The Trial, by Franz Komkast

The speed test from when I was sitting in the living room. We pay for 50mbps.

I'm losing my mind with Comcast.

At our old dump, we had Comcast XFINITY for awhile. It was under a roommate's account (the thief one) and in August I put one in my name. We kept the router in the middle of the house where the old one had been and had no problems.

After I had a couple of months under my belt at my then new job, we bought a new television - a "smart" TV, as they call them. Because we wanted the router near the television so we could use it to its full potential, we moved the router into our room in the front of the house. This was in October or November. Still no problems.

In December, this new chick moved in, a spoiled brat who had never lived apart from her parents in her 22 years. She hogged all the bandwidth, and the internet was always overloaded. She didn't have a television but watched streaming video all day long. Being an intern, she only worked a few days a week (she had neglected to tell us that her "job" was a low paying internship.) She used A LOT of data, so much so that if it were still legal to cap data, we would have been cut off. As it were, we believe we were throttled anyway. Within a month of her living there, the internet slowed to a crawl. Then it stopped loading pages at all. Throttling is not legal. (Thank god that was passed before you idiots elected an all Republican Congress.)

If you've ever had to call Comcast for a problem, you know it is hell. They always, always, always blame you for the problem. They tell you obvious things like "power up your modem" or "restart your computer." Then they try to sell you an upgrade. Every. Single. Time. Oh, and that's AFTER you've waited a half hour or so to talk to a person. Often you are transferred from one department to another where you have to tell your problems all over again. We had a technician over once who was in and out of there claiming nothing was wrong when we couldn't load a single web page. It just happened to work at the moment the technician was there. Maybe they turned off the throttle so they could say nothing was wrong. We were charged $40 for the visit though nothing was fixed. We had no internet in February, though we still were charged full price. In March I finally got fed up and sought the higher ups. (I learned that from writing to a PNC board member when I could not resolve a banking problem with the customer "service" people and when I could not resolve a problem with the MLB.TV people. Fortunately, I know how to write for an audience. Many people don't have that skill.)

It was right before the start of the baseball season, and I was concerned I wasn't going to be able to watch the Reds, so I dug through the depths of those tubes we call the interwebs and came up with an email address for an executive office. I sent the email about 5pm on a Friday and went out for some dinner.

I'm not kidding you, the executive called me within a half hour. By that time, I was in a noisy restaurant and couldn't take the call, but he left me an email address so I had an email exchange and set up a time to call him the next day. During that phone call he did some tests and could see that there was definitely some sort of problem with our connection, and he set up a service call the next day. They came, two of them did, and they were there for four hours. They replaced everything - the cables, the splitters, the router - but as it neared 5pm, they were still confused about the reason for the varying speeds. Sometimes it would come in at 20mbps (which is what we were paying for at the time). Other times it'd come in at ten or fewer. I had explained that I had gotten as low as two on a speedtest - anything lower wouldn't even load the speedtest page.

But, as with everything Comcast, when the bewitching hour of 5pm hit, they were out of there.

The problem seemed to be resolved that night. We had had rare nights when the connection actually was fast enough to use, and on this night I was able to watch a baseball game for the first time all spring. I thought it'd be ready for Opening Day.

I went to watch Opening Day at the Bottom Line, a bar known to be a Bengals bar where Reds fans sometimes get together to watch big games. I didn't know the internet had returned to whatever memory hole it had come from. We were going to Spain on the 10th, however, so I didn't do anything. (The whole reason I started this post tonight was to continue on with my Spain pics, but Comcast interrupted those plans.) Then, when we got back we found out our landlord was, well, that's another story, so we needed to move and get the hell away from there. I wasn't going to bother with fixing the internet since we'd be moving asap.

Moving. Hooray! We've moved to a wonderful place. We love it so far, aside from Chris getting attacked by teenaged girls at the Metro station. (That's another story, too.) We thought also, hooray, we'll get to have internet again! But no. We had to call Comcast because although the television worked, we couldn't get any webpages to load. (I know what you're thinking - must be my computer, right? No. First, this computer works on any other wifi network anywhere we go. Second, it didn't work for either of our phones or our tablet.) It said we were connected - it always said we were connected - but it was useless.

