What Up?

[Tetge]

Not too many posts lately, so I decided to post a short story:

Not too long ago, AT&T, acquired DirectTV, and now U-Verse, and DirectTV, as a combo, appear to be going to cost a LOT more than they did previously. It seems that AT&T will not play the old customer loyalty game, and, I am also tired of having to plead each year for a decent rate that isn't a 50% increase over the previous one. So, I jumped ship to a TWC bundle that will not average more than $140 a month for the next 24 months. It was installed yesterday, and today, my first full day, the TV began dropping shows, so I checked, and the robot said that my area was experience a service outage and that their techs were working on it, and not to try to talk to a human because they were aware of the outage and they were doing all they could to restore the spotty TV feed to the area. Great way to start off with a new provider. Then I had to call back and wait a long time to talk to a tier one person in tech, about the fact that the 200Mbps down that I purchased tested at only 55Mbps, the first evening. They said that it was no doubt some connection issue that the installer made, and I said that why did it read 217 Mbps early the next morning if it had bad connections? Also, the installer was friendly and did not mind me watching and he pulled a new line from the fiber in the box right across the street up to my house, just to be safe. I could tell that he was both experienced and knowledgeable and he also was really impressed by my little KTM, as he was a sports biker. When he tested my speed, in early afternoon, it was at 179Mbps, which was adequate, since I never expected 200. But, he said that I should never suffer a dramatic slow down as people came on board as TWC had made improvements in that area. So, unlikely that the installation was faulted, as the original tech contact thought. They finally said that my modem pinged good and that they would have to transfer me to a tier 2 tech. Which they did, and, after we went all over it again, the tier 2 said that they would have to open a ticket for a system engineer, as the tier 2 had no tools to figure out the problem with. However the tier 2 said that I should never see a tested speed of less than 140-150 Mbps, at the worst, and my slew of 55-80Mbps speeds (I did screen dumps) were not acceptable for a 200Mbps plan, and, that they would monitor my modem for about three days and figure out what was going on. He said, don't call us, we'll call you sometime after the three days of testing, or so.

Everyone was very polite, but, there were still delays in getting to a human via phone, and, a couple of disconnects, and the usual script kiddies. NO! I will not pull the power plug from my modem and I will not crawl under my desk to insure that the connections to my computer are properly attached. What part of 217 Mbps when there is no traffic did you not understand? Could you repeat that, as I couldn't understand your English.

So, TWC is cheaper, and, even at 55 Mbps, it is twice the speed of U-Verse, but I am paying for 200, not 50. I really don't expect any positive results, but, why not try, as the likely answer is that their equipment is old and also that they are crowding too many people onto a node, and, they will never really fix that. But, they are inexpensive, in today's market, and will stay that way for two years, and, my cable channel selections feature all of the channels that I watched, and they threw in a whole house DVR, or whatever they call that recording thing. They also threw in three subscription movie channels, for at least 12 months, which are not all that great but which I did not have And, I have to admit that DirectTV winked out a few times during the recent stormy weather, so no one is perfect.

However, the Time Warner Cable TV ads are bogus, and they appear to be the same old Adelphia that I dropped 10 years ago, with a new name. But, poor people can't be fussy, and, my next step may be an entry level Korean car to replace the 5.0. Things are rough in the ghetto................ I'd get rid of the KTM to save some money too, but, it is worthless since the new 690 Duke is smooth as glass with no paint shaker vibes, and has another 1000 RPM in the red line due to a shorter stroke and makes +5 HP and has more features yet costs and weighs the same as mine. No wonder the dealer gave me a good buy. So, I guess I'll have to soldier on with last year's dog slow model, massive paint shaker vibes and all. At least it pulls DR-Z SM's like they are broken and also, it pulled up on Norton John's trick KTM at will. So, riders of those other little singles, have to respect any 690 Duke, as they are the most powerful street singles ever. But, there is a footnote, which is that this only applies when on a dead straight road, as corners are not my thing.

[Tetge]

And, this evening I hit a new low of 45Mbps! At this rate, I will be at dial up speeds before long. And, the TV is still winking out, but, they are working on that since, I suppose, it is difficult to stiff hundreds of households that all are watching, or trying to watch, TV. TWC is evil but cheap but I knew that going in and cheap still has an attraction. Beside, the only real alternative is AT&T, and they are evil too.

