I have been without internet access here at home for the last four days. It’s ok. I survived. Don’t panic.  #firstworldproblem

My survival was mainly due to my phone’s 3G connection. I used 900MBs of data over the weekend, and now have about 60MB left for the next few weeks. also.. #firstworldproblem

The interesting part of the story is how Shaw messed up this weekend, and how they revealed that they really have no idea what is going on in their organization.

I first noticed that my internet was out when I got home from work on Thursday afternoon. I did all the usuals: bounced the router and modem, cleared the line of an static buildup. After that didn’t work, I checked the TV, and noticed that the cable was out as well. That is when I phoned up shaw. The first time I called, I was on hold for 45 minutes before I gave up. I started checking around to see if anyone else’s internet was down in the area. It turned out that my buddy Greg‘s internet was down as well. After hearing that his was down as well, I figured that I would just wait it out. His came back up in a few hours, and mine was still very dead. I called Shaw again, and after only 30 minutes on hold, I got through to someone.

The person over the phone confirmed that I was down, and said that all his techs were booked up until Monday.

After a weekend of tethered internet, the tech showed up on Monday evening. He quickly noticed that our cable connection was unplugged. The residents in our neighboring unit had their cable disconnected, and the tech that performed that accidentally unplugged ours at the same time!

The thing that baffles me is how shaw didn’t know that there was someone working at my address the day my internet went out. My conversation with shaw should have gone something like this:

“My internet and cable are both down.”

“Oh I see. One of our techs was working at your address today. Maybe they did something by accident. We’ll send someone right out to correct that.”

It is worrying that Shaw employees don’t have that information available to them.

</rant>

After this webpage made it to the front page of reddit last night, I now have a new homepage.

http://welcometointernet.org

There is audio as well, so go check it out for yourself. It might seem like it would get annoying after a while, but I’ve been using it for 12 hours, and I haven’t got sick of it yet. A big part of that might be because I rarely open new browser windows. Chrome is almost always open.

Anyways, I’ll let you know when I get sick of it and revert back to Chrome’s new tab page as my homepage.

My house went over our bandwidth cap imposed by Shaw last month, and I am positive that they are throttling us now.

My upload speed is better than my download speed….WTF???

Stumble upon is the social bookmarking tool that I use the most. This title used to be held by digg and reddit, but I only visit those sites on occasion now. I find that stumble upon delivers higher quality pages, and the content is better targeted to whatever category I am stumbling in.

The one gripe I have with stumble upon is the quality of its comments. They are always pretty useless, and never offer much insight. A comment is rarely longer than one line. Stumble upon comments are not just bad; they are the worst on the web. I think that it is a community that hasn’t yet learned the etiquette of commenting.

The comment page’s location isn’t immediately evident, and I suspect that a lot of stumble upon users don’t even view the comments page.

I have had a few of my posts ‘stumbled’. Here are some highlights from the worst of the comments that I received.

Santa vs. God AND Atheists vs. Monotheists

Observations of a guy who makes up statistics and implies a relationship in an attempt to be funny: Adrian Corscadden – RRamsey118

The first one is another rip-off of Stephen Roberts, and the second is just untrue. Not everyone believes in God until they are 7. What kind of crap is that? – Viperine

When I stumble humor section, I expect to laugh… Now you show me the humor in this… – Stariuss

Egg Peeling Gadget

All I want to know is, if Jesus was a carpenter how come he never build a damn thing in the bible? Hell, he didn’t even complain about that half-assed cross. – Riff-Randell

Riff-Randell doesn’t even make any sense. How does this have anything to do with the post?

I seem to be using more and more google products. My life has become googleized. I am generally happy with their products, which is why I use them. There is a need for one small addition.

The header on the google homepage should be customizable. My two most used google products are gmail and reader. Reader is mysteriously absent from the default header.

Am I the only one who has a problem with this?

I have been getting a few of my entrecard ads rejected due to a ‘design clash’. This could be for two reasons. Either there actually is a design clash, or my entrecard is ugly. I am now starting to second guess its design. Originally, I liked it for its simplicity and I felt that it stood out around other graphical entrecards. After living with it for over a month, I feel that it needs to be redesigned.

What are your thoughts? Should I stay with this simple entrecard, or design a graphical one?

[update] I just received an email from my mom asking what entrecard is. For those of you who don’t blog or know what entrecard is, it is a networking tool for bloggers. Each blogger produces a business card (called an entrecard) that can be placed on other blogs. In return, I place other bloggers’ entrecards on my blog.

Not too long ago, Digg and Reddit had the largest market share of my browsing time. Over the last year, this had declined to the point where I only check these pages on occasion. The reason for this is quite simple: poor content. Democracy is only as good as the voters (ie Bush) and the new wave of users on Digg and Reddit just aren’t getting the job done. These sites have strayed beyond their technology news beginnings. They have become sites to waste time on with “neat tidbits” being the primary content.

Currently, there is a Digg rebellion happening. I discovered this on cnet rather than on digg itself. Here are some of the recent negative articles that were highly dugg articles:

“It became extremely slow and buggy, it implemented a horrible comment system, it introduced several useless new features while ignoring existing issues.”

“Digg has gone far off course from the technology focused social news network it once was.”

“I miss the old digg.”

“Once you realize that Digg is NOT a social NEWS site, but rather a fun facts site, you see how worthless it really is.”

I should have added the downfall of Digg and Reddit (within the tech community) to my 2008 predictions.

Household Hacker is a relatively new site that demonstrates FAKE hacks with simple household items. A WHOIS search reveals that their domain was registered on Nov 8 ’07. The site has been fairly popular after their hacks were picked up by popular blogs such as TUAW and Gizmodo. Here is a link to the google trends of “household hacker”.

Their hacks include charging an iPod with an onion, powering a TV with a AAA battery, turning your PC into a space heater and improving XBOX 360 WiFi reception. All of these hacks are fake. Charging an iPod with an onion is fake; I even tested it out here. There is no way that a AAA battery will ever be able to power a TV. The space heater is obviously fake as well. It involves taking the side off of a computer and continuously running a processor intensive task; they claim this will heat up a room by 15 degrees. They improve WiFi reception on an XBOX 360 with a ridiculous tin foil contraption. It is a pretty crude reflector that wouldn’t work very well, if at all. These reflectors need to be a precise parabolic shape like the popular ones over and FreeAntennas.

I’m am not sure what the goal of Household Hacker is. At first I thought that it was just stupid, but I am now finding it funny. Many people are actually taking these guys seriously and are providing some cheap entertainment. Other people are going along with it and making some pretty funny video replies. Here is a funny video with another way to charge an iPod.

I can’t wait to see what these Household Hoaxsters come up with next and who will fall for it.