The Comcast guy got here at about 10:30 and it was surprising how easy it was for him to get my cable setup. There were two minor snags, one of which is resolved, the other of which is pending.
I couldn’t get my computers connected to the internet unless I was directly connected to the cable modem. The cable guy “hated” Macs and furthermore, he didn’t know anything about them. He stuck around for about 45 minutes while I tried getting it working, but no luck. He had to go on another call. I spent the next two hours trying myself. I could get a connection if I was directly connected to the modem, but not if I wasn’t. On the other hand, if I plugged the Airport Extreme base station back into the DSL line, it worked fine. I called Comcast tech support. No help there. Finally, on a whim, I thought that perhaps the base station was retaining the mac address assigned by the DSL modem. I performed a manual reset of the base station, reconstructed my network–and everything worked!
I hooked my TiVo up to the new cable box and got it configured for the new channel line up. One nice feature was that all of my Season Passes were updated with the correct channel automatically. TiVo recently provided an upgrade which allows WPA2 encryption, so I was able to convert my wireless network back to WPA2 encryption. That is working great now too.
The final snag was that I was supposed to get a Digital DVR for the bedroom. There were none in the warehouse at the time the service guy went out there. So I have only “basic” cable in my bedroom right now. (That’s fine because I don’t watch much TV in there.) He said he’d keep checking the warehouse today and if they got one in, he’d bring it out. Otherwise, I’ll probably have to wait until next week. Once I have that, however, I’ll have DVR capabilities in both rooms (meaning I can record Gray’s Anatomy and Scrubs since they are on at the same time.)
I was frustrated by the Internet connection issue, but I’m glad that I got it all fixed. On initial glance, I think the cable connection is faster than my DSL. I noticed download speeds of just about 1 MB/second earlier. I’m going to confirm my downloading the most recent episode of Battlestar Galactica from the iTunes store. In the past, it takes about an hour to download. We’ll see how it goes over cable.
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