offensive fouls are just offensive

Filed under: basketball — Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , — sohum on January 30, 2010 at 2:01 am

This may be weird coming from a Rockets fan, having, as we do, on our roster two of the premier charge-drawing players in the NBA–Kyle Lowry and Luis Scola. However, I’ve been following this season closely and I will conclude that the thing that has annoyed me the most after the general state of refereeing, is the definition of an offensive foul.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I can see where the idea of the rule came from. It works as a way to prevent bigger, stronger, and more athletic players from moving you out of the way to get their shot. Believe me, I sympathize with that, given that I am a small, relatively rotund guard.

However, the idea of “drawing a charge” is getting out of hand. I don’t see drawing a charge as a particularly admirable skill. Especially if you are a center/forward. If you are a center the size of Nene Hilario, you have no business trying to draw a foul against the likes of Aaron Brooks, for example. Unless he is shoving you out of the way on a layup, or elbowing you in the face, there’s no real way that Brooks can create enough offensive contact to get a good shot. I think the NBA needs to move in and make more “common sense” rules. If you’re a center, play like a freaking center. If a puny guard is going up for a lay-up on a fast-break, go for a block, don’t just cover your genitals and fall over. This applies to Houston players as well, and I’m looking squarely at you, Luis Scola.

The offensive foul started out as a way to protect weaker defenders, but today it has become a joke that everyone in the NBA has attempted to pull. Much respect for Shaq, by the way, for publicly making fun of centers who take charges (I think it was a few years ago, and he was talking about Vlade Divac, but I may be mistaken). I mean, how much respect do you lose if you’re a 300-pound behemoth and fall over on a gentle drive.

At the very least, you should eliminate charges taken by secondary defenders. The situation I’m referring to is an offensive player using a pick and the secondary defender stepping into his path at the last moment and falling over. I mean, come on. Is that really worth a foul? Protecting a guy who wasn’t even initially defending? Punishing the offense for the defense unable to communicate and respond to a pick-and-roll situation?

They should also implement unofficial rules wherein a smaller player cannot commit an offensive foul on a larger player. I mean, it makes no sense if you’re a 150-lb guard and routinely run over NBA-caliber centers on the way to the basket.

This hasn’t been a very well-composed entry, but it’s something that I’ve had on my mind for a few days. I think rethinking the rules of offensive fouls would make NBA games more fun to watch and would eliminate the European football culture of diving that is slowly creeping into the game of basketball. The current rules make the definition of a good defender a joke–I’d much rather take someone with a lot of steals and blocks than a guy who takes 2-3 charges a game.

APNS.hk: internet fraud scam

Filed under: technology — Tags: , , , , , , , , — sohum on January 07, 2010 at 10:01 am

This morning I woke up to an email for one of the domains I own, with the following text:

“Dear CEO,

We are a domain name registration and dispute organization in Asia, which mainly deal with the global companies’ domain name registration and internet Intellectual property right protection in Asia. Currently, we have a pretty important issue needing to confirm with your company.
On January 6. 2010, we received an application formally. One company named “Citters International, Inc” wanted to applied for the network Keyword “brandscapesworldwide” and some domain names through our body.

Now we are handling with the registration of find that the keyword of these domain names and network keyword is identical with your company’s. So we have to confirm with you at two points:
1. If your company consign Citters company to register these domain names and network Keyword, we will send application form to them and help them finish the registration at once.
2. If your company have nothing to do with Citters company, they maybe have other purposes to register these domain names and network Keyword.

I want to confirm that are you the corporate representative of this company? If you do, I will feedback some problems to you; if you do not, please send my words to your company’s coprorate representative or lawyer. We need your answer of force adeffect. In order to deal with this issue better, please contact us by telephone or email as soon as possible.

Waiting for your reply ASAP.

