Tech News Vermont

The new Droid ad infers that other touch phones are beauty queens while the Droid is ugly but functional.  The metaphor the commercial uses is a racehorse duct taped to SCUD missile.  I’m not a marketing whiz by any stretch of the imagination but I think Verizon and Droid need to seriously consider connecting their service and phone with a 1950’s era missile that has been used to attack Israel in 1977,  fired by both Iran and Iraq during their war in the 80’s, and used against US troops in the first Gulf War.

Watch carefully and you’ll see that the missile doesn’t appear to be a SCUD at all but, resembles the American Polaris missile.

I suppose Verizon and Droid want to emotionally connect their phone with a Soviet weapon system employed by such wonderful countries as North Korea, Iran, and Vietnam for some particular reason.  Perhaps Droid is going to go for the left over international market where other touch phones are not available. Why would you sell to the American market by comparing your product to an adversarial missile system?

My DSL service has returned and seems to be better than ever.  Fairpoint was very responsive via Twitter and e-mail.  I got several direct messages from @MyFairpoint and an email that kept me in the loop with everything that was going on with my service.

I know that WCAX or the Free Press won’t be interested in my story, because it was a fairly standard service call.  I wonder how many customers Fairpoint helps versus the few horror stories we read about in the media?

I took my Pal Mickey back to the Walt Disney World Resort this autumn to see if he would still function correctly. I bought the 3.0 version of the toy in February 2008 and had a great time wandering the four parks looking for places where Mickey would interact with us. I have seen some of the discussion boards where people say that Pal Mickey is annoying and not helpful, but I found him to be a fun extra.

I read in Disney’s Pal Mickey discontinuation notice and on the discussion boards that Pal Mickeys still work in the parks, so I packed mine up in my carry-on on our 2009 trip to the Animal Kingdom Lodge.

I didn’t find any new places where Pal Mickey worked, he didn’t seem to have anything to say at the AKL, he didn’t contribute to our shopping in Downtown. He did work as before in the Magic Kingdom, Epcot, and Animal Kingdom. We didn’t go to Hollywood Studios this trip and I’ve never taken him to the water parks. I imagine all he would do at Blizzard Beach is worry about getting wet, much in the same way he does near Splash Mountain.

I was surprised to hear him tell new jokes after going into the Magic Kingdom. In February ‘08 he was stuck on the camping themed jokes (Hot Dog and Sleeping Bag) but this trip he had a few new ones. Perhaps we hadn’t heard them before, but that’s unlikely since he’s been hugged and squeezed by me and my three kids thousands of times.

He spent a long time resting after leaving Epcot and I had to reset him (power off, count to 10, power on) a couple of times in the Magic Kingdom. I don’t recall having to reboot Mickey the first time we used him in the parks. Apart from the occasional reset, he worked as well as he did on our first trip. I was quite glad to have him along, telling trivia about the windows on Main Street and complaining that the pirates had called him a bilge rat.

There are no accessories for him in any of the stores anywhere in the Walt Disney World Resort. I asked on Main Street and at World of Disney and no one had anything left. Some cast members commented on him saying things like, “put him away, he’s a collector’s item now“ and ”wow a Pal Mickey, those are so cool!“

I’m not sure if I will put him away or take him with me on the next trip. I’d like to see if he is really learning new jokes or if he’s just holding back things until he gets a signal from some computer at the resort.

I posted on twitter about my DSL woes and I was amazed to receive a direct message from Fairpoint. I
have been in contact with the twitter enabled Fairpoint support folks for a few days now as they try to restore DSL service to the house. Nice job Fairpoint, I’m very happy that you’re trying to reach out to customers via twitter. I hope we can solve the DSL problems once and for all this time.

We use a dry loop DSL line for connectivity at Technewsvt.com’s northern command bunker.  We migrated from a standard voice with DSL line because we really didn’t use our voice service.   The migration was a fiasco thanks to Verizon.  That story is in the archives here.  Fairpoint seemed to be a much more responsive company and fixed many legacy problems that Verizon was either unable or unwilling to fix.

We’ve always had spotty service in poor weather: especially rain.  Nothing makes my DSL reset like a nice rainy day, sometimes 2 or 3 resets a minute.  For normal web and email that’s not terrible, but for gaming and uploading podcasts it’s awful. I’ve complained to both Verizon and Fairpoint and it’s never been really fixed. I’m guessing that there’s something in the line between me and the CO that shorts out when it gets wet, probably a bad seal on a relay box or something.

On Sunday we had a completely DSL failure and the line has been down. Everyone once in a great while I’ll get a signal and the line will come up at half its normal speed and after a few minutes the line goes back down. I think it’s gone up twice during the four day outage.

I called Sunday evening and received the scripted support session. Reset the modem, do you have filters in place, etc, etc. I’m on a dry loop line so there are no phone connected at all. I go from the NID to the DSL modem with a single patch cord, no break outs, no chance that something will interfere with the signal between the modem and the telco. I’ve given up trying to explain this to the support people, they really hate being dragged off script. I had little hope that things would be handled at all when the telephone support person could not give me a trouble ticket number.