Endopolis

I'll spare all the gory details, but DSL is still not available at my house. I haven't had a Net connection for about three weeks. It won't be on until Monday at 8pm.

AT&T tells me that there's not a possible way to expedite my order, and I don't believe that. However, they have eased the pain by reducing my bill from December, when I had no service. I'm also getting a couple of rebates. So, I'll actually be making money for my troubles, which is good considering I deserve it for all the time I've spent on the phone with them over the past few weeks.

In other news, Comcast has poured salt in my wounds. I knew that Sunnyvale was getting a big service upgrade in HD service, bringing the city into the modern age of television/cable harmony. Still, I was upset I was paying so much for so little, so I cancelled Comcast and signed up for DirecTV. I'm largely happy with my new satellite service. But as I was leaving the house this morning (after wrapping up another 30 minute hell-call with AT&T, natch) I noticed an armada of Comcast and sub-contracting cable trucks in my neighborhood. Surely they're installing the long-awaited upgrade.

Had I only known this would happen sooner, I would have quit AT&T and gone with a bundled TV, phone and Net service from Comcast. Instead, I'm still wallowing in purgatory.

Life goes on...

Posted by senders at 12:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

These certainly are not a big deal, but I managed to finally create a couple of handy RSS feed aggregators using Yahoo! Pipes. I had dabbled with Pipes before, but never spent the time to figure out how to actually create anything. Now that I know how, it's super easy and only takes a few minutes to do.

First, I threw together a bunch of feeds produced by folks who used to work at TechTV. It's a kind of where-are-they-now thing (many are doing quite well). I need to add a few others from blogs and sites that I know of, but this is a start.

Finally, for a side-project I'm kicking around, this is an aggregation of multiple extreme sports news feeds.

Some additional filtering would make these more useful, but it was fun to toy around and finally create something with this cool service. 

Posted by senders at 10:08 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

We left our technology troubles behind on Saturday for a long day of good, old-fashioned wine tasting in the Dry Creek Valley area, near Healdsburg. Actually, we started a little south of there, in the Russian River Valley. Here's a list of places we hit (with notes). It actually was not a good weekend to have been there due to their annual Winter Wineland event. Still, fun (and way too much wine) was had by all.

• Foppiano (great Petite Sirah)
  
• Rodney Strong (Alexander's Crown cabernet was a rare treat)
  
• Fritz (Nice buttery chard and good zin)
  
• Preston (Great  06 Barbera, not to mention killer organic olive oil made on site)
  
• Talty (very good zins)
  
• Seghesio (Sangiovese... single vineyard "Venom" was excellent, not to mention a great name for a bottle of wine.)
  
• Longboard (the vintage surfboard-lined tasting room had me in heaven, as did a great 03 Syrah)

After all that nonsense, we stumbled into Cyrus restaurant in downtown Healdsburg, at the recommendation of an article that ran in the San Jose Mercury News last week. The piece said that you won't get a better $12 cocktail anywhere, and after having experienced it, I believe it. We had a blast in this place, and the cocktails were unlike anything I've ever had before -- they're fine art. They're mostly made seasonally with all locally grown organic ingredients and locally made spirits. We were able to chat for a long time with bar manager Scott Beattie about his craft, not something you get to do at the average bar or restaurant. This experience really deserves its own post. Unfortunately, I didn't have my camera with me.

We ended with dinner at the Bear Republic Brewing Co. with a pint before heading home. Somehow.

Posted by senders at 09:41 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

You'd think that by living in the center of Silicon Valley, within walking distance of some of the world's greatest technology companies, you'd be afforded certain modern day technological luxuries that other communities don't enjoy.

Take cable television and web access, for example. In a neighborhood like mine, in the 94086, you might have access to cutting-edge communications technology. Perhaps you'd have a fiber-to-the-home setup where your TV (HD, natch) and Internet, and maybe even your phone were all piped in through one blazing fast line. You'd have video on demand, and the fastest Internet connections possible. You might have IP phone service. You might even have fast wireless home networking where all of your gear was connected to the same network.