[SonicVenum]

I hope they resolve everything for you quickly. I've had great luck with TWC. When we moved here a couple years ago, I signed up for 100Mb/s (the fastest at the time), and regularly tested above that. Unbeknownst to me, they increased the top speed to 300 Mb/s, and we were upgraded to that for free. I called the for a different issue, which is when I was told about the upgrade. Unfortunately, we weren't seeing speeds anything close to that. Turned out we had an out-dated modem. A quick trip to my local TWC office, and I had a fancy new modem (DOCSIS 3.0, I think), and we were getting the 300 Mb/s speeds.

We're moving next month, and I'm keeping TWC for cable internet, and DTv for satellite tv. TWC made a tempting bundle offer, but DTv cut more than half off our bill with additional equipment added to keep us, so they made it worth my while.

Good luck!

[xbacksideslider]

Tetge's 690 Duke " . . . . it pulls DR-Z SM's like they are broken and also, it pulled up on Norton John's trick KTM at will. So, riders of those other little singles, have to respect any 690 Duke, as they are the most powerful street singles ever. . . . ."

I'm saving that quote. Forever and for the next time we hear your excuses .


As for cable/satellite, they all are monopolists and cartels;, politicians sell cartelized or monopolized territory or methods. We had some relief, maybe 10 years ago, when satellite first came on line and was competing for market share but then the politicians sold the industry protection from prosecution for defrauding us. Where were the politicians when DirectTV was swallowed by AT&T? Don't they always beat their chests about how their anti-trust regulation protects us?

[Tetge]

KTM is the source of my information about the 690 Dukes being the most powerful production street singles ever. And, I know that KTM would not lie. But, we (me and other riders know) long ago decided that it was 85-91.33% rider and 15%, or less machine, so pulling up on weaker running bikes on straights means only that you have a faster machine if the road is straight. My contention that, due to meeting Brakelate, and riding with him, I was introduced to the dark side of street riding for the first time, as Brakelate sought out members of the I never saw a double yellow or a posting of the speed limit, and, I have high limits and no fear, crew. I tagged along as best as I could, but, generally, most of these riders were grouped up at various spots, helmets off, patiently waiting for me, and perhaps a couple of other stragglers, to catch back up to the ride.

None of this is an excuse, although even highly skilled DR-Z riders bump up against its limited performance at times. Cubes is cubes, and, there is no replacement for displacement, etc. Even a skinny tired ancient antique Norton can run with a DR-Z on a tight road (see Brakelate's epic video of said Norton that has almost 50000 views for proof https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7CZTGqk0Gno). Of course this Norton had one of those top 15%, or less, riders on it, and the same goes for the DR-Z, and, some say that the Norton is full race with all the trick mods learned over the years, and who knows how big it has been punched out to? But, it does have skinny tires and they don't really make cutting edge rubber for those skinny spoke rims either.

So, no excuses from me. Just references to the cold hard truth, which would be that, conservatively, these days I am definitely solidly in the less than 85% group, not the top tier. And, I am slipping back fast, so I might be in the 50% area when it comes to skills and speed. You see, almost anyone can put on a burst of speed, and some can speed for awhile, but, without skills, you will get smitten down and tossed on the ground sooner or later.....

Now, back to our normal programming.

[03_SONIC_BLUR]

My TWC connection is working fine. I think maybe my 7 year old mother board may have had it. The last time it was problematic, shutting it down and then looking up a replacement MB and CPU straightened it out. But that seems to not be in the cards this time. I may actually have to do it as the keyboard and mouse have both stopped working. It was fine this morning, and it shut down properly, but when I tried to start is a little while ago, it was kaput

So, I need to do some comparison shopping and then prepare for the hell of swapping out a mother board and the re-installation of all of the software due to the new chipset requiring drivers that are buried in the OS during install and not easily dealt with

Well. I have two Windoze laptops and a mini mac to keep me going until I fix it. I am not computer barren, but I miss a machine with a shitload of ram, disk storage and processor power