Now here’s another one while I’m blogging on gripes: spam.  No, not the allegedly edible luncheon meat of deniable dubious decent.  I mean the propensity of jerks to flood the world with meaningless marketing and malign malware messages.  You might have noticed that very rarely do I ever respond to comments anymore.  You might have even noticed that there seem to be fewer comments left than there used to be.  The reason?  Spam!

I apologize if you leave a legitimate comment on InsanIT.net and it gets eaten by my spam filter, but I literally get hundreds of spam comments a day.  Do you have any idea how much time it would take me to sort out the real comments from that morass of malign messaging?  I’d have to hire a staff just to filter the spam!  Instead I rely upon good old software and a big Delete button.  Sorry.  They’re ruining it for everyone.  If you’re lucky and your real comment gets through, congrats.  And if not, sorry, but it’s the best I can do with the limited time and resources I can devote to my blog.  It’s not like anyone pays me to do this.  Even my advertisements don’t actually as much as the hosting costs.  I know I could turn the hounds loose and make InsanIT.net a money-making website, but I fear quality, honesty, and integrity would take too much of a hit were I to do so.  So it remains as it is.

Of course it doesn’t greatly affect me personally, because I just hit the delete button and the indigestible mess just magically goes away.  But it affects you, and for that I apologize and admit as much culpability as I sanely can in this insane unwinnable war of worthless words.

On a related side-note:  I seriously would not object to a law making the hacking of spammers and hackers legal.  That say, if, you could document damages done, you were legally protected to act in internet self-defense.  I would not object to such legislation in the slightest, at all.  Not even a little bit.

Howdy fellow readers,

I’m sorry that InsanIT.net has not been providing you with regularly scheduled news and such.  I’ve been bookmarking things and writing up stubs, but I just haven’t been up to staring at a glowing screen long enough to publish anything lately.  Sorry about that.  My eyes haven’t been doing so well.  It’s been a struggle just to sit in front of a computer at work these past couple of weeks.  They dry out and get sore and red so easily.  I come home and just try to rest them instead of push out a blog entry.  Or I write on paper (gosh, actual paper) because it doesn’t glow, with the hopes of typing it up later.

But fortunately I think my eyes are finally better.  Huzzah!  So I’m catching up this weekend and backdating articles for you.  Enjoy! 

So if you’re a faithful reader (or if you tried to email me) you may have noticed that InsanIT.net was down for a few days there.  Oops.  Sorry about that.  Minor SNAFU.  But we’re all better now.  Huzzah!    And all of the entries that got lost in the shuffle have been restored and backdated.  Enjoy, and sorry.

Okay, so you may have noticed that I haven’t been writing any posts for a while.  Sorry about that.  Believe it or not, I have actually written some, I just haven’t uploaded them.  Why not?  Oh goodness is that a long story…

But basically it comes down to incompetence at The Landmark at Hatchery Hill apartments in Fitchburg.  Do you remember when they were in hot water?  Well, more of the same.

Though, admittedly, it wasn’t all their fault.  But they certainly didn’t help the situation any.

So here’s the story, as short as I can make it:

When my wife and I moved in, one of the many (36) items clearly wrong with the apartment in our initial inspection was that the living room phone jack was clearly broken.  It was bashed in and still contained half of a phone wire jammed/stuck into the jack where someone had obviously just yanked out a phone cord while it was still plugged in.  Yes, it was that obvious to see something was seriously wrong from a simple visual inspection.  One that clearly had never been done by management before we moved in, even though the manager handed us an inspection sheet with everything marked as “okay”.

Anyway, so our living room phone jack was DOA from our move-in date.

So when the AT&T U-Verse technician hooked up our internet and cable, he had to use a bedroom phone jack, even though the main TV, two computers, and network printer were all in the living room.  But he was just a cable guy, not a wiring technician.  So he couldn’t fix the living room phone jack.  That was the responsibility of the apartment complex to fix.