Best Regards,
Karl
Auditing Department”

At first I was afraid, I was petrified…. oh wait, that’s a song. But anyways, I tried going to APNS.hk (the domain listed as the website for this company) and they did not exist. I then Googled the company and found a wealth of similarly worded emails that have been largely considered a scam. Apparently what this company does is prowl the WHOIS database to find companies that have only registered a .com TLD and don’t have the other TLD’s, specifically the .cn and .hk ones. Then, they send this strongly worded and poorly grammatical email to the admin and tech contact listed in the WHOIS, spurring them into action. I suspect their eventual goal is to sell the .cn and .hk and possibly other domains at highly inflated prices to these hapless domain owners.

Not exactly a scam, or fraud, but kind of unpleasant anyway. Just posting this so that anyone else who encounters such an email in the future can take heed!

the customer ain’t king

Filed under: life — Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , — sohum on December 09, 2009 at 10:12 pm

This is a rant directed towards NBA League Pass.

A few weeks ago I complained about ridiculous blackout restrictions that prevented me from watching the Rockets here in Austin, just about 200 miles away. Since people had been complaining for ages without the NBA or anyone who could do anything giving a shit, I decided to stifle my voice and instead purchase a pricey NBA League Pass package. I bought the cheapest one available–that allows me to watch games that are not blacked out by regional restrictions for any 7 teams. It came out to something like $90 for regular season, which isn’t all that bad since that’s equivalent approximately a month and a half of cable for me (which I’ll be downgrading as soon as I can, since the only reason I bought this, more expensive, package is because it has the regional Fox Sports channels, which I found out later they blackout for NBA).

My experience with League Pass has been decent. I’ve been annoyed at the fact that they use a proprietary Flash player which means that I cannot do anything to change the ratio (they output 4:3 whereas my TV is a widescreen 16:9), the scores that take up about half the screen and the fact that they don’t show actual half-time shows. These issues I can understand because (a) they wouldn’t want to provide free advertising to the half-time show sponsors and (b) the entire system was designed by UI dimwits.

What I cannot accept, though, is the fact that sometimes games will just not show. And the reason is that whoever is behind their intricate UI setting up the streams has messed up what channel outputs what game. I had this occur sometime a few weeks back when the Rockets were playing a no-name team. That didn’t matter so much. Tonight, we’re playing the Cavs and were playing them pretty well. Of course, League Pass decided to output the Hornets-Timberwolves game. It went down to the last second–but I don’t give a crap about either of those teams. I was hopeful that the problem would be fixed after the Hornets game was finished and the pivotal fourth quarter began in the Rockets game, but now I have a blank screen staring at me that says “NBA League Pass Broadband Channel 1″. Googling a few forums, I found that the Rockets game is actually playing on the Spurs-Kings channel (who knows what channel that game is being played on?). Of course, the awesome part about this is since Austin is in the Spurs’ hometown sphere of influence, its blacked out on my League Pass. So my options for watching the game are basically down to one: watch an illegal stream from some site (justin.tv, ustream.tv, myp2p.eu pop into mind immediately).

Argh.

But wait, there’s more! The last time, in my frustration, I sent the folks at League Pass an angry email. I got a response about a week later saying sorry because of technical difficulties. Today their chat line happened to be open so I logged in to that. After waiting for about half an hour and posing my query, the representative, “Rebecca” told me that it was a technical issue that they had been notified of and that they couldn’t do anything. I guess their chat line is open for far more pressing issues such as “OMG I can’t install Flash”, which can be solved by using the great Google.

Thank god myp2p pointed me to a Chinese stream. Too bad I can’t understand the commentary…

iTunes kills the iPhone Experience

Filed under: technology — Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , — sohum on December 02, 2009 at 1:12 am

This Black Friday I made the jump to purchasing an iPhone. AT&T had a pretty awesome deal going on which allowed me to snag a refurbished version of the 3G-S 16GB for a mere $49+$18 upgrade fees+some taxes. Total price was around $70, the condition being a 2-year contract, which I’m not too worried about since I’ll probably be staying with AT&T anyways. I was already paying for a BB data plan, which is equal to the iPhone one, so no extra charges there.

