Minor things that bother you

[Amaury]

Technology. There was an outage for Spectrum in the area yesterday. Our Internet was super slow all day, with things taking forever to load. Later in the evening, before we knew of the outage, we tried resetting the router to no avail, as it was still slow, and our Internet kept dropping us, in addition. Left the router off for an hour, plugged it back in, and when it finally reconnected because it took longer than usual, everything seemed fine, with speeds back to normal, before it dropped our Internet connection again. Called Spectrum, and the guy said it could be our line. About 30 minutes after my mom got off the phone, our Internet problems were resolved. We got clarification earlier this morning that while it wasn't a Spectrum-wide outage, there was some kind of outage in the area, so it wasn't just us. A friend of mine who lives here said he wasn't having problems, so it must have been certain blocks or something.

Because my receiver connects to the Wi-Fi, I was still able to watch TV, but I didn't have access to certain things, like the full TV guide or the full menu. That didn't resolve when our Internet problems did, so I went to go try to reset the receiver, something I've done before without issues, and have not been able to watch programs on my TV since. I have the receiver so I can record, and I can still watch my programs via the app on my phone or TV, it's not just the same. So, we contacted support again today via chat, and they said since we've tried everything, including leaving the receiver unplugged all night, we just need to go to our local Spectrum office and replace the receiver at no charge. The channel will briefly come on, and then the receiver turns off and says "hold." I turn it back on and it says, "preparing your Spectrum experience," which is normal after resetting, but it should only take a few minutes. It stays stuck there forever before eventually saying there was a problem. Not sure what it is, but there's also been an icon flashing.

I don't understand how an Internet outage would cause my receiver to go out, but okay.

[kphoger]

Technology. There was an outage for Spectrum in the area yesterday. Our Internet was super slow all day, with things taking forever to load. Later in the evening, before we knew of the outage, we tried resetting the router to no avail, as it was still slow, and our Internet kept dropping us, in addition. Left the router off for an hour, plugged it back in, and when it finally reconnected because it took longer than usual, everything seemed fine, with speeds back to normal, before it dropped our Internet connection again. Called Spectrum, and the guy said it could be our line. About 30 minutes after my mom got off the phone, our Internet problems were resolved. We got clarification earlier this morning that while it wasn't a Spectrum-wide outage, there was some kind of outage in the area, so it wasn't just us. A friend of mine who lives here said he wasn't having problems, so it must have been certain blocks or something.

Because my receiver connects to the Wi-Fi, I was still able to watch TV, but I didn't have access to certain things, like the full TV guide or the full menu. That didn't resolve when our Internet problems did, so I went to go try to reset the receiver, something I've done before without issues, and have not been able to watch programs on my TV since. I have the receiver so I can record, and I can still watch my programs via the app on my phone or TV, it's not just the same. So, we contacted support again today via chat, and they said since we've tried everything, including leaving the receiver unplugged all night, we just need to go to our local Spectrum office and replace the receiver at no charge. The channel will briefly come on, and then the receiver turns off and says "hold." I turn it back on and it says, "preparing your Spectrum experience," which is normal after resetting, but it should only take a few minutes. It stays stuck there forever before eventually saying there was a problem. Not sure what it is, but there's also been an icon flashing.

I don't understand how an Internet outage would cause my receiver to go out, but okay.

I work in cable, albeit as an office employee.  However, I used to handle tech calls.

It's likely that you had an outage in the node or even a smaller geographical area.  From the sound of it, your video service runs on DOCSIS, and therefore it's using a different frequency band than your internet.  I say this because guide and menu information is affected, which typically operates on 'out of band' frequencies (or at least it used to back when I knew this stuff better), and you specifically mentioned having issues with that.  Depending on what caused the outage, it's possible that an issue with those frequencies remains even though internet service was restored.  If it was physical damage—say a truck hit something or there was an electrical issue or whatever—then it will take time for that crew to fix whatever was damaged.  Or it's possible your cable box went kaput.  It's worth swapping the box at the Spectrum store first.

But if that doesn't resolve it, then I'd call in and set up a trouble call for a tech to come out and run scans at the tap.

[Mav94]

I've had problems with intermittent internet outages for well over a year, mostly because the signal coming into my house was either too weak or too strong. Yesterday the tech told me that the lines in my neighborhood aren't really set up for internet -- I nodded like I understood -- and that my line is split three times before it even gets into my house. He told me his notes would say that he couldn't put the signal back into spec, because he couldn't, and the problem was likely to recur. It didn't even take 24 hours. So I called the company again, and this time I included words like "angry" and "upset" and "options."

Late this afternoon I was informed a maintenance crew will be here tomorrow

[kphoger]

I've had problems with intermittent internet outages for well over a year, mostly because the signal coming into my house was either too weak or too strong. Yesterday the tech told me that the lines in my neighborhood aren't really set up for internet -- I nodded like I understood -- and that my line is split three times before it even gets into my house. He told me his notes would say that he couldn't put the signal back into spec, because he couldn't, and the problem was likely to recur. It didn't even take 24 hours. So I called the company again, and this time I included words like "angry" and "upset" and "options."

