Archive for the 'Website' Category

So I decided that I have enough photos and enough trouble managing them using my existing gallery feature on the website that I’ve bought myself a pro flickr account and enabled some pretty awesome flickr integration with the blog.

It’s now SUPER easy to upload photos and manage them using flickr and it should be much easier as a visitor to view photos and flip through album and photos.

To check out the new photo gallery which is pulling photos from Flickr, go here: http://www.gochnauer.org/photos

In the mean time, I’ve added 3 new albums: The Gochnauer Christmas, Laura Splinter and Tim Akers wedding, and New Years 2007 photos. Check them out at the URL above.

So some of you may have noticed that the site was offline all day Friday and Saturday.. Well our Internet connection has been EXTREMELY flaky lately which has been partly due to the fact there is all this construction next door. The construction works cut our cable line a few months back so there is this temporary cable strung along the street to feed our house. Anyway, the biggest problem with Comcast is that they have the WORST internal communications of any company I have ever dealt with. I have been having ongoing problems with our cable modem for probably 6 months now (outside of this cut line). Each time it’s a different issue: line balancing, bad cable modem, bad cables in street, line being cut, accounting confusions, etc. I think I’ve experienced all the problems possible. Well, the issue with Comcast is that every time you call to follow through on a problem, it is like you are calling for the first time, even if you have a case number. Not only that, but nothing will ever be resolved unless you keep calling them to constantly check on the status. They have no clue about the case history so you have to sit and explain it every time. The next big problem is that whatever I tell the Comcast technical support guys on the tech hotline number is COMPLETELY disregarded. I know what the problem is, I describe it in detail and tell them exactly what kind of tech guy to send (they have 4-5 different kinds). Anyway, it never fails that they send the WRONG one every time. When the tech guy gets there, I ask him if he can look at a certain aspect of the line and he would answer with “no. I’m not that type of tech guy”. So they I show him the issue, and he is like: “yup, you’ll need so and so. I’ll have to call him. Why did you tell Comcast that you needed this type of person in the first place” and of course I had told them at least 5x to 5 different people that I needed a specific person but again, they have no internal communication what-so-ever. One time it was so bad, there were 4 technicians out over a period of 48 hours because each one that came was the wrong guy. If they had listened to me in the first place, the issue can have been resolved in only a few hours.

Another example is when our cable was just shut off. We called Comcast asking if there was an outage and had tech guys out and they could not find the problem. Turns out, the billing department stopped sending us bills because they confused our account with another one and so they shut off our cable without any warning. We had to spend the better part of 2 days trying to figure out the problem, dealing with frustrating customer support people that were no help whatsoever to figure out they screwed up and the resolution to their screw up was to shut off our cable. Seriously!

I’d have to say that Comcast has some of the WORST service of any company I have ever dealt with. However, the tech guys that have come out to help fix the issue have been great. The problem is getting them to the house, and getting the right guy. Apparently when I talk to the tech guys, they even agree that Comcast sucks ass. They have to sit on hold just like the customer does to find out their next job apparently. I was told the internal communication is getting worse all the time as Comcast tries to outsource their internal infrastructure and everyone is running around with no clue what they are supposed to be doing. When I heard that, I wasn’t surprised in the least bit since the customer can clearly see that they don’t have their act together. It’s a shame really.

OK.. Rant over