An Epix Decision

We've had Verizon FIOS for nearly three years and have been pretty happy with it. So last week we finally decided to drop our final link to twentieth-century audio-visual technology, the copper-wire phone line, and rely on the FIOS line and cell phones.

Since this meant we were going to be using FIOS for a while, I decided to call up Verizon and see what kind of a deal they could give me if we locked in for a couple of more years. Primarily, I was looking to save money and add Showtime, so that we could watch Dexter, Weeds, and Nurse Jackie without waiting for the DVDs to get to Netflix. (Yes, these are all shows about, shall we say, socially challenged individuals. Deal with it.)

Well, I didn't save any money — well, I will if we drop HBO, but otherwise not. But such a deal!. In addition to Showtime, we get all of the HD sports channels turned on, the regional Fox sports channels, and some other HD movie channels.

In particular, we now have something called EpixHD. This is a joint venture by Paramount, MGM, and Lionsgate to make a few more dollars off of their movies before Netflix buys about a million DVDs and starts sending them out essentially for free.

So here's the deal. Epix streams movies such as Star Trek, Iron Man, etc., starting about 90 days before Netflix gets streaming rights. In addition, Epix streams to a Linux computer, unlike Netflix.

Furthermore, after a little bit of searching I found that HBO also streams its shows, even to a Linux box, although I had to do the sign-up from Windows.

And, finally, even Showtime is coming around to streaming its shows, although right now it's apparently only available to Comcast customers through something called Fancast.

So here's the dilemma: I can watch movies and shows from HBO, Showtime, and Epix using Verizon's OnDemand service. I can also stream HBO and Epix to my Linux, Mac, or Windows boxes. So do I really need to keep Netflix?

Look, I love the fact that Netflix lets me watch ancient episodes of Dr. Who and things like Doctor Horrible's Sing-Along Blog, but I really don't watch it all that much. It's useful that I can get a copy of KU's 1988 NCAA championship DVD when I want it, but, really, how often is that? Is it worth another $10/month?

And, really, I'm upset with Netflix, which won't consider streaming to Linux. They say it's a DRM issue, but if the studios that make up Epix can solve that to their satisfaction, why can't Netflix?

For now, I guess, we'll keep Netflix, but we'll see for how long.

A Year of FIOS

Well, in the language of a current TV show, we've been using FIOS for One year, nine days, and forty-six minutes, so it's time for our first annual performance review:

• It works. Internet, Television, Telephone, all work.

• The system has no trouble with Linux machines. The tech who installed the router had to use a Windows machine to initialize it, but I think that was more of a tech ability issue than an absolute requirement. I can certainly log into the router via the web interface from either of the Linux boxes, as well as the Macs and the windows machines. I think I've noted that the router won't let you listen to streaming RealPlayer output with a program other than RealPlayer, but that's a minor issue and I could probably call tech support to see how to set the router firewall permissions appropriately. Everything else works fine.
• We haven't used the telephone that much, frankly. My wife prefers the sound on the copper-wire line we kept, and since I'm not here that much this year we don't often use the FIOS line. I don't notice any difference in sound quality, but you should know that I just found out that a Sonic Screwdriver makes a sound that I can't hear, but everyone else can.
• TV reception is excellent. There haven't been a lot of the pixellation issues that we had with Comcast digital. The only thing better about Comcast was that they included Starz, Encore, etc., in the standard package. FIOS doesn't, but if you buy the Showtime package, you get all of that as well. (HBO is a separate package, alas.)
• When FIOS switched to an all digital TV signal last summer, they sent me a free convert box that allows me to access all of the TV channels on my second TV. It doesn't have any fancy features, but it accesses all the FIOS channels.
• All in all, the quality of service is slightly ahead of Comcast's. However, that has a lot to do with the quality of the connection between the street and the house, and Comcast was using an old cable. If we ever switch back to Comcast, they will hopefully install a newer, high-speed, connection.

So all in all, a positive experience. Knowing what I know now, would I sign up with FIOS again? Yes, absolutely. Next December our two-year commitment to FIOS ends. Will we keep it? It depends on the package Comcast has to offer.

30 Dec 2008: Things I forgot to add the first time:

• Verizon gives you a measly 10 MB of personal web space, last I looked. I think Comcast gave you about 250 MB. So I had to move my personal web pages to a freebie website provider. Well, it was free except that I had to register my domain with them. Since that only costs $7/year, it's not a problem. But if you have a significant amount of junk content in your current ISP's personal web space, it won't fit into FIOS.
• The DVR box that we rent from FIOS comes with some nifty widgets, allowing you to view weather, traffic, news, and sports results, along with community information, of which we've had none.

