Category: Soap Box

NCF DSL Review

[May 2014 – I can no longer recommend NCF as an ISP, please see the comments on the post for a link to an updated article]

The National Captial Freenet (NCF) is the 3rd ISP I’ve had high speed service from.  Originally not having cable, I chose the Digital Subscriber Line (DSL) solution and went with Bell who provided my phone service.  I might still be with them had it not been for Magma changing the rules on their dial up email account causing my @magma.ca address to expire, so switching to Magma (which was bought by Primus) for highspeed allowed me to keep my email address active.  I don’t have much good to say about Primus.

With Bell, I was stuck on the 1Meg Nortel modem for a long time.  My neighbourhood had been upgraded to use the newer higher speeds, but due to my ignorance (and Bell’s lack of information) I kept paying the same premium cost and getting low speed.  Until I found out things had been better for many of my friends on DSL and called Bell to upgrade.  It was a free upgrade, but annoying that it took me calling to get it to happen – I also had some interruption in service in the switch-over.

Calling Bell customer service was always frustrating, you had to run through the standard script – only to get yourself passed along to the next level where you might get someone more informed.  I had an intermittent problem on the line and it was impossible to get help from them.

When I moved to Magma, the switch was smooth on their end.  Bell continued to charge me for my DSL line for a couple of extra months, even though I wasn’t using their services.  A huge thumbs down on Bell’s billing department.

Magma was a great company, and using their technical support I was able to get my intermittent line issues sorted out and fixed.  Sadly, now owned by Primus there is in my experience terrible customer support.  As a Magma customer I was grandfathered over to Primus, but apparently didn’t have full rights as a Primus customers (my customer ID wasn’t even a real Primus one).  After a 20+ minute wait on hold just to talk to someone, I ended up in a frustrating conversation which took at least another 20 minutes to determine they couldn’t give me the service I wanted (DSL + static IP) at a competitive price.

Ages ago, my Dad had pointed me at NCF offering high speed at a very reasonable rate.  I probably should have made the switch a long time ago, but I convinced myself into thinking that maintaining my email identity @magma was worth the extra cost.  Ken had also had some success with Magma as an ISP, but I suspect my recent success moving away from them will help convince him to make the leap too.

Signing up with NCF is done online, similar to many ISPs today.  They do support switching from another ISP and their website recommends a week or two of overlap to avoid losing service.  I cut things a bit fine, but the switch-over looks like it has gone ok (knock on wood).  There was a small mess up with the start of service date, to which I got a fairly detailed email reply promptly – included in that note was the line “any further questions, just give us a call” followed by the office number.  On a whim, I dialed it up to check on one more detail – and was astounded to hit “0” and almost immediately talk to someone.  Better still, they knew what they were doing – and could answer my question right then and there.

As I already own a DSL modem and line filters etc.  The only thing I needed from them was service.  I was able to switch over before my Primus account had expired, and today marks the official start of my NCF service.  When I initially switched (June 25th) I did some speedtests to see how things were.  On Primus/Magma my speeds were consistently 2500kb/s down and 650kb/s up.  On the 26th, switching to my new DSL login on NCF – I wasn’t surprised to see the same numbers.  Today I checked my speed again.  WOW!  4400kb/s down and 650kb/s up.  Maybe its a fluke, but I’m hoping it isn’t.

Summary – NCF offers DSL service for $29.95 a month, no contract.  There is no speed cap, so up to 5 Mb/s down, 800 Kb/s up (max).  They offer static IPs for additional cost.  It is run by people who know what they are doing.  This not-for-profit organization deserves your business.

Not my day..

I’ve got a pretty bad DVD habit, which is pretty evident if you check out my collection hosted on MMDB.  When I first got started, I’d pick up at least one new title a week.  My purchase rate has slowed down, but I tend to binge.

