of the modem I owned. That did not solve the problem.
Next you claimed it was caused by an old television hooked up to a completely different branch of the cable, not in the same line as the modem. Removing it did not help. In fact, it got worse the next day.
Then your techs came out and ripped my network apart. They said they couldn’t find a problem. They offered two theories: either it was my Vonage box (which was one of the items replaced twice) or “you’re being throttled.” That was an exact quote from your tech, even though later you tried to deny that he’d ever said that on Twitter.
Well, out of pure frustration today, I took the Vonage box out of my network.
The throttling got even worse.
Turns out my Vonage box was handling QoS, which gave my web traffic higher priority than all other traffic. So without the Vonage box in the picture, I couldn’t get any of my web traffic out through your throttling, where before it had a better chance.
So why did your guys claim it was the Vonage box? To try and cover up your throttling (which you would now have to admit you’ve been doing for nearly two years)? Or to get me to sign up for your more expensive and less reliable “digital voice” service?
And when I call and try to cancel my television service next week, is your operator going to hang up on me again? Are you finally willing to admit that you are abusing your power as a monopoly in my neighborhood (no other broadband service is available at my address)? Including refusing to let me cancel or downgrade my other services so I don’t have to give you any more money than is absolutely necessary?
iTunes under Windows is, at best, a flaky piece of software. One annoying thing it does is sometimes fail to properly close down the connection between your computer and an iPod when you’re syncing it. This results in the “OK to disconnect” never showing up, sometimes even after you’ve pressed the button to forcibly eject the iPod.
When this happens, sometimes the “dirty” bit will be checked in the NTFS structures on your iPod. Then, whenever you plug it in, the computer will nag you to scan the disk on your iPod and fix any errors. Of course you can’t do that because iTunes grabs the iPod and won’t let it go, so Windows can’t do low level work. They usually ask you to schedule a disk check when you reboot your computer, which is also a pain.
For those who haven’t yet figured it out (and until this morning I was one), here’s how to get around that.
- When the message shows up, tell Windows you will scan later.
- Let iTunes finish with the pod, and (hopefully) eject it.
- Go into Task Manager. There are two ways you can do this. #1 is the classic “three finger salute” of Ctrl-Alt-Del. The other in more recent versions of Windows is to right click on the taskbar and select the “Task Manager” option.
- Click on the “Processes” tag.
- Locate the “iTunesHelper.exe” process, and end it by clicking on the “End Process” button.
- Locate the “iPodService.exe” process, and end it the same way. Shutting down these two processes will prevent iTunes from waking up and seizing your iPod.
- Connect the iPod, and when the nag pops up, this time tell Windows to scan the pod immediately and fix all errors. Without iTunes in the way, it will be able to do so. It will make sure everything is okay and clean that “dirty” bit so it won’t bother you any more.
- Disconnect the iPod.
- Put things back to normal by going into your iTunes program folder (usually c:\Program Files\iTunes, c:\Program Files (x86)\iTunes, or c:\Programs\iTunes depending upon the flavor of Windows you have installed) and run the “iTunesHelper.exe” program. This will restart the two services you killed earlier.
Not the simplest of processes, necessarily, but less of a pain in the ass than rebooting when you have a lot of work open.
Recent Comments