31 Dec 2008: Just one more thing: The FIOS tech can initialize your system without Windows. Just look at the last paragraph of this link. Wish I had known that last year. Oh, well, that was a long time ago, in (almost) another administration, and anyway, that Windows installation is dead.

A Programmable Audio Recorder

You might remember that I like to listen to A Prairie Home Companion at the gym. That link shows you how to take the Real Audio stream from the PHC Archive and turn it into an mp3 or ogg file.

And that works, everywhere except with Verizon FIOS, which for some reason only lets streams in RTSP be played by a real RealPlayer client. Probably a firewall issue. I've tried tracking it down, but haven't gotten up the energy to try to talk my way up the FIOS help staff to find someone who would tell me how to fix it.

But, as someone once said, “there's more than one way to do it.” For example, I could use Realplayer to play the file through the speakers, and then record the output either by invoking SoX as rec, using gnome-sound-recorder, or using Audacity (which I can't get to work in this mode). Any of these methods, of course, ties up the speakers for two hours, not very desirable.

Alternatively, one could stumble upon the fact that Minnesota Public Radio (MPR) plays as an http (port 80) continuous stream on the web, that Prairie Home Companion airs for two hours starting at 5pm Central Time (6pm Eastern) every Saturday Night, and that FIOS allows mplayer to listen to that stream. Oh, and that MPR puts on a 15-20 second advertisement when you start the download.

With that information, we construct this little script, which you should save in a directory that the /bin/sh shell can find. We'll call it mpr_record, and we thank Penguin Pete for the hint on how to put all of this in a box:

#! /bin/bash

# Get to the correct directory

cd $HOME/audio/podcasts/prairie_home_companion

# get year month date

year=`date +%y`
month=`date +%m`
day=`date +%d`

# Print out what we want to do:

echo Recording to phc_$year$month$day.flac

# Record for 122 minutes:  One minute before the official start,
# and one minute after the official end, just in case our clocks
# are off, and to account for the initial MPR ad.

# You don't have to use the flac format,
# Using .wav will end up giving you a smaller .mp3 file
# with a loss of quality that won't show up at the gym.

# You might not need the two-step process, just save directly
# to .mp3 or .ogg, but my notes say this isn't very efficient
# in terms of final file size.

# The 1> /dev/null makes sure all of the streaming information that
# mplayer continuously spits out doesn't make it into the final
# output.

# http://www.prairiehome.org/play/128.pls is linked to the MPR stream.

mplayer -endpos 2:02:00 -vc null -vo null -ao pcm:fast -ao pcm:file=phc_$year$month$day.flac http://www.prairiehome.org/play/128.pls 1> /dev/null

# Convert to mp3
# ogg produces a smaller file, but my player doesn't do ogg.

echo Converting to phc_$year$month$day.mp3

# Note that SoX must be recompiled to support MP3s, if that's
# what you want here.  Actually, that link doesn't work on Ubuntu,
# I had to recompile from source.  Someday I'll write that up.

sox phc_$year$month$day.flac phc_$year$month$day.mp3

# Of course, ffmpeg would work just as well:

# ffmpeg -i phc_$year$month$day.wav phc_$year$month$day.mp3

# Edit id3 info.  This adds both id3v1 and id3v2 data.
# My labeling scheme is designed to overcome the limits of my
# player.  You might want to label yours differently.  See
# 'man id3v2' for all the options.

echo Labeling phc_$year$month$day.mp3

id3v2 -t $year$month$day -g 100 -y 20$year -A NPR -a "Prairie Home Companion" -T 1 phc_$year$month$day.mp3

So, if you've read all the comments, you'll see that this records from MPR for two hours and two minutes. Now we just need to make sure this starts one minute before 6pm (Eastern US), every Saturday. If you've been following along this blog, you know this is a job for cron. The crontab entry we need is

59 17 * * 6 mpr_record > $HOME/audio/podcasts/prairie_home_companion/mpr.errors 2>&1

which starts the recording at 17:59 (5:59pm) local time (Eastern, here), on the sixth day of the week, running the program mpr_record and putting all of its output into an error file, just in case we need to track things down.