Late this afternoon I was informed a maintenance crew will be here tomorrow

I don't know what type of service you have down there.  When we lived in Herrin back in 2006-2008, I think we had Verizon phone and internet, but I wasn't in cable yet to even pay much attention.

When they say the lines in your neighborhood aren't really set up for internet, it makes me wonder if they just mean the infrastructure can't handle today's speeds.  Ever since the introduction of DOCSIS 3.0, internet has been transmitted on multiple channels and, especially with the advent of DOCSIS 3.1, the number of channels has only continued to grow, and some frequencies that used to be allocated to video are now allocated to internet.  In more recent years, major cities have been transitioning to mid-split or high-split in order to increase the number of available channels.  Each of these changes has also required upgrades to the headends and individual nodes, so it's possible that the physical plant feeding your neighborhood simply hasn't kept up with the rapid pace of the times.

If a residential field tech is unable to get your levels in spec, then that means he's done all he's able for your own service drop from mainline to premises.  The maintenance crew will come and figure out what's wrong, but it's not necessarily something they can fix themselves.  They might be able to remove a splitter somewhere along the mainline or add an amplifier or something, though, so it's possible you'll see an improvement.

[LilianaUwU]

I don't have that option here because it's actually the same shit under different names. Bell Canada is the only company rich enough to get wires through town, which means if one goes down, all of them go down.

[kphoger]

I don't have that option here because it's actually the same shit under different names. Bell Canada is the only company rich enough to get wires through town, which means if one goes down, all of them go down.

But 'wires going down' can mean many things.  When my own internet was having persistent issues back in the winter, for example, it was because an apartment complex a couple of neighborhoods away was back-feeding noise into the node.  I was regularly doing ping tests via command prompt, and it would alternate every so often between 0% packet loss and 90-100% packet loss.  Nothing physically wrong with the MSO's mainline network, just with the internal wiring of that apartment complex.  But, a few years before that, when I was experiencing 5-15% packet loss on a regular basis, I think they had to replace part of the node, which required several mainline techs to trace back and figure out first.

[Amaury]

I work in cable, albeit as an office employee.  However, I used to handle tech calls.

It's likely that you had an outage in the node or even a smaller geographical area.  From the sound of it, your video service runs on DOCSIS, and therefore it's using a different frequency band than your internet.  I say this because guide and menu information is affected, which typically operates on 'out of band' frequencies (or at least it used to back when I knew this stuff better), and you specifically mentioned having issues with that.  Depending on what caused the outage, it's possible that an issue with those frequencies remains even though internet service was restored.  If it was physical damage—say a truck hit something or there was an electrical issue or whatever—then it will take time for that crew to fix whatever was damaged.  Or it's possible your cable box went kaput.  It's worth swapping the box at the Spectrum store first.

But if that doesn't resolve it, then I'd call in and set up a trouble call for a tech to come out and run scans at the tap.

Well, after being gone all day on my weekly drive and leaving the receiver off all day—not unplugged, just off—everything seems to have resolved itself. That blinking icon disappeared, and I am able to access the full menu and guide again instead of only having access to the quick settings and mini-guide. Maybe I wasn't being patient enough. I don't know, but yay!

[bugo]

Be concerned once the CyberMower starts making odd requests.
[/url]

Haitian immigrants?

[bugo]

Who's to say Nintendo is wrong if people complain but yet still purchase anyways?

Let me throw in this news report from 1991...

OK boomer.

[kphoger]

Haitian immigrants?

Nope.  Alf.

[Max Rockatansky]

Haitian immigrants?

Nope.  Alf.

And/or Patrick Bateman.  I for one would be very interested in an ALF/American Psycho crossover.

[SectorZ]

Who's to say Nintendo is wrong if people complain but yet still purchase anyways?

Let me throw in this news report from 1991...

OK boomer.

1:38 mark in that video, I never saw any demo/prototype of Super Mario World that had the "Super Mario Brothers 4" subtitle in it like that.

[Max Rockatansky]

Who's to say Nintendo is wrong if people complain but yet still purchase anyways?

Let me throw in this news report from 1991...

OK boomer.

1:38 mark in that video, I never saw any demo/prototype of Super Mario World that had the "Super Mario Brothers 4" subtitle in it like that.

There are some screenshots in a volume (I forget which) of Nintendo Power which has that prototype in it.

[kernals12]

Blackstone and Blackrock have such similar names and are both investment firms

[kphoger]

When the daily weather forecast and the hourly forecast don't line up.

This morning, I asked Alexa what the weather would be like today.  She said the high temp would be 67°F today.  I then asked her what the weather would be like at 4pm today, and she said it would be 68°F.  Hmm...

[kernals12]

Mercedes claims they were the first with anti-lock brakes when Jensen, Lincoln, Cadillac, Oldsmobile, and Imperial were all offering it earlier

[formulanone]

Mercedes claims they were the first with anti-lock brakes when Jensen, Lincoln, Cadillac, Oldsmobile, and Imperial were all offering it earlier

I think Mercedes-Benz were the first manufacturer to make it standard equipment for all of their models.