The phone itself is beautiful. Of course, having used the iPod Touch for nearly a year now, I knew what I was getting myself into. I was able to activate after a few issues and copied over all my apps from my iPod Touch using iTunes. So far so good. Next, I found a tutorial on the web that essentially used iTunes to create ringtones. Splendid, right? So I created a couple. Then, I thought, “Oh, I might as well get all my music into my iTunes.” This was possible now finally that I have my Windows 7 Homegroup set up properly. So I went ahead and added the music folder to iTunes and went and did my P90X workout and showered.

Once I came back, I was ready to crank out some ringtones manually. Not. iTunes was busy “Determining Gapless Playback Information”. A feature that I really don’t care for. And one that is programmed badly enough that it ends up using all of iTunes’ resources, rendering the program unusable. Now, iTunes wasn’t a fantastic program to begin with, being slow and clunky, so imagine how the end user experience is when your mouse events are delayed by 5-10 seconds. Ridiculous. Luckily, there was an “X” right next to the message, and I clicked it and decided to hunt around in the Preferences for a way to disable it.

Midway through my search of the first Preferences tab, I noticed my mouse events slowed down again. “What?” I thought to myself. After about half a minute more I was out of the preferences dialog and to my disgust I found that iTunes had decided once again to “Determine Gapless Playback Information”. Annoyed, I clicked “X” again and sure enough, about 5 seconds later, it was back! Not only that, but it started from the first track every time! Looking around on the internet for a few fixes, I found a couple that should have worked but didn’t. I realized that now that I have bought my first “real” Apple product, I will have to enter that realm where I sacrifice a few of my rights as the owner of a device to do what Apple wants me to do. In this case, this means that I will have to let it run for the 30-60 minutes it must take to set up this feature which I don’t care about, anyway, and come back to do my ringtone-making tomorrow.

And they complain Windows 7 takes a minute to boot up…

yay networking and remote access!

Filed under: technology — Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , — sohum on October 31, 2009 at 1:10 am

Two cool features that I unlocked today, despite knowing about them for a while, were networking and remote access. I had heard of LogMeIn for a long time and even used it in one of my classes at Rice last year, but I had never realized the true potential of it. I set up a LogMeIn account for myself this morning and tested it out at work. I was very impressed by how well the technology works and though its no Windows Remote Access, I did not have to fiddle around with port settings, security settings, firewalls and the like to get it working. Thus, at lunch at work, I took the liberty to remotely install SVN on my computer and start to set up a web-based SVN system through WebDAV. I’m planning to couple this with my DynDNS account that I created a few days back and hopefully soon I will have a computer that’s hosting a variety of different servers running.

Second was home networking. I hadn’t previously had success while trying to use Windows 7’s Homegroup feature to get my home network in place. Seems like it was an issue with the way Hubert had created the Homegroup that prevented this. Just a few moments ago I created a new Homegroup following a really easy article on Neowin. It took less than 10 minutes to do and I was able to set up my own libraries and share data out of the 5 partitions I have in an organized manner. The library feature is pretty nifty, too. This time the Homegroup read/write permissions actually worked and I was able to copy a bunch of data that I had on my laptop over through the network. The speed certainly left something to be desired, but this beats the USB flash drive system any day of the week!

That’s all for now. I haven’t checked the ability to share files that aren’t in a library and this did seem to be the problem earlier. So perhaps the problem is still there, and just hidden away. Hopefully not!

karma?

Filed under: technology — Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , — sohum on October 25, 2009 at 11:10 pm

I’ve been riding the Microsoft high for the last week or so, so it was only fair that they would let me down and really screw up. Oh well, thankfully I’m not a Microsoft fanboy, so I will go ahead and call them out on their faults.

This story has to do with the Windows Installer framework and how poorly it is designed. On or around October 14th, Microsoft released a “critical security patch” that fixed SQL Server 2005–KB970892. Great… I always keep my patches up to date–or try to–so I went ahead and downloaded it. I didn’t actively do it, of course, since Windows Update takes care of all that. Unfortunately, the update was poorly designed and kept failing. All the time. Every time I opened my start menu, the little “Updates will be installed on shut-down” shield was winking at me. I didn’t realize it was the same update over and over again, and thought that perhaps updates are being triggered by each other, so that different updates are being installed.