The previously viewed movies at Rogers is a terrible temptation.  Recently I picked up Casino Royale in a 2 for $10 deal.  Unfortunately with dirt cheap prices, I also end up buying movies that I probably should have just rented.  The other movie I bought paired with Casino Royale was Night at the Museum, of course I selected a box that was the widescreen version – yet upon opening it at home I discovered the full screen copy (sigh).  So, back to Rogers for a refund as they had no copies for exchange.

Tonight, a bit at loose ends, I figured I’d visit the local Rogers video store and browse the previously viewed section.  I had almost made it though the entire section of 2 for $15 when I came across a copy of Night at the Museum.  Now it so happened that this was a different Rogers to the one that I had previously bought a mis-boxed full screen version.  I figured my odds were pretty good on finding an actual widescreen version this time (at least, that’s what the box said).

It is starting to seem like I’m doomed to either watch the full screen version, or not see this movie.  Yup, I managed to buy another copy of the movie that was mis-boxed.

At home I figured that I’d check out IMDB viewer ratings on this movie to see if I should even bother to try to find a widescreen copy.  Almost beyond belief, it seems that imdb.com is down tonight?

To top it off, today I had picked up an external USB enclosure to stick a 60gig IDE drive I’ve got sitting on my desk into.  As you can guess at this point, it seems I managed to get one that is DOA.  So it will be off to exchange that sometime next week.  When I do get it working, I plan to pair it up with my slug and possibly use it to run a RESTORE backup server.

Summary: 2nd failure to purchase a widescreen version; Unable to check IMDB ratings as the site is inexplicably down; DOA hardware purchase.  Just not my day.

Playlists

It seems some people are really into creating playlists.  I’m not one of them.  While I have a lot of nasty things to say about iTunes, the smart playlists feature has been the only way I’ve bothered to make playlists.  At least until now.

The other day I was thinking that while its nice to have iTunes recommend songs that you might want to buy that are similar to what you’re browsing in your music collection, and Amazon has lots of recommendations on what you might buy based on your previous purchases.  No one seemed to be harnessing the relationship between things that I already own.

Well, it turns out there is a bunch of stuff out there that does exactly that.

At first I ended up at wikipedia on music recommendation systems.  Further digging turned up something called The Filter which was blogged by Wired a while back, unfortunately it doesn’t seem quite ready for prime-time so I keep hunting around.   Then I came across MusicIP mixer, and a related comparison review article on lastfm.

MusicIP seemed like the best, most available candidate, so I gave it a shot.  The free version is limited, but not crippled.  It installs as a stand alone application, but is aware of iTunes and will read settings from there to figure out where (and what) your music collection is.  Out of the box, all you do is pick a song (or a few) and ask to make a mix.

I picked a random Haujobb track and asked for a mix of 75 songs (the limit for the free version).  The sample_mix was a fairly good selection of the music in my collection that I’d consider to be fairly compatible.  There were a few odd songs in the list that I trimmed out by indicating “less of this” and it shuffled things around (and I suspect remembered the error for later).

I then burned a MP3 CD for the car with these 75 songs (some 500MB).  As an aside, I’m terrible for updating my driving tunes, so what I had in the car was pretty stale.  Well, its been 2 days so far and I’m very pleased with the experience.  This is a much better mix set than the smart playlist I primarily use on my iPod.

One note about the MusicIP system, it needs a lot of processing time until it has consumed your music collection.  I ran my PC for well over 24hrs processing 3500 songs.  This is a one time hit, and I consider it a fair tax for the free version of the software – especially if it gives me an easy way to make new mix CDs, or new playlists for my iPod.

Be it through some social network, algorithm, or mixture of the two – I hope that this type of technology grows in popularity.  As we gather more and more media, we’re going to need better ways to interact with it – and insisting that we manually tag, sift and sort our data simply won’t scale.

Imagine if your email could be grouped and sifted based on how others had handled the same messages?  How about if your PVR could just record the same shows your friends are watching?  If you always answer “yes to all” on that dialog box, why not let me make it a sticky setting?