First World Rant About My Cable Box

 Sigh so here it is, my Bluesky box from Shaw Cable tits up again. Seems at least once a week this thing has a stroke for a short time... Well some days not so short a time. Most of the time it dies in the middle of the night and I wake up to an error code.

I love my really fast internet and Sasktel for the price i'm paying just WON'T give me the same speeds or the amount of TV I am getting (no matter how many times they say they will). But this is annoying.

See I am disabled and in my apartment for 95% of my time. This means I am reliant on things like internet and TV to keep me from going more crazy than I am (what? It's a good kind of crazy). So when something goes down for more than a moment it's a problem to me.

I keep getting drops in speed on the internet and it seems to happen at least once a day where it drops so low it almost does not register. I have Tweeted them a bunch of time and for some reason they keep telling me there are no errors in the logs - sigh...

Thing is, I actually have training on how these things work. So I know that if the problem is shorter than the report interval they often don't make it to the logs - see it's not actually possible to have a million modems reporting constantly every second of the day.

This was the thing for people who mass download on torrents to know (yes I know some shady feckers). They figured out the report interval (in the old days it was literally 2 hours) and then you power cycle the modem and POOF it forgets all that data you used. Good luck now, I think the report time is 15 minutes (not sure though). You would NEVER finish a download at that rate...

But that is just a moment in time when a video stalls or a post to Facebook pukes. Nothing to write home about. BUT the TV being dead when I wake up in the morning is a bother. Most of the time if I power cycle it it's fine after. Being that the OS has it retry every now and then to do things, it is a special kind of locked up when it won't do that. Yeah that's a problem.

My BIGEST issue with this thing is the same with a lot of them - you can't watch the DVR if it's not able to connect to the network. See that is a programming issue either in the Shaw software or on the OS side (more than likely OS side). It will error out and not let you do things while it's trying to reconnect. See if you toss in some code to pop up a button that lets you send the reconnect crap to the background then you could watch your shows... But NOOOO...

See the real modern ones do the same thing with voice control and so on. The also record in the cloud and give you a vast amount of storage space on the server some place. This allows you to log on with your phone and watch your recordings any place. The actual use of a heard drive inside the box is outdated.

Also some cable companies record 3 or 4 hours back on every channel so you can time jump on any station if you missed something. But think of the storage? Well storage is actually not that expensive these days and a mass storage server is not that hard to keep going - the software tends to warn you BEFORE a drive fails and moves stuff to another dive then you just replace it.

BUT all this being said, Sasktel was a living hell for crashes and losing stuff on me that I recorded - that alone made me switch to Shaw. Then the internet 150 came out and the upload speed was WAY more than I could get on Sasktel and I was hooked - being a content creator and tossing photos, graphics and video to the internet every day and all...

Now that I said all this, think that there are people in this world with no safe place to exist, starving in the cold (or hot sun) and children working in a mine some place. But I'm in the first world DANG it, make my toys work! #FirstWorldRants #EntitledPersonComplains...