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.

OpenOffice.org, the great organization that brought you … OpenOffice (of all things), is planning on making a move into PC hardware to improve your office productivity.  (And gaming.)  They call it the OOMouse and it might even be available by February 2010.

OOMouse - Brought to you by OpenOffice.org

All I have to say is: WTF?!

This multi-button mouse produced in conjunction with WarMouse has 18 programmable buttons.  (And ugly blocky very unaesthetic ones at that.)  But that’s not all.  Each of these buttons can be double-clicked and can operate in key, keypress, or macro mode.

The OOMouse also comes with the obligatory scroll wheel, of course, and the not-so-obligatory 512KB of flash memory for remembering 63 separate configurations, of which will be 20 default configurations for common programs like … OpenOffice (of course), Adobe Photoshop, GIMP (Gnu Image Manipulation Program … the freeware alternative to Photoshop), World of Warcraft, Call of Duty, etc.  Funky.

It is also purportedly one of the first mice to ever include an analog joystick similar to that from a Microsoft Xbox 360 joystick and can use the joystick as a keyboard?  (Really?!)

OOMouse - Check that out, an analog joystick on a mouse!

“In the three joystick-as-keyboard modes, the user can assign up to sixteen different keys or macros to the joystick, which provides for easy movement regardless of whether the user is flying through the cells of a large spreadsheet in Microsoft Excel or on the back of an epic flying mount in World of Warcraft.”

Umm … yeah.  If you say so.  I’m thinking that the assortment of 18 buttons and a scrollwheel and a joystick on a mouse might ever so slightly cause not just a few people to suffer from information overload.

But whatever.  It’s still pretty freaking cool!

(Well, except for the colors.)

The OOMouse will be compatible with Windows, Linux, or Macintosh.  And should be priced around $75.  If you really want one, check it out here.

As of yet though, no mention of adjustable weight balancing.  Clearly ergonomics is not the primary feature of this slick puppy.  Maybe it’ll be a feature for the OOMouse2…

Hopefully by now you’ve heard it and know all about it: the switch from analog television signals to digital signals.  February 17th was to be the day that the analog signal stands still.  But maybe it won’t be.

Because, as was obvious would happen, things aren’t going smoothly.

There’s talk of a new bill that would extend the date of the required switch over all the way out to June 12th.  And according to Nielsen, there are still in excess of 6.5 million American households not yet ready to go digital.

The real question is, why digital?  “Experts” will tell you that it’s because digital signals come in clearer and have better sound.  Which, theoretically, is at best only a half-lie.  The truth is that technically speaking, you get slightly more visual information in the analog signal as you do the lowest quality of digital, which is the only quality required to be broadcast.  Only when talking about the audio signal is the digital broadcast actually better.  In theory.

In practice however, this is really only true of the ideal cases, where the signal strength is strong and there are no interfering signals.  We all know that there are plenty of places in the world where this isn’t true.  In the “boon docks” signals get weak.  And in areas of heavy population, interfering signals occur all the time.  With an analog signal, when there are problems, you get “snow”.  The signal may not be perfect, but often it still manages to deliver quite a lot of information.  Where as, when a digital signal has problems, you get failures.  The screen may freeze.  The screen may go black.  The screen may just get a lot of bad transmission artifacts that make it all gobledy-gook.  The sound may just stop.  Or may have “pops” or “gaps”.  When things are less than ideal, analog is a lot more ideal than digital is.

So if the quality isn’t better, and things are much worse when Bad Things Happen, then why is the country being forced to broadcast in digital?

Money.

It’s really that simple.  Though no one will tell you that simple honest truth.

You see, an analog signal takes an awful lot of the radio spectrum to broadcast.  Where as a digital signal takes just a tiny blip of the spectrum by comparison.  So if you force a switch, all of the digital broadcasts can be made in a fraction of the radio wave spectrum reserved for TV.  What will happen to all of that unused spectrum?  Why, it’ll be sold of course.  Maybe it’ll be the next range for cell phones.  Maybe it’ll be used for satellite communication.  Maybe it’ll be a new wireless network standard.  Or most likely, it’ll be split up and sold for all sorts of things, each piece of it going to the highest bidder.