However, a visit to the Windows Update page showed that the same KB970892 patch kept failing. With the descriptive error code of “Unknown error”. Awesome. If I had been a lazier, less obsessive person, I would have ignored the problem and let it fix itself. However, I decided to use “teh Google” to help me out. Apparently I wasn’t the only one with the issue. Apparently lots of people were having the problem. Solutions ranged from registry fixes to starting/stopping SQL services to many other random options. All suggested by third parties, since Microsoft didn’t think this was big enough to address. Even on their own damn forums.

The option I chose, that was marked the answer on one particular MSDN forums thread, involved downloading the Microsoft Windows Installer Clean Up utility and getting rid of all the installers for SQL Server products. This seemed like a viable solution since I haven’t and don’t plan to ever use SQL Server, so I set about my business. Now, a word of warning (unfortunately from hindsight). Just because it is called a “Clean Up utility” doesn’t mean that is what it does. I thought “clean up” had to do with cleaning up temporary files and the like that were generated on program installation. In actuality, clean up means to actually delete the installer files for the products you choose. Why anyone would want to do this is something I won’t understand, but why the utility is called clean up is something I’m pissed off about now. Very.

So I went through and removed all the installers for SQL server, inadvertently. I then happened upon a post later in that thread saying that following those steps broke Office. Hmm… interesting. I opened up Microsoft Word and sure enough I was greeted by a flurry of installer dialogs followed by an error message saying that Office wasn’t installed for this user. No Office. Fine… I’ll just repair it, right? Wrong. No repair allowed. Apparently you need to have the installer for SQL server to repair Office. Okay, gah, I’ll just uninstall and reinstall it. With a flashy new computer, the process is going to take 15 minutes tops.

Strike 3, I’m out. I can’t uninstall Office either, using the installer. Apparently to uninstall Office, you need to have the installer for SQL Server 2005. The logic here was beginning to baffle me. How many freaking dependencies did I have to fulfill to remove a freaking program? I Googled and found Microsoft-provided instructions for removing Office 2007 manually. There was an automatic utility I used first that seemed to succeed but I still wasn’t able to install Office since it was apparently still “installed”. But not for me, for some mysterious user that didn’t exist, so I wasn’t able to use it.

I used the manual-manual instructions, finally, and backed up the registry and set about deleting files here, there and everywhere. It took about 30 minutes to do and once I was done, I restarted. And the freaking SQL Server 2005 update was still sitting in Windows update, accompanied by a “Microsoft Office 2007 System Update”. WTF? I just went through and REMOVED MS Office… how the hell could I now be getting an update for it? Nonetheless, I selected both to install and it seemed to… WORK! I restarted my computer and guess what? Failed update… again.

Getting thoroughly annoyed, I decided to try and use System Restore to restore to before I had tried any of these shenanigans. No deuce there, either. Apparently system restore depended on some file that had been removed, and hence kept failing. I was under the impression that system restore files were stored in some alternate location so they could be used to usefully recover from a system “failure”. Apparently, not. So now I’m left with a computer with a mysterious version of Office 2007, an update for a program that doesn’t exist and a major headache.

Microsoft’s installer framework has baffled me. It seems like a ridiculous prerequisite for an installer to depend so heavily on another component such that it cannot even uninstall a program. I mean…. any program I install should be completely uninstallable, right? If I remove ALL Microsoft Office products, it should handle all the dependencies and remove EVERYTHING, not leave things here and there. This is nothing new, of course. If you install Visual Studio 2008 and then the service pack, you cannot actually uninstall the IDE without manually uninstalling the service pack first. And they don’t even tell you that… the uninstaller just goes through a process and then fails with a generic error message. Ridiculous.

Thankfully, I had made a backup of my entire registry before I set about removing any installers. So my plan of action tomorrow will be to restore the entire registry and hope things work from there. Of course, I’m not hopeful, since I have technically removed all the files for the Office installation now, so having the registry recovered is probably going to create a ton of deadlinks. Whooptee doo daaa!

