Today’s eight hour outage (from about 11:30 CDT until about 19:20 CDT) brought to you by Comcast. Sorry, everyone. The errors you were getting earlier today were due to that. The downside of paying $0 for dedicated server hosting out of my closet is that you get exactly $0 worth of uptime!
(Seriously, though, this is the longest non-hurricane-related outage I’ve had in 11 years of living here, so that’s not a terrible record.)
As much as I like to complain about Charter and their pricing, I’ve hardly had any issues with the service over the past 12 years. I’ve had maybe 4 or 5 outages that have lasted more than an hour.
Did you even get my emails?
I’m just glad you’re back up. 
Sure! I mean, after Comcast got things back online, yep! The CoG & Bigdinosaur.org mailserver is hosted on the same physical box as the web server, so it obviously wasn’t able to serve anything until connectivity was restored.
Comcast’s explanation for the outage was that it was “weather related”—so apparently the sprinkling of rain some parts of Houston got this morning was enough to knock multiple nodes offline for ~8 hours. Their data centers must be open to the sky or something.
Please don’t harp on Comcast. They are my ISP, and I really don’t want my service interrupted because their in-house version of Carnivore detected derogatory language directed at them.
Just don’t tell Comcast who you work for when you complain.
Wow, that’s terrible.
Comcast knows who I am and who I work for, though. I’ve talked to their PR group enough times 
Yeah, it would probably end slightly differently in your case
Wow. That’s a serious dick move right there. And they want to buy Time Warner and make this even worse? One thing stood out to me.
How many times a day do Comcast reps hear a customer say something like
“I’m a lawyer” or “I’m a big shot at [fill in the blank]“? How many of
those result in Comcast going out of its way to contact that customer’s
employer?
I spent a year in the trenches at Cox when I was a baby IT person and heard this multiple times a week. I just shrugged it off and mentally said “yes, and you’re calling the guy making 12 bucks an hour to fix your internet”.
Methinks someone higher up at Comcast decided this guy was trouble and decided to screw with him so that he would go away. I would definitely be calling my lawyer, which it sounds like he’s already done.
Actually, it sounds like some suspicious activities we had when the company I worked for was contracted to Cingular to provide customer service. We’d have reps deleting orders, changing orders, etc. On more than a few occasions, we had everything to show the order had been been shipped, right down to the tracking number and delivery confirmation. Once, it was (just by luck) a customer I had set up service for. I couldn’t figure out what was going on and was getting frustrated, and one of the managers was harping on me to wind it up. I finally got on the line with UPS, and the service person verified the address it was delivered to… my manager’s Mailbox Plus address.
On one occasion, we had 40 people fired in one day, for running similar scams. Nobody outside our center (and a select few inside it) knew what had happened, not even the Cingular folks.
It’s not difficult to believe that some rep wanted credit and cancelled the install appointments, intending to schedule them under his/her own name for commission purposes. If more than one rep was doing that, it could have snowballed. And then the company has to save face by pretending it didn’t happen. CYA, c’ya!
However, the idea that he is going to subpoena the recordings is, unfortunately, laughable. If the calls were actually recorded and if the calls were each monitored and if their QA actually archives the calls they work from, there’s no way to find them. The calls are saved by, if you’re lucky, time, date and rep’s employee number or workstation number. No, I am not kidding, those systems were some of the crappiest out of the whole batch we had to work with.
On the Cingular site, the recordings were deleted as soon as QA was done scoring it - made it harder for us to contest QA’s evaluation. At Wells Fargo, the only way that we knew the recording was one of our calls, prior to listening to it, was that QA emailed the recording to my stuporvisor. And yes, there were a couple times when QA sent a recording attributed to the wrong person.