Of course, what we've done is turned the machine into the Internet Audio version of a programmable VCR. This can be used for any regularly scheduled broadcast the mplayer can play.

Under Construction

Comcast finally pulled the plug on our account this week. They were actually pretty nice about it, giving us about a month of email forwarding and web space after our defection to Verizon. Heck, I may switch back to them when our contract is up in two years (hey, folks, we've got competition in the cable TV and high-speed Internet market — enjoy it while you can).

With the account turned off, some of the links on the right-hand side of the blog will be invalid, and some of the pictures in the blog will probably disappear. (I moved as many as I found onto Blogger its own self, but I probably missed a few.) I'm working to restore the links. I even have my own domain, now: http://www.rcjhawk.us. You'll note the home page is pretty much like the Comcast one, but not all of the links are live as yet. I'll try to get everything pretty much back the way it was during the upcoming three-day weekend.

I should say that the Verizon FIOS service has been pretty good so far. Only two glitches. One, the wireless connection has gone down three-four times, sometimes for an hour or more. This might be neighborhood interference. Two, for some reason I can't play streaming audio of Prairie Home Companion via mplayer, even though I can play it using Real Player. This might be a bug in my mplayer setup, but it started immediately after we switched. Something to be tracked down ...

Telemarketers, Be Gone!

You forget about these things. Changing one of our telephone numbers from a land-line to Verzion FIOS involved dropping the old number and getting a new one. One minor annoyance is that Verizon (copper) and Verizon FIOS don't seem to talk much, so Verizon (copper) never seems to put a change-of-number message on our old number. We've called, emailed, etc., it's been two weeks, and still nothing.

That, however, is not the major problem. The major problem is that we'd forgotten the persistence of telemarketers. Hence we didn't sign the new number up on the National Do Not Call Registry.

Oops.

It took telemarketers about 10 days to figure this out. Since Saturday, we've had a bunch of telemarketing calls. Of course, once I realized the mistake I immediately registered the number, but since it hasn't filtered through the system yet, we still get a few calls, including the annoying machine call that was half cut off by our answering machine's greeting.

It makes you appreciate the fact that the Do-Not-Call list is a Federal program that actually works. OK, a few calls get through, but the volume of calls we got on the old number was next-to-nothing, and now we're getting them daily.

Now if there was just an enforceable do-not-spam law.

Note: Why, in the name of all that's holy, would any marketing firm suppose that anyone would respond well to a call placed at 9 am anytime between Christmas and New Year's Day? It's almost anti-marketing. Hint: I'm sure not going to buy anything from DISH network any time soon.

Cronic Emailing

So now Comcast knows we're leaving. I'm assuming that this means that they will eventually shut off my old Comcast email address. I could check this by logging onto my old Comcast account every day, but I decided it would be simpler to let the computer do it: Comcast currently forwards email to my Verizon account, so let's send my Comcast account an email. Either I'll get it, via Verizon, or it will be bounced, in which case I'll get an email from Comcast telling me to buzz off. I'd like this to be done daily, say at 1 am. Then when I check my email in the morning I know immediately if Comcast is still forwarding mail.

To do this, we need several utilities. First, we need a command to allow the computer to send mail, preferably from the command line. In Unix-like systems, this is called mail (Duh). Well, that's not quite right. First we need a mail server. We'll use Gmail's SMTP server, located at smtp.gmail.com. (Who thinks up these names?) Second, we need a program to access Gmail's SMTP. That would be msmtp, which we've discussed before. Finally, we need a command line program mailer. That would be the aforementioned mail, except that it's not the standard one that's loaded in with Ubuntu. Ubuntu comes with mail from the GNU mailutils package. That doesn't work well with msmtp. Instead, you want the simpler mailx package. So fire up a command-line prompt and type:

$ sudo apt-get install mailx

adding msmtp to that line if you don't have it installed. This will remove mailutils and install mailx.

