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Comcast troubles with Motorola DVR’s

Here in eastern Loudoun County, our cable service used to be Adelphia. Adelphia sold their holdings out here to Comcast, which has since won the cable franchise from the Loudoun County government. As a result, Comcast picked up a bunch of former Adelphia customers equipped with the Adelphia gear that had been installed. In this house, that includes the Motorola DCT6412 III cable box with integrated DVR.

I’ll be the first to speak out about Adelphia’s shortcomings as a cable provider so I wasn’t overly upset when I found they were selling to Comcast. Comcast has an internet service that was interesting, as well, since it’s speed is significantly higher than the Verizon DSL I’m on now. So, I was OK when I heard Comcast was taking over. I understand the actual takeover has occurred and the latest cable bill I received in the mail has their logo on it.

Over the past couple of days – I don’t know when, precisely – the DVR in this cable box died spectacularly. I had a number of shows I had set up to record during my recent absence and sat down last night to view one of them. Not only was it not there, there was nothing on the list of recorded shows at all. I called Comcast and was informed that, “yeah, there’s a problem with the Motorola box’s DVR.”

And that’s the sum total of assistance I got from Comcast.

Gee, we’re sorry, but it’s a complete coincidence that your box and all those other ones that have failed have died inside 60 days of Comcast taking over your network. Yeah, we know we’re charging you monthly for the DVR service and you can’t use it. No, we don’t know when it’ll get fixed. You just have to keep checking in.

Interesting how a quick search of the net hasn’t yielded mass numbers of Motorola customers experiencing problems with their Motorola boxes. Only the Comcast users are complaining about them. Hmmm. With such a widespread failure of a manufacturer’s product, I’d expect to hear about it from everywhere. Only on Comcast’s network. In network troubleshooting, we call that a correlating event.

The part about it that irritates me the most is the attitude from the “customer service” rep that they weren’t going to do anything at all about actually providing the service they are charging me for, monthly. We all just supposed to sit and wait and one day – maybe – someone, somewhere will do something about it. If we’re lucky.

Until then, just keep paying the bill, bub.

This is the kind of customer satisfaction killer that pushes people to other vendors. Satellite TV ain’t that bad that I’m not considering it.

Technorati Tags: Comcast, Motorola DVR, DCT6412

New passport regulations being relaxed for kids

New regulations requiring passports for all US citizens leaving the country, even to places like Mexico and Canada, are being relaxed for children under 15 years of age.

U.S. and Canadian children will be exempt from new rules that will require travelers to show passports when entering the U.S. at land or sea borders, a move the Bush administration said Thursday is aimed at helping families and school groups.

Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff addresses the Detroit Economic Club in Detroit, Thursday, Feb. 22, 2007. Children will be exempt from new rules that will require travelers to show passports when entering the U.S. at land or sea borders, the Bush administration announced on Thursday. The new passport requirements will take effect as soon as January 2008. (AP Photo/Carlos Osorio)

The new passport requirements will take effect as soon as January 2008. In a change from earlier plans, U.S. and Canadian citizens ages 15 or younger with parental consent will be allowed to cross the borders at land and sea entry points with certified copies of their birth certificates rather than passports.

Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff discussed the relaxation in rules at a speech Thursday to the Detroit Economic Club before touring the Detroit-Windsor Tunnel, a link with Windsor, Ontario under the Detroit River.

“This is going to make it a lot easier for kids to cross the border without having to get passports and passcards,” Chertoff said. “By the way, it’s specifically designed to make it cheaper for families.”

I’m of 2 minds for this move. I can certainly understand the concept that a passport with a 10-year expiration timeframe given to a 6-year-old will be nearly useless for identification purposes when that child is 14, let alone 16 just before it expires. Requiring yearly updates would be expensive and onerous for the family to say nothing of the workload it would make for the federal employees at CIS. Most children of this age who are traveling are doing so with their parents, in any case, and having the notarized copy of the birth certificate along with the verified ID of the parents is a reasonable amount of security in allowing said child back into the States.

That said, it’s not like we’ve never seen kids that age being involved in terror activities.

Still, security isn’t about ironclad guarantees. That’s because where security is concerned, there’s no such thing. It’s about risk management and acceptable levels of risk versus acceptable levels of access. A nod to the realities of identification consistency of children (as I mentioned above) and to the cost of time and money for parents falls within the acceptable risk category, I think.

Please note that the explicitly stated goal of Chuck Schumer to drop this requirement for everyone just shows how ignorant and disconnected from the reality we live in Senator Schumer is.

Technorati Tags: passport, travel, politics, immigration

Senate Dems gearing up to press forward with “Operation Hamstring”

Hanging onto a razor-thin majority by their fingernails and the eroding support of Joe Lieberman, Senate Democrats are trying to find a way to cut and run in the GWOT without actually passing a law that reads:

Resolved, by order of the Senate, that the President shall issue orders to the military forces now engaged with the enemy in Iraq and elsewhere wherein said troops shall:

1. Cut
2. Run

Knowing that such an action would not be painted well anywhere, possibly not even in their MSM allies’ domains, they are seeking other ways to force the issue. Wanting to find a way to follow their brethern in the House, they are preparing to introduce legislation that will serve as the Senate’s opening salvo in the Democrats’ grand design, Operation Hamstring. According to reports, the Dems are going to offer a bill that will “limit the military mission” where our forces are engaged. The very first point of the bill is just so ridiculous it defies description.

They want to restrict the troops to fighting only Al Qaeda and to training the Iraqi troops. That means in order to engage a hostile force, the troops in the field would need to confirm that the enemy is Al Qaeda and not, say, Islamic Jihad. Or Hezbollah. Or the Girl Scouts, or whatever. That’s a nice trick when the enemy doesn’t seem to want to wear an easily identifiably uniform or carry a banner in battle that says “I’m Al-Qaeda. Shoot me!” It also presumes (again) that Al Qaeda is the only terrorist group in the world, a situation we already know isn’t true.

What’s particularly loathsome about this is the obvious stance that these Senators have that the American public is too stupid to realize this. Yes, of course that’s their stance. If they truly thought that the American people were supportive of their efforts to hamstring the military in a war zone, they’d just come right out and pass a resolution cutting the funding for the military’s operations in Iraq. They aren’t doing that, so they know the public’s not behind such a move. Which leads me back to their pretty clearly displayed disdain for the intelligence of the common American in that they feel they can pass such a resolution and we won’t notice what the effect of it is.

Technorati Tags: GOWT, Senate, Operation Hamstring

A pack, not a herd.™

As Instapundit likes to say, “a pack, not a herd.” I guess the local 20-something crowd in Costa Rica will think twice about trying to rob the old gringos on the bus next time.

Update: Told ya he’d say that…