The Gates’ Gate

Lisa and I went to see The Gates twice today. First with Frisket in the morning, and again with Oliver Kamm and Corey this afternoon.

It’s a neat installation and I want to go back again later this week for another, less crowded (I hope) view.

I've posted my pictures at flickr: http://flickr.com/photos/epc/tags/thegates.

No comment

Unfortunately, due to bozos running comment spam and trackback spam tools, I've had to turn off comments and trackbacks entirely here until I have the time to return fire at the losers running these things.

The Gates of Somerville

Waiting for Time Warner Cable

For several weeks we've had no service whatsoever on our HDTV tuner from Time Warner Cable of New York City. I first noticed it, well, lessee...mid-January. I called TWC and spent five minutes wading through voicemail menus only to be put on interminable hold.

TWC does not track (apparently) if you have called and hung up.

Days passed and we made do with the basic cable service. I moved the box to our kitchen nook were we watch TV at most an hour a day, so having basic cable there wasn't a huge loss. I did the standard TWC diagnostics: unplug the box, wait 30 seconds, and plug back in; to no avail.

As part of TWC's "recent update" to their voicemail, you must e-nun-ci-ate each answer because you can no longer simply press the keypad. Twice I ended up in the Spanish menu, which offers no way to switch back to English. My Spanish being lousy I'd again hang up.

Eventually I reached someone at TWC who informed me that there was a known problem with HDTV service and they were working on it. I asked Is there an ETA for restoration and was informed that there wasn't.

So, another week passed. Spending ten-fifteen minutes wading through voice prompts and then being placed on hold do not rank as the best ways of wasting my time, I have many others. But eventually the box or service or something just died entirely. We now receive "PLEASE CALL YOUR OPERATOR" on the LED screen, and "YOUR DIGITAL CABLE SERVICE HAS BEEN TERMINATED PLEASE CALL YOUR OPERATOR" on the screen when I turn on the TV. So, no basic cable even. Finally last week I called again (this would be the fourth time actually, there's a couple I'm not bothering to write about) and they (again) walked me through disconnecting the box, reconnecting the box, and waiting for the reset signal to be sent from TWCland.

Again no change. So they (finally) offered to send out a service technician on Saturday morning. We had plans so I demurred and requested an appointment next week (that is, this week as I write) and got an appointment scheduled for today, the 16^th of February 2005.

Apparently TWC is quite concerned about missed appointments, and determined to verify that someone is actually home because their automated service has now called three times to verify that someone will be home, wasting time, between noon and 4:00 PM. Once last night, and now twice in 30 minutes. I'm betting, just betting, that the service will call again because it doesn't cost TWC anything except one annoyed customer.

Update @ 1:50 EST 2/16/05

So...I hear a thud outside and look out to see a TWC van pulled up on the sidewalk in front of the house. Given the flaky nature of our doorbell, I go ahead downstairs to let the guy in. However, he goes across to 111 instead. I pick up the mail and return upstairs, figuring surely, surely TWC will send the guy across the street on completion of the 111 job.

No, again I am mistaken.

Instead I hear another thud (the van door closing) and the TWC van drives off. At this point I'm just going to cancel the service if they don't return today, another wasted four hours.

PHP Oddity

Discovered a little oddity with PHP and Firefox. In my root .htaccess file I have:

php_flag zlib.output_compression On
php_value zlib.output_compression_level 9

This causes all PHP files to be compressed, if the user agent accepts compression.

My error page is also a PHP script, mostly to trap the referring URL and include that in the page. Entirely by accident tonight I discovered that the error page was being returned as complete gibberish to Firefox. My guess is that Firefox was receiving the error page as a compressed page, but was not uncompressing it.

A little investigation with the Live HTTP Headers extension revealed that the page was being served with Transfer-encoding: chunked instead of Content-encoding: gzip. I don't know where to look to debug further, but did manage to override the behaviour on the server side by adding:

php_flag zlib.output_compression Off

to the .htaccess for the directory containing my error pages.