I was livid. I made Chris call, as I didn't want to deal with any of it, knowing what a customer "service" call is like. But he doesn't understand technology. He kept saying we didn't have a signal. We had five bars. He doesn't understand the difference between a wifi signal and internet connectivity, among other things. In the end, I had to talk to the guy, and I wasn't nice. He blamed us. He said it was the computer's fault. He said we probably wired things incorrectly. He refused to listen to the fact that we had four devices that wouldn't connect. He was reading from a customer service manual, and any deviation from that manual he couldn't handle. He was also rude. I handed the phone back to Chris while the guy was in mid-sentence so I didn't say anything nasty.

Finally Chris was transferred to another department, and at least you could tell that guy was doing something on his end. He was trying different frequencies and the connection was going on and off. Some worked better than others. None worked very well. I was sitting in the living room with the laptop at the time. In the end, we had to schedule a service call.

That night, I had the laptop in the dining room, two feet above the router. I watched the Reds game. Most of it, anyway. There was some serious buffering at key moments, but at least I was getting it. I thought it was working. Chris called Comcast again to cancel our appointment for the next morning, because we knew it would be of no use to have them look at it.

They came anyway.

How on earth they can't coordinate their phone people with their service people is beyond me. There are hundreds of software programs that could do it at minimal costs. They really just don't care, I guess.

Chris didn't answer the door for them, so they left a message on my voicemail, but I wasn't going to call back. I thought the problem was over but last night I was trying to post a recipe of a concoction I made (pomegranate brats) and it wouldn't post. So I had Chris call again today and upgrade the speed to 50mbps. (Yeah, it's a racket they have going on there. You don't really need much more than 20 for your day to day internet activities.)

So tonight, I sat down to post more Spain photos thinking I had 50mbps and couldn't load them. Too slow. Speed test gave 6mbps. I was in the living room, a whole 13 feet away from the router. I know because I got out the tape measure. Yeah, it's an old place and the walls are plaster. But we have an open archway! See?

I guess you can't see the archway in that pic. Here:

Two feet further than I was sitting tonight.

I put the router in the dining area (which we are making into a sports bar) because it is in the middle of the house and theoretically could reach both the bedroom and the living room without any issues. Kitchen, too, for those times when the Reds are on and I'm cooking.

But the router is too weak to give a decent connection from 13 feet away. Seriously, WTF. Now, I know that the routers they give you are cheapass POSes, but is 13 feet too much to ask for? To sit in my living room with a laptop on my...lap?

Eventually I'll probably do most of my computering at the bar, as I have it set up to double as a desk area (you just have to see it, but it's not done yet so no pics for now) but we don't have barstools and probably won't for a month. I could probably move the router into the living room but why should I have to do that?

I did a speedtest back here and am getting more than 50. 13 feet from a comfortable seat.

And there are people who think that the government should not regulate the internet. Why? So we can let these crooks get away with even more than they already do??? You're just trading one government for another, only your corporate rulers don't have the checks and balances that the feds do.

Support net neutrality. Support consumer rights. And let's stop accepting these duopolies that are the telecoms industry.

Pomegranate brats. Really.

The gas isn't turned on in our new place yet so the only thing we can cook with is the crock pot, which is great except when you get home at 7pm and you have to wait until at least 9pm to eat your dinner. I didn't think about it until too late last night so I couldn't prepare it then.

Still, it's a great way to cook, even if you are eating at Spanish dinner times. What I cooked tonight cost me $15 total and was enough for three people. I cooked brats, sliced in one inch pieces, in pomegranate molasses and topped it with a yogurt sauce. It was delicious.

First I cut up the brats - a whole pack of five - and put them into the crock pot. I used 1/4th of a cup of pomegranate molasses, 1/4th of a cup of olive oil, and two teaspoons each of lemon juice and apple cider vinegar. Then I threw in a teaspoon of grains of paradise, which is a kind of pepper that has a flavor similar to cardamom, a tablespoon of sumac (maybe more), a teaspoon of sage, and a teaspoon of dried pomegranate seeds, which taste like tart nuts.

