Comcast has overall been VERY reliable here in Crystal City (Arlington, VA). However, here’s my gripe! Arlington, VA is on a old legacy equipment manufactured by Scientific Atlantic which is now owned by Cisco. Comcast for the most part, has left their SA/Cisco markets behind in new services. No XFINITY iPhone Remote App and our HD channel lineup is VERY LIMITING compared to neighboring counties! While Comcast has transitioned Motorola areas to digital only services, doing away with expanded basic analog channels to make way for more bandwidth to provide additional HD and DOCSIS 3.0 internet tiers, SA/Cisco markets have not seen any of this.

Now for Verizon….

I’ve had an absolute HORRIBLE experience with anything to do with Verizon in the past, from DSL, to Wireless, and even FIOS. I had Verizon FIOS over 2yrs ago at my old apartment, my building was an early FIOS deployment for an apartment complex in Montgomery County. Verizon only offered internet service and phone, no TV. Verizon used existing copper telephone lines to provide a vDSL service. They had all the ONTs and battery backup equipment in the basement that terminated to copper. I’ll just leave it at that and spare you the details… I had such a horrible experience I ended up taking a hammer to the vDSL modem and mocca enabled FIOS gateway. (I got pictures somewhere…)

Even with all that, I’ve decided to give FIOS another shot. I went through the order process online, so hopefully they stick to their 24 month promotional pricing structure. At the lowest my new plan is $96/month and goes up to $120/month from month 7 to 24. Their claim is roughly 250 HD channels and I’ll be getting two HD receivers. Internet will be a symmetrical 25Mbps down/up. Overall I’ll be getting more for the money. I don’t agree with Verizon still blocking port 80 on residential accounts but that’s something I can live with.

For those interested, check out this post over at ARLnow.com regarding Comcast and Verizon in Arlington.

Verizon FIOS install date is this coming Wednesday, so we’ll see how that goes…

Surprisingly the phone ‘somewhat’ survived! The rear glass was in shards as you can see in the pics below. The front glass had a few hairline cracks and some chipped areas around the edges. The metal band around the edge of the iPhone 4 was bowed. Although the front glass was not fully damaged, I guess the pressure from being ran over damaged the underlying LCD touch screen, it had a multi-colored football shaped pattern at first and went away over time until nothing was visible at all. I was able to call the phone, while I got no sound from the speaker, it did still vibrate but I could not answer the call due to the damaged LCD. Surprisingly iTunes was able to see the phone and complete a backup in its damaged condition.

None of the local AT&T stores had iPhone 4′s in stock (thankfully). My parents ended up meeting up with me to head over to the nearest Apple retail store, just around the corner from me. I was able to make a Genius bar appointment 2hrs out before they arrived. We ended up heading over to the store early as they were already on their way here when I made the appointment.

Arriving at the store, Apple was very understanding of the situation. With a fairly small Genius bar in this store and no earlier appointments available, Apple accommodated us early to resolve the situation. For the record, I knew Apple has an employee discretion policy for warranties and repairs but I didn’t think they would come through on this one! Boy was I surprised when the guy said we’ll replace your phone free of charge! He was so intrigued over the story and that the phone ‘somewhat’ survived, he must have felt bad for us, as it was a fairly new phone.

Understand Apple may not be able to accommodate everyone in an accidental damage case like this but if you walk in the door with a good calm collected attitude and just be honest, you may be surprised what can happen!

Huge Thank You Apple!

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A new firmware update (version 2.06.06), launching June 9, has significant improvements in store for Overdrive customers. Many of these improvements resolve issues presented by customers. Below is a summary of the improvements.

• Improved device stability, eliminating all known freeze-ups and lock-ups • Wi-Fi enhancements that improve Wi-Fi stability and eliminate Wi-Fi
disconnects and crashes
• Significant improvement in 3G & 4G WAN stability, eliminating most 3G and 4G disconnects
• Some improvement (?10%) in overall battery life and battery life in poor coverage. For more information on how to improve battery life, see the “Overdrive Battery Tips” at http://www.sierrawireless.com/en/sitecore/content/Sierra%20Wireless/Su pport/Downloads/AirCard/Mobile_Hotspots/Overdrive_3G- 4G_Mobile_Hotspot_for_Sprint.aspx
• Faster boot-up time (?20%, or 10-12 seconds faster)
• Improved response time when changing the WAN Mode setting – time savings of approximately 1 minute and 20 seconds; no reboot required (includes switching from 3G to 4G and vice versa)
• ToolTips added to GPS settings screen to help the users understand the GPS settings
• Faster response time after canceling an operation on the Advanced Settings screen (device reset is no longer required; offline time decreased by ?1.5 minutes)
• For Enterprise customers, customization (enable/disable the micro SD card and the TRU-installTM feature) and DataLink support have been added. The Enterprise tool kit to disable the SD card slot and TRU-Install (automatic driver installation) is now available on Sierra Wireless’ Enterprise IT site at www.sierrawireless.com/enterprise. Please note:
? To access this link, you will have to register and log in. ? To use the tool kit, you must have the Overdrive tethered to a laptop.

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Don’t get me wrong here, Microsoft Windows has it’s place. I’m definitely a multi-platform computing person with systems here at home running different all kinds of different flavors of Windows and Linux. I thrive in this stuff, my couple hundred dollar annual subscription to Microsoft TechNet proves that point. At work we are an all Windows shop on the desktop side, which I what I support. Every OS has it’s place and differences, yes, Apple just suites my general home computing needs very well.

I opted for a high-end refurbished 17″ MacBook Pro, I couldn’t be happier with the switch. I do have VMware Fusion for the occasional Windows app I need to run but I find myself using that less and less. Come on GOOGLE, where’s Picasa for the Mac?!?!?!?

I must say, Apple has a wonderful online community behind them. I would say almost like a cult following if you want to look at it that way. Very nice people who are willing to help and grow the community to make it was it is. This really came to life when I recently got the latest 3G iPhone while I was waiting in line, I’ll make that a posting of it’s own. What an experience!

As of late as mentioned above I got the iPhone 3G which was to upgrade my 1st gen iPhone. I know, I’m a g33k, got to have the latest and greatest. Especially if it’s an Apple product, right?

Don’t be surprised if I post something about the Apple TV, that’s all I’m going to say for now. Can you guess?

I shot an email off to to support detailing the situation, here’s what I received.

There was a car accident several blocks away from the datacenter that caused a power surge in the system, it ended up tripping quite a few breakers, the UPS on your power segment did not sync back right away and did a power bounce. I have talked to the techs and more then likely we will be doing some maintenance on that segment and may replace the unit.
Jay

At least I can say it wasn’t a total disaster, could have been a lot worse. Definitely struck me by surprise though.

My server has been shipped, so it should arrive on Wednesday. I think I’m going to put it through about a week or so of testing before moving everything back over to it. Hopefully everything goes smoothly. I’m still a bit freaked about sending hardware out that really hasn’t been tested as a production server but it ‘should’ be fine. When I build my workstation way back when, the hardware was chosen for its reliability not performance value, it has a decent Intel board with a P4 3.2Ghz CPU with hyper-threading. For memory I chose a 512 stick of Crucial PC3200, at the time that was above standard.