Archive for the ‘Technology / Computing’ Category

Windstream 3Mbps DSL

Posted on the June 5th, 2008 under Technology / Computing by jglemza

Well, the new DSL line is installed. Below is a speed test result. Sadly this will probably be the fastest I’ll ever be able to get here as my attenuation is 59 and signal-to-noise ratio is 11.

 

Time Warner Cable / Road Runner – The Rip Off

Posted on the May 30th, 2008 under Rants,Technology / Computing by jglemza

After 6 months with Time Warner Cable’s Road Runner Internet service at home I was hit with a nice surprise. Month 7th would cost me $70.95, instead of the $44.95 that was/is advertised on their site. For some reason my location does not get their standard pricing. While my initial service was great, below I’ve identified some issues I have with Time Warner that has led me to cancel my account.
  • Their 800 Number - Whenever I try to call their customer support number I have to call at least five to ten times to get through. For some reason I keep getting a busy signal. Annoying!
     
  • Hold Times - It takes about 10-15 minutes to get someone on the phone. I really wish I would’ve bought a speakerphone.
     
  • Getting Bounced Around - During my first of three calls I was bounced around to three different operators that could not help me. However, before I reached the third person I was conveniently lost in phone-space and had to call back.
     
  • Lack of Logic - There was no good explanation as to why the Road Runner service costs so much more in my area than someone who lives a couple miles from me.
     
  • Customer Support Staff - While the staff was very nice, they were unable to help me. It was quite frustrating having someone tell me, “I agree that $70.95 is ridiculous and I have no idea why it is priced that way. I can understand why you would want to cancel.”
As of next week I will no longer be a Road Runner customer and have since signed up with the Windstream Greenstreak service. The biggest disappointment about their DSL service is that they claim I only qualify for 3Mbps service. After living with 7Mbps and 15Mbps for the last year and a half, 3Mbps is going to feel pretty slow. I guess no more streaming HD movies from the iTunes store to the AppleTV.

Googlebot and FreeDNS from afraid.org

Posted on the February 27th, 2008 under Technology / Computing by jglemza

Back on January 8th I canceled my Dreamhost account and began hosting my site off of my cable modem. Only receiving ~15 hits a day I figured I might as well save myself $120 a year. So I chose freedns.afraid.org to host my DNS. They were free and had all the options that I wanted, including working with Tomato.

After the switch I noticed that my traffic had declined dramatically, down to ~1 hit per day. So I starting doing a bit of investigating and found that Google was no longer crawling my site and had deleted my previous results. Logging into the Google Webmaster Tools I found that Google was having DNS issues connecting to my site. Well, after pulling my hair out for an evening I found that FreeDNS was blocking the googlebot from crawling my site.

Solution: I have switched my DNS provider to ZoneEdit. ZoneEdit offers similar features to that of FreeDNS. Now Google can access my site again, but I’m no longer in the results for some searches. I guess it will take some time. Yahoo and Live search were totally unaffected by FreeDNS.

So this is a warning to all people using FreeDNS and want Google to crawl their site.