Photo-A-Day #1835

On Thursday our Internet went out. Bam! Gone! I spent a few hours trying to get it working again but no luck. When I got home on Friday I ended up working on the problem again for a few hours. Eventually, I had to give in and get a technician to come to the house. So today I had a service call appointment today at 5:00pm. Today was not a good day for getting things done online but I did get things done.

Using the Coopers Micro Brew Kit was so easy. Once everything was clean and ready to go I opened the can of concentrate. This had to be placed in hot water to loosen it up. I poured that into the fermenter along with 2 liters of boiling water and the 1kg of brewing sugar. That I stirred up quickly and then proceeded to pour five gallons of water into the fermenter. Once that was full I poured the yeast on top of the wort. I sealed up the fermenter and made sure that the airlock was filled. I put the fermenter into a dark corner and now we wait.

Getting back to the Internet issue. I had the Comcast appointment for between 5 and 7pm. So while I waited I watched the move Up in the Air. I liked it. It was a pretty good movie overall, depressing but still a decent movie.

The tech called a little before five and he was about five minutes out. He arrived and we checked the line. What we discovered was that the lines were leaking. We had to find the leak. I have to say that this guy was a real professional. He went from line to line and out on new connectors, he tested every single line and then went outside. There he replaced all the splitters there as well. As he was working another tech called and then he came over as well. Both guys worked throughout the whole house replacing cables and connectors. Then they went to the pole and replaced the cable from the pole to the house. We now have a very clean signal. The Internet is running very fast however our HD DVR is not and that is because I haven’t put the signal booster back in place. I just watched the Legend of the Seeker that got taped by the DVR without the booster. The 2nd half has no sound. I’ll have to catch it on Hulu, it looks like a pretty revealing episode too. The point is, the guys form Comcast were great. In my eyes they went and did a great amount of work and didn’t stop till I was completely set up.

When I mentioned something on Twitter about Comcast I got a response from @ComcastGeorge. I like how Comcast is approaching Twitter, very engaging.

Comcast was not perfect however. The techs who came to the house were great, however the phone calls that both me and my sister Tara made were not exactly helpful. It turns out that on Thursday when the Internet went down it was actually the Comcast guy at the street who made this happen. He put a pad on the line and that made the internet stop working. This was done because our line was leaking signal.

If this was the case then why did we have to call and talk to 4 separate people who told us that the issue was the modem, we even had to go get a new modem from the Comcast Office. Had we known that our line was leaking signal and there was a problem with the wiring then tell us that in the first place and tell us that we need a tech to come out. Had this been done with the first person we talked to then so much frustration would have been saved. On the flip side the guys who came out to help us were great and helped us so much.

While talking to one of the guys I learned about a bed and breakfast over in Wrentham. The guy who owns the place is renovating it back to its Victorian roots. One of the things that he told me was that the house was a 3 foot round red window. That was a symbol that the house was a safe house for slaves. I tried Googling this to find out more because our home has a 3 foot round window that is slightly pink in color. Our house is well over 100 years old. I am now interested in the history of the red round window and want to find out if our house was also a safe house.