ISP change fun, Paul’s fifth job, and why there haven’t been many updates
I mentioned that there were some AT&T issues the other day that affected a good chunk of the country, what I didn’t mention was that Saturday my work had made the leap from Comcast to AT&T’s new fiber offering.
I’ll point out this isn’t me complaining, just something that happened I thought I’d share. My potential job story is at the bottom as a note.
We’d tested last week with a couple of computers and maybe got one dropped ping out of 200,000 or so. I was pulling 800mbit on my desktop and pushing 350 on my laptop (that’s as good as its “gigabit” chip will do,) and all seemed right with the world.
We went live on Saturday with relatively few issues (some people had the old Comcast DNS hardcoded, and it tends to not respond all the time from outside their network) but Saturday and Sunday with about 20 people on the service, life was good.
Monday the Chicago 5Ge experiment started. We started seeing issues at the same time and as AT&T’s twitter was flooded that Chicago was down, Bay Area was down, Detroit was otherwise down (their 5Ge turnup).
Later in the day, everything seemed to return somewhat to normal, this was about lunch time and fewer people on Twitter were complaining so I assumed they’d gotten their act together. About 1pm it fell apart and I flopped us back over to Comcast, which was also having some issues (unrelated) but significantly fewer.
AT&T chose to dispatch and scheduled a tech for the next day. Turns out a large chunk of our problems were with the router – it couldn’t hold enough connections to handle 20+ computers, 40+ cell phones, etc at once so everyone was fighting for a connection.
This was the fourth modem we’d had since install the previous week. I’ll point out that install date I was not informed that they’d chosen what functions as a home grade router for their fiber connection.
So over the week I’ve been swapping out a building between two ISPs. Still am working on that, but phew.
Yesterday I hauled ass from home to work to fix two of the three remaining internet issues at work. I have to leave Job #1 at 2:40 most days to get my kid from school, which means people wait until 2:38 to tell me their internet has been down all day and they emailed me and I never responded.
Er yes, email goes over internet.
I had a meeting with the Nashville Metro Council to attend. I’d applied for a position on the Citizen’s Oversight Board – which was basically a new board that Nashville voters voted for that would provide some transparency and investigations when things go wrong with the police department.
It’s basically a board that could be great benefit, or it could catastrophically self implode causing demoralization of the police force, a mass exodus, and a several million dollar money pit in Metro’s pockets.
I was mostly worried about it becoming a fiasco, offered my services, jumped through so many hoops you would not believe, and last night with 150 others I sat while the Metro Council spent four hours voting on this.
Anyhow, I didn’t get it, that’s fine. They put in a couple of former police officers, a couple of community organizers, couple of attorneys, and built the thing.
Very odd to have worked so hard to get a position that I didn’t desire, then not get chosen for it. I’ve had to tell people it’s been like Frodo in LoTR – didn’t want the job, job needed done. Hope they picked the right hobbits.
