Where I live, the company is Cablevision and I recently switched from AT&T to Cablevision’s promotional Triple Play offer of $99 plus taxes, fees and other charges for internet, telephone and television.

The television part of this completely sucks! Finding a decent show to watch is damn near impossible. There is a super-long list in the guide, which takes several clicks of the remote to access, passing a page with advertisements on it. Instead of highlighting or filtering the channels that have access to, I see all the channels on cable, 9 times out of 10 I select a channel that I don’t receive and I’m left scrolling from 1-700 or just settling on anything to watch other than the guide.

The quality of the TV is absolutely atrocious. I get digital distortion on the best of the HD channels. Some shows on popular channels can’t even be viewed clearly. My Optimum Online service is like watching small mpegs on a giant screen TV. Streaming Netflix is superior to my television service.

Why so many advertisements for a pay service? There are ads on the TV guide, ads on all the shows…and…. on to the internet service:

The reason I’m writing this right now is because of the search.domainnotfound.optimum.net redirect. This is an underhanded low-life redirect to optimum’s affiliate relationships, forcing anyone who leaves the TLD off when typing in a domain name to suffer an unwanted page of affiliate links, which btw can be unrelated to the domain name entered.

At least with AT&T’s DSL if I type in “google” it goes to “http://google.com” and not to “http://search.domainnotfound.optimum.net/cablevassistsearch_keyword/ws/results/Dns/google/…”

The only problem with the phone is that instead of being a separate cable to the pole outside my house, my telephone signal travels on the shared coax. Now my phone is not only dependent on the cable company fixing their equipment when a storm comes knocking down trees but also the internet and cable modem. That’s a lot of dependence on new technology that is proving to be full of issues.

I’m going to drop the TV service because I can’t stand paying for so many advertisements when the quality of picture is so poor with distortion.

I read a few posts which seemed unrelated except to mention the peculiarities with 1&1’s system.

My solution: try, try again. …which worked.

Updating DNS settings can be stressful. As soon as my domain resolves to the new server I breathe a huge sigh of relief. I figure the problem happened because this week’s updates were important to me.

This morning I had only one domain left to update, so I tried again, 1&1 served an error message, I tried again, error, tried again and it worked – all within less than a minute. [other attempts didn't work for hours but "try, try again" worked for each, eventually.]

I’ve used 1&1 webhosting for many years now and have quite a load of domains with them. Granted they have their own backend software which is unusual relative to a plesk or cpanel interface but all in all I haven’t experienced too many delays, problems or lack of response.

In 2008, I moved my hosting accounts from 1&1 to Hostgator.com for added features at the same cost. Hostgator allows wildcard DNS for WordpressMu sites.

I’m really impressed with myself for successfully moving all my sites over the past weekend. The move included (2) Drupal sites, (2) stand-alone Wordpress sites and one huge multi-site WordpressMU install.

Everything was moved to a new server and restored to new databases. Several of the DNS changes took overnight to complete, keeping me anxious all the while.

I’ve got two ways to distinguish which server I’m resolving to. The first takes some forethought and involves creating a post before the db back-up called “New Site”. After I back up the database, I delete the post from the old site.

The other method is to simply stick an index.html in the new root which will over-ride the index.php. As soon as I can see the index.html, I delete it.

What a joy. …and still I feel like I don’t know nothin’

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