Below is the current fail log through today. We didn't use the Cube much the last couple days, partly because it's not working well and partly because I was so insulted by the last tech support person who basically got very angry when I said I'd been told to put the Cube SIM into my phone. He made it very clear that no-one should have told me that and I needed to take the SIM out of my phone immediately (I'd used it to call Three to demonstrate that the SIM was working).
Today the support person asked me to try the same thing, which made me laugh.
Today, I was informed that the reason the replacement Cube wasn't working was because it hadn't been "charged up." This was news to me-- a bit hard to believe, really, but as I said, I'm happy to try whatever they think will work. So we're charging it up (it's been plugged in for about a week, really, but we'll do it OFFICIALLY for three hours as requested by the tech support people). I told the person that if it worked, we'd be happy, but if it failed, I was taking both cubes back to the Three store on Princes Street because I refused to pay to ship them back.
We'll see :) Here's hoping that the Cube works... that would be the simplest solution to the situation.
Although lots has been going on, we've just not been keeping up on blogging at all. But this requires a blog if only to make the information available.
In September, we signed a contract with Three for mobile broadband. We'd had terrible luck with both Virgin and BT (British Telecom) for home internet services. Since arriving in the UK we'd generally been very happy with our mobile phone services from Three, so we thought it made sense to go with a provider we knew and liked.
We received our WebCube from the local store, brought it home, plugged it in, and, as Three says, "Ta-Da" we had internet and wifi. Brilliant.
Until November. In mid-November the Cube was a bit temperamental. It would lose the signal once every other day or so. That was annoying but not really a big deal.
Until December. The failures became more common. By mid-December they were happening once or twice each day. By late December it was multiple times an hour.
I called Three on 29 December and described the problem to a representative who was clearly skeptical. He checked the local masts to make sure there wasn't a service issue (I pointed out that we when the Cube wasn't working we were tethering our 3 iPhone, which seemed to suggest that service wasn't the issue). He then assured me that 99% of these kinds of problems were "the user not the device." He had me hard reset the cube, which I'd done a couple times already (in addition to reslotting the SIM card). As expected, after the reset the device started up properly, but ironically failed while I was still talking to him. He assured me that wouldn't happen so much, but he would have tech support call me anyway.
The next few days (30-31 Dec and 1-2 Jan) were hectic and we didn't use the Cube much, but when we did it worked consistently. But on 3-Jan it began running into problems again, and I began tracking the fails.
I called Three again, and after some haggling, they agreed to send us a new Cube. To their credit, they sent it next-day delivery. Oddly, they told us it would take 3 business days to arrive, so we weren't around to receive it when it was delivered. I then picked it up on the 8th from the local mail depot.
When the postal worker handed it to me, I got nervous. It was rattling in the box inside the delivery bag. Something clearly wasn't right. When I got it home and opened it up, I discovered that the Cube hadn't been packed with any care at all-- pretty much just thrown in the box, and without the right packing materials. The plastic SIM card holder was also in the box, though without the SIM card (which we are supposed to switch from the current Cube). I'll be posting a photo this afternoon of how it was packed.
Suspicious, I videotaped turning it on for the first time. It failed.
I turned it off and on and tried again
I tried reslotting the SIM card
I did a hard reset of the Cube and then restarted it. It failed.
I then re-tested the original WebCube, which fails regularly but usually restarts. It re-started properly
Below (soon) is the log of the original Cube fails over the past week. I'll post again after I talk to Three this afternoon.
29-Dec-12
13:15
Call to Three
29-Dec-12
13:18
Fail
29-Dec-12
13:23
Hard reset
29-Dec-12
13:45
Fail
1-Jan-13
11:19
Fail
1-Jan-13
11:44
Fail
3-Jan-13
11:23
Fail
3-Jan-13
20:15
Connected but unable to receive data
3-Jan-13
20:18
no data
3-Jan-13
20:21
Fail
3-Jan-13
20:40
Fail
3-Jan-13
21:15
Fail
3-Jan-13
21:18
Fail on cube restart
3-Jan-13
21:19
Hard reset
3-Jan-13
21:28
Fail
3-Jan-13
22:12
Fail
3-Jan-13
22:30
Fail
4-Jan-13
13:04
Fail
4-Jan-13
13:14
Fail
4-Jan-13
13:30
Fail
4-Jan-13
13:33
Fail on cube restart
4-Jan-13
13:42
Fail
4-Jan-13
13:43
Fail on cube restart
4-Jan-13
13:44
Fail on cube restart
4-Jan-13
13:45
Fail on cube restart
4-Jan-13
13:57
Fail
4-Jan-13
14:13
Fail
4-Jan-13
18:35
Fail
5-Jan-13
16:11
Fail
5-Jan-13
16:45
Fail
5-Jan-13
16:53
Fail
5-Jan-13
16:54
Hard reset
5-Jan-13
16:55
Fail on cube restart
5-Jan-13
16:56
Signal but no wifi, unable to turn it off, had to unplug mains
5-Jan-13
17:40
Fail
5-Jan-13
19:32
Fail
5-Jan-13
19:47
Fail
6-Jan-13
9:53
Fail
6-Jan-13
10:04
Fail
6-Jan-13
10:28
Fail
6-Jan-13
11:01
Fail
6-Jan-13
12:30
Internet only accessible after logging in to webcube manager
6-Jan-13
13:08
Fail
8-Jan-13
8:42
Fail
8-Jan-13
8:53
Fail
8-Jan-13
9:57
Fail
8-Jan-13
20:07
Fail
9-Jan-13
10:56
Fail
9-Jan-13
11:30
Fail
10-Jan-13
9:20
Fail
Thursday, 18 October 2012
Adam's blog
Pretty much nothing happened. Kids didn't wake up until 10am for some reason, and then they calmly and cheerfully cleaned their rooms, brushed their teeth, made breakfast for me, vacuumed the flat and cleaned the toilets. I let Taran use the computer for a while, which he seemed pretty excited about, but every time I checked on him it looked like he was just browsing on Amazon. I took all the rubbish out and the flat smelled a bit like smoke when I got back, but the kids said they just burned some toast. Didn't we use to have two sofas? It was so nice outside we walked through Stockbridge, and I took Kenna to a couple charity shops while Taran picked up a couple things at Waitrose. There seemed to be a lot of activity around the front door when we met him there, and he smelled terrible, but he said they had a problem with the refrigerators and some of the meat had gone bad. He and Kenna spent a ton of time looking at the designs in the window of the one tattoo parlor in Stockbridge, so I figured it was fine to run into the wine shop for a minute. We just threw together pasta and stuff for dinner, and the only weird thing was that both kids said they wanted to stand up while they ate. Whatever. At least they were way better behaved than yesterday. This parenting thing isn't so hard after all. Where ARE those sirens coming from? I swear it's like they've been following us around all day. Hold on, there's someone knocking at the door.
