Monday, February 25, 2013

First Contact with Owd Bob


The Warp drive was invented
by a Sheep Herder
I’ll be honest.  I am not someone who regularly watches family themed moves however, when I saw that two characters from Star Trek were the starts of Owd Bob it got my attention.  Owd Bob is the story of a grandfather (played by Zefram Cochrane) and his grandson.  The Grandfather is a sheep herder on the Isle of Man.  Basically he is a really angry old man.  After his parents die David, the grandson comes to live with his grandfather.  Throughout the movie David is befriended by his grandfather’s neighbor (played Miles O’Brein) and his daughter.  I am not really sure what the plot of this movie is but there is a dog named Zach and another dog named Owd Bob.  Owd Bob really doesn’t come into this movie much but I guess it is a cool name and caught people’s attention.
Owd Bob is based off a book which I haven’t read, however having not read the book this is a pretty good family movie.  In one way it reminds me of Old Yeller set on the Isle of Man.  In another way it reminds me of Babe although Babe never ate sheep.
Although this movie is not Star Trek, the fact that it has two characters that played is Star Trek was the reason why I watched it.  Even without this feature if you like a movie that is family friendly, about dogs that not only heard sheep but also kill them, has a somewhat confusing plot and you have a Netflix account this movie is worth watching.

Saturday, February 9, 2013

ISP High Speed VS Good Customer Service What is More Important?


Internet Service providers are interesting.  In some areas there will be dozens of providers of high speed internet in others there will be next to none.  Growing up in a rural area we got cable internet when I was about 13 years old.  In those early days we had @home service through AT&T.  After a while @home went away and then ever since we have had Comcast internet service.  The nice thing about Comcast is that generally they have a stable connection and they also are able to give you 20MBPS versus 3MBPS with Century Link in the same rural area.  While most people do not need a connection faster than 3MBPS it is sometimes nice to have especially when one likes to design websites.

In most urban areas all ISP’s have similar connection speeds and various packages available however over time I have learned that customer service makes a drastic difference when choosing an internet service or any other service for that matter.

I have one experience working with customer service for Century Link while hooking up a network for a family friend.  Their service people are quick, reliable and were able to solve the connection problems very quickly.  I don’t know what they did but in a matter of minutes all problems were resolved.  I cannot say from ongoing experience how they are however I have had lots of experience with Comcast.

Comcast is a great dilemma to me, I enjoy the fact that their internet has higher speeds however, they make it easier to discontinue service than it is to get it set up.  After my parents left for Guam it was necessary to get their internet and phone service switched over to our names.  We already had the equipment however, for some reason Comcast would not allow us to just switch the service over, instead it was necessary to call them, go in and visit their store, and even get a different phone number than the one my family had used for the past 14 years.  After visiting the store, it took two days to get service up and running because for some reason I needed to have and FCC pin which I was not able to receive online.  Through this experience I found out two things.

    1. Comcast service over the phone for creating a new connection does little good.  They say they are busy and that if you do such and such they will call you back when are available.  They never called back.
     
2. Comcast IM service works really well however, throughout the process they will feed you advertisements and try and get you to buy services you do not really want.

Despite these setbacks my recent experience has been better than my previous mentioned learning experience.  Moving to Utah, I decided to have one of their service people come and set up our internet service.  Although I had the same experience as before with the IM service trying to sell me stuff I really didn’t want (which made it take about twice as long to get through the process) it was easy set up and worked out quite well.

One the flip side as part of moving we got rid of our phone service.  To do this I called Comcast.  What is interesting is that unlike setting up a new service it is extremely easy to get rid of service.  Not only is it easy but its quick and simple.

Overall I am not a fan of Comcast customer service however; they are reminder to me of why I need to provide good customer service.  The other issue is truly deciding what is important to me meaning a fast internet connection over poor customer service.