spugbrap’s blog

News/Info:

My at&t wireless service has been horrible for the past 3 days, and I am not alone. My wife and several friends in my neighborhood (in Bristow, VA) have been having the same issues. We are not able to reliably make or receive calls or text messages. Details on the problems we’ve been having are below in the My Story section.

I finally called 611 for at&t customer service, this evening, and the Customer Service Representative (CSR) told me that this issue is affecting quite a few customers. She rattled off a list of states that were reporting these issues, and although the list may not have included every state in the Northeastern United States, it definitely included most of them. I can say, for sure, that DC, Maryland, and Virginia were on the list, since those are the ones I was listening for.

The CSR found as much information as she could, for me, from her computer and from other reps. As of 5:25pm EDT on 4/13/2008, 3200-something minutes had passed since they first learned of the issue (note: There are 1440 minutes in one day). Although she couldn’t tell me when the problem might be resolved, she said that it’s a “priority” and they’re working on it. For what it’s worth, she told me that our 911 service was still fully functional.

If it’s affecting people in that many different states, I figure that means potentially millions of customers may be without reliable voice and SMS service. The outage does not seem to affect all areas, though, but I know it at least covers about a 5 mile radius around my house. So, the actual number of at&t customers affected may be a lot smaller, if it’s just a bunch of small areas that are experiencing these problems.

My Story:

My cell phone started having issues late Friday night (4/11/2008), but at first I thought it was just my phone acting up. I just upgraded the OS on my AT&T 8525 (HTC Hermes) to Windows Mobile 6 last week, and it’s had a few minor issues every day.So, when a friend of mine IMed me and said they kept getting sent straight to voicemail when calling my mobile number, I figured my phone was just being stupid. So, I tried making an outgoing call, but it just kept saying “Dialing” and could not seem to connect.

I checked my signal strength, and saw that I had only 1 bar. Usually, in my house, I have 3-4 bars and my cell phone works just as well as the landline. So I went outside, to see if my signal would improve. I think it went up to 2 bars or something, and after a couple tries, I was able to call out. But, the call was very broken up and staticky–pretty much useless.

Still thinking it could be my phone’s fault, I went back inside, turned off the phone, and removed the battery and SIM card. I left it that way for a few minutes, since that was one of the troubleshooting steps that a Cingular CSR had be perform when I had some kind of problem last year

After about 5 minutes, I blew the visible dust out of the back of my phone, put it back together, and turned it on. When it was done booting, I still had only 1 signal bar, but I tried to make a call anyways. As expected, it was still not able to connect, and when I told my friend to try calling me again, they said it was still going straight to voicemail.

Oh well, it was late at night, and I needed to go to bed anyways. I didn’t really need to use my phone, so I just hoped it would work better in the morning.

On Saturday, my family and I planned to go out and have a pretty busy day with some friends. I ended up having the kids at home while Lacey went out with her friends Jena and Anne. It was a beautiful day out, so my kids and I went outside and planted some flowers (I tried to call Lacey to find out where, exactly, to plant them, but could not get a call through, so the kids and I just kinda used our best judgement for planting locations.), then took care of some long-overdue outside work (cleaning plant debris off the deck and treehouse).

We were expecting Dallin and Xander to come over eventually, to hang out while the wives were out shopping. I could not seem to get ahold of Dallin, though. When I tried to call him (from my landline), it went straight to voicemail. When I tried to send a text message, the message stayed in the Outbox for longer than usual, then popped up an error saying that it was unable to send.

I retried it a few times, and eventually got it to send, after about 10 minutes or so. I didn’t get a reply, though. About a half hour later, I tried to text him again, but had the same difficulties. A few minutes later, though, I received 2-3 messages from Dallin. Apparently he didn’t receive any of my messages when I sent them, but they had just come through all at once. Along with those messages from Dallin, I also received one from Lacey, which had a timestamp of about 45 minutes before. I tried to reply to Dallin and Lacey, but still could not get messages to go out without several retry attempts.

By this time, my kids were bored out of their minds, and we were all wondering what we should do. I eventually managed to get a voice call to Dallin, and by talking fast and repeating ourselves, we were able to have a short conversation, despite the fact that the call quality was horrible and static dominated the conversation. The gist of the conversation was that they were at their house, and we were going to come over.

So, the kids and I went over to Dallin’s house. We wanted to go out and do something fun, like go to the park and/or Chuck E Cheese’s. The girls had been out for quite a while, though, so we wanted to coordinate with them before going out anywhere. Of course, we were not able to effectively communicate with them. Thankfully, they arrived at Dallin’s house shortly after we did.

We had more trouble communicating with one another that evening (from the park, Burger King in Gainesville, etc.), and still more on Sunday. It’s been quite frustrating for all of us. We take our cell phone service for granted, since it’s usually pretty reliable. Jena and Dallin don’t actually have a landline, anymore, so they are pretty much cut off from the world right now when they’re at home (or anywhere near home).