kenna's blog
Today was absolutely crazy!
After breakfast Daddy told us to hit ourselves on the head until lunch time!
After lunch Daddy was varry silly.He (by himself) put a glass of water
on his head!
taran's blog
todays morning was terrific!! i got £200 & bought a 3ds & a plasma t.v. . daddy said not to but i found mommy's credit card number(really! its 2736110048637384).and no matter what the police said,i told them i had nothing to do with the fire. after lunch we went to watrose and there was a special deal that involved a pick at the lottery and i won.of corse, at the worst possible moment i was registered of being 17 instead of 18(i wonder why they didn't know that i am 9).it is so unfair that i am not allowed to the store again and besides, i didn't drink all of the wisky. and i only threw up on three aisles, not four. what made things worse was that i got into the Guiness world record of running fast to the toilet after a massive outburst from my bum.i like when mommy goes on vacation. and daddy says it will all blow over as long as mommy doesn't find out where the tattoo is.
It's fun with Daddy but without Mommy it's not vary fun.
But Daddy is mean. I am going to tell you some thing's Daddy is mean about him.
1.Tickle me until I pee!
2.Made me eat snail's for breakfast \ worm's for diner!
Taran's blog
no devices running.
scavenging for food.
don't know how mom is able.
no water.
barley surviving.
sleeping all in same room.
WE NEED MOMMY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Adam's blog
The children are like rabid wild animals. How does Lynn put up with them while I'm gone? Taran ate his food off the floor. Kenna refused all the nice food I offered her and chewed on the table. I can't figure out how the washer/dryer works-- we'll have to survive without clean clothes. The phones are running out of charge and we can't find the charger. Had to sponge bathe the children with hot water from the tea kettle because we can't figure out how to get the boiler to turn on. Likely to be very cold, we'll all have to sleep huddled up in the same bed. Rained incessantly, couldn't get out for more food. Not even sure where the money is to buy food anyway. Probably shouldn't have let the kids sword fight with real swords. Who knew children had so much blood in them? Took hours to get the stains out, and that was even with the kids' help. Injuries don't look that permanent. I'm sure they'll be fine, right?
Almost 20 years ago, I spent a year as the IS manager for the strategy consulting firm I worked for. We had 4 North American offices, as well as a virtual Bay Area office. Two of our offices were on PCs, two offices ran Apples, and we had to have duplicate networks (Ether/Appletalk), duplicate printers, and so on. Just to make things interesting, we were also a Beta site for Lotus Notes, and we had to be able to connect to our European and Asian offices, which we did via dial-up modem at midnight, transferring emails in batches. Needless to say, it was a significant learning experience for someone with nor formal training in IS/IT. I'm not saying it didn't have it's moments, but on the whole, it wasn't exactly fun.
So I feel like I do have some sense of the challenges associated with small, much less large-scale IT infrastructure management. And it is not my intent to criticize the University's IT/IS staff, especially at the Business School, who have been responsive and helpful since the day I arrived. Paul, Matt, Clarke, and Martin, in particular, have handled all sorts of issues technically not covered by their day-job expectations (like the time I effectively crashed the School's network with DropBox).
But the University expects/requires me to utilize certain tools as part of my teaching process. These primarily include WebCT and Euclid. While these systems have their strengths, personally I have not found them easy to use or consistently reliable. Euclid, for example, has been down the entire weekend, which prevents me from accessing any information about student enrollment in my courses.
While WebCT has been available this weekend, I cannot run it either on my home computer (iMac) or my desktop PC at work without a consistent stream of messages from my web browser (Chrome/Firefox) explaining that components of the site are not secure, or are presenting expired signatures, and similar sorts of warnings. Given the amount of malware on the internet, it's not exactly confidence-inspiring.
Lynn and I just watched Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2. And, at the very end, as we see Harry, Hermione and Ron on Platform 9 3/4 at Kings Cross, as their children depart on the Hogwarts Express, Lynn says: "Gosh, they all look so tired."
And I said, "That's because they have children. Fighting the master of evil is one thing, but at least you get to sleep at night."
