July 26, 2005
Scuba Tragedy
Gunner links to an amazing and captivating tale about an extreme diving mishap in South Africa. I could not stop reading until I got to the end.
Others describe the tale as creepy. I just see it as tragic.
Read the whole thing.
Posted by: JohnL at
11:33 PM
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1
A guy dies doing something he knows is extremely risky, that he really wants to do. I don't know if I'd call that tragic.
It's sort of like astronauts. They all know it's risky, and think it's worth it. Some would say the worst thing about the Challenger explosion was that the crew didn't get to space.
*knocks on wood*
I tend to think of completely pointless, wasteful death as more tragic.
Posted by: Owlish at July 27, 2005 10:36 AM (fAJnA)
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I see your point, but if we had video of the Columbia astronauts being ripped apart by the hypersonic wind, that would have been tragic.
I think it's the account of the video recording of Shaw's last moments that got me. The fact that you knew how it would end, but that he kept plugging on.
Posted by: JohnL at July 27, 2005 08:25 PM (gplif)
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I have a fair amount of "Six Degrees to Kevin Bacon" connection to astronauts and wannabe astronauts.
Make space flight directly suicidal, non-return missions, and I'd bet you would still have more qualified applicants than you could use.
And yeah, I don't think I could watch the tape. If forced to watch it, the whole time I would be hoping for a different outcome.
Posted by: Owlish at July 31, 2005 10:01 PM (VgqcJ)
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July 24, 2005
I'm Back
After finally getting through to an executive complaint hotline regarding our dissatisfaction with the 1-week response time Comcast told us to expect, a technician came out to the house yesterday.
It turns out our sprinkler guys had cut a cable, but we couldn't tell since Plano is one of the few cities still using a two-cable delivery system. We still had TV, but no Internet. The technician was polite and had the problem temporarily fixed in less than an hour. A crew will come out in the near future to bury the temporary cables (which are currently running across the surface of the lawn).
Long story short, the outage was our fault. Apart from dissatisfaction with the initial response time, Comcast handled the situation great.
Posted by: JohnL at
03:09 PM
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July 20, 2005
Connectivity Issues
Comcast is experiencing service issues in our area and I will have limited access to the Internet until it is resolved.
At our old house, we had Comcast cable internet for more than 2 years with only one or two disruptions in service, which were resolved almost before we noticed them.
In our new house, we had one minor issue registering our cable modem after we moved, but until today we haven't had any other issues. However, Comcast can't explain the current outage problem. The best they can do is roll a truck to our house, but not until next week. My wife is up in arms and ready to switch to Verizon DSL. Now. Or Yesterday. Substandard technology notwithstanding....
Now, I have a long and deep-seated prejudice against DSL, going back to my early telecom contracting days. Technically, you get a small slice of dedicated bandwidth at $30 a month (DSL) versus a variable slice of monster bandwidth at $50 a month (cable modem).
Anyone have feedback on the relative merits of the two? I can review comments from my work computer at lunch time, so I'm looking forward to some suggestions.
Needless to say, this will cut into blogging around here until resolved.
Posted by: JohnL at
05:43 PM
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Bummer. I got a cable modem at the same time that I got cable TV. No major problems.
Posted by: owlish at July 20, 2005 06:00 PM (fAJnA)
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I have both cable modem service (residential) and DSL service (business) here at home--the DSL has been far more reliable (it's more expensive, but I suspect that business-rate pricing accounts for much of that). Good luck.
Posted by: Chan S. at July 21, 2005 10:37 AM (7kycG)
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We had a Comcast problem that started about a month ago. The symptoms were long waits and frequent time-out messages. Their tech support admitted that there was a problem, and after about 2 or 3 weeks everything went back to normal. Comcast can be frustrating, but they do work on the problems when they happen. All in all, I'm satisfied with them.
Posted by: Ted at July 21, 2005 01:48 PM (blNMI)
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Although I much prefer the technology of cable internet, I had some horrible customer service experiences with Comcast about a year ago. So, I switched to my local telco's DSL service. Although the bandwidth isn't as reliable, the customer service is much better. That's hard to argue with.
Posted by: Eric at July 21, 2005 11:16 PM (4720N)
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