As far as making accounts at new sites just try and log in using your email address and reset the p/w. You can then go and change any of the info you need to to yours. I had one guy that tried to squat on my email address and I would get all his frequent flyer notices tons of assorted spam. I finally was able to get him to stop when his dentist and doctors started emailing me appointment confirmation stuff. I called the doctors told them, "I was a different John Doe but the email address they had was mine. If the idiot John Doe didnt want me to start canceling and rescheduling his appointments for a time that was better for me then he needed to fix the email issue on his end. oh and by the way let him know that I was going to the beach next month and planning on using all those frequent flyer miles to get the airline tickets and it looked right now that there were enough points to cover the hotel also." Nothing prior had worked but I never got another wrong email once I called his docs that day.
I'm sure a sexy red paint job would help it sell. But I'd be afraid that it would catch fire and burn up. Considering the beating that my truck takes now and the recent history of Tesla considering battery fires and damage. The insurance on it would be as much as another truck payment. Much less the hassle of having to replace it every 3 or 4 months.
When I bought my new house over a year ago. I took the opportunity to go satellite,home phone and cable free. I spent about 200 Dollars for a big ass antenna ( I live in a rural area ). Most people dont realize that when the big digital conversion happened most stations added 2 or 3 more channels. So in my area I have fox, abc, cbs, nbc, the wb, upn , pbs and a couple of local independents. All of which have a couple of added channels. So those give me my local news and weather. Better weather in fact than with cable since on a couple of the added channels the local stations feed their weather radar image. So I can see whats coming weather wise anytime I feel like it. Point is with DSL for netflix, etc and my free over the air I never have nothing to watch. Sports is the only thing that might bother me and my favorite teams were on the major networks for all but one football game this last year.
When cable considers ala carte pricing I might consider going back. But probably not.
I was in the last engineering class at the University of Alabama to have to use punch cards for the intro to fortran class. I still have all the programs I wrote for that class in a shoebox. I pulled them out about a year ago for a friend to show him how to deal with a rounding error he was getting in something he was doing. It might be a pain but you can still read the cards especially where i wrote the actual text on each one so you dont have to try and translate the holes. I started doing that and numbering them the first time i dropped the stack and it took forever to rebuild it. Anway the oldest file I have is from September 1984 and it is still readable in the original format today.
I also worked there. A few years before you did. I was involved in building out the cable modem network for the Birmingham area. In some sort of great management strategy for that those of us that did that also got to do customer service for all the cable modem subscribers. Not that I mind being helpdesk but having your network guys do it was probably okay when we had 50 subscribers but as we rolled out the service we stayed helpdesk. Essentially all our time ended up being spent on being helpdesk personel tied to a phone. We even had to take care of regular cable billing issues and such. Charter truly had a ton of issues with departmental turf wars and such. One of my favorite things that probaly directly relates to this is how email ended up being done. We initially wanted to set up our own mail servers, but that was not to be. Charter farmed out all the email services for the whole country to a company called High Speed Access. HSA was a small company that also provided cable modem service to smaller market that charter had but didn't want to build out the infrastucture or support it. Essentially HSA ran cable modem service over charter cable lines in various locals around the U.S. The real reason HSA did this is because Paul Allan a mjor shareholder in Charter also was a major shareholder in HSA. HSA had some real issues making money and staying in business and Paul used his pull with Charter to get them the contract. I am not saying HSA wouldnt have gotten the contract for the email service without that contact, but I am sure they wouldnt have kept it. There was one person that worked in the HSA noc that knew anything about how the mail servers worked. Whenever there would be a issue with provisioning a email account, she was the one you had to talk to. Talking to anyone else in their NOC was useless. I know they didnt pay her enough and shortly after I left Charter I heard that she had also left. From my experience with charter I am sure that the mail system is probably the same one today that was overloaded then. At the time the system was adequate for serving about half the user base it had. Rather than build out a new system charter would tend to just try and incrementally gorw one. Sometimes you have to just retire the old stuff and get all new infrastructure but try telling that to charter and having them take that advice isnt going to happen.
I cant really say that I am surprised by what happened. What surprises me is that charter is actually willing to give out some money instead of just saying tough.
