5:01:51 PM        comment []    IM Me About This   

AT&T Broadband / Comcast or "I'd Rather Eat Glass"

Damn.  Last week Kasia got screwed by AT&T / Comcast.  Now its me.  Here's what happened:

1. Come back from meeting with a client about a bunch of rather interesting stuff.  Some Inbox Buddy, some Feedster for internal use, some Frontier consulting and some miscellaneous other open source issues. 
   
2. Virtually no network performance at all.  > 200 ms ping times, hosts not resolving, etc.  Call AT&T. 
   
3. Suffer thru one of the worst voice response systems I've seen in a long time.  Horrid.
   
4. Reach a technician.  He makes me remove my PC from the Linksys broadband router that shields my PC from the outside world.  I'm not happy about this but a 10 Base T coupler makes it a lot easier.
   
5. He tells me to restart.  I counter with "ipconfig /renew".  He shuts up.
   
6. I start doing some ping tests and he's telling me that all is well and happy, frothy goodness since he can ping me fine. 
   
7. I start to traceroute and give him feedback about the broken routes.  I ask him:  What's an email address so I can mail it to you?  "I don't have one".  What's a hot mail account I can send it to?  "I can't give that to you either."  So I ended up reading him the bad routes.  Pathetic.  And this from a company that sucks $50 from me monthly for broadband?
   
8. I finally give him the info, he checks it from there after a 5 minute hold session and B I N G O !  I was *right*.  They have a problem on their internal network and then I had to wait on hold for another 5 minutes while he filled out a trouble ticket.  Then I got the really bad news.
   
9. "It'll be resolved within 72 hours.  Not necessarily fixed but hopefully a solution decided upon."  What the fsck does that mean ?  That within 3 days from now, you'll decide how to fix it and then take as long as you like?  Utterly, totally pathetic. 

End result?  Over an hour of my time shot to hell simply because AT&T can't proactively monitor its own damn network.  I tell you, times like this?  I'd rather eat glass than be an AT&T customer.

5:01:50 PM      Google It!   comment []    IM Me About This   

Rock Library and Memphis

I've mentioned before that I'm involved with RockLibrary on a non-fee basis where my firm is pitching in basic web development, Cold Fusion programming (you didn't know that I knew Cold Fusion, did you?  there was life before PHP even if it wasn't as good) and other general geek type issues.  Now Rock Library isn't my idea -- Anne Fitzpatrick, the Executive Director, has been thinking about this working towards it most of her life and she's doing an awesome job.  So while I can take some (small) degree of technical credit, everything else goes to Anne and her staff.  She's done some really good things including getting the involvement of both Melissa Etheridge and Yoko Ono.

With that said, we're in the middle of a fund raising drive to attend a conference "Music Museum Alliance's Annual Meeting in Memphis, TN March 28-30, 2003" to work with other professionals in the field.  This is a good cause and Rock Library is a legitimate non-profit organization (501(3)(c) status).  So if you'd like to make a contribution, we'd appreciate it.  Here's more information.  Yes PayPal is accepted and every little bit helps.  Thanks in advance.

10:37:09 AM      Google It!   comment []    IM Me About This   

PHPCon: Are You Coming ?

Since I'm both a PHP guy and a speaker at PHPCon (hence I am biased), I wanted to let everyone know that the conference is coming up -- in April in New York City.  Now they asked me to pass on that there is an early registration discount and that it ends March 31st.    Here's the official blurb:

Register by March 31st and take advantage of reduced tutorial and conference rates. Currently enrolled students, university faculty and staff, PHP User Group members, and employees of non-profit associations are eligible for additional discounts off registration rates. Log on http://www.php-con.com for full program and registration details.  PHPCon East is three days of intensive learning through hands-on tutorials and three technical session tracks on Enterprise PHP, Applications Development and XML/Web Services by PHP notables including PHP inventor Rasmus Lerdorf, Zend's Zeev Suraski, MySQL's Zak Greant, Apache.org's Jim Winstead and authors Luke Welling and Laura Thompson.

PHPCon East 2003
April 23-25, 2003
Park Central New York Hotel
New York, New York

Hotel rooms are actually pretty cheap (well for New York City at least) and this is a really, really, really good conference.  When I spoke at the last one, I don't know a single person who didn't get something from the conference so keep that in mind. 

I'm giving a session on "PHP Subtleties" as well as a tutorial on Learning PHP.  Hope to see you there.

8:20:18 AM      Google It!   comment []    IM Me About This   

More on Website Optimization

Under the "Can This Slow Ass Site Be Any Faster Before I Lose My Mind Category" comes this.  I referenced Andy's book on "web site optimization" not too long ago and now he's being interviewed about it by Sean McManus over in the U.K.  Andy's really reaching out to the blog world for help promoting his book.  Interesting.

8:10:43 AM      Google It!   comment []    IM Me About This   

Feedster Morning Update

Good Morning Blogdom! (Sorry, woke up with strange memories of old Robin Williams movies and I just couldn't resist).  Not a whole heck of a lot to say save that the index took another 20% increase in size last night to 120,000+ posts..  Wah Hoo.  The bookmarklets have already been well received by at least one happy user.  Today's back end work mostly so don't expect any dramatic changes.  We're continuing to tune "frequency of blog checking algorithms" which is obviously an area of big concern for everyone.

And while I won't blog much about Feedster today, I will cover some other things in the next few posts.

8:06:16 AM      Google It!   comment []    IM Me About This