On another note, I started re-watching Lost. I figured if I started now I would be all refreshed by the time the new season rolls around next year.

windows 7 launched!

Filed under: technology — Tags: , , , , , , , , , , — sohum on October 23, 2009 at 5:10 pm

I’ve been following a lot of tech news sites of late and feel like it would be worthwhile writing my responses to them on my blog rather than lost forum posts. :) This one’s in response to Five Ways Windows 7 Could Become another Vista on PCWorld.

–

Actually surprised to see one of few articles on PCWorld that isn’t glorifying Apple at the expense of Windows 7. It seems most people ignored the whole “devil’s advocate” section of his article just so that they could come here and show off their virtual biceps.

With regards to UAC, I was one of the few who was happy to have it from Vista itself. I always feel better knowing exactly what’s going on with my system files and who wants admin access and why. The result being that I’ve gone nearly my whole life and definitely my whole life on Windows Vista+ without getting a single virus. People keep attacking Windows for being insecure, but the fact of the matter is that you have to do at least a stupid thing or two to expose a hole that cannot be easily patched by Microsoft.

Regarding drivers, with Vista being around for a couple of years, most driver development has been geared towards that platform, and hence will be compatible with 7. With MS dropping XP support in a couple of years, it would make sense for device developers to focus on the Vista/7 target platform.

I disagree with the point about performance improvements. I think at least between Vista and Windows 7, Windows 7 has been much faster and much more stable all the time. I ran Vista and Windows 7RC off the same machine to test this, in a dual boot environment. Even with the Windows 7 install booting off an external HDD through eSATA, it was far and away mindblowingly faster than Vista. In fact, after two months of using both, I realized the majority of my time was spent on Windows 7 so I went ahead and upgraded my Vista installation to the RC. I’ve been using the RTM edition since around September and just got done installing it on my powerful new build. The boot time is literally on the rate of seconds right now, which is ridiculous. Of course, this is because its a new computer, but compared to a clean install of Vista, the difference is absolute and large.

Windows 7 is indeed expensive and I would feel the bite if I wasn’t an MSDN subscriber. It would be nice for them to make the price lower. But you’ve got to see at the same time that Microsoft cannot contend with Apple in the OS pricing model. Apple knows that for 99% of the purchases made for their OS, they will have made a hardware sale. Apart from the few Hackintosh builders out there, OSX only runs on Apple hardware. So they can afford to drive the price down really low because they’re going to be making a sale of a MacBook, iMac or Mac Mini. Compare this with Microsoft, who will make very few retail sales of the OS since the vast majority of the PC market purchases pre-built computers. Microsoft has made most of its money from OEM sales to the likes of HP, Dell, etc. and these prices are low so they won’t recover the costs of development. Retail buyers will feel the pinch. However, look at any professional software and you will realize that Windows 7 isn’t that ridiculous. If users are willing to shell out thousands of dollars for the Adobe Creative Suite and other specialized applications, the price tag of just about $130 on an OS doesn’t seem to ridiculous.

Direct upgrade from XP was never going to be possible and Microsoft was adamant about this from the beginning. Users who thought that MS were just joking around really shouldn’t have and should have prepared for a migration well beforehand. They can continue using XP, of course, but I would personally migrate while Microsoft still supports the XP platform since it’ll likely be a lot harder later.

iMac? $1601.37 reasons I will not switch anytime soon!

Filed under: technology — Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , — sohum on October 20, 2009 at 11:10 pm

Anyone who knows me will know that I’m not the biggest fan of Macs. I’ve had the pleasure of using an Apple iMac quite consistently during my time working in the Marketing & Communications department at Rice University IT and thoroughly enjoyed using it for web-design and graphics development, two of my responsibilities that were made easy by iMacs. I always knew Macs were a bit pricey, but only when I actually began setting about building my own computer did I get an idea of how much.

As many of you may know, Apple released their new line of Mac computers today. They released MacBook Pros, the good old iMac and a Mac Mini or two. Among their new offerings were two iMacs built on the latest Intel quad-core chipset–the Nehalem architecture’s LGA 1156 offerings (the Core i5 and i7). These babies start at a price of, wait for it, $1999! This is daylight robbery, in my opinion, and I’ll take it upon myself to prove exactly that.