After that I cut up a whole small onion, a whole large red pepper, and two cloves of garlic and threw them in the crock pot, putting on the lid and cooking on high for two hours. Oh, and I almost forgot a key ingredient - a cup of cantaloupe chunks. Yes, cantaloupe. It. Was. Awesome.

In the meantime, I combined a single serving sized container of Greek yogurt, one fourth of a small cucumber cut into very tiny pieces, a lot of sumac, a lot of black pepper, a drizzle of olive oil, and a little garlic salt, mixing them well and putting them in the fridge until it was time to serve.

I served it on tortilla but perhaps I should have used thin pita bread. Still, it was awesome.

Now I can't actually post this because COMCAST SUCKS and I can't load any pages even though we supposedly upgraded to 50 mbps speed when we used to have 20. Doesn't matter, I'm getting 6, just like at the old place when I paid for 20. Although sometimes that was 2. In case you didn't realize, 6 is not enough to load webpages.

WHAT ARE WE PAYING FOR, YOU CRIMINALS?

And all you anti-net neutrality idiots just want to hand total control over to these assholes? Let them screw us even more than they already do?

Well, at least dinner was good.

And then came the Christians

We moved on from the Nasrid palaces to the part of Alhambra established by Christians after Ferdinand and Isabella conquered Granada in 1492. Normally I would love this kind of stuff but after seeing the Moorish palaces, these sites were rather bland. The views of Granada, however, were stunning.

The ceiling of a room Charles V redesigned for his wife. They never lived there.

Washington Irving wrote a book called Alhambra that I have to read now. He lived there in 1829.

View of Granada

You can see what this part of the palace looked like before Charles V redecorated.

Then the sun came out. I asked Guillermo if I could retake all my photos. I was joking. Sort of.

Old paintings they discovered behind a wall.

A tour of a nearby monastery was included with our ticket, so we set off from Alhambra with Guillermo and a few others from the tour group. Pics were not allowed within the monastery, which was actually full of nuns, not monks. They let tours come through on Wednesdays, but they don't let tourists see them, so while the place felt empty, we knew there were nuns hiding behind the walls. I think Guillermo said there were 22 living there, mostly from South America, whereas in the past they had more than 100.

More to come...

Lapis Lazuli

The Nasrid palaces. That's what you come to see. The Spanish have done a fantastic job of preserving these things, which is why tickets are so limited. The palaces are pristine, considering they're 800 years old, had to deal with reconquista Christians inhabiting and altering them, and saw the French destroying things in the nineteenth century.

Again we see water as the theme here. This pool makes the place look much bigger than it is.

The artworks is fantastic.

Lapis lazuli, a gem more valuable than gold and found mainly in the mountains of Afghanistan, was ground up and used to paint the palace. The blue color is stunning. Below you can see remnants of the blue paint on artwork made to represent stalactites, as legend says that the Quran was revealed to Mohammed in a cave.

The inside of the palace was incredible. I can't even imagine what it looked like before the paint faded. It was stunning as it was.  This was the ambassadors hall, where the sultan received visitors. On the walls you can see the Arabic phrase meaning "the only victor is God" and various other Quranic slogans.

The ceiling was meant to represent the seven levels of Heaven in Islam. You can see the star shapes below.

It was time to go to the Courtyard of the Lions, named for the fountain of lions. This is particularly interesting because it is a depiction of living creatures, normally forbidden in Islam. They justified the fountain by saying that these are "imperfect" depictions created by man and not God, therefore not suitable for worship. One theory says that the craftsmen who created the fountain were Jewish; another claims that they were Christian. Guillermo thinks that neither of these are true; that in fact, they were Muslim craftsmen judging from the style. Regardless, it is an interesting fountain.

The Palace of the Lions was the private residence of the royals. It is also where the harem was located. It was as impressive as the other palace.

Again with the stalactites

This was...wow

The star shape - symbolizing Heaven

The views were spectacular, too

One of the few places where the original stained glass remains

Up next, the Christians return...