09/28/04
It has been 3 weeks since I got a short notice from Bill Zeller, in which he promised to get back to me. So far, he didn't, so I sent him another email today.
There haven't been any channel freezes since late last week, so they may have fixed or exchanged the receivers, as Kevin Ansel mentioned in his email.
We'll see how stable it is going to be.
Update (9/30): We got more freezes. So that's not resolved yet.
Anyway, the email to Bill Zeller:
09/19/04
I am organizing the listings of cable outages by month now, with the latest ones listed first.
This post has the list for September. The list for August is here.
Here the list for September so far:
- 2004-09-30 to 2004-10-01
Channels frozen: NBC, Weather Channel, Research TV - 2004-09-30
Channels frozen: MTV2, TLC
09/15/04
I got an email today from Kevin Ansel, where he talks about the problems with the channel freezes and what is done to overcome that: exchanging the receivers with a new model.
Here it is:
09/13/04
I talked to Ted Roberge of Resident Networking (ResNet) today and he was surprised that they are listed as contact point for cable problems. They don't have any expertise with or knowledge about the cable hardware.
He said he is going to talk with the main cable guy, Kevin Ansel, to change the webpage back to point to the housing offices as contact points.
So I will continue to call the housing office (for PV, 824-8918.)
Ted Roberge also mentioned a little tidbit that I found very interesting: he said that housing is going to switch to DirecTV.
As far as I'm concerned, that is just a rumor at this point, so I still like to get confirmation of that from Kevin Ansel or Bill Zeller. But, if that's true, then we should push them to solicit input from the residents (and of course act on that and not just ignore it...)
It seems that UCI Housing tries to avoid dealing with irate residents complaining about Cable outages.
The problem reporting page now refers to Resident Networking for reporting problems.
This means that the service hours got worse. Instead of 8am to 5pm, Resnet is available from 10am to 6pm. And of course, like housing, they are not available on weekends.
Furthermore, my experience with Resnet shows that they are not overly good managing the Internet connectivity. For example, they changed the subnet for Palo Verde without informing people, which resulted in me losing data (but that's probably a topic for yet another blog...)
Anyway, I have left a voice mail with them complaining about the current channel freezes (CBS, GSN, CourtTV, see here.)