First, to gain even ground, let’s look at a spec-down of the two computers at hand. I’m going to compare the price of the components of the computer I build with an equally spec’d out iMac. Here we go:

iSohummm Edition

Processor: Core i7-860 2.8 GHz
Motherboard: ASRock P55D Pro
RAM: Corsair XMS3 2×2GB 1600 MHz DDR3 SDRAM
Graphics Card: Gigabyte GV-R467ZL ATI Radeon HD4670 1GB
Hard Drive: 1TB Western Digital Caviar Black (7200RPM)
Optical Drive: 22x Samsung DVD+R 8x DVD+RW 16x DVD-ROM 48x CD-ROM
PSU: Corsair TX650W
Case: Antec Three Hundred Illusion
Keyboard-Mouse: Microsoft Wireless Desktop 6000 v2
PRICE AFTER TAXES AND DELIVERY: $779.05

Apple iMac 27-inch

Processor: Intel Core i7-860 2.8 GHz
Motherboard: UNKNOWN
RAM: UNKNOWN 2×2GB 1066 MHz DDR3 SDRAM
Graphics Card: UNKNOWN ATI Radeon HD4850 512MB
Hard Drive: 1TB UNKNOWN (7200RPM)
Optical Drive: 8x DVD±R 8x DVD+RW 6x DVD-RW 8x DVD-ROM 24x CD-ROM SuperDrive
PSU: UNKNOWN (but apparently >365W)
Case: Apple 27″ IPS-enabled Monitor
Keyboard Mouse: Apple Magic Mouse + Wireless Keyboard Bundle
PRICE AFTER TAXES AND DELIVERY: $2380.42

A total difference of $2380.42 – $779.05 = $1601.37. Hence the title of this post. “But what about your display!” you scream. Well, I’m going to be using my HDTV as my primary output for a while (until a decent LCD offer comes around). That cost me ~$854 after taxes and a 3-year warranty from Fry’s. And it has S-IPS (that’s Super IPS, for those who’re wondering) technology, supposedly. And it’s about $15 inches bigger (only diagonally, though) than the iMac computer. So the question is… is the all-in-one functionality+magic mouse+a slightly better gfx card worth a whopping $800? Or is Apple taking its dedicated user community on a ride (again)?

To better answer this question, I want to highlight a few details I picked up on while customizing my cart:

  1. Upgrading from the Core i5-750 (2.66 GHz) to the Core i7-860 (2.8 GHz) costs $200 on the Apple store, before taxes. The retail price of an i5-750 on Newegg is $199 and that of the i7-860 is $289. The difference is $90. Apple is charging its customers $110 extra to make this upgrade (remember, the mobo+everything else does NOT need to change to enable this since both are on the LGA 1156 socket), over the retail cost, before taxes.
  2. Upgrading from one 2×2GB memory kit to a 2 (in essence, buying another 2×2GB memory kit) costs $200 on the Apple store, before taxes. The retail price of the most expensive 2×2GB DDR3 SDRAM kit at the 1066 MHz clock speed on Newegg costs $87.49. The price difference is a whopping $112.51 extra that Apple is making from its consumers. Unless their original mobo only has 2 memory slots (which is kinda scary to begin with) and they need to do a mobo upgrade to support the second kit (did not appear true for any of the P55 boards on Newegg).
  3. And here’s the kicker–Apple charges an upgrade price of $250 for a 2TB hard-drive from a 1TB offering. That’s $70 more than the most expensive 2TB 7200RPM SATA drive on Newegg! And that is to upgrade from a 1TB, which usually retails for around $90. So, Apple is charging consumers an extra $160 approximately, to upgrade their HDD from 1TB to 2TB than it should cost.

