Tag: Technology

Computer won’t connect to a web site. Looking for a job but the website is down. Okay… move on to the next job site. Nothing there. To the next site, no connection. sigh. Next site. Got connection but horrendously slow. I mean slower than old teletype. 

Connect to phone hotspot. 

Get email. Huh! That email came into phone over two hours ago only now showing up on computer. Weird!

Now I can get to the web site that was down, oh, and the super slow one too.

Disconnect from hotspot

Reconnect to home wifi

Now web sites work. WTF?

Go back to phone hotspot… Can’t connect. Connect but no internet. GRRRRR!

Reconnect to home wifi, websites wont load.

Connect HARDLINE Turn off wifi completely.

Websites won’t load.

Okay Now I want to understand what the hell is going on. Shit should consistently work OR NOT! Intermittently working isn’t going to cut it with me.

Hours pass. Time lost. I’m not looking for work, I’m not learning anything new, I’m not studying anything. I’m troubleshooting.

Other half comes in after talking to the damn satellite people AGAIN! 

“I need to disconnect their box from the router and connect it directly to my computer.”

“Okay I’ll take care of it”

“Thanks”

A few minutes later,

“Their modem is connected directly to your computer.”

“Thanks.”

Tests running, more tests, leave disconnected for hours. More wasted time. Time lost. I’m not looking for work, I’m not learning anything new, I’m not studying anything. I’m trying to make the connection to the phone hotspot work. I’m troubleshooting.

Except now I can’t research hotspot problems using the home internet. Doing the research on the phone while trying to FIX the phone is a major pain in the ass.

More hours, more frustration. Now I’m pissed off that absolutely NO COMMUNICATIONS in my home are working right. Suddenly I can’t even make a phone call because my phone is saying ‘No Service”

Is that the cause of the original problem? Has the west coast internet service taken a dump? Is my phone broken, my computer, my hotspot, my home internet, my router…

Without the ability to have at least one fixed point of reference I’m spinning my wheels.

Then the freakin neighbor starts spray painting something on their rear deck. It’s a LARGE something and the fumes are blowing into the room I’m in. My sinuses immediately wad up, then start bleeding. Hey Thanks!!!!

At this point trying to learn anything new is pointless because I’m frustrated and angry.

This is how I lose entire days.

First of all let me start by saying;

Under no circumstances should you consider HughesNet satellite services.

When we signed up for HughesNet it was awesome, we were pleased and totally happy to get rid of Verizon.

We were so pleased that after the first month we upgraded our service. 

BUZZ BUZZ BUZZ BUZZ BUZZ, Danger “Will Robinson”, WARNING, WARNING, “Antimatter containment failing, Warp Core explosion will occur in 3 seconds”

And that’s when it went to hell.

We opted for the super duper premium plan, the fastest, bestest, razzle dazzle plan they offered. Which still cost less than what we’d been paying the bastards over at Verizon.  

Unfortunately, this move resulted in a degradation of the service to almost total un-usability instead of an improvement.

One of the things you don’t consider when you think about communication satellites is that the satellite is essentially a reflector (That’s seriously inaccurate but for the purposes of illustrating this point, it will do.  For those of you that might not remember… Radio, & Microwave is all part of the electromagnetic spectrum. The practical upshot of this is that a lot of stuff in the EM spectrum acts like just like the flashlight you played with as a kid in your backyard.) 

Picture a flashlight pointing at the sky, in say, New York. If you wanted that light to fall in Los Angeles you could put a mirror in orbit and then reflect the beam down onto Los Angeles. It’s just a big triangle. But if you have heavy storms or cloud cover over either the source, the destination, or both, then the light falling in Los Angeles is likely to be obstructed or dim.

When the same model is applied to satellite service it’s easy to see why there will be good days and bad days. Satellite Internet has the added problem that all data requests are being sent from a little dish to the satellite, then being bounced back down to the HughesNet station, then put out on the internet, then the requested data is returned along the same path.

After explaining all of this to the other half and that we should expect that sometimes there will be transient problems. The other half said, “Oh that makes sense.” Which is why when we started noticing that the service was slower than it had been, we looked at the weather reports across the midwest saw all the storms and said, “meh,” it’ll pass. 

It wasn’t until later when we noticed things like our data allocation being chewed up when we weren’t home, that I started the investigation.  At first I thought someone had managed to compromise our WiFi password. No problem, I changed it to something a bit tougher. Now it’s a stone bitch to enter on some of our devices. 

After running through every single possibility and accounting for all devices on our network. I concluded that something else was going on. 

Even when we’d purposefully disconnected the satellite box from the rest of our network backbone and left the house, we still saw our network allocation disappearing, thats when we started asking questions.

The answers we got from HugheNet were not acceptable. 

To date we’ve been told:

“Your router is always transmitting data to our network.” (Uh not really, a router doesn’t work that way. It may check daily for software updates but it’s not sucking up gigabytes of data by itself.)

“You should only have your computer connected directly to our satellite box.” (Oh?? Then why do all your commercials show families with their tablets and computers and games? That’s more than one device, would you care to walk us through the configuration???)

“Too many people are using the service right now.” (Really? So you’ve oversold your service to the detriment of all, instead of telling folks there’s a waiting list, while you increased service capacity?)