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Not sure if any are being trained for this sort of situation. But I can see some benefits other than just guiding the relative around
As far as making accounts at new sites just try and log in using your email address and reset the p/w. You can then go and change any of the info you need to to yours. I had one guy that tried to squat on my email address and I would get all his frequent flyer notices tons of assorted spam. I finally was able to get him to stop when his dentist and doctors started emailing me appointment confirmation stuff. I called the doctors told them, "I was a different John Doe but the email address they had was mine. If the idiot John Doe didnt want me to start canceling and rescheduling his appointments for a time that was better for me then he needed to fix the email issue on his end. oh and by the way let him know that I was going to the beach next month and planning on using all those frequent flyer miles to get the airline tickets and it looked right now that there were enough points to cover the hotel also." Nothing prior had worked but I never got another wrong email once I called his docs that day.
I'm sure a sexy red paint job would help it sell. But I'd be afraid that it would catch fire and burn up. Considering the beating that my truck takes now and the recent history of Tesla considering battery fires and damage. The insurance on it would be as much as another truck payment. Much less the hassle of having to replace it every 3 or 4 months.
When I bought my new house over a year ago. I took the opportunity to go satellite,home phone and cable free. I spent about 200 Dollars for a big ass antenna ( I live in a rural area ). Most people dont realize that when the big digital conversion happened most stations added 2 or 3 more channels. So in my area I have fox, abc, cbs, nbc, the wb, upn , pbs and a couple of local independents. All of which have a couple of added channels. So those give me my local news and weather. Better weather in fact than with cable since on a couple of the added channels the local stations feed their weather radar image. So I can see whats coming weather wise anytime I feel like it. Point is with DSL for netflix, etc and my free over the air I never have nothing to watch. Sports is the only thing that might bother me and my favorite teams were on the major networks for all but one football game this last year. When cable considers ala carte pricing I might consider going back. But probably not.
I was in the last engineering class at the University of Alabama to have to use punch cards for the intro to fortran class. I still have all the programs I wrote for that class in a shoebox. I pulled them out about a year ago for a friend to show him how to deal with a rounding error he was getting in something he was doing. It might be a pain but you can still read the cards especially where i wrote the actual text on each one so you dont have to try and translate the holes. I started doing that and numbering them the first time i dropped the stack and it took forever to rebuild it. Anway the oldest file I have is from September 1984 and it is still readable in the original format today.
I also worked there. A few years before you did. I was involved in building out the cable modem network for the Birmingham area. In some sort of great management strategy for that those of us that did that also got to do customer service for all the cable modem subscribers. Not that I mind being helpdesk but having your network guys do it was probably okay when we had 50 subscribers but as we rolled out the service we stayed helpdesk. Essentially all our time ended up being spent on being helpdesk personel tied to a phone. We even had to take care of regular cable billing issues and such. Charter truly had a ton of issues with departmental turf wars and such. One of my favorite things that probaly directly relates to this is how email ended up being done. We initially wanted to set up our own mail servers, but that was not to be. Charter farmed out all the email services for the whole country to a company called High Speed Access. HSA was a small company that also provided cable modem service to smaller market that charter had but didn't want to build out the infrastucture or support it. Essentially HSA ran cable modem service over charter cable lines in various locals around the U.S. The real reason HSA did this is because Paul Allan a mjor shareholder in Charter also was a major shareholder in HSA. HSA had some real issues making money and staying in business and Paul used his pull with Charter to get them the contract. I am not saying HSA wouldnt have gotten the contract for the email service without that contact, but I am sure they wouldnt have kept it. There was one person that worked in the HSA noc that knew anything about how the mail servers worked. Whenever there would be a issue with provisioning a email account, she was the one you had to talk to. Talking to anyone else in their NOC was useless. I know they didnt pay her enough and shortly after I left Charter I heard that she had also left. From my experience with charter I am sure that the mail system is probably the same one today that was overloaded then. At the time the system was adequate for serving about half the user base it had. Rather than build out a new system charter would tend to just try and incrementally gorw one. Sometimes you have to just retire the old stuff and get all new infrastructure but try telling that to charter and having them take that advice isnt going to happen. I cant really say that I am surprised by what happened. What surprises me is that charter is actually willing to give out some money instead of just saying tough.