I noticed that when we took the kids to their swim lessons in Manasass, Sunday evening, our phones worked just fine. We still couldn’t talk/message with Jena and Dallin, though, since they were at home. This is the point when I realized that the service problem seemed to be confined to a 5 mile radius around our neighborhood.

While the kids were swimming, I went ahead and called at&t, which brings me back to where this post started: Widespread outage, no ETA for a fix.

I’ll post updates when I find out anything more. Hopefully this entry is useful for some of those at&t customers that have been having similar frustrations. I was surprised that when I Google searched the web, news, and blogs, I did not find anything about this outage, even though it covers a wide area and has been happening for about 3 days now.

I’m having an annoyance right now from some evil marketing company, possible in Maine, or maybe the UK. I don’t really know. They call my grandcentral.com number, and since I’m getting fed up with it, I sent a message to grandcentral support today. Here is that message, which describes the problem I’m having:

I’ve received this call from 5 different numbers over the past 2 weeks. They show up on my grandcentral.com account as coming from the United Kingdom, with a +44 prefix. Here are the numbers:
+44 2074225790
+44 2088082763
+44 2088981403
+44 2088093629
+44 2074413433

When I pick up, the recording is in mid-sentence, and says something like “This is your final notice for an interest rate reduction. Press 1 to speak to a live operator.”

The first couple times, I just hung up.

The second and third times, I tried pressing 1, and got put on hold, but I was on the road and my call got dropped.

The next time, when I pressed 1, I got put on hold for over 6 minutes (all the while planning to place THEM on hold as soon as they picked up), then finally the hold music stopped and the call ended quietly. Nobody ever answered.

The last time, today (2/15/2008) at 1:46pm, I answered quickly, and hit 0 which made the greeting message repeat. It said something like “Hello, this is Heather with Account Services! This is your final notice regarding an interest rate reduction on your credit card! Press 1 to speak to a live operator, or press 2 to stop receiving these notices. Since I’d already shown them that I’m alive by pressing 1 on previous calls, I pressed it again this time. I was on hold for less than a minute, then someone answered, saying “Do you have a balance of $3000 or more on one of your credit cards?” (or something like that). I said “Please hold for the next available operator” and put her on hold. She hung up before I got around to picking back up (I was going to wait at least 2-3 minutes, if possible).

Anyways, I’ve marked all 5 of these numbers as spam on my grandcentral account, and changed my preferences so spam numbers get BLOCKED rather than going to spam voicemail

The problem is, they call from a different phone number each time! I’d like to block ALL numbers that start with +44, or even starting with +4420. I do not expect or care about any legitimate calls coming from numbers that match those prefixes.

So, do I need to just let them keep calling me, and just send them to voicemail, and deal with the fact that they’re going to keep calling me? Or can you block them all somehow?

Every time I get a call where they just hang up, or from a company that’s annoying me, I go to whocalled.us and look up the number/post info about it. Usually the numbers are not listed there, yet, but I’m mentioning this site because if we all report evil spammer companies there, as a community, it will become a more valuable resource over time.

The only reason I ever pressed 1 at all is because I wanted to find out what company was behind this evil automated phone call crap. Since they mentioned credit card interest rate reduction, that narrowed down the possibilities to 2. If I could find out which company was responsible for this, I would cancel my card, and complain publicly about their horrible marketing scheme. At this point, though, after hearing that live operator ask a stupid question, I know that it’s not from any of my credit card companies. It’s just some evil marketing company, and/or scammers. I hope grandcentral is able to help me out with preventing future calls like this!

Lacey and I have had a several different sets of cordless phones over the past 8 years or so. They’ve all had caller-id, and we’ve moved from 900mhz->2.4ghz->5.8ghz.

When I say “sets of cordless phones”, I’m talking about cordless phones that come with two or more phones (and charger cradles) in the box, and only one of the bases needs to plug into the phone line wall jack. The other bases just need to plug into the AC power outlet.

Two or three of those sets were made by Uniden, and I recently re-learned how to do something that I haven’t had to do for a long time. When I wanted to dial a long-distance number that was in my caller-id list, I needed to put a ‘1′ in front of it.

So, I first tried using the directional pad, hoping I could just move the cursor all the way to the left, and then push 1. But the left side of the directional pad is a global hotkey that opens the Phone Book.

Next, I opened the phone’s “Settings” menu, and looked for an option to automatically put a ‘1′ in front of long-distance numbers. Some of the other phones we’ve had allowed you to configure that, but this one did not.

After looking through the settings, I decided to try pushing the button that our last set of phones used for toggling the ‘1′ prefix. With our previous set of phones, if you did not configure them to automatically put a ‘1′ before phone numbers in the caller-id when the area code was different from the one you were calling from, you could toggle it by pressing the pound (#) button.