[Takumi]

The abbreviation for anti-lock brakes wasn't even standardized until the early 90s. Honda referred to it as ALB until 1991.

[vdeane]

The fact that the shortcut keys for cutting, copying, and pasting files are all right next to each other.  I have a tendency to hit the wrong one.  Usually I catch myself in time or it's something I can easily notice and undo.  Not this time.

I was doing the photo updates for my website.  As part of that, I need to copy the original photos out of the directory they're in for the trip into the directories for the routes in the photo gallery.  Then I run a perl script on the routes directory to find all full-size files and resize them down for the web and generate the thumbnails before uploading them to the server and running the scripts to get everything into the database.  Unfortunately, when I was doing that, I accidentally hit CTRL-X instead of CTRL-C when "copying" the three I-490 photos over, and I didn't notice this until I went to select the images I wanted to include in the Facebook preview hours later.  As a result, the script didn't run on copies of the images, but the originals, and the full-size versions are completely gone.

I am beyond upset at this.  Sadly, since I manually do backups to my external hard drive before trips and after site updates, and seldom any other time since it's a PITA and my hard drive contents tend not to have important changes outside of images taken on trips and the subsequent site updates, I have no backup to restore from.  I tried to run testdisk and photorec (the recommended file recovery programs on Linux) on the relevant directories and my camera's SD card, but I couldn't find anything to recover (which is VERY odd; even if I assume that there's nothing on the hard drive due to how the files were moved and the scripts work, shouldn't there have been something to find on the SD card?).  If anyone has any other ideas, have at it, because at this point I'm worried that I'm just SOL and the original images are lost permanently.

This means that I'm locked into displaying images on my site in 800x600 forever; if I ever wanted to do the work to change that to a larger size or go back to offering the full-size images like I did when I first created the site, I can't, because I don't have these three images in any larger size any more.

[gonealookin]

On the subject of automotive systems with acronyms, TPMS on my 2012 RAV4, which has never worked properly when I had the Blizzaks on for the winter, has now completely failed.  The warning light flashes for a minute upon engine start and remains on for the duration of the ride.

The minor thing that bothers me is the warning light on the dashboard being a distraction.  Finally I used the "small piece of electrical tape on the plastic over the light" solution, and I am no longer bothered.

[Max Rockatansky]

On the subject of automotive systems with acronyms, TPMS on my 2012 RAV4, which has never worked properly when I had the Blizzaks on for the winter, has now completely failed.  The warning light flashes for a minute upon engine start and remains on for the duration of the ride.

The minor thing that bothers me is the warning light on the dashboard being a distraction.  Finally I used the "small piece of electrical tape on the plastic over the light" solution, and I am no longer bothered.

I replaced two of those last year for $60 a piece on my Impreza.  The failure blinks happened at the exact wrong time when I was descending Blue Ridge Road in Tulare County.  I knew what the blinking-to-solid living meant but it was like you said a distraction. 

[Scott5114]

I was doing the photo updates for my website.  As part of that, I need to copy the original photos out of the directory they're in for the trip into the directories for the routes in the photo gallery.  Then I run a perl script on the routes directory to find all full-size files and resize them down for the web and generate the thumbnails before uploading them to the server and running the scripts to get everything into the database.  Unfortunately, when I was doing that, I accidentally hit CTRL-X instead of CTRL-C when "copying" the three I-490 photos over, and I didn't notice this until I went to select the images I wanted to include in the Facebook preview hours later.  As a result, the script didn't run on copies of the images, but the originals, and the full-size versions are completely gone.

Why do you not just have the script read the originals from the source directory and have it write the scaled down version to the target directory of your choosing? (i.e. read the images from $ARGV[0] and write them to the location at $ARGV[1])

[kkt]

On the subject of automotive systems with acronyms, TPMS on my 2012 RAV4, which has never worked properly when I had the Blizzaks on for the winter, has now completely failed.  The warning light flashes for a minute upon engine start and remains on for the duration of the ride.

The minor thing that bothers me is the warning light on the dashboard being a distraction.  Finally I used the "small piece of electrical tape on the plastic over the light" solution, and I am no longer bothered.

TPMS has detected 8 out of my last 1 low tire pressures....

[Max Rockatansky]

On the subject of automotive systems with acronyms, TPMS on my 2012 RAV4, which has never worked properly when I had the Blizzaks on for the winter, has now completely failed.  The warning light flashes for a minute upon engine start and remains on for the duration of the ride.

The minor thing that bothers me is the warning light on the dashboard being a distraction.  Finally I used the "small piece of electrical tape on the plastic over the light" solution, and I am no longer bothered.

TPMS has detected 8 out of my last 1 low tire pressures....

I've found the systems which feature the actual pressure in dash to actually useful (like my Corolla and Challenger).  The kind in my Impreza was the type that only flagged a light when the pressure was 3 PSI below the minimum recommendation.  In the case of the latter, I usually was catching my slow leaks during my monthly air pressure check via gauge.

[Rothman]

I generally find TPMS useful.  My tires have at least a 7 psi swing from winter to summer.