I won’t say it, because saying it is the equivalent of walking up to a pissed-off hungry lion, whipping out the private part of your choice, and smacking him across the face with it. So I’ll couch it like this:
Today, Comcast doesn’t suck as much.
Now, I fully realize this can (and probably will) change in the upcoming days. But right now, for once, I’m reasonably gruntled by my Internet provider. (I’m still pissed off over that whole cable thing, though.)
See, today is the day of The Big Switchover, where the absorption of AT&T Broadband by Comcast finally kicked in for the cable modem users, and all of our accounts and associated settings switched over to the Comcast network. And Comcast has been prepping us, harassing users to download this little ticking time bomb that will make the necessary changes in settings for people who phear the Accounts dialogue in Outlook Express, and keeping the information away from those who won’t until today.
Well, this morning, I got the four or five bits of information I needed, reconfigured two of my three computers, and told my DNS provider where to redirect this web site to. And so far, so good. As you can see, the site is up, I’m getting my mail, the forwarding is working well on the old address (and will do so through 2004, I’m told, which is plenty of time to tell all and sundry what my new address is), I can still remote access my home machine from work, and I still have unlimited news service. (I was particularly worried about that last part, but it looks like Comcast is playing it smart and leveraging the assets they got from AT&T. Impressive.) Not bad at all.
And The Four Of You who read this site regularly might notice another little nicety: the ad banners that stunk up the weblog pages are gone! Yep, one of the benefits of this switch is that I can FINALLY publish the weblog directly to the site instead of using Blogger’s hosting service. (Don’t get me wrong, it’s a great free service and I’m glad they provide it, but when you get web space from your ISP and you’re forced to use something ad-supported ANYHOW ‘cuz someone at the ISP has an irrational hard-on for security, it bugs.) Practical benefit for me: everything in one place, no having to rely on multiple servers. Practical benefit for The Four Of You: the page should load MUCH faster, all of the time.
So while I’m not planning to organize a parade or write a long letter to the Pope, I gotta give ’em props for not making this the horrible pain in the ass they could have.
If they get the cable situation hammered out, I might post that they suck even LESS….