My mom and dad have most of this, at their home in Tigard, Ore, a Portland suburb. All the cables were laid and work was done relatively recently, courtesy of Verizon. To be fair, I don't know what he pays for this service. And, he's stuck with Verizon -- he can't switch providers and still get all this.

Then there's me. The 94086 seems to be somewhat of a black hole in Silicon Valley. My own problems, as stated in the previous post about my troubles with phone service, are well documented. There is no fiber. There is no quality HDTV service. I haven't had web access for weeks, save for occasionally connecting to the MetroFi free wireless service which is nice, but not great.

Besides spending the bulk of my free time on the phone with AT&T trying to get my phone and DSL sorted out, I've been busy switching from Comcast to DirecTV. I was paying a high rate to the aforementioned cable behemoth for HD service that I wasn't even getting -- in all I got about 8 channels. Now with DirecTV, for less money, I get more than 20. Comcast has been upgrading areas in and around Sunnyvale, but I couldn't get them to name a date when they'd have our area upgraded, so I left them. DirecTV did the install earlier this week, and I'm a happy customer so far.

Our phone line has apparently been fixed, but our DSL hasn't worked for weeks. I'll be calling to get that fixed tonight.

And so it goes from the heart of Silicon Valley. I just hope our phone still works next time it rains.

Posted by senders at 11:16 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I was going to write a nice Happy New Year post, but instead I need to rant about AT&T. Pardon me for a moment while I do.

For the year and a half that we've lived in Sunnyvale, we've dealt with problems to our phone line. Whenever it rains, our line gets crossed up with our next door neighbor's line. Our phone rings when she gets a call, and she gets lots of them. It's really annoying. Sometimes we can hear her talking, on our phone. During storms, our phone line often doesn't work at all. We had AT&T out last year to fix the problem, which they didn't do. So this year when the rains came and our phone stopped working entirely, we asked them back to fix the problem once and for all. Apparently, they're unable to do so. We also have DSL service from AT&T, which has been really reliable for us over the years and at the new house. The rains don't seem to have affected our web service.

After not having phone service for about three weeks now, we decided that we don't need our stinkin' phone line anyway, so we decided to turn it off and try AT&T's new "dry loop" or "naked" DSL service, offering DSL without the landline. We looked into keeping a bare-bones phone line with their "measured" service, but AT&T applies a bunch of fees to switch to that. We don't want fees, so we chose to cancel it altogether.

When we called to set this up on Jan. 3, AT&T told us they'd cancel the phone service on the 8th, and flip the new DSL switch on the 9th -- we'd be without web access for a day. That seemed reasonable. Instead, they turned off the telephone service and DSL the next day -- we haven't had any Net connection since the 4th. It won't be turned on until the 9th.

I'm pretty irate at this point, and was ready to cancel AT&T completely. Unfortunately, "naked" DSL is expensive from providers like Speakeasy or Covad -- I don't want to pay $80 a month for web access. I also don't want to give any more money to Comcast -- in fact I'm cancelling their cable service completely and going with DirecTV instead so I can actually get some HDTV channels. So, I'm stuck with AT&T.

During our downtime, I discovered that we have free wi-fi in our neighborhood, thanks to MetroFi. Actually, I always knew it was there but didn't use it because it seemed really slow. This weekend, I found out that the transmitter is perched high atop a streetlight across the street, and if I sit in my living room with the transmitter in sight, the wifi works quite well. It's not as fast as my home network, of course, but it's better than dial-up or having nothing at all. You have to deal with the occasional ad or webpage not working quite right, but for scanning news headlines and checking email, it actually works pretty well.

So, I can deal with that until AT&T finally gets me sorted out. I wish I could cut the cord completely with AT&T for giving me such lousy service and no incentives to stay. But, they've got me (and, probably, you) by the balls, and they know it.

Posted by senders at 10:38 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)