ale machina, Bryant Cutler's blog

Qwest: Worst company ever?

Tuesday, December 9th 2008

Our move to Seattle actually went surprisingly smoothly. One pain point, unfortunately, was our internet connection. In Utah, we had a high-speed symmetrical fiber connection, courtesy of the iProvo and Utopia projects - some of the best municipal broadband in the country (note: Qwest lobbied strongly against these programs). When we moved into our apartment here in Renton, we hoped to get a similar fiber connection. Verizon's FiOS isn't available in our area, though, so we were stuck with Comcast: twice the price of our old connection, at half the speed (and less than that, upstream).

So, when some Qwest representatives stopped by our door one night with an offer for one of their new fiber connections, at a lower price than Comcast, we thought, despite all we'd heard, we'd give it a try.

What a mistake! We were promised our modem would arrive within the week. When it didn't, I called customer service (ugh!) to find out why not. After I waded through the (poorly implemented) phone tree, they apologized that the modem hadn't been shipped, and promised to overnight a modem to us right away. A week later, the modem still had not arrived. Per my two-strikes-you're-out policy, I called customer service (ugh! ugh!) to tell them to cancel our account. I was pleasantly surprised that the rep from the "loyalty department" was so polite; he told me our account (and bill) would be canceled, that he had taken care of everything.

Two months later, we started getting past due notices. I called (ugh! ugh! ugh!) just before Thanksgiving, trying to find out why our account hadn't been canceled. There was some nonsense about supposedly shipping us two modems. I was on the phone for more than an hour and a half - long enough that the battery on my phone ran out. I was told that I could call back later and talk to the loyalty department to finish straightening out my bill.

Thanksgiving, with its attendant craziness came and went, as well our move across the apartment complex. I called Qwest (ugh! ugh! ugh! ugh!) to make sure our "past due" balance was taken care of. Our account had still not been canceled, the reps claimed not to have any record of my first two calls, and it was (very patiently) explained to me that because my account had been suspended, I could not cancel it (or prevent a collections department from coming after me) until I had paid them off.

To sum up: today, I paid Qwest $150 in return for the following three things:

  1. The modem they never sent me
  2. The internet service they never provided
  3. The privilege of canceling my account with them.

If I had the tiniest bit of confidence that it'd cost me less in the end than it has already I'd sue the pants off them. My advice to anyone choosing a telecom provider is DON'T SIGN UP FOR QWEST - that way you'll get no modem, no internet service, and no Qwest account for free.

Tags: qwest sucks rant isp

That's ok Stickers, you can take... Bessie.

Friday, July 11th 2008

Saw the most amazing thing yesterday on the way back from the grocery store (which, at 10 miles away, is the nearest one we've seen where you don't have to pay for parking). The police had closed off one side of the road (all lanes) on long stretch of 124th Avenue NE in Bellevue for repaving. An enormous machine, one lane wide with tracks fore and aft, was cruising down said closed lanes at maybe three miles per hour, surrounded in a huge cloud of dust. As I got closer, I realized that the machine was basically a giant belt sander, grinding off the asphalt surface of the road. It was grinding 6 inches deep, in asphalt, in a single pass, and moving faster than a person walks. Holy cow! Almost makes me wish I had stuck with mechanical engineering instead of CS.

Tags: seattle july 11th 2008 engineering awesome road sander

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The Move

Saturday, July 5th 2008

Well, we made it. Our little family is now a family of Seattlites... no longer... Provonians? Provoese? Anyway, we're here, and I thought I'd blog about our experience.

Tags: move seattle amazon family

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IIW 2008A - Day Three

Thursday, May 15th 2008

The third and final day of IIW was full (for me) of one-on-one conversations rather than a lot of session attendance. Devlin and I had a chance to present a summary of our lab's research, which got a generally good reception... I think a lot of people disagree with the premise of our research, until they get a chance to talk with us about the use cases we're aiming for.

Tags: iiw may 14th 2008 conference museum babbage

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IIW 2008A - Day Two

Tuesday, May 13th 2008

My notes on today's IIW sessions:

Tags:

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Quote of the Day: 5/13/2008

Tuesday, May 13th 2008

The quote of the day, which encapsulates perfectly the advantages and perils of conferences like IIW:

Tags: qotd iiw may 13th 2008 plaxo conferences

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IIW 2008A - Day One

Monday, May 12th 2008

Well, another year, another Internet Identity Workshop. This has been the first time that I've been to IIW that I'm here for community and not really for the various conference sessions.

Tags: iiw2008 iiw 2008 may 12th conference logo identity

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Have You Heard?!

Wednesday, April 16th 2008

Have you heard about it? The new app? It's fantastic! It does podcasting, podcatching, and feed reading. It uses Atom, microformats, HTML, XML, jQuery, and Prototype... it even uses Ruby on Rails! It's got blogging and wikis built in, it can handle email, and it's SMS compatible. There's a mobile version. Its a social network, unique in that it appeals to just about everybody...

Tags: unix webapp facebook web rant web3_0 blog wiki april 16th 2008

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Cyclical Reality

Friday, April 11th 2008

In the long, lonely moments since my wife left with the in-laws for Disneyland (curse you, finals week!) I've been musing about the way that my to-do lists seem to wax and wane over time. I never feel like there's nothing I could be doing — of course, I could always go do the dishes, or get ahead on my homework, or do some reading — but I can remember, quite clearly, entire weeks when I felt like nothing was really going on. No big announcements in the blogosphere, nothing urgent for school, no paper or thesis deadlines...

Tags: cyclic nature reality products appengine deadlines

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Movie Review: Live Free or Die Hard

Tuesday, February 19th 2008

The wife and I rented Live Free or Die Hard over the weekend. Most. Unintentionally. Funny. Movie. Ever. There were intentionally funny parts, of course, including some good wisecracks from both John McClane and stereotypical hacker dude, but the "serious" scenes were funnier by far. The trailer-spoiled slaying of a helicopter with a catapulted police car was a hoot, as was the supposed-to-be-creepy conversation between the googly-eyed bad guy and McClane's daughter.

Thinking back on the movie, I do have a few little nitpicks:

  • Apparently the villain got his HR policy out of a Bond movie: sidekicks included a ninja babe, a freerunner, and the always-popular bearded foreign weapons guy. However, he didn't have a deformity (besides the previously mentioned bug eyes). Where's the scar/prosthesis/embedded bullet?
  • As usual, "hacking" skill consists mostly of typing speed and the ability to explain the movie's plot to laymen, and everyone in the movie uses custom non-Windows, non-Mac, non-KDE, non-GNOME interfaces with integrated video conferencing.
  • I know road rash isn't really photogenic, but I can't get over McClane diving out of a speeding police cruiser and ending up with a pair of small cuts on his brow. Someday, some costume guy from E.R. or House is going to give us realistic-looking injuries on the big screen, but this was not that day.
  • An "E-Bomb?" I mean, I understand that flooding the other guy's screen with spam is funny, but surely they had a writer or two on this movie, right?
  • No helicopters are available to stake out the computer compound, so they send a fully-armed F-35 over instead to... um... blow things up along the way? What?
  • And the heat-seeking, proximity-fused Sidewinder decides to go for a concrete freeway support pylon rather than the chiller on a mobile server farm? Which then causes miles of freeway to collapse? And the pilot then conveniently flies under the collapsing road, the better to catch some concrete with his lift fan? COME ON!

All-in-all, a whole lot of good, clean, completely brainless fun: should be enough guns and cars and explosions in this movie to keep anybody entertained for the duration.

Tags: diehard movie review hacking f35

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