This also meant that we had to have a wireless AT&T U-Verse TV box in the living room.  Which just wasn’t working.  I suspect that perhaps in many homes it would work just fine, but in an apartment complex where the wireless channels are all highly jam-packed, the airwaves are just too muddled.  The result was that the TV signal in our living room, our primary TV, was quite often dropping out.  If we were lucky in maybe a minute or two the box would eventually realize it had an issue and reset itself.  (And then in another minute it’d finally finish rebooting.)  If we weren’t lucky, it wouldn’t realize and we’d have to get up and unplug the bugger to reboot it, because the box would get so FUBARed that you couldn’t even use the menu to reboot it.  And worse, because though not officially supported, you can easily run a network jack from the wireless box and run all of your other network devices (like two computers and a network printer) off of that line, that also meant that our internet was frequently going down as well.

Clearly, that wasn’t working.

So after repeated attempts to get the apartment complex to fix our living room phone jack, so that we could make the living room the primary line in for AT&T’s U-Verse modem/router, theyfinally sent someone over to look at the phone jack.  And that wasafter we had to convince them that it was their responsibility and that we did not want to assume liability by fixing it ourselves, as management first suggested.

And then, when they finally got a technician involved, believe it or not, in no uncertain terms we were told to send them pictures of it.  Because they clearly had no idea what a phone jack that hooks up to a DSL modem for ethernet was?  That was already a Big Red Flag.

Well, wouldn’t you know it, the technician comes over, plays with the jack, and leaves.  And I don’t mean fixes everything, tells my wife (who was the one there for his first visit) that it’s fixed, and then proves it to her or anything.  No, I mean he monkeyed with the jack and then just disappeared during one of his many trips to the main junction box and back and simply never came back.

And when I got home from work, what did I find?  That everything was fixed?  Nope!  Quite the opposite.  Instead now not a single phone jack in the whole of our apartment was working.  So not only could we not finally hook up the AT&T U-Verse modem/router in the living room like we were supposed to be able to do by this point, but now not even the bedroom jack workaround was working.  Nothing was working.  It was a Friday night and we were now officially without TV or internet.  And all attempts to contact the technician or the apartment management to resolve this fell on deaf ears.  It wasn’t until Monday morning, when anyone bothered to check their messages, that we finally got anyone even willing to listen.

Late Monday afternoon the same idiot technician is sent back out to our apartment.  This time my wife calls me from work so that I could come home to talk to him as he works to make sure things get fixed correctly this time.  (Since I’m the techy one, so I know how to speak geek.)  I even had my PC hooked straight up to the router so that I could reboot the modem on command as soon as he tried anything.  Still no resolution.  Very uncommunicative and extremely unprofessional, the electrician insisted that everything was in working order and that the problem had to be outside the apartment.  And that we had to contact AT&T to have them re-activate our cable service because this was all their fault.  Since nothing was wrong in the wiring.  According to him.

Now, I knew that couldn’t possibly be true because before he touched anything, we at least had a working bedroom jack.  Where as now we didn’t.  The only factor between those two points was him.  He must have screwed something up somewhere.  But just like the first time with my wife, on one of his many trips to the main box, he just vanished and never returned.

The problem was most assuredly not resolved.

But clearly he thought it was.

And once again, attempts to contact both the technician’s manager and apartment management got nowhere.  We were still without working TV or internet.  And clearly at this rate, would never get any.  Not even back to the way things weren’t really workout out before with the wireless signal coming from the bedroom.

So I was forced to take things into my own hands.  I cracked open the living room jack.

Cat5 used as phone wiring.  Interior wiring was clearly blue and orange pairs as every jack in the apartment used that scheme.  Exterior line … unknown.  In fact I wasn’t even sure which wire was the outside line.  But one thing was clear, that the living room phone jack was apparently where outside met inside.  Strange.  Most apartments have that in a separate junction box in a bedroom closet.  But not The Landmark at Hatchery Hill.  Oh no.  All done in the living room jack, clearly.  Well no wonder the idiot screwed up the whole apartment.  All it’d take was incorrectly connecting the outside to the inside line there.  Which obviously is what he did.

And I say obviously because when I opened up the living room jack, it was immediate and undeniable proof that the technician had no idea whatsoever what he was doing.  Well, that or he was intentionally trying to break things.  But more likely the former.