What does this mean? It means that Apple is not only charging a ludicrous premium on their i7 offering, but they are at the same time charging HUGE premiums on upgrades. I’m going to be in the market for another TB and another 2×2GB kit of RAM come Black Friday, and I don’t expect to spend more than a total of $150 on that (did I mention that my mobo also has onboard RAID support?). That’s more than Apple is charging than market to upgrade from a 1TB to 2TB.

It’s crazy. I’ve not been making many friends with Mac fans over the last couple of days (especially on a certain CNET article) but the fact remains that these prices are heavily, heavily inflated. The iMac, I understand, is targeted towards home and home business users, compared to the Mac Pro, which is targeted towards business users and professionals. I shudder to think how much one of those will cost, after being loaded by one of the higher end i7 chips. Probably well into the $4000’s as a base price.

I’ll admit it here and once. If that Mac was available for around $1500, I’d seriously consider getting it. The cost would be just about $700 more than what I’ve spent currently to get into a seriously hard-to-upgrade, all-in-one machine with a sexy display. The best part would be I could use bootcamp and run Windows 7 off of it. But at this price, it would make more sense for me to upgrade all my components to their max (getting a 58xx video card, getting the $999 i7 chip) and I reckon I’d still just about break even.

22X DVD+R 8X DVD+RW 16X DVD-ROM 48X CD-ROM

at&t comes through!

Filed under: technology — Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , — sohum on October 20, 2009 at 12:10 am

I thought it was only fair to give AT&T U-Verse its due after bashing it so much. My U-Verse connection was installed last Thursday by a very polite guy who hit his time range (10am sharp on a 9-11 am range) and left in about an hour. This minimized the amount of time I had to take off of work, which was great. The end result was the parking of a massive device known as a “gateway” which supposedly decodes the VDSL signal into TV and internet. Speaking of internet, my bandwidth got doubled to 12mbps for the same price so that’s fairly awesome.

TV is good! The DVR service is cool in that I can remotely schedule it from a web browser/iPod Touch App. So in case I have forgotten to set the DVR to record a show, I can fix that problem fairly easily. One gripe I do have, and one that is not local to AT&T, is the whole scenario of sports blackouts. I had my first encounter with them when I tried to watch a Rockets preseason game on FSSW. I get the channel, but the Rockets game is blacked out here in Austin. Supposedly because the Spurs are our “home” team. Couldn’t choose a worse home team if I had picked one blindly–I despise the Spurs.

Anyways, with no league pass available on U-Verse and the Rockets sucking enough to only have something like 6 games broadcast nationally (and all of those on NBATV meaning I can’t watch it anyway), it looks like I’ll have to follow the Rockets via the good old online live stream. At least with a 12mbps downlink I shouldn’t have any buffering problems!

I suppose that’s it for now. I should’ve been asleep a while back but my college habits haven’t faded away yet.

at&t rant partially repealed

Filed under: technology — Tags: , , , , , , , , — sohum on October 13, 2009 at 8:10 pm

So an update on the AT&T U-Verse situation. Today I gave them a call at around 8.30 in the morning and was transferred to a very helpful lady who just happened to be working with both AT&T U-Verse and AT&T! Apparently a cancellation order had been placed for my internet on the 15th, somehow. Don’t know how that happened… perhaps it happens automatically if they detect the presence of an AT&T HSI account? The AT&T service rep didn’t know how that happened, either.

Anyways, so it was confirmed that my AT&T HSI account would be cancelled on the 15th, and that my TV was installed on that day. The lady also scheduled my internet installation for that day so that I wouldn’t have to pay an installation fee on another day. So if all goes to plan, I will be getting my TV+Internet through U-Verse on Thursday, and have my old AT&T account cancelled (that will have a rebate check of about $18 worth of credit from the previous snafu).

Oh, did I mention that I’m going to be getting 12mbps for $45. That’s the price I was paying for 6mbps DSL earlier. Hopefully cable will stand up to DSL. Oh, I’m also going to be getting a $100 rebate card in addition to the $200 I’m supposed to receive for applying online. So hopefully I should be getting about $300 back and will have Internet and TV all ready to go this weekend. That rebate check will also help me with my expenses for my new computer. ;)

Yay for good news!

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