Lancer Kind

So sometimes I need to get something off my chest. Call it a PSA, a public service announcement (PSA). Is this a PSA for Event Horizon or Verizon? You be the judge. You may be a defender of either of these “products.” If so, comment away. But remember, my mother said I was special. 🙂

The movie, Event Horizon looked good on the commercials: sexy spaceship, strong looking cast, and a goth looking warp drive. I was ready for a great show. Then about thirty minutes into the film, I wanted to leave the theater because the same suspenseful music used in Friday the 13th movies grated my ears to forshadow something wasn’t right.

That’s about what it was like using FiOS: the HD channels were an extraordinary 1080P, the Internet connectivity gave me undreamed of download speed, and the goth looking Verizon router was loaded with features. I have a friend also enjoying blazing speeds but with a fiber home internet package from EATEL – https://www.EATEL.com/residential/internet/. We can both confirm that the latest wave of broadband technology is lightyears ahead of anything we had back in the day. If you consume a lot of data or you watch a lot of HD videos, high-speed fiber internet might be for you.

But then the problems started. The router would reset itself and lose my settings, the WIFI would shut down and come up again. Normally, I would follow something like the AT&T Router login instructions to sort out the router settings but this Verizon one was having none of it. Some features of the router only pretended to work. The equipment acted is if I got massive speed but at the cost of tapping into a universe of infinite evil. It made me wish I could use this guide here with a different router instead of dealing with this hell.

I could almost live with this. After all, were talking about Verizon here. This is the company that cooperated with the so called Patriot Act and sold out Americans to the NSA as part of a warrentless wiretapping program. So their boardroom is comfortable with practicing evil.

But Verizon, in it’s infinite wisdom, decide to block port 80, which means in laymen’s terms, I could no longer host LancerKind.com.

After talking to an amazing number of different people at Verizon, and searching the Internet, I decide that working around this problem wasn’t worth the amount of time it was taking. After another call to Verizon and requesting that they put GIANT warning labels on all their slick FiOS commercials that say: we’ll make your website go dark (unless you want to spend $100/month for a business line), I went back to Comcast.

That was then, this is now. Now I’m in China and rather than brave the Great Firewall and self host LancerKind.com, I’ve thought about using web hosting service www.hostiserver.com. My friends have recommended it to me and it seems pretty reliable.

OK, that’s my PSA. Back to our regular scheduled SF programming.