While my wife was here on her Philippines vacation, she had cable TV installed in our house. She didn't just get an installation done; she had the installation done in three rooms: The living room, the master bedroom, and my son's bedroom.
When you hear of websites that get thousands of unique visitors per day, wouldn't you like to get a piece of the action? Even a small piece of the action? If you concentrate on link clustering while writing, on a continuous basis, you'll begin to receive website traffic like that. It won't happen overnight, but it will happen.
If you don't know what link clustering is, you need to read Courtney Tuttle's article, "Introduction To Link Clusters". He gives a detailed description of what link clustering is all about, and I'm going to give you a real world example in detail.
I'm going to use my previous article, "Broadband and High Speed Internet Choices in Olongapo City, Philippines", as my example. In a future article (probably within a month), I'll report the results of my efforts.
I was going to title this post as "The Return of Dumb and Dumber", but thought it was better to leave that alone. Back in November, Dumb and Dumber spent some time at my house checking my internal wiring and such. They didn't fix my DSL connectivity problem.
A few days ago, I mentioned that I had spoken to "Doofus" as part of my first gray matter exercises post. On the day before yesterday (it's after midnight now and I have to remember which day I'm on), an unnamed technician called and asked if my connection was working right then. I told him yes, but that it wouldn't be in a few minutes. He said he'd check some other things. Since I didn't get another call within a couple of hours and the end of their work day was nearing, I called "Bonehead" and told her that I lost the connection less than 5 minutes after the unnamed technician called. I did more than banter with her; I exercised my balls of steel and had her apologizing multiple times. I explained that I'd been dealing with this crap for more than 4 months now. She assured me that the situation would be resolved soon.
I was up all night after that for 2 reasons: 1) Nighttime is only time I ever had a stable connection, and 2) My wife calls me on the IM at night and keeps me tied up for hours. Yesterday morning, after sleeping a mere 3 hours, my mother-in-law rudely awakened me by ringing my doorbell many, many times. As I staggered to the front door, ready to swear at the top of my lungs, I spotted Dumb and Dumber through the window standing off to the side. She was saved from my wrath.
After Dumb and Dumber spent more than 4 hours checking wiring again, they found a grounded wire at the nearby junction box. The ground was between that junction box and the primary junction box about a half-kilometer away — it wouldn't have affected my connection in any way. Dumb and Dumber thought they had the situation resolved with that and hooked their company laptop to where the line comes into my house, bypassing any wiring to my jacks. They got a connection on the first try and one of them had the audacity to tell me that the problem was with my internal wiring somewhere. Yeah, sure, right. He changed his tune when the connection suddenly dropped about 3 minutes later.
I went away (in order not to expose my temper) while they talked to the main office. In fact, I left the house and went off to visit neighbors. About an hour later, one of the technicians called me out on the road and told me the situation was resolved. I went back inside and they explained that they changed a line at the ISP, a port at the ISP, and the IP from the modem to the ISP and everything started working properly. In other words, they put my modem on a different node. In one of my past lives I was an IT manager for a huge telemarketing company, so I knew the nature of the problem from the very first time it happened and explained it to Doofus back then. It took them 4 months to figure it out themselves. The problem is that an Internet cafe was put on the same node with me back in September and it ate up all the available connections during the daytime hours that it was open for business.
I spoke to Doofus on the phone just before Dumb and Dumber left and verified that the connection was working. Is it fixed yet? I won't be sure until a week has passed without any down time that isn't caused by external forces such as a power outage, high voltage spike, or something of that nature. I have my fingers and toes crossed, my lucky rabbit's foot is losing all its hair from all the rubbing and my good luck pendant is starting to tarnish. I can only hope for the best and if everything works out, I will not longer be blogging as a vampire.
My DSL connection was intermittent and so bad for the last 24+ hours that I was lucky to have a connection for more than 60 seconds. When I said excuses are like anal sphincters, I didn't know that excuses from SubicTel were the only thing they knew how to do well.
I called them on Tuesday. They showed up today, on Friday afternoon. There were two technicians. "Dumb" plugged his meter into the phone jack and saw that I didn't have a connection. He sent "Dumber" to the main junction box to refresh the wiring (replace corroded connections, etc.) while he refreshed the wiring outside my house where the phone line comes in.
When all of that failed to correct the problem, Dumber called the main office. I listened to the exchange, as difficult as it was since he spoke no English, and realized immediately that he was clueless when he turned to me and asked me if I had the PC going through a router. I looked at him and could barely contain my laughter. Instead I said, "Um, no, do you see a router?"
