Author: DOuG pRATt

Iowa oughta know

I haven’t watched any of the Republican debates, choosing instead to read and hear about them the next day. Yesterday’s debate in Iowa reportedly showed Newt “Nut” Gingrich doing well against Mitt “Milquetoast” Romney. Prior to the debate, Liz Goodman, who writes for Yahoo!, had an outstanding feature article on how immigration, legal and not, has affected the little Iowa town Postville.

Gingrich is currently leading solely by the process of elimination — and even then, only because his multiple marital infidelities are older than Herman Cain’s. Newt isn’t presidential material, and he has no chance of ever winning the White House. So the GOP has to find a way to make Romney, who is the only Republican in the field truly qualified to be President, acceptable to its hard right base before next summer.

Honestly, nothing the Republicans have done this year has made any sense. At this point, how the heck can Donald “Comb-over” Trump still have a place at the Republican table? Romney is right to decline an appearance at Trump’s post-Christmas debate, but instead of manufacturing a scheduling conflict he should say he wants nothing to do with Donald Trump and his silly circus. We seem to be in an age where people want political contests to be like professional wrestling matches — loud, rancorous, and low class, where everything is personal.

I signed Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders’ online petition supporting a repeal of the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision, granting free speech rights to corporations, as if they are distinct individuals that are separate from the people who run them. The real problem is that political campaigns need so much money for TV commercials. TV stations must love the prospect of unlimited funding for “unaffiliated” ads supporting and opposing candidates, but the best thing everybody can do is to simply not watch the TV ads. I trust neither the Republican’s nor the Democrat’s TV commercials, and I actively avoid all of them.

House mouse

In other exciting weekend news from home, after the Comcast salesmen left I caught a mouse in my office, in the finished half of the basement. I used one of these Victor live traps. They work well and I recommend them. I let the little guy go in the woods near the house, and if a deer mouse can look scared, he looked scared.

Sunday follow-up: OK, let’s make that two mice.
Monday follow-up: Looks like Mr. and Mrs. Mouse were it. Trap still set with bait intact.

Xfinity by any other name is Comcast

Comcast is going door-to-door today, trying to get Verizon FiOS customers to switch to Xfinity. Ha! Fat chance. I gave the two sales guys a real earful, not that they deserved it personally, telling them how, in 2005, Comcast left me without Internet service for a month. A MONTH! The only thing that was working was e-mail, because it came from their own domain. Finally, after I’d pushed and complained almost every day, a technician called from a van, on his way to a substation, and I used traceroute to help him find the dead gateway.

Comcast offered no credit for the loss of service, so I asked for an adjustment and the request was denied. Sporatic outages continued after that, the same as they’d been previously. I got tired of resetting the cable modem, and I knew FiOS was coming to town. That was when I vowed to switch the moment FiOS was available. March, 2006, I saw the fiber optic cable being installed on the street, and I called Verizon to order service.

Since then I’ve had essentially no problems. Oh, a few times when I happened to be online at midnight the router went offline for 3-5 minutes, undoubtedly for some scheduled work, but that’s been it. As confirmed by the FCC, Verizon FiOS is not only the fastest home Internet service, it is also the only one that is perfectly consistent throughout the day.

As I told the Comcast/Xfinity reps at the door today when I refused the discount they were offering, there is NO WAY, AT ALL, I will EVER switch back to Comcast, as long as I can get FiOS in this house. Period.

P.S. By the way, my Comcast e-mail address still works. For whatever reason, it was never deleted. It’s dougpratt5 on comcast dot net. Everything sent to it is automatically forwarded to one of my dograt mailboxes.