But, that didn’t work. So I went online and googled for something along the lines of ‘uniden tru9280-4 how to add a 1 before calling from caller id’. I did not get (m)any results, though, so I kept trying variations of that, but never ran across the result I was looking for.

Finally, I went to Uniden’s website, and found the manual for the Uniden TRU9280-4. In the manual, in the section called ‘Using Caller ID, Call Waiting, and Redial Lists’, and under the sub-heading ‘Making a Call from a Caller ID Record’, I found the answer I was looking for.

Here is that paragraph, with the information I needed highlighted:

Making a Call from a Caller ID Record
When the phone is in standby, press [ ] to open the Caller ID list.
Use [ ] and [ ] to find the Caller ID record you want to dial.
To add (or delete) a “1” to the beginning of the displayed phone number, press [*/tone].
Press [ /flash] or [ ] to dial the number.
Note: You can also press [ /flash] or [ ] before you open the caller ID list. When you come to the phone number
you want to dial, press [select/ ].

So, the Uniden has a feature to toggle the 1 from the currently selected phone number, just like the VTech. The Vtech uses ‘#’, but the Uniden uses ‘*’.

Hopefully this information will save somebody some time, someday.

**UPDATE** I just noticed that when I copied/pasted that paragraph from the manual, all of the phone button icons disappeared. So, I uploaded a screenshot of the paragraph, with icons intact.

Baby monitors can be useful, but most have their issues. Of course, I’m saying this based on our experience with some monitors we tried about 7 years ago, so I suppose they may have improved in some ways. We tried a few, which had problems like excessive interference, lack of AC adapter or rechargeable batteries, reception range much less than advertised, etc.

We settled on one, which we’ve been reasonably happy with ever since (enough so that we used it for all 3 of our kids, and in 4 different houses [our old and new houses, and two friends’ houses]): Fisher Price Sounds ’n Lights (pictured at right).

However, the range was not always good enough. Sometimes we’d be a little bit too far from the transmitter, and we’d hear an awful lot of static. If we were just barely too far, then we could just turn down the volume to quiet the static, and still hear if/when the baby cried. But, for those times when the baby monitor was not adequate, I figured out a trick:

I could call my cell phone from the house phone, put the house phone outside the baby’s door, and carry my cell phone with me. Then, periodically, I’d pick up my cell phone and make sure the baby wasn’t crying. Since it was usually night time or weekends when I used this, I didn’t waste my cellular plan minutes.

Over the years, I made a few little tweaks to this procedure, and learned a few lessons. Here are a few tips, from my experience:

- Call mobile to mobile. If your cellular plan, and your spouse’s, both have unlimited mobile-to-mobile minutes, then leave one of your phones by the door, and carry the other one with you.

- Call FROM landline TO cell phone. If you’re doing landline to cell phone, always make the call from the landline, so if the call gets disconnected for any reason, the phone does not end up making that loud, evil, phone-off-the-hook sound.

- Make some noise. If you have some kind of noise in the house, like a TV/radio on somewhere, then it’s easier to verify that your connection is still valid. If the house is completely quiet, and you listen through your cell phone, you’ll just hear quiet, and may question whether you’d actually hear the baby crying.

- Use speakerphone. If possible, put your cell phone on speakerphone. If not, at least turn up the volume all the way, so you’re more likely to hear the baby crying/smoke detector/etc., without having to repeatedly hold the phone to your ear.

- Mute your cell phone. The point is to be able to listen for your baby, not communicate both ways.

- Lock the keypad. You don’t want to accidentally hang up the call or anything. If the connection does get dropped, you have to run back and call from phone to phone again.

MOST IMPORTANTLY:

- Don’t go too far away! This tip is to enable you to go beyond the reach of your baby monitor, but not to the grocery store!

Never leave your child(ren) alone in the house, without at least being nearby. The point is so you can go to the opposite corner of a big house, out in the back yard, or maybe to your closest neighbor’s house, for a limited time. In these situations, you can run to your baby’s aid if the need should arise, within seconds.

If you decide to make a late-night beer run… well, isn’t it a well-known fact that most accidents happen within a mile or two of your home? What if the one time you leave your baby alone in the house, some moron doesn’t stop at the stop sign a few blocks down? Or if, somehow, the house catches on fire? Or if someone gains unauthorized entry to the house (burglar, kidnapper, etc. likelihood may vary depending on your neighborhood, but the risk is there, particularly if you are not in the house). These are the scenarios that always went through my mind, and always kept me close to home.

I’m not sure what actually constitutes criminally neglecting your children, but I don’t believe what I’ve described here is it. I think driving away seems like a logical place to draw the line, if one needs to be drawn in this regard, and that is something I have not done.