Now that all our tools are in place, we just need to set things up. First, let's work on msmtp. We need to create, or edit, the file $HOME/.msmtprc. The contents have changed just a bit from the original install. Here, with some obvious changes, is my current file:

account default
host smtp.gmail.com
from dubya@gmail.com
auth on
password nuculer
user dubya@gmail.com
tls on
port 587
tls_certcheck off

port 587 is Google's preferred email port, and tls_certcheck off tells the program to not bother about doing certificate checks — which means that you should probably not use this method to send anything of value. Also note that your password is in clear, so you'd better set the permissions of $HOME/.mtmsprc to keep anyone else from reading it:

$ chmod 600 $HOME/.mtmsprc

Now, let's set up the message. I want a script, basically, that sends a short message to my Comcast account. So I set up this little bit of code:

$ cat > $HOME/cmailtest
mail dubya@comcast.net -s "Comcast Mail Forwarding Check" << endmail
Today, it's still working.
endmail
^D
$ chmod 700 $HOME/cmailtest

Which creates a file, called cmailtest, in my home directory, that sends a simple email. The file is made readable and executable by me and me alone, just in case someone else stumbles upon it and starts sending it to me at random times.

Send the email by executing the file from the command line:

$ $HOME/cmailtest

That's fine, but how do I get it sent at 1 am every day?

That requires the cron and crontab commands. cron is a daemon that searches for things to do. Most of these are specified in the /etc/cron* directories, but you can add things to the list as well. In my case, we do this:

$ cat > cfile
0 1 * * * /home/dubya/cmailtest

^D
$ crontab cfile

This creates a file, cfile, which will tell cron to run the cmailtest script at the 0^th minute of the first hour of every (the “*”) day, week, and month. The blank line is to ensure that there is an end-of-line after cmailtest, otherwise cron won't recognize it. The command is entered into the system with the crontab command.

And that's it. From now on, Hal will send a message to my old Comcast account early in each day. As long as the account exists, I'll get it at my Verizon email. Once the account dies, Gmail will get a bounce message.

So when that happens how do I turn the thing off? Simple. I just use the

$ crontab -r

to delete all of my cron jobs. Or, if I want to add other things to the list, edit the cron jobs with

$ crontab -e

For more examples, see the previously mentioned link, a more Ubuntu-specific page or, of course, try

$ man cron
$ man crontab

Comcast Unplugged

With no unpleasantness, really. Just a polite “why?” Not something I have a really good answer for. Corrupted by Verizon marketing, I guess.

Anyway, we have ten days to return the box. Let's see how long the web pages and email stay up after that.

Three Days With Verizon

And so far, everything's working pretty much the same as it did with Comcast.

This is not a bad thing. The best thing and ISP can do for you is to not be noticed: Just give me the Internet, Sir, and we'll all be fine.

We have two TVs, one connected to a Verizon High Def DVR box, and the other one, downstairs here with me, is just plugged into the cable. Comcast let the later TV access local plus about 40 cable analog channels, while Verizon only gives you local channels, plus, for some reason, Chicago's WGN. Probably some Cubs fans around. I only use the downstairs TV to watch local sports, anyway, so that's OK. The downstairs picture is clearer than Comcast provided, probably because Verizon put in a brand-new high-speed connection from the street, while Comcast used the cable left over from the 1970s, which was sensitive to interference from the local PBS station's tower. The digital connection doesn't seem to break up as much as Comcast's did, but then it's Christmas time, so there isn't a lot to watch right now. The OnDemand feature seems to respond faster than Comcast's did. This is a function of bandwidth, and we had problems with Comcast in that regard.

The DVR software is a little annoying, in that you can set a global option to record only first run TV series, but you can't set it for individual shows, unlike Comcast's system. I can't comment on how it actually works, because, again, it's Christmas, so there aren't any new shows to record.

The phone service has been perfect, except for the fact the Verizon still hasn't put a “this number has changed” message on our old phone number.

The Internet connection has been pretty stable. The hard-wired computers haven't lost connection at all, except for the moments after I accidentally hit the off switch on the power strip. The wireless connection: well, as you probably know, Verizon provides you with their own combination modem/wireless router. The router only has WEP encryption. I'm not terribly happy with that, but then again we live in a neighborhood with widely separated houses — signals we get from other wireless systems are pretty weak, and I don't think it would be profitable for anyone to try to hack in. If somebody drives up in a car close enough to access our signal, I think we'd notice the driver hunched over a keyboard after a while.

We did have one initial problem with the wireless connection: Wednesday night it just stopped working, as in wouldn't let you connect. This was frustrating, because I could see the router from Hal's Evil Twin, but I couldn't connect to it, no matter how many times I tried. The problem cleared itself up by Thursday morning. Spouse was talking to Customer Support about getting the message on our old phone number and mentioned the wireless problem. She got the response “sometimes that happens the first day,” which may be true but isn't exactly encouraging. Nevertheless, it has worked well since then.

