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Three Days of a Hundred Years of Darkness: Hurricane Sandy and 12 Months of Nothingness

One year ago today, 8.5 million people in the New York City area were without heat or power as Hurricane Sandy blasted the soft middle of our lives — thrusting us backward a hundred years behind a wall of water into at least three days of cold and darkness:

Monday night, at 11:00 pm sharp in Jersey City, New Jersey, the lights went out and stayed off until last night at 7:43pm.  That’s three days without power or heat.  Hurricane Sandy was a massively nasty beast, and we’re just now starting the recovery process.  We are hungry and scavenging for food.  Supermarkets are closed.  Few places have power.

For many of those directly touched by the floodwater a year ago, life has yet to return to normal, and many will never recover the good lives they once had before the storm; and that is a clear failure of the government safety net and the lack of any sort of real social fabric that meshes us together.  The King has no clothes, and we don’t, either!

When it is better, and more profitable, to cut and run and abandon than it is to stay and rebuild and recover — we all have a problem.

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Comcast in the Philippines

I have had my share of joys and troubles with Comcast as my “Triple Play” provider, but I’ve never before experienced a total failure to communicate with a company — as I have this week — in trying to get my voice and cable modem replaced.

When you used to call Comcast customer support, you dialed an 800 number and you were then connected to the regional office that served your area.  Having that sort of local connection was important because, “Jersey Understands Jersey” and you could speak in cultural semaphores that clicked understanding that helped quicken resolutions to any technical or billing problem.

It now appears Comcast have outsourced all their technical support and billing to the Philippines, and that is causing a lot of widespread and furious grief for customers.  There isn’t just a cultural separation between the Philippines and the USA, but, like it or not, there is a language difference that often bears down on not understanding each other because of natural accents.

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Recovering from Hurricane Sandy in Jersey City

Monday night, at 11:00 pm sharp in Jersey City, New Jersey, the lights went out and stayed off until last night at 7:43pm.  That’s three days without power or heat.  Hurricane Sandy was a massively nasty beast, and we’re just now starting the recovery process.  We are hungry and scavenging for food.  Supermarkets are closed.  Few places have power.

Continue reading → Recovering from Hurricane Sandy in Jersey City

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Connecting to Comcast Xfinity WiFi on the Street

When I read in May of this year that free WiFi connectivity outside the home was coming my way as a Comcast Xfinity customer, I was delighted at the thought of being able to have as fast an internet connection in the street as I’ve had here at home.

Comcast Corp. (CMCSA), the biggest U.S. broadband provider, is teaming up with other large cable companies to create a nationwide network of Wi-Fi hot spots, helping them fend off competition from phone carriers.

Time Warner Cable Inc. (TWC), Cablevision Systems Corp., Bright House Networks LLC and Cox Communications Inc. are part of the pact, according to a statement from the companies today. The five cable carriers will let one another’s Web customers connect laptops, tablets and other mobile devices to their Wi-Fi networks in metro areas, totaling more than 50,000 hot spots.

During my daily walks, I’ve been seeing a lot of Xfinity vans along major thoroughfares with technicians installing metal things atop Jersey City Janky Poles.

Finding that curious, I decided to fire up the Comcast WiFi Hotspot webpage to get more information on new connectivity niches and I was surprised to see so many new indoor and outdoor WiFi connectoids for Xfinity in my immediate neighborhood.

Square icons indicate an indoor WiFi hotspot and round icons mean an outdoor WiFi hotspot.  A triangle icon is a “partner” WiFi hotspot.

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Comcast Just Doubled My Internet Speed for Free! Or Did They?

My Comcast Internet and Phone service went out last night for three hours.  It was a unique widespread outage — I might lose either Phone or Internet, but in 10 years I don’t recall ever losing both of them at the same time with no modem lights — and I was secretly hoping Comcast were finally doing their free “double speed” upgrade for our area they’d been publicly promising for weeks in an attempt to tamp down Verizon FiOS infiltration into their broadband power user neighborhoods.

In the past, I’ve written about Comcast Data Caps and I was happy to see Comcast suspend data caps for the 2012 Summer — because that makes for great Big Brother live stream viewing — and I wondered if the cap suspension was because of the planned doubling of internet speed so users could get used to the added speed without having to worry about going over their broadband usage limit?

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Bumping Your Head Against Comcast Data Caps

On September 5, 2008 I wrote an article — Comcast Kills the Internets – explaining, in detail, why Comcast’s broadband data cap of 250 gigs a month was a terrible idea set to freeze us all in their time and space for what we can and cannot do on the internet in the future.  Today, less than three years later, that prediction has horrifically come true.  When I read in Ozymandias that a user had been cut off from Comcast broadband and given a one year death penalty, I was alarmed, because I knew my concern had come true.  I checked “Users & Settings” on the Comcast website to check my account and broadband usage.

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Should I Choose Verizon FiOS Over Comcast?

I’m not a big fan of Comcast or Verizon — but I am a fan of saving 50% on my phone/internet/cable bill each month.  We have been Comcast customers since 2001, so our history with them has been both rough and pleasing.  Verizon FiOS is getting installed en masse in our neighborhood, and we were told by the landlord that Verizon would need access to our apartment to “run a FiOS installation line from the basement to our closet and then to all the closets above us in the building.”  We can choose to sign up for FiOS, or not, but the construction for installing a FiOS pipe will be done no matter what.

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