Yearly Archives: 2007

Back to normal

Life,

After three weeks of either vacation or house guests, our life is finally nearly normal again.

We left for Illinois on July 28 and visited with family in the Elgin area. My mother had been in the hospital with a severe case of pneumonia just prior to our visit, so things were a little unusual in that regard.

Then we headed to Wisconsin where we spent a week blissfully unconnected. No cell phone, no internet, only one channel on the television. The weather was perfect. It could not have been much better – perhaps a little longer. We went back to Elgin for more visiting. We even got a chance to see Wicked in Chicago.

We headed back to Maryland on Friday, August 10 and on August 11 welcomed three visitors from Japan. They remained with us for a week, and left this morning. While all of the experiences were really only minor changes, because they were in tandem, made for a bit more stress. While the visitors couldn’t have been less obtrusive, the mere fact we had to clean house, cook breakfast, a few dinners and some lunches and ferry them around the area was time-consuming and tiring. I got no work (for pay) done while they were here.

I’m glad we had the guests, but also glad to get our lives back to normal.

WordPress and Fantastico

Blogging

I was delighted when I saw I could create and manage a WordPress blog through my Web host’s Fantastico interface. I immediately set up this blog and began writing. However I now am concerned because I’ve tried to upgrade to WordPress 2.2xx with no success. The interface on my host doesn’t seem to work. Not happy.

Comcast again

Technology, ,

Question of the day- Is Comcast screwing with us?

A few weeks ago we switched to Comcast for telephone, cable TV and internet. So far I have to report that I’m not delighted. We’ve had at least three outages of the internet and two of the telephone. The technician who came out last week told me it was because we had “too much signal” coming into the house – it caused what I invisioned as a potential broadband heart attack. We had high-speed hypertension. Cable clogged coronary. The way to fix it was to have a “line guy” come out and reduce the incoming signal.

After that the phones and internet went out again. I called and the phone technician said the only thing he could see was too strong a signal coming into the house. While we were on the phone it fixed itself.

Earlier this afternoon I noticed that most of the lights on my modem were out. For a while I could still connect to the internet, but then even that was messed up. I called Comcast and talked to a friendly person on the phone. Again, while I was on the phone the problems cleared up.

So, while the issues may be very temporary, they are still issues. I make my living by being connected to the internet. A slight hiccup and I lose data. We never had this issue with RCN.

Maybe we should have tried Verizon Fios.

Too late now, we have a 2-year contract with Comcast. (And that’s subject for another post)