He used those B Connectors, beanies, those long blue sheaths with the little teeth inside that you clamp over the wires, to make his splices.  But he had stripped and twisted the wires together first, as if he was using caps.  The result meant that the teeth in the B Connectors meant to cut through the insulation and lightly into the wire – with no insulation in play anymore – had just cut deeply into the wires.  And because the wires were twisted, the beanies didn’t have many places to grab.  So as a result two of the four splices that he’d made had broken apart, the wires so damaged that they just snapped and fell free, no more connection.  A 50% splicing failures.  And as it just so happened, of the two lines through the apartment, it was one from each pair that was broken.  So not a single pair from the outside line to the inside wiring had both a positive and negative connection.  There’s no way in the world that either line had ever worked after he had left.  So there’s no possible way that he could have even checked either connection.

So he used his tools incorrectly.  He used B Connectors instead of UR connectors (like were used all through the apartment).  He replaced the living room two-jack box with a single-jack box.  And half of his splices had been broken by the time he left so that not a single positive/negative pair was left intact.

Oh, and I almost forgot to mention, four, count them four lines of the inside wiring were stripped of their insulation so that they could ground on each other or on the metal of the box and short circuit … if any of them had been working.  I’m not sure if that’s a fire hazard, but it certainly can’t be to code, let alone safe or right.

Oh, he also removed the short lead from the wall wiring to the jack panel that allows you to pull the jack panel away from the wall a bit without disturbing the wiring in the wall.  Because I guess that was one set of wires too many for him to work with?

Thank goodness they’d made me take pictures to send them before they started work, because it was those pictures that helped me to figure out how to fix things at least a little.  I could easily identify the outside line from the inside line because the outside line was using the green pair as the main line.  (Where as inside the apartment, blue and orange pairs were used for the main and secondary lines.)  So that made it stand out which one was supposed to be the outside line.

What had the genius done?  I guess he didn’t like mismatched colors.  Even though he had access to the outside box, so he knows which color pairs are coming into the apartment.  So he spliced the outside green pair to the outside brown pair.  And then the outside blue to the inside blue, and outside orange to the inside orange.  (Or, as I said, tried to, because both of his blue and orange pair splices had one line broken, so neither worked.)  So not only had he not spliced wires together, but he had tried to splice the wrong wires from the outside to the inside.  So even if he hadn’t been completely incompetent at splicing, he still had the wrong lines.

Now, I’m not sure what the outside line colors were supposed to be.  I know green was the AT&T U-Verse line.  But there’s two lines and I couldn’t tell what the secondary line was for certain.  I thought I had it, but now I’m not so sure.  But in that we don’t use the secondary line for anything, that doesn’t really matter for us.  The important thing was, I was able to fix the correct green U-Verse outside line to our primary blue inside line.  So now our TV and internet work again!

But I didn’t have the right tools.  I don’t do this for a living after all.  All I have are some old-school caps and some electrical tape.  I also used the electrical tape to fix the insulation stripped from various inside wires to prevent the potential short circuiting problems.  I doubt either fix is to code.  And at some point I’ll probably have to fix things properly.

Because, again, this isn’t supposed to be my responsibility.  But I can’t live without TV and internet indefinitely while management pulls their head out of their behind.  Allegedly, we’re supposed to have a proper technician come in to clean up the mess.  One day.  In theory.  That’s what we were promised the last time my wife contacted the apartment manager.  So I’m not supposed to be the one fixing these wires permanently.  What I did is just supposed to be a kludge to get us to the point where a professional fixes things The Right Way.

But now it’s been a week and a half and still no pro, nor word on one.  I’m pretty sure that once again, for the umpteenth time, the apartment manager has promised something and then just either neglected it or forgotten all about it.  So we’ll have to nag him for another week or two until he finally schedules someone.

If he ever does.

I may be making a trip to RadioShack shortly for a couple of UR connectors and be fixing this on my dime if I ever want it fixed right.  Because the management at The Landmark At Hatchery Hill is apparently just as incompetent as the electrician they hired.  And at this rate, even if they bring in another “pro”, will they even do the job right?  How can I possibly trust them?

And no, this isn’t the only story of such incompetence here.  There are plenty more.  This is just the reason why I haven’t been updating InsanIT.net lately, because I haven’t had TV or internet!