Now, is this necessarily bad?  Not really.  By now a lot of people really are using cable, sattelite, or some other digital means of getting their television already.  And as has been sold from on high since the first announcement of the switchover, if your TV doesn’t already have a digital tuner, a simple box will do the work for you.  (Though you’ll probably want a new antenna too while you’re at it.)  It’s only a one-time cost for a household to switch, and the government does offer coupons to reduce the cost.

But it’d be awfully nice if the government just told the truth.  The digital switch may bring you worse TV than better TV.  It’s not being done for the sake of quality.  It’s being done for money.  And they’re making both you the end consumer and the TV broadcast stations both pay so that they can sell off the unused airways.  If the government really wanted it to be about better TV then it wouldn’t be just a digital switchover, it would be a high definition switchover.  It isn’t.

So I’ve had the pleasure of being a Comcast customer for a year now. I guess like any company, they have their ups and downs. I’m a techie, so generally I know what I’m doing. Hooking up cables is child’s play to me. The concepts of compressed digital high-def cable signals that have a pause as it has to find a key frame before it can start using the difference frames, I get. So I’m not the kind to complain about flicker or a two second delay before the channel comes in. Nor am I the kind to completely screw up plugging in the component video cables and the audio cables.

So with Comcast, all was good for the first year. Mainly because we (and by we I mean my hun and myself) only had a crappy old CRT tube TV with a crappy little low-def / analog box with composite video only. Simple. Easy. So last century.

Then we ‘upgraded’. We picked up a high-def 40″ TV a while back, and so when our year of Comcast contract ended and they wanted to bump up our prices (annoying, but normal) we switched packages to include high-def. Which required a new box.

Well the trip to pick up the new box was a pure joy. And by joy of course I mean sarcastic for hell. We had to wait in line for at least a half hour with every hick that could be drug up from the worst of society, a real bunch to make Jerry Springer proud. No, I am not exaggerating. It really was that bad. But oh, wait, it gets better. We finally get up to the counter to talk with a customer service representative – who was a nice and knowledgeable lady by the way – when the pest exterminator sprays for poison. Because one of those winning customers brought in a box infested with roaches. Lovely.

(A strange fact that seems to be cropping up repeatedly lately for me, is that bugs – especially roaches – are attracted to electro-magnetic fields. Which kind of makes me wonder how those pest control plug-in thingies are supposed to actually scare them off if bugs are attracted to emf.)

So finally we get the new high def box. Yipee! All we have to do is phone up their tech support to ping the box with the new activation code and tada – high def! So we’re told.

Well I hook up the box with glee, happy to have component video instead of HDMI because my YSP-1000 surround-sound speakers have a component video pass-through, but not an HDMI. (The reason the speakers have a video pass-through is two reasons, one is that the audio signal can be ever so slightly delayed because of audio decoding, so the pass-through re-syncs the audio and video, and the other reason is how else are you going to see the speaker’s menus if you don’t have a video connection to the TV.) So I wanted component video. The box is hooked up. And working … ish. It works for all of our old channels, but we get no high-def channels. Well, okay, so we haven’t activated it. There’s a code that triggers in the box what you get and don’t get. Time to phone in and fix us up!

I phone. Stupid automated directory, none of options there even sound remotely related to “activate my box” or “tech support”. But hey, if I choose the wrong option they’ll just forward me in the right direction, so a wild guess later and we have a real live person. Well, no. Actually we go on hold. I kid you not, twenty minutes on hold. Of REALLY loud elevator music of a decibel an order or two of magnitude higher than the phone directory’s volume so that it nearly deafens me as it blasts me with the most boring music man can create. The irony of it is the only thing that keeps me from getting well and truly pissed.

But lo, we do finally get a human being. She’s relatively nice. It’s a simple procedure. And just as the box is supposedly being activated – BAM – dial tone. We got hung up on? We wait for the Comcast tech to call us back while we try to dig up the number to call again. No callback. And whatever happened, it didn’t change a thing. The box still doesn’t get our high-def channels.

