u-verse – TechVirtuoso

Fun with AT&T U-verse

April 27th, 2011 at 9:07 PM 1 Comment Michael Stanclift

I’ve had AT&T’s U-verse service since October 2009, the day we moved into our house. At it’s heart, it’s really a fantastic service offering… IPTV, whole home DVR, advanced DSL, all wrapped up into a nice package. But for the last 6 months I’ve been struggling with a lot of different issues ranging from broken DVRs, freezing TV signal to Internet connections that go away at random. While the issues have not been persistent enough to track down an exact cause, they’ve been frustrating.

The other day, after watching Face Off on HBO (for the first time, I know) and getting right to the climax of the movie, the whole TV signal froze and wouldn’t come back. It was 1AM and my wife was already sleeping, so I muted by frustration and went to be deciding to look into alternatives the next day.

Monday, I called up the two traditional cable providers in the area looking for pricing. Then, I hit Twitter with my plan: (more…)

Microsoft CES keynote fails to excite

January 7th, 2010 at 8:28 AM No Comments Michael Stanclift

If you couldn’t get a chance to watch the Microsoft CES pre-show keynote last night, you didn’t miss much. If you were actually at the event, I feel sorry for you, it must have been hard to stay awake.

After starting late due to power issues (which fried one of the Microsoft demo units on stage) the keynote got off to a rather boring start with Steve Ballmer, Microsoft CEO, giving various statistics about how well recently released products like Windows 7 and Bing are doing. For the first half hour, the audio stream for the webcast was so bad, it kept cutting out and then required constant volume adjustment. Note to Microsoft, hire a decent sound engineer next time.

If you’d like to watch the keynote for yourself, you can see the saved version on the Microsoft website.

It was all pretty much downhill from there. The much discussed “Courier” tablet that many in the tech press was excited they would announce never came, and there were no details about Windows Mobile 7… at all. Only “we’ll have more about mobile at Mobile World Congress.” So overall, the keynote failed to deliver much of anything that we didn’t know or have not seen already. But, here is a breakdown of what was covered, after the break.

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