Categories: all aviation Building a Biplane bicycle gadgets misc motorcycle theater
In the last few days I've had some suprising events work out around me.
The first was to do with my projector. A couple of years ago, I made some changes to my home media life: I ditched pay TV service and the TV I'd had (which had its own story, having been passed between friends since college), and I got a projector.
The projector was a good choice, and worked well for me, but in the last few months, every time I'd turned it on, it started making this terrible grinding noise. I knew what that meant: dying bearing. I figured it was probably a fan, so I pulled it off its ceiling mount, and opened it up. There was the horrible noise, but no, it wasn't coming from any of the fans. Huh, though I, what else could make that noise?
Then I dug a little bit further, and realized what was going on: the color wheel's bearing was dying. The color wheel is a little translucent wheel that sits in front of the lamp, and filters the light a few hundred times per second. Each time a different color is up, the miniature mirror array in the projector moves to light up those pixels which should the that color.
It's a pretty good system, but with the bearing on that wheel dying, the projector obviously had a very limited lifespan. I couldn't replace it without risking damage to the whole thing, so I decided to throw myself on the mercy of the manufacturer, Sharp, and see what they said.
Imagine my surprise when I heard that this projector had a 3 year warranty! Imagine my further pleasure when I called up Costco, where I'd bought it, and discovered that I had gotten it in October, 2006. The repair probably would have cost a few hundred dollars -- cheap enough to be cheaper than getting a new projector, but possibly close to the original purchase price of the thing, which had been marked down and on closeout.
That pleasurable surprise was amplified as I worked with Sharp: they sent me an electronic shipping label, for overnight shipping to their factory. Two days later, I received an email saying it was headed back to me, again by overnight shipping. A day after that, I had it back in my hands. Wow! I had really expected the warranty repair to take weeks, if not a month or two. Go Sharp!
The next pleasant surprise came from an even more unexpected corner. When I moved into my house in 2000, I ordered DSL service through a now-defunct company called Bazillion, which was bought by Speakeasy when it croaked, so I've been a Speakeasy customer for most of my time in this house. Unfortunately, my house is about twenty seven thousand feet from the Central Office, which means that Qwest won't even acknowledge that DSL is possible, and Speakeasy could only get a nominal 144k connection speed out to me. Even that was something of a lie, actually testing around 90-100k. Maybe twice the speed of a 56k dialup connection.
Of course, the alternative is Comcast cable service, but Comcast has been on my villians list for a long time: bait-and-switch pricing, high-pressure sales tactics to get you to buy TV and internet service together, port-blocking and traffic-shaping (techniques to limit the customer's access to the internet in various ways), and a reputation for being evil cusses to deal with when anything wasn't exactly as you hoped.
So I avoided Comcast. In 2007, when I tried and failed to sell my house, I decided to swallow my pride, and give Comcast a try, figuring it was 2007, and it was reasonable to expect higher broadband speeds in Seattle, one of the tech centers of the world. The conversation went something like this:
Comcast: Hi, thanks for calling Comcast. Can I have your social security number?
Me: What? No.
Comcast: [a little hurt, but rallying] Ok, then... can I have your driver's license number?
Me: [increasingly annoyed] Uh, no.
Comcast: Ok, well, you're pretty much SOL then. You can to into one of our stores, where they can record your driver's license number...
Me: <click>
I can't stand businesses that need your social security number for no greater reason than "we want it," so that pretty much killed things right then and there. I called Speakeasy up and re-established my DSL service, all 144 thousand shimmering bits per second of it.
Then, a few months ago, I somehow heard about Comcast Business. A little bit of research later, and I realized that this was the answer to my desire. Comcast Business is a separate division from the consumer folks I'd talked to before, and is in the business of providing no-nonsense bandwidth to small businesses. It costs a tiny bit more (not very much more, once those bait-and-switch "introductory rates" on the consumer side expire, as it turns out). The service it provides is straight service, without traffic-shaping, port-blocking, or any of the other crap that made me want to shoot Comcast into the sun.
And, perhaps most importantly, when I called them up to set up service, I talked to someone in the Seattle area, who asked for the service address, and some questions about what kind of service I wanted. There was no mention of SSNs, or security deposits, or any of the abhorrent nonsense the consumer division seems prone to. I was not pressured to add TV or voice service to my order. The service was explained in clear (if techy) language that was music to my ears.
Imagine my further surprise when I found that the installation appointment was for a 2 hour window! Comcast is famous for informing their victims that their installation appointment will occur some time between 8 am and 6 pm on a given day, and you'd better be there, or there will be a fee! And if Comcast fails to show up, oh well, we'll schedule you for another day-long period of waiting for that indolent knock on the door, maybe a week or two away, because hey, we're a busy corporate monolith!
On the day of installation, the installer called me early in the day and asked if it would be alright if he showed up early. I agreed that that was fine, and he was there about half an hour later (exactly as he'd predicted), and about an hour later, I had internet service. He was pleasant to deal with, knew what he was doing, and did it well and quickly.
Since then, I've been able to watch streaming video (a rare treat!), download and upload files with impunity, and generally have an honest high-bandwidth experience. DSLReports' testing tools have informed me that, depending upon where I connect, I'm getting between 5 and 20 Mbps download speed, and between 1/2 and 6 Mbps upload speed. Comcast calls this service 12/2, a nominal 12 Mbps download, 2 Mbps upload. It costs $59.95 per month, or about $4 less per month than I'm paying for 144k iDSL service from Speakeasy. Wow. Wow!
So it's been a rare period of consumer success for me these last few weeks. I'm so used to companies exerting themselves strenuously to anger me that it's a bit of a shock. Don't worry, I'll come down off the cloud soon enough, I'm sure, but for the moment, it's nice to know that it's still possible to get good service without feeling like I'm some company's whipping boy.
Posted at 08:10 permanent link category: /misc
Categories: all aviation Building a Biplane bicycle gadgets misc motorcycle theater