gaithersblog.net

From the New MoCo Progressive:

County Councilman and retired CASA De Maryland board member George Leventhal’s comment that “At some point, they [the Gaithersburg city council] need to make a decision and understand that 100 percent of people are never going to be satisfied” has motivated Gaithersburg residents to unleash a firestorm of letters to Leventhal.

MoCo goes on to quote several of the letters.

I wrote of my reaction to Leventhal’s comments in an earlier post.

My intent with this post is to offer a bit of an apology to visitors who have followed a link from the Washington Post only to find nothing related to the story they had been reading.

Recently, I added sidebar boxes to my blog with RSS feeds from various sources. One of these sources is the Washington Post. By including these sidebars, my intent is to give readers (and myself) another opportunity to see what’s being reported in the news websites; I can’t blog about everything.

Now, the Washington Post’s website has this cool feature, called “who’s blogging”, where they use the Technorati search engine to find blogs linking to their stories, and they include links back to those blogs in the “who’s blogging” box on the orginal story’s website. Chances are good that you’ve followed one of these links to my site today (welcome!). In the past, I have had a number of my blog posts — which intentionally referenced a Post story — linked back in that way, and those links have brought in a bunch of visitors, for which I’m grateful.

Unfortunately, there seems to be one weakness in this system: The Post does not appear to be able to tell if a blogger is intentionally linking to a story or even if the context of the link is relevant to the story. More importantly, the Post does not appear to be able to tell if a link was hand-enterered by a blogger, or if the link was generated automatically, as would be the case with the links in my RSS boxes. As a result, there are now a large number of Post stories linking to my blog as a result of the links which are automatically published in the Post’s RSS feed. You are welcome to be confused at this point.

Anyway, please know that I honestly am not carrying those Post links as a way to lure unsuspecting visitors to my blog. I carry no advertising and would have no way to profit from such a ruse. I also carry RSS feeds from two other newspapers, neither of which do this. I thought about removing the Post RSS sidebars, but in the end decided that they were too useful to regular readers of this blog. If by chance you happen to have an interest in Gaithersburg, please do take this opportunity to read through some of my archives and consider coming back again in the future. If not, please accept my apologies, and have a good day.

Don Libes reports,

Comcast was hit with a fine in the 2nd quarter and for the 3rd quarter has not submitted sufficient data to even know if it is in compliance. But partial figures show some decreases in customer service performance.

Complaints to the Cable Office are up 31% from 2nd quarter with 76% for service. (Complaints for RCN are down 40% for the same period.) CTC reported 2450 violations, up 11% from the 2nd quarter and 53% from a year ago. While many have now been corrected, CTC reports 1830 violations outstanding.

Picture freezing is mentioned as a notable problem which the county is receiving complaints about. Hasn’t this problem been going on ever since Comcast rolled out its digital service? Another problem mentioned is the issue of standard installations. This was supposed to have been settled but evidentally customers are still being overcharged.

Comcast is also well behind on its obligation to provide cable service to public facilities. Jane’s report shows 33 outstanding requests.

C. Benjamin Ford writes in the Gazette,

Montgomery County’s cable office received complaints about Comcast from 1,156 people, including from 506 in the past three months.

Comcast’s own records showed the company failed to meet customer service standards under the Montgomery County franchise agreement in six of the first eight months of this year. Data for the ninth month was not provided to the county.

‘‘I’m getting more and more complaints about this when I go to the grocery store,” said County Councilwoman Marilyn J. Praisner (D-Dist. 4) of Calverton, chairwoman of the Management and Fiscal Policy Committee which reviewed the cable office’s quarterly report on Monday.

Gaithersburg has its own cable franchise, but has the same franchisees, Comcast and RCN. I will try to obtain equvalent data for this contract. Notwithstanding this,

Janice Cadel, 48, of Gaithersburg recently found herself one of those who experienced Comcast’s customer service problems first hand, she told The Gazette.

When she called Comcast to change her billing because she added Comcast’s telephone service to her television and Internet service, ‘‘they literally closed out my Internet account,” Cadel said. ‘‘When I called the customer service line, I got hung up on several times.”

She managed to get through the next day and was told her Internet service would be restored in 24 to 48 hours. When it was not restored, Cadel said she called again and was told there was no record of her previous call. Her Internet connection was restored the next day, but Cadel said the e-mails the family received during the outage were lost.

Statistics for second quarter 2006 now released. The New MoCo Progressive has the details.