TexasSwede

Finally home after a week in a very cold Orlando, at a great Lotusphere. Picked up my son for the weekend, handed him some of the stuff I got for him on the trip, and turned on the TV and the cable box from AT&T U-verse to watch some shows I had recorded while I was gone.

"No recordings" was the message I got. I tried a few times, but all my recordings were gone. The service worked, I had all my channels, and the internet connection worked as well. Called customer support and finally eneded up at technical support. After a while the girl I talked to came back and said that they pushed out an upgrade and that "something must have gine wrong and erased the recordings". I had about 10-12 movies recorded from when I had HBO/Showtime and the other movie channels (I since then cancelled those channels because I was not that interested in paying $50 extra/month to watch one or two movies each month), as well as several other shows from History Channel, Discovery, Military Channel and other channels. I had several eopisodes of Mythbusters recorded for my son, as well as a bunch of documentaries and movies that I specifically marked as not to delete.

The DVR has a nice feature, it start deleting the oldest recordings to make room for a new one if there is not enough space, but I can protect the shows I want to really save.

I asked the girl what AT&T could do for me, and after talking to her supervisor, they offered to credit my account with 10 dollar. I asked to talk to the supervisor, and he siad that is the most technical support can do. When I indicated that I found that offer unacceptable (just going online and trying to find all those shows and movies would take more that $10 worth of time, even if counting below minimum wage), the supervisor said he would send a message to the billing department and someone would call me back tomorrow. They better have something else to offer, or I will be a very unhappy customer.

I been pretty happy with the service this far. I have four incoming streams, meaning I can record three channels and watch a fourth one, all at teh same time. The internet service (I curently have the Elite plan with 6 Mbit down and 1 Mbit up) is pretty stable. Lately I had to reconnect more frequently with the wireless router, and for a few days prior to leaving for Lotusphere I had more problems that usual. But other than that, I have been happy with them.

The PVR have several USB ports, but they are basically useless, since you can not paly Divx or any files from them, and you can not hook up any external drives to transfer your recordings over to, so you have a backup if AT&T decide to reformat your drive while you are gone...

Well, I will update this entry tomorrow, if AT&T call me back... Stay tuned.

Update: AT&D did call me back this morning (Saturday), I had told them I would be home/available between 9am and 3pm (have a friends b-day party in the afternoon), and they called shortly after 9. They upgraded me from U200 (200 channels)to the U300 plan (300 channels, mainly getting a bunch of movie channels) for free for six months, and upgraded my Internet from Elite (6/1 Mbit) to Max (10/1.5 Mbit) for free for six months. I think that was a good offer and a nice gesture of them. I might also go for the VoIP phone service, that will save me about $15 in taxes each month, they say.

Have you ever watched Beauty and the Geek? They are now casting for another season. Why not give it a try?

More at the SweetOnGeeks blog.