Outage

5:45 a.m.: We're having intermittent but persistent phone-line problems here at TOP World Headquarters—the line keeps going dead, causing a cascade of Internet outages. An AT&T technician is supposed to be arriving between 8:00 and noon.

And I might finally be getting close to relaxing the clenched tightwad muscle sufficiently to spring for cable Internet. We just signed up for AT&T UVerse a couple of months ago, providing a searing 5 mbps connection speed. Which is better than the .25–2.5 mbps we'd been limping along with before. But only if it works.

I might be able to get Ctein's column posted in between outages, but maybe not. I compose in the TypePad interface, and when the 'Net goes down, so does the interface...frequently taking bits of unsaved work with it. Combined with the hinky Bluetooth of my new (and soon to be old) wireless keyboard, which has regular seizures, it's like trying to work with hypermanic monkeys in the room. Who knows when I'll even be able to get this posted.

The meantime might find me actually doing something positively antediluvian: working on the computer offline! Wow. Take me back to the '80s and '90s.

—Mike, TOP Head of Housekeeping and
All-Purpose Radar O'Reilly

UPDATE 9:45 a.m.: Well, I have to give AT&T props for punctuality. They were out here by 9:00—two trucks, no less—and in 45 minutes had replaced all the phone lines in the house with new cabling. Everything seems fine again, but I'll keep my fingers crossed. Can't wait till the new keyboard gets here (note to self: never throw old keyboard away until you're sure the new one works).

Original contents copyright 2013 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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Comments

[Mark]

I got a better idea. Go out and take some pictures. LOL.

That's why I would never get that Triple Play crapola, where the telephone, TV and internet is all wrapped up with one company. Nope. I've got Cable internet, DirecTv (and I hate their service and always have), and Verizon for home phone service. Expensive, but worth it.

[Tony Roberts]

Mike:
The missus brought me the Cox bill yesterday:$53.99 for PowerBoost High Speed Internet. I get fast mps ups and downs, no complaints. Is it worth it? Yes since during a brief few months of austerity in 2011, we went with their slowest connection and suffered mightily. I am killing off two land lines, though, which cost me $73.84/mo and will put those $$$s to work on cell phones/data service upgrades. HDTV is a killer cost, too but it stays tho I might look at Direct TV so I can watch the Pack here in AZ.

[m3photo]

You'll have to speak up a bit ...

[Mike Johnston]

"You'll have to speak up a bit ..."

CAN YOU HEAR ME NOW??

[g]

Mike

[Patrick Perez]

As a general rule, DSL, while perhaps having a lower advertised speed rating, is more likely to maintain that speed at all hours. Cable internet performance is heavily impacted by usage of the people sharing the connection (think neighborhood) and can drop in speed and become very susceptible to latency during peak times. Again, these are generalizations and if the people on the same cable loop as you are moderate users, it wont be noticed.

Personally, given a choice, I go with DSL, although if fiber were available to me, Id opt for that in a PING round-trip. It may be old-fashioned thinking, but one of the reasons I like DSL is it uses phone lines. The phone company knows how to run a network for maximum reliability, the cable companies don't. This is, of course, out-dated, but its *my* reasoning, dangit!

Patrick

[Indigoid]

Mike,

Do compose offline. Heartily recommend! It means you get to use the text editing interface you prefer, rather than the one Typepad provide. Especially worthwhile if (like me) you have RSI and/or arthritis problems and need to be careful about your computer use habits.

Then paste your text into TypePad, insert markup, images, etc. If it all goes FUBAR, you've still your text to paste back in --- and for me that's easily the most valuable part of TOP. The images are nice, sure, but for me they're really an accent* to some invariably interesting writing.

John

* except for Random Excellence postings, of course

[Pak-Ming Wan]

When PSTN goes (i.e. the phone line supporting your ADSL service) it goes pretty quickly. If you are hearing static on your line, then that's a pretty good indicator that you've probably got a loose joint or a break in the line (quite common after heavy rain or a change in weather). In Australia, we have MSD (Mass Service Disruption) which the telcos can declare after heavy rain / flood to cover for exactly this.