So we go through the tedium of calling up again. Only a 15 minute wait this time. This woman at least has more of a clue, as she tells us that the programming signal they send out resets all devices, including the VoIP phone. So when we get disconnected again – because it’s not a matter of if since we’re calling from our Comcast phone – she’ll call us back. (Might I add … BRILLIANT design Comcast.)

It turns out the reason we don’t have high-def channels is that we aren’t signed up for high-def. Umm … what? We called, made the switch, and picked up the new high-def box because we were told that we’d need it to get our new high-def channels in high-def. Which I know is true because you don’t get high-def video out of a single little lonely composite cable – which is all our crappy little box had. Why would we be told to get a high-def box if we hadn’t signed up for high-def? And how would we know the exact price change for the upgrade? Hmm … clearly someone at Comcast forgot to enter the customer information into their database. Brilliant. But, luckily, this phone customer service rep, being apparently smarter than the other two we’ve dealt with so far (I’m not counting the one we talked to in person in this) is actually capable of doing it right this time. So we get switched to high-def. And she re-pings the box with the new activation to include high-def channels, all the while complaining about how complicated the new code entry is.

We get cut off. It’s inevitable. Change the hardware code, lose your Comcast phone connection for a few seconds while the device reboots.

But at least she calls back. That’s a nice improvement.

Only now the box isn’t working. We have no channels. None. The TV guide information is there. But each channel just says something like “please wait – this channel will be available shortly” like it’s just having decoding problems or something. Every single channel.

I try to convey this problem to her.

She spends the next half hour trying to convince me that the connection between Comcast and the box is working fine, the box is programmed correctly, and so the problem clearly is that I have the box hooked up to the TV incorrectly. Uh-huh. Which is why I get a video signal from the box. Which is why just before she re-programmed the box it was working perfectly on all of the analog channels, receiving audio and video. Right. Clearly I screwed it up. (That’s sarcasm by the way.) We go around the issue over and over. I’m adamant that I have it hooked up right. She’s adamant that she did her job right and it’s my fault. And whenever I get aggravated and my tone changes, she quips things like, “I’m only trying to help you, sir.” Because she’s been such a great help so far. Telling me how to connect component cables and asking me if I have the coax connected to the back of the box clearly is helping me diagnose the problem. (Again, sarcasm.) I even get her to admit that she has no diagnostic skill, she’s simply going through a written list. And that’s helpful, how?

Well, we both get tired of the game. She schedules a tech to make a house call. Thank god!

So a couple of days later the Comcast guy is set to show up. He calls up to ask if it’s okay if he comes early. Cool! Hell yeah! He shows up. He’s baffled. I’ve got it set up right. It’s most definitely working between box and TV. The problem is clearly between box and Comcast.

He fiddles. He has them re-ping, service-ping, yada yada. Nada. So he swaps boxes. One ping to the new box later, all is perfect. Cool. Friendly and helpful. I like.

So whatever the problem was, it was either that Ms. Genius sent codes that FUBARed the box, or the box’s flash memory was literally on the edge of one too many writes. Either way, it wasn’t my fault, like she’d been trying so hard to convince me. And the house-call tech, who actually knows what he’s doing, was able to resolve the problem unlike the phone support who just blamed me for the problem instead of just admitting culpability and/or she simply doesn’t know.

Moral of the story?

Dealing with Comcast over the phone sucks. Period. They don’t have a clue what they’re doing.

Dealing with Comcast in person gets results. The people that deal with live customers are actually trained, intelligent, and personable.

So if you have Comcast, and you have a real problem, I suggest taking it to a real person. Chances are the customer service person on the phone will just frustrate you more than help you.

That’s my experience anyway.

Oh, as I was talking with the house-call tech, one tip I learned is that if you’re upgrading to a high-def box or DVR and you absolutely need HDMI, tell them that you absolutely need HDMI. Because if you don’t specify that you need it they’ll just hand you whatever high-def box is available, be it brand new with HDMI or years old recycle without. They don’t care. And if you don’t tell them that you care, how are they going to know to choose one more specific than that it’s high-def?