And keep in mind, I’m a computer programmer.  I don’t fix phone lines for a living.  And yet I’ve already shown far more competence and skill than the jerk they hired to fix my phone jack.  All I wanted was a phone jack fixed.  There was no need whatsoever to mess with the connection from the outside line to the inside lines, even if they just happened to be in the same box.  Just replace the phone jack.  That’s all he had to do!  Instead he takes out every single line in the apartment and then declares it’s all working inside, so it must be a problem on the outside, with AT&T.

Moron!

So anywhen, yeah, I’m finally back.  And some of the articles I wrote and cached locally, maybe I’ll even get around to publishing.  Sorry for the downtime.

And keep in mind, if I hadn’t kludged together a fix myself, things would still be down.  All for gross incompetence followed by patent negligence in replacing a single phone jack that should have been fixed before we even moved into the apartment, because it was very clearly broken by a former tenant.

Whatever you do, don’t move in to The Landmark At Hatchery Hill unless you enjoy this level of mismanagement.

So I’ve unpacked enough to set up my “office” in the apartment and crank up the ol’ PC.  So now I can get around to writing on my blog once more.  Huzzah!

Which brings us to the first topic on my mind then, AT&T U-Verse.  What is it?  Is it all that it’s cracked up to be?

Well, AT&T U-Verse is basically just your every day cable/internet/phone bundle from AT&T.  It’s “fiber optic”.  Which basically means DSL in fancy-speak.  Yep, ye olde phone line is what powers U-Verse.  And your cable channels?  IPTV of course!  At least that’s near as I can figure anyway.  I didn’t opt for the phone option, as my cellphone is sorely underutilized as it is, so I don’t know if U-Verse uses VOIP or honest to goodness regular analog phone like old DSL options did.  Either way doesn’t much matter.  The point is thanks to companies like Tektronix, we’re able to find ways to push crappy old lines to data rates never even remotely dreamed of.  That crappy old DSL technology that couldn’t even remotely compete with cable … now can!

Mostly.

First, the caveat.  The setup in my apartment is not ideal.  Let me just say that my apartment complex, The Landmark at Hatchery Hill, has been somewhat less than ideal so far in that the apartment has a plethora of niggling problems and so far hasn’t even acknowledged that they should maybe get around to fixing any of the problems on the move-in checklist.  The apartment manager happily checked off the whole list as all ok, only for us to find 36 real issues.  From cosmetic “small hole in wall” type things, to water damage, mildew damage, shower door problems, phone jack broken, missing screws in electrical covers, etc.  Some things we’ve fixed ourselves out of necessity.  Everything else is a nuisance, but “livable”.  One such obvious hindrance is that broken phone jack in the living room, where our main TV is, not to mention my “office” where both my wife’s computer and my own reside.  So the primary TV and internet usage is in the room with the broken phone line on what is essentially a DSL-based service.  It brings out both the good and the bad of AT&T-s U-Verse.

That caveat stated, first let’s look at the good:  AT&T was able to provide us with a wireless setup.  I don’t just mean Wi-Fi.  I mean a wireless TV signal as well.  The secondary TV in the bedroom is actually set up as primary TV as far as AT&T is concerned.  It gets the wireless router with built in DSL modem.  And it gets the actual DVR.  And to connect to the living room box, it gets a wireless TV antenna connected via ethernet cable to the router.

In the living room we get a wireless TV box that takes that wireless TV signal (effectively one heck of a good wireless router system I guess, on a different bandwidth I hope) and gives us TV.  As a fortuitous surprise, the wireless TV box in the living room also has a network port which I have successfully glommed all of our living room’s networking off of!  I wasn’t expecting that, but it’s been a life-saver since the wireless router has to be in the bedroom in this broken-jacked apartment.  (At least until maintenance finally gets around to doing something about it.)  And that all works.  (Though I have not tested the networking speeds.  They seem quite good, which again suggests that this isn’t a simple Wi-Fi system delivering the wireless TV signal.)

And, like any modern system, you can access your recorded shows on your DVR from the other boxes as well.  So that’s something.

The TV boxes are pretty good in theory.  They have HDMI jacks and even component and composite wires and stereo analog and optical digital audio.  They have coax.  Great!