When they arrive, the technicians may use their wire analysis tools to find the break in the line. They can basically determine to the closest metre where the break is, and then hunt down the trench ... very cool. I'm assuming that a physical line problem is it for you, because most telco operators can do some basic line testing remotely now.

Pak

[James Sinks]

Composing in a web interface is a Bad Habit--capital letters well earned.

[Taran]

Get Bean, the free word processor for mac, type on that, then cut/paste from there into the TypePad interface. No internet connection required and no chance of losing your little bits.

[Mike Johnston]

"In Australia, we have MSD..."

Um...what? I thought you lived in Paris, Pak!

Mike

[Hugh Crawford]

"I compose in the TypePad interface, and when the 'Net goes down, so does the interface...frequently taking bits of unsaved work with it. "

Oh Mike, just stop that. The extra stress is bad for you. Compose off line in the name of all that is good*.

Just paste the completed post into the typepad interface after you are done. If you absolutely must compose in the TypePad interface, copy the post into the clipboard before you hit the submit button, then when the U.I. goes poof you can paste the post into text edit or something.

*not the actual name of a text editor, textedit will do.

[Phil Cook]

Is there not an off-line editor for TypePad? I know a guy who blogs from a remote location (or locations even) and his connection was frequently falling over. He used to be constantly losing carefully crafted content until he started editing off-line.

[Hugh Crawford]

"Is there not an off-line editor for TypePad?"

Before we switched to wordpress on a rented server we used a nice app on the iPhone to work with Typepad.

[Pak-Ming Wan]

Ah yes, it pays to be precise. I'm Australian living in Paris. :D

For a while back I worked as a consultant to various telecommunications companies on their repair systems. Given the size of Australia, and the population density, it's a huge task. Some of the stories there were really interesting given the remoteness of the country (like packing a 4x4 for a trip in the desert)!

If you're interested, here's a look at Telstra's MSD page:
http://www.telstra.com.au/abouttelstra/commitments/mass-service-disruption/

Pak

[David Anderson]

Mike, glad you are back on the Intermitnet ™

[John Robinson]

Get Cable....its not perfect, its just better....at least here....

[Robert McCall]

I had DSL from AT&T and got fed up with replacing modems that seemed to fry at 9 months to a year. U-verse may be better. I got Cox and haven't looked back; if a modem fries they give you another one, the speed on fiber optic is great and service is good. I got wireless and Mike I'm surprised you don't have it, it's nice to have a laptop and be anywhere in the house with access to the net.

[We do have wireless, an Apple Airport. I use a desktop, but my son uses a laptop, mostly in his room. Also, we only have one DSL provider in my area, no choices. It's the one cable provider or the one DSL provider, that's the choice. --Mike]

[Mart]

If you're happy composing offline I recommend trying Dropbox or Google Drive. Keep all your work in the Dropbox/Google directory and every time you press save your work will automatically be backed up to the internet. When the internet is working of course. There's some other niceties such as automatic synchronisation between computers which you may or may not care about.

[Ben Wilkes]

Since nobody has mentioned it (and since I generally despise web text input), maybe you would want to take a look at MarsEdit for offline composing. It's not a word processor, it's a blog editor that syncs with your blog's programming interface. It should make it easy to pull images from your photo library, and to schedule posts. Find it at red-sweater.com.

[Dennis Ng]

"searing 5 mbps" ... sorry just to annoy you my friend ...

Just paid for a guy who commented that my router is too slow for the new Internet link - need a port to support 1 Gbps!

After installation, my son do a test direct using Mac and it is up to 800 Mbps ...

I suspect that Korea (the South one) would be faster as have been the case for quite some year. Whilst I saw in Washington Post mentioned D.C. got 100 Gbps, at least Kansas got Google one that is also 1 gbps.

As we now talk trillion platinum coin, we do not use Mbps as a unit ...

Self destroyed in 5 min as it is too annoying.