08/25/04
As I mentioned before, I had a meeting scheduled with Bill Zeller, the assistant vice chancellor of student housing, for August 16.
The Housing IT manager, Kevin Ansel, joined into that meeting.
I addressed a couple of issues:
Channel freezes
They said that we have to call the housing office if there are problems, and the housing office will then forward the complaint to Mr. Ansel.
This obviously means that there is no 24/7 service. For outages over weekends or after 5pm, nothing is going to happen until the next business day.
Lack of a channel lineup
This is a scan of the short and only printed cable switchover announcement that we got, as mentioned earlier.
We also got personalized emails. How nice of them to personalize it; they obviously have learned how to use the merge function of Eudora 
.
The email consisted of a copy of the FAQ on the CampusTelevideo website, and the station listing (of course without actual channel numbers.)
The switchover actually happened on August 10.
The email:
08/24/04
Most of the problems I have seen so far were channel "freezes": the channel shows a static picture.
These are the outages for August 2004 that I have noticed since the switchover:
Since the meeting with the Palo Verde Housing director, Gerald Parham (see the history) did not provide any satisfactory result, I sent a letter to Bill Zeller, Assistant Vice Chancellor for Housing.
The UCI Housing website does not show any postal office address, nor does it list any names of the housing management personnel. A couple of searches on the UCI website and the UCI Phone Directory provided me with the housing address:
University of California, Irvine
500 Housing Administrative Services
Irvine, CA 92697-3250
This is the letter I sent:
I, like a sizeable number of people living in UCI's on-campus Palo Verde housing complex, had for several years subscribed to cable TV service offered by Cox Cable.
Since early 2004, we heard through "the grapevine" that UCI planned to manage cable TV service themselves.
Interestingly enough, the Palo Verde Housing administration did not find it necessary to make an official announcement until shortly before the switchover... more on that later.
Several people who had heard about the change inquired with the Palo Verde Housing office. We were assured that the cable TV provider would remain Cox, and the Basic Extended Cox Cable service would be provided to the residents free of charge. We would be able to purchase additional Cox services, e.g., HBO, pay-per-view or digital cable.
Then, in mid-July, came the shocker: the Palo Verde Housing newsletter contained a short notice announcing that the switchover would happen at the beginning of August and that Cox Cable "will no longer be the service provider."
They did not provide a channel lineup, they did not give any indication who the provider was going to be.
Aside from the short notice, no other communication.
Soon after, three people, me included, met with Gerald Parham, the Palo Verde Housing director, to find out what's going on.
The result of that meeting was rather dismal:
- It is not possible to keep Cox as provider in addition to their new one (which, btw, turned out to be a reseller of Dish Network, called CampusTelevideo.)
- It is not allowed to have our own satellite dishes installed, unless the dish is inside the apartment pointing out a window or on a patio or balcony
- Satellite dishes in "common areas", on the roof or mounted on outside walls are not allowed
- Since a dish would have to point south/southwest towards the satellite, and most apartments do not have windows in that direction, most people would not be able to install a dish
- There will be a crackdown on people who installed satellite dishes in violation of the Palo Verde dish policy
- The only remotely positive part of this meeting: we received a preliminary station listing (no assignment of stations to channel numbers, though)
- And the always repeated mantra: "But it is free!"
This whole disaster reminds me of procedures common in socialist countries.
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