The Diary of A Simple Man

Our internet service is from Comcast Xfinity. And the WiFi has been absolutely terrible. Constant freeze-ups, slow-downs, and sudden shifting to low resolution images. It happens on Netflix, Hulu, and YouTube, and it's almost all the time. Every time I called Comcast about it, they'd reset the signal. That helped for a day at most, and then we were back to the same shitty service.

So I went to the store. The clerk recommended I buy a router to replace the Xfinity one. It was pricey, but I figured it would be worth it. We stream a lot. In fact, we hardly ever watch broadcast TV. The only reason we get TV from Comcast at all is because they'd charge us more for just internet.

But our WiFi remained terrible.

This didn't make sense to me. My place isn't that big. Comcast had refused to give us a second wired connection to the TV, but the router was still less than 20 feet away from the TV - albeit one floor up. No matter how I aimed the router's antennae, the WiFi signal never stayed good for long.

So I went back to the store. The clerk recommended a range extender. It was pricey, but I had bought a large-screen TV a few months ago and I'm already paying for Netflix, Hulu, and YouTube Red; I figured it would be worth it.

Still our WiFi remained terrible. I tried moving the range-extender around, But no matter where I put it, our signal was totally unreliable. Drops, long pauses, low resolution...all the time.

Maybe you know how utterly frustrating it is when you're really into a show, and suddenly it freezes and that damned "loading" circle appears - only to be replaced after a few minutes with "Signal lost, check your internet connection". I grew up in the age of broadcast TV and rabbit ears, and I swear that our signal was much more reliable back then. And it was free!

So I went back to the store. The clerk suggested I set up a mesh network; he said that would fix the problem for sure. But it was pricey. Too pricey. It was $500, and I just didn't have that kind of money to blow on TV any more. So I bought a fifty-foot ethernet cable for $14.99. We went home, plugged one end into the router, ran the cable down the stairs and plugged the other end into the TV.

I've never seen such a crystal-clear picture. And not a single pause in the last two days!

Recently I heard about what sounded like a great deal: a refurbished Pixel 1 for $199. So I ordered one. The company selling them was called Woot.

My current phone is a discontinued South Korean model. It's usable, but limited and VERY slippery. There's no cover that will fit it.

When the phone arrived, I tried to peel the plastic film off the screen. To my surprise, the screen itself wasn't fully attached; it was entirely detached from the lower left corner, and I could literally see inside the phone. It had clearly been dropped, hard, on that corner. There was visible damage inside. The phone worked, apparently, but had clearly been "refurbished" in the shoddiest way imaginable.

On further investigation, the screen turned out to be detached from the entire lower half of the phone. I did some research, and found that Woot had been acquired some time ago by Amazon. It seems that Amazon uses Woot to sell garbage that they can't or won't sell on Amazon itself.

And this phone was literally garbage. So I contacted Woot and told them I'd be returning it for a full refund. They sent me a prepaid return label, and I shipped it back.

The thing is, I still want a new phone. I won't buy a used or refurbished phone, and I'll certainly never buy anything from Woot again. I don't want to spend what it will cost to buy a new new phone - not directly from a manufacturer, anyway. But there are new-in-box older model phones available on eBay.

Here's what I'm considering:

A Pixel (1) XL - an excellent camera, but will only get Android updates for another year at most. And the manufacturer, Google, is a company I no longer like or trust. 

An Essential phone. Titanium and ceramic, and not manufactured by Google. It has virtually no bezel, but that's a negative; my current phone has a tiny bezel, and it's actually a drawback. My palm isn't that fat, but it still tends to bulge around the edge enough to cause the screen to get confused or fail to respond. I never had that problem with a normal cellphone, by the way.

Last is an older OnePlus phone. I don't know much about that.

My Twitter account was apparently hacked by a Russian - at least, they posted a bunch of things in Russian to my Twitter account. Those tweets were mirrored to LiveJournal (but not Dreamwidth) automatically. I've deleted the original tweets and the LJ mirror-post. I've also taken a number of enhanced security steps to resecure my Twitter account.

It's almost not worth it. I don't really USE Twitter. It just grabs some of the stuff I post elsewhere. If something like this happens again, I'll just delete my Twitter account.

As far as I can tell, nothing else has been compromised. What I don't understand is how my Twitter account got compromised in the first place!

It wasn't easy, but tonight I finally managed to hook up the Roku Netflix player that my dad had given me a while ago. Let me tell you: it's a HELL of a lot easier to get Netflix to work with a Wii than with the Roku player! But eventually I got everything to work, so we can watch Netflix on the upstairs TV. All in all, I think we're all pleased with Netflix.

My parents got us a family membership to the Roger Williams Zoo the last time they visited us, so we used it by going to the zoo today. We also invited one of Sebastian's friends from school to join us on an impromptu play date. We all had a lot of fun, though neither Teri nor I was feeling our best. One odd thing: the zoo closes at 4PM! On a beautiful early-fall Saturday, that makes no sense at all.

We spent around three hours at the zoo, and only got to see about half of it. We told the boys that we could come back and see the rest of it soon.

I really need to unload the pictures and video from my phone and camera!

Google recently added the option for voice calling to my Gmail and Google Voice. I can call anywhere in the US for free. But what's really exciting is the sound quality of the calls.

It's been frustrating to use cell phones, for me. My hearing isn't great in the human voice range, and cell phone sound quality usually sucks, to put it mildly. When I call my parents, we sometimes have trouble communicating (no jokes, please ). And when I talk to some of my friends on the cell, it's extremely frustrating; I listen as best as I can, but often miss part of what they're saying.

In addition to the sound quality problem, there's the...I forget what it's called, but basically the problem is that when you speak on a cell phone, the incoming voice signal is suppressed - and contrariwise, when someone is talking to you, they can't hear you. The old land-line connections weren't like that. And they're still not, but it sticks in my craw to pay to call my parents or friends for a land-line call when the same call would be free on my cell phone.

Google's new voice option solves both problems, at least for now. Until the end of this year, domestic calls are free and international calls are 2¢ per minute. They aren't saying what the cost will be after the end of the year, but in the meantime I can make free calls with my headset that actually sound clearer even than a land line call!

Some of you are going to be hearing from me before too long.

So we signed up for Netflix a few days ago. I hadn't realized that we could stream movies to the Wii and my computer! Pretty cool...