Noise

Occasional and random personal reflections by Doug Kaye.

Goodbye DSL. Hello Cable! Over the past few years I've had four DLS connections here in my home office. Today I switched to AT&T @Home, and it's already a major improvement. I started about 8 years ago with ISDN. I owned a small ISP, so I setup a dial-on-demand ISDN router here and one at the office, and they did the near-instantaneous dial-on-demand thing. But I still couldn't poll for email every minute (there were time-based charges), and it was a max of 128kbps. I sold the ISP but cut a deal with the new owners to keep me running. (Nacio still has my web server and email account.) The started offering DSL, so I upgraded to IDSL. That's essentially a wired-up ISDN connection at 144kbps (symmetrical). It used the same router at my end and worked well. But still just 144kbps. And expensive: about $100/month. Then I started down the dark PacBell path. The details would go on for many pages, but suffice it to say I was only able to get about 290kbps download and 100kbps up. And it was very flaky. After a few months, PacBell gave up and offered to just give me back all the money I'd spent. I took it. Next Earthlink ADSL. Lots of promises, but at the end of the day, it was just the same pair of copper wires that PacBell tried to keep working, with the same results. Earhlink's service and support was, however, somewhat superior to PacBell's. Then Pac Bell called and promised they had a nearby Remote Termnal (RT) that would solve the problems. Only 6,000' away! Well, after a few more weeks of hassling, it turned out to be a virtual RT. I was still 21,000' from from the central office (CO). I gave up and called the cable company. That was less about a week ago. The installer showed up today. Intelligent, polite and on time. Within two hours, the modem was live. A few hours later, I was back on line. What took one week to do on cable, was vastly more satisfactory than eight months of suffering with PacBell. 1.4mbps download and 100kbps up. I love it. And since I provided my own modem, it's only $35.95 per month. Posted Tuesday, August 21, 2001 10:33:36 PM

Recording the Producers. While in New York City in June we had a chance to see Mel Brooks' The Producers on Broadway. It was as good as advertised. Last night we watched Recording The Producers: A Musical Romp With Mel Brooks on the Great Performances series on PBS. It's a 90-minute behind-the-scenes view of the recording of the Original Broadway Cast CD, and the show was nearly as entertaining as the musical itself. Nathan Lane is always terrific, but the standout on this show was Gary Beach who plays Roger de Bris, the director who's also a last-minute replacement for Adolf Hitler in the play-in-play musical, Springtime for Hitler and Germany. Beach is awesome, and the whole show is worth recording on your TiVo. The PBS show was a Maysles-Froemke production. I remember working with Albert and David Maysles (the makers of the documentary Gimme Shelter, and many others) when I was a sound engineer and, later, Director of Computer Services at DuArt Film Labs in the mid-1970s. A previous lifetime. Posted Tuesday, August 21, 2001 1:03:16 AM

August 2001
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