Comcast

Who Won The Week? 9/29/19

Fandango5 Comments

10CC3057-4EEA-4C80-B8C1-700C0FC6C906It’s time for another Who Won the Week prompt. The idea behind Who Won the Week is for you to select who you think “won” this past week. Your selection can be anyone or anything — politicians, celebrities, athletes, authors, bloggers, your friends or family members, books, movies, TV shows, businesses, organizations, whatever.

I will be posting this prompt on Sunday mornings (my time). If you want to participate, write your own post designating who you think won the week and why you think they deserve your nod. Then link back to this post and tag you post with FWWTW.

My pick for this week is technology.Technology I chose technology this week in the sense of a zero-sum game. A zero-sum game is a situation in which one person or group can win something only by causing another person or group to lose it. And this past week, technology won and Fandango lost.

I spent hours on Monday, as I posted here, about my battle with Comcast. I spent the bulk of last Monday trying to resolve a significant performance degradation in my internet speeds after Comcast magnanimously “enhanced” my internet speeds for free. The good news is that, after more than six hours, that problem finally got resolved.

Not so yesterday, though, when I spent another six or seven hours trying to resolve an issue that surfaced after I installed iOS 13 on my iPhone, as well as the latest update to the WordPress app for iOS, which I wrote about here. In the end, the issue that surfaced and prompted my rant, remains unresolved.

I did get a suggestion from a fellow blogger, who commented,

“So I went in to the editor on WP.com and I was in the new block editor. When I went back to the classic editor I was able to duplicate your situation. Back to the other editor, all is well. See what happens when you change your editor on your iOS device in Safari’s wp.com.”

My response was

“I’ve been trying to bypass the block editor because I hear it’s kind of cumbersome and harder to use. But maybe I will have to give it a shot.”

So bottom line, this past week I was beaten down by technology and technology won.

And if any of you have thoughts and/or suggestions about the WordPress block editor, I’d love to hear from you.

And now it’s your turn, folks. Who (or what) do you think won the week?

Ups and Downs: An Update

Fandango16 Comments

You may recall my rant on Monday when I shared the fact that Comcast told me they had theoretically increased the speed of my internet service. But what happened in reality is the internet speed dropped precipitously. I shared this graphic to illustrate that point.2715EA7F-A16E-4ACF-88A0-67F7CAF2CACEI ended up spending about four hours on the phone with Comcast tech support. I was instructed to reboot my laptop and my iPhone. No help. Then I was told to unplug my modem/router, wait 10 seconds, and then plug it back in. No help.

Then the tech support guy sent something (a code of some sort) to my modem to electronically reboot/update it. No help.

After several more attempts and a lot of trial and error, the guy from Comcast suggested that I might want to take my six-year-old modem to the nearest xfinity store and exchange it for the latest, greatest, most technologically advanced modem/router ever made.

The good news is that there’s an xfinity store about a mile and a half from my house, so I took my old modem, put it in a shopping bag, and took a bus to that store, where I made the exchange. Armed with my new, state-of-the-art modem/router, I took the bus home, plugged in the new modem, connected it to my laptop, and waited, as instructed by the guy at the xfinity store, about 20 minutes for the new modem to “acclimate.”

Lo and behold, half hour later I checked the internet speed on my iPhone and it was zooming. I reran the seven day speed chart and this is what it showed:76A559A1-3B9D-4469-BCD2-B03574B2F493Alrighty then. My internet download speeds are lightning fast. And all it took was about six hours of my time on Monday, including four on the phone with tech support, two bus rides, and a lot of aggravation.

I wonder what will happen the next time Comcast enhances my internet service.

Ups and Downs

Fandango11 Comments

Last week I got an email with some exciting news from Comcast (aka xfinity), my cable TV and internet service provider.2F4455A4-CC03-4418-8D9E-E8F47BE47A2AWoohoo! Faster internet speeds! What’s not to love about that?

But the strange thing is that subsequent to getting that email, my internet has seemed sluggish. Even opening up posts from other bloggers in my WordPress Reader and doing internet searches on Google have been noticeably slower.

I have a handy-dandy iPhone app that does periodic internet speed tests, so I ran it and my download speeds were about 80-90% slower than normal. I used the app to chart my speeds over time and this is what I found:2715EA7F-A16E-4ACF-88A0-67F7CAF2CACEWTF Comcast? You get me all excited about lightning fast download speeds and then you screw me with performance that is closer to dial-up speeds.

I guess I’m going to have to spend the rest of the day on the phone with Comcast customer service. Ugh! You know what that’s like, right?

Thanks for nothing, Comcast! Sheesh.