I also had a slight problem getting logged on to the router so that I could change security settings. (I think we'll go to MAC authentication, just to help out against hypothetical war-driving attacks. It's not like we have a lot of people who need to hook up to our network.) I couldn't log on. Verizon provided me with the IP address of the router, and the administrative account name, but not the password. I looked up the router on the net and found the default password, but still couldn't log on. Eventually I called the Customer Support number. The “we're pretending to be a computer, ignore that man behind the curtain” help system kicked me over to a live person in about five minutes, and I was only on hold there for a couple of minutes — that may be how long it takes the signal to travel to India. Anyway, the tech figured out the problem in about thirty seconds — sometimes the default password has a “1” after it. I logged onto the router, which has a reasonably clean interface, and changed that password. This week I make it as secure as possible with a WEP system. If I get really paranoid, I suppose, I can turn off the wireless function of the router and plug in our old D-Link router, but I doubt I'll bother.

Speed: we're paying for 5MB/s download and 2MB/s upload, and we're getting something close to that, if you believe all those Internet Speed Test sites. It's fast enough that I don't notice any difference from Comcast. For what it's work, the sales people at the kiosk in the Mall said that we'll be upgraded to 10/4 in a month or two.

Oh yeah, the same sales people mentioned that we'd get support to forward our email for a month after leaving Comcast. No one else seems to know about it. There is something that lets you copy your email from one web service to Verizon's, but we pop our email to the house, so that isn't particularly useful. Well, we've notified friends and family, and we'll get to our customer service emails this week, so it shouldn't be too much of a problem.

All in all, and so far, I'm happy with the service. We'll see how it goes over the next few months. I'll be particularly interested to see how the battery handles our phone service the next time the power goes out.

One more note: I still haven't activated Verizon's oh-so-generous 10 MB of web space. Hopefully later this week. It may be that the links to our old Comcast web space on the right may die before I get things changed. If so, my apologies, but remember that everything except some of the cat pictures is still here in the blog.

Well, It's Done

We're running on Verzion FIOS. The installation process actually went pretty smoothly. Well, the Tech couldn't get Hal's Other Twin's Windows XP account to register with Verizon. I have no idea why. So we went upstairs to Hal's Evil Twin, an XP machine, and she couldn't use the D-Link card to connect to Verizon's Wireless router. I suspect that she just didn't know how to do it, and I'll fix it later, but she gave us a USB-port wireless router, which works just fine. I didn't have any trouble connecting the Mac via wireless, either.

Initial setup was done with Windoze, but I've done all the account tweaking at verizon.net from Hal, using Firefox. I even have the email accounts set up.

Now, those of you who like to look at Cat Pictures, be warned: when I shut down the Comcast account, some of the pictures will vanish. I'll do my best to replace them, not on Verizon's server, which only gives me 10 MB of “Personal Disk Space” unless I want to pony up extra money per month. Until I find a cheaper alternative I'll move as much as I can to Verizon-space, and the rest will just have to stay on Hal's disk and live on in DVD backups. I'll do my best to change the links from Comcast to Verizon, but it'll take some time, and some links might never be updated. If you see a dead Comcast link that you'd like to view, let me know and I'll try to expedite matters.

How's it work? Speed seems the same as Comcast, meaning, “faster than I need.” The analog TV picture seems clearer than Comcast, which was always getting interference from the local TV tower. Of course, the analog signal is only good for the local TV channels, unlike Comcast, which gave you 30-40 cable channels as well. Eventually I'll have to get another TV box.

Verizon also seems to have fewer free movies, but that might just mean I haven't found all of them yet. The OnDemand feature seems to respond faster than Comcast's did.

And the phones work perfectly: One copper, one fiber.

Undoubtedly there will be problems, and I'll bitch about them when the time comes. But for now, everything looks good.

Still Here

Remember a few days ago, when Verizon came over and installed the fiber line from street to house, shredding (and repairing) the coax and copper lines in the process?

Well, they didn't install the fiber correctly, so they've spent the last few hours redoing that. They do have the box installed in the garage, and we're only about 45 minutes from finishing, once they have the fiber line dug.

The Verizon tech's pretty cool about all this, he's doing as much as he can while the line is being dug up.

Fortunately, my lawn is 90% trees and weeds, otherwise I'd be rather upset by all of this. Instead, I'm just bemused. I've got the whole day off, and the most stressful thing I'll have to do is cancel the Comcast subscription.