Now, the less-than-good and the bad.

Yes, the TV boxes all support High Definition.  Almost.  It’s everything that you could ask for in a box, really.  …Except 1. no pass-through and 2. no 1080p.  You read that right, in this day and age, where HD can practically be taken for granted because the standard is so old by now, and we’re all wondering when the next iteration of HD is coming, AT&T limits you to 1080i at best.  That’s pretty sad.  Not life-endingly sad, but certainly not the best technology can offer … has been offering for many years now.  I suspect this is how AT&T broadcasts their HD signals, so even if the box supported 1080p you’d still be stuck with a 1080i signal.  I have no proof, but that’s my guess.  It does significantly cut down the bandwidth after all, even if it is a less-than-ideal technology.

Speaking of substandard technologies, so is AT&T’s wireless router.  It’s an IEEE 802.11 b/g standard with minimal security.  Yes, you read that right.  My personal ancient router is a b/g/n, and AT&T is still pushing g as their standard?  Not only that, but my ancient router has real firewall feature built in and takes security seriously.  AT&T’s router?  Not so much.  So that’s why I have (and likely will keep it that way) my own router as the main point of connection for all of my PCs, wired and wireless.

And while it’s been claimed that we can watch four shows at once, that simply isn’t true.  DVR three HD shows for the same time slot and the thing wigs out and forces us to switch to viewing one of those three shows – at the recording.  It doesn’t even let us watch the channel that it’s recording like my old crappy Frontier cable box would let us do simply at the press of a button.  It forces us to switch to the DVR and watch the recorded show.  Three.  Not four.  Three.

And now for the real kicker, how does AT&T’s wireless TV connection handle every-day life?  Not flawlessly, that’s for sure.  Even with all bars allegedly present, indicating the best possible signal strength, AT&T’s wireless U-Verse TV is … flawed.  It likes to just plain drop its connection on average of once a day.  And I don’t just mean skip for a second.  I don’t mean lag.  I mean flat out FUBAR drop to where the box, after a minute of no signal, finally reboots itself.  (Or if you’re impatient, you get up and yank the power cable out of it to hard-boot it because the box completely stops responding during this time so you can’t soft-boot it.)  Thank goodness this isn’t the DVR!

It did that before I even had my own wireless router plugged in.  Before anything was even using the network at all actually.  Just pure TV, epically failing once a day.  And for the record, those other lags and brief second-long drops happen too, much more regularly.  You’d think you were on an ancient satellite TV system, you get so many flaws.  The only reason that I put up with it instead of cancelling the service is because eventually, when the apartment complex finally fixes my phone jack, I’ll be switching the boxes around so that the wired TV is in the living room and the awful wireless TV signal will be for the rarely used bedroom TV set.

And then there are all of the weird eccentricities.  For example, the channel guide is neither color coded, nor even bothers to show you when a program is “new”.  It must know it somehow, since the DVR can be set to record only first showings, but you’ll never find any kind of indicator that a show is either new or a re-run.  The preview of the channel as you use the channel guide is theoretically a good idea … except that it lags moving on to the next channel until each and every channel has loaded, making it very slow and painful to scroll through channels.  A simple programming change to delay the preview of a channel until you’ve rested on a choice for a second could miraculously solve that dilemma.  There’s no way to set the default recording behavior of the DVR and AT&T’s default settings are not what I would have thought anyone, let alone myself, would want as a default.  And so on and so forth.  It’s just a lot of poor design.

Conclusion?

So, there you have it.  AT&T’s U-Verse is not cable.  It’s throwing a lot of technology at an age-old problem, that phone lines just don’t carry enough bandwidth.  And a lot of that technology is cutting a few too many corners.  AT&T has come up with an “okay” solution.  It’s not awe-inspiring.  It’s barely keeping up with the Joneses.  It’s not 1080P.  The wireless router is cheap crap.  The wireless TV makes you feel like you’ve got unreliable satellite even at its best connection strength.  The box/DVR software has some less-than-ideal design that makes some things awkward to use.  In all, everything about it only just barely does the job adequately.  But, that said, it does the job … just.  I’d give it a 3 unusable phone jacks out of 5.