“We’ve been having problems with the “super duper premium plan, the fastest, bestest, razzle dazzle plan” (Then why did you allow us or anyone else to change to that plan knowing that it wasn’t working properly? And why when you’ve changed us back are we still having problems?)

The sound of silence, then suddenly, we got a month free. Even then the system is running the monthly allocation of data down in a matter of days.  They claim they’ve got us in a two year contract. I contend that because the service is not working properly, and is not functional for common activities that they advertise their service is fit for, like:

Streaming media such as Netfllix, Hulu, Apple TV rentals, etc

Accessing the management console of my domain

Email with graphics such as family photos, not downloading or taking hours to download.

Constant disruptions to email retrieval

Web pages that are being apparently blocked.

That their two year contract is toilet paper.  

They’re in breach as they are not providing the services they’ve promised to provide.  No matter. The other half is dealing with it.  I figure at some point there’s going to be an attorney letter and HugheNet will be out here removing their dish from our roof. But I’m staying the hell out of it.

For right now I’m being a good little network technician and connecting or disconnecting the satellite from our network as requested, because I’m over it.  I’m sick of technology or maintenance of technology becoming all consuming. My internal shit is working just fine.

I’ve written and posted this blog as a warning  and follow-up to a previous post about the conversion to satellite. Bottom line…

DON’T go HughesNet.

As an aside, since the satellite connection has become so wonky I’m using my phone hotspot more often than ever before.

It’s a little bit of a pain in the ass, but when I want email or web access I just connect that way.  Most of the time the one bar of 4G signal on my phone is faster than the satellite. So I’m running in “Burst” mode. I’ll queue up stuff and transmit it when I connect my computer to the internet via my phone. 

It’s interesting because I’m spending less time mindlessly surfing the internet. I’m not reading as much of the news and generally I’m happier. Oh there are things I’m reading that are mindboggling and I’ve got a lot to say about them but reading these pieces on my phone somehow diminishes the likelihood that I’ll write about them.

Ok, perhaps I’m high, or simply well ahead of my time. I’ve had an on again, off again relationship with Social media.

Let’s look at this shall we?

Anyone remember Myspace? I actually had to go look it up, I couldn’t remember the name to save my life, and I had an account at one time. 

I had (Past Tense) a Facebook account. Haven’t missed it since I shut it down.

I’m on Twitter but the vitriol on Twitter is getting to the point that it’s not fun anymore.

LinkedIn is interesting, but even that site is becoming questionable. Really? Dick shots on my timeline? Uhh, suppose I’m looking for a job?

Thanks DUMBASS, I really appreciate your posting potentially offensive material on a professionally oriented website. Oh and by the way, I appreciate the morons that favorited said dick shot. You’ve propagated it across all your friends timelines too, well fucking done! To the owner of the dick… Umm there are some things no-one needs to see and your personal dick is, umm, one of those things. #uglydick #caring

I’ve never had instagram, vimeo, or any of the rest of the social media things.

I’ll personally be happy to see all these things relegated to the dustbin of computer history.  

You know, like the 36 PIN Centronics parallel printer cable?

These “social” sites and applications aren’t bringing us closer together they’re excuses to sit on our couches being hateful to each other.

Internet trolls multiply like antibiotic resistant Staphylococcus. I’m still unclear what the whole troll Raison d’être is.

I mean what’s the point of being inflammatory if you don’t even believe the shit you’re spewing? If it’s just about attention, then why do these “Trolls” immediately block someone that has an alternative opinion and the facts to back up what they say? 

Even negative attention is attention. 

Why do the trolls even bother to seek out groups of people that they know will disagree with them, when they could just as easily hang out with a bunch of people that think exactly like they do? Wouldn’t they want to get positive reinforcement no matter how wacky their opinion is?

I’ve been thinking about it because I was noticing that I was using Twitter less and less.

When I do login my timeline is full of trolls duking it out with people who know their shit and yet… the battles go on and on. I can’t take more than about 10 minutes of it now.

I’m going to purge my timeline, my tweets, and thin out the folks I’m following. Maybe that will make the time line less vicious and more interesting. 

Perhaps I’ll ride Twitter into inevitable oblivion, maybe not, I’m still undecided.

I have no clue what the future of social media holds, but I think it’s on it’s way out. 

More and more people are going to completely ephemeral communications. like instant messages that self destruct after they’re read.

It sounds mission impossible but I can see the point. There are still HR departments and bosses that want to know if you’ve got a social media account so they can monitor it.

I welcome the time when Facebook, Twitter, and all the other social media sites are considered “quaint” and outdated.

I wonder if I should be concerned about what will replace these quaint communication forms… 

God I hope it’s not going to be some tacky ass antenna sticking out of my skull! 

I stumbled across an article titled  Why Bloggers Are Calling it Quits a day or two after I wrote this blog piece. 

There’s a quote from Andrew Sullivan that sums it up very well:

I am saturated in digital life and I want to return to the actual world again. I’m a human being before I am a writer; and a writer before I am a blogger … I yearn for other, older forms. I want to read again, slowly, carefully. I want to absorb a difficult book and walk around in my own thoughts with it for a while. I want to have an idea and let it slowly take shape, rather than be instantly blogged. I want to write long essays that can answer more deeply and subtly the many questions that the Dish years have presented to me. I want to write a book.

The entire piece is worth a read.