And They're Here

No sooner posted than the Verizon truck showed up. Some things I sort of knew, but hadn't really worried about before:

• The box lives in the garage.
• It needs to be plugged in — OK, I knew that, but I didn't realize the implication: We really should have an outlet on the inside of the garage's outside wall. We don't. So probably another long extension cord snaking around the ceiling of the garage. Must get an electrician in here to rewire the place.
• It'll take 4-6 hours.
• The tech assures me we'll keep the copper line we're meant to keep.

Waiting for FIOS

Well, it's 9:30 am, and Verizon isn't here yet.

The morning is not lost, however. We're putting in some new doors off the den. The delivery man got here right at 8 am, well before he said he'd arrive. So one visit is taken care of, just not the one I'd expected.

Verizon's FIOS page hints that they will only support Win$ and Macs. The people I talked to at the Mall, however, assured me that there would be no problem, and the comments to this article seem to suggest that. I just need to hook up to DHCP, and find out where the smtp and pop servers live, right? The consensus seems to be that some Techs will be happiest checking out the connection using a Windows machine. That's OK, Hal's Other Twin has a Windows XP partition, used only to play Pinball. If I have to re-install that to remove any Verizony software it's not big deal. In fact, it might even motivate me to try getting Windows running under QEMU. If it's fast enough, I can play XP's Pinball game right here on Hal. If it's really fast, I can convert Hal's Evil Twin to Hal's Nice Twin with Windows on QEMU, one small step towards moving the house out from under the Shadow of Redmond.

Fear and Trepidation in Davidsonville

Verizon FIOS is coming tomorrow morning, “between 8 and 12 a.m. (sic)” I'm going to stay home for the event, mainly to insure that the copper line that Verizon restored (after cutting) (1) stays in the ground, and (2) stays connected to our AT&T phone service.

After that, make sure the new computer, phone, and cable connections work, then say “bye-bye” to Comcast and send out emails to all friends and family describing the change of address.

Some of the links in the right-hand column are on Comcast's web space, I'll move them when I get the Verizon-equivalent, or find another host for the pictures, descriptions, and accounts of my weblife.

First post tomorrow will undoubtedly be “Verzon isn't here yet.” What, or when, the next post will be depends on how well things go here.

See y'all tomorrow.

Maybe.

I, For One, Welcome Our New Telecom Overlords

I'm filled with wonder, hope, excitement, fear, and dread.

Yes, my children, we're changing our broadband, cable, and ½ of our phone service from Comcast (broadband & cable) and Verizon (phone) to Verizon FIOS.

Specifically, we're getting the Verizon package for all three services, which is supposed to cost $99/month, but actually costs about $135/month when you factor in the DVR, and the movie package (we chose HBO) that they require you get in order to get the installation charges dropped. That's about what we pay now for Comcast's cable and broadband service, and it allows us to drop a copper phone line.

Of course, Comcast has its own “Triple Play” which costs about the same. However, that all goes through the same coax that provides our service now, and which is sometimes inadequate (it was first laid over 20 years ago, what do you expect?). And friends have Verizon's FIOS phone and broadband, which seems to be decent. No one I know has the TV yet, as far as I know. We're pioneers. Hence my dread.

But we get this really neat $200, 19 inch high def TV, which I plan to mount right by my computer, so that I never have to leave this chair — OK, maybe to go to work, but otherwise. (Or we can get a $200 Best Buy gift card, for a down payment on a really big HDTV.)

Anyway, installation is scheduled for Wednesday next week, so I'll let you know how it goes.

Such as today: Last Friday Miss Utility came out and painted orange paint on the snow in our yard, along with flags marking various cables. Today, the line-digging crew came out and installed the fiber from the street to the house.

Along the way they cut the Comcast cable — unfortunate, as we're still using the cable until Wednesday next. They did manage to repair that.

The Verizon-owned copper phone line, however, they shredded.

This does not comfort me.

I'm sure it was unintentional, as we told them that we wanted to keep one of our copper phone lines, because we've had many power problems in the past. True, the FIOS box comes with an 8-hour telephone battery, but there have been times when I'm sure we would have run through that. Hence we want to keep the copper.

Verizon is supposed to come back tomorrow and replace the copper. If the don't cut anything else I'll report later in the week.

Oh, yeah, the deal's for two years. We'll see what kind of offer Comcast has then.