What happened next nearly made me flip my lid. Dumber was on the phone with his main office and they told him to see if he could use the web browser after they made some adjustments. He was sitting at my PC and closed Firefox. He then started searching through my start menu and couldn't seem to find what he was looking for. He turned to me again and told me he wanted to get on the Internet. I pointed at the Internet Explorer icon in the quick launch area of the task bar. He clicked on it and it came up. Of course, Google Search is the page it was set for and it was being displayed. He then typed the word "internet" in the search block and clicked search.
After 30 minutes of watching him do various things, none of which were related to the actual cause of the problem, both Dumb and Dumber got up to leave. They both told me to call the main office at the speed dial number of 179 if I had any more problems. Then they left. I can't tell you if my connectivity problem is resolved. It seems to be working right now. I guess I'll find out within the next three days (it always works on Sundays).
I'm just wondering what kind of education you need to have to work at SubicTel. How could they send a technician who doesn't even know what the Internet is, much less how to navigate the web? I feel extremely insulted by their lack of technical knowledge, so much so that I'm not giving them another chance. The next time I have a connectivity problem, I'm heading to Globe to get set up for their wireless connection service. If it turns out that it works for me, I'll take the DSL modem and the assorted wiring and drop it all off at the SubicTel office as quickly as I can.
The title is a mild way of starting off this sentence: Excuses are like assholes. Everyone has them and they all stink. I don't like making excuses, especially when I'm making them on behalf of someone else.
Some of you may wonder why I don't respond to email or blog comments in a timely manner. You know I'm up and around, awake and ready to go. It's not my fault I'm not responding as quickly as I should and I'm not making any excuses for my Internet provider. Subictel sucks to no end. For a minimum of 8 hours per day, during the day, I've had an intermittent connection where I'm connected maybe 10 minutes per hour (if I'm lucky — I've been trying to post this for over two hours). I have a decent connection from 10 pm through 10 am, on holidays and on Sundays.
I have a multimeter here. Rather, my brother-in-law June does. I've been using it off and on for the last month to measure the voltage and amperes coming through my 220V line (I have a 110V line also). Despite what the Subictel technical support representative told me (and I bought off on it at the time), there isn't a power issue. I suspect there's another issue, but I'm not technically inclined enough to put it into words.
Earlier today, I called Subictel and gave them a piece of my mind. They said they would start a "job order". I've heard this line more times than I can count. I have the current monthly bill in my possession. I'm not going to pay it until they fix my connection, one way or another. This isn't the US. They can't ruin my credit.
Until very recently, I was stuck with two choices: 1) Use a prepaid dial-up card and 2) Subictel DSL. A third option appeared a month or two ago that I couldn't pursue because of my one-year contract with Subictel. Globe broadband is available with a Wi-Fi connection. They even provide a router so that more than one computer can be connected. One of my neighbors, Joel, is using it now. He gets more than 3 megabits per second while I get 1.5 megabits on a good day (or night I should say). He pays 2000 pesos per month. I pay 2500 pesos per month. Who's getting the better end of the stick? He is!
For my Filipino friends: If you live in Olongapo City and you have broadband choices, skip Subictel. Their service is horrible and they make nothing but excuses for it. What do you expect from an ISP who hasn't updated their website since 2002?
While I don't live in the UK, I can relate to the use of Broadband Internet there. Regardless of how good or bad a particular Broadband ISP may be, UK residents seem to have more high speed internet choices than I do at the present time. Just comparing the monthly rates to what I pay (for less) makes me salivate. I pay P2500 (about $55.00 in US dollars) per month for 768 Kbps down and 196 Kbps up. I see only one service that's slower and it's still better because it's less than half of what I pay.
The most popular Broadband Provider appears to be "BT". At £8.95 (less $20.00 in US dollars), it seems like a good service. They have many more good consumer reviews than bad. When you compare providers, you have to consider the bad along with the good and in this case, it seems the good outweighs the bad. While the main review for a particular Broadband UK supplier may indicate they're a good service, a lot of bad consumer reviews may indicate otherwise. A fellow blogger has had nothing but problems with one of them and Cheap Broadband Suppliers has no problem leaving all the bad reviews in place. Her provider has had nothing but bad consumer reviews.
One thing that I find lacking on the website is that the type of broadband connection isn't easily obtained. Of the ones that I looked at, I couldn't tell whether they use ADSL Broadband or cable for the connection. That would be a deciding feature for me because a cable connection doesn't require a telephone line. With the ubiquitousness of cell phones, many people can do without telephone lines altogether.
For those of you that live in the UK, this website is a valuable resource for when you need to Compare Broadband providers. I recommend it and I don't even live there!
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