brb - I have had an idea and need to feed it.

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10:15 Setup and people have already started streaming in.

There’s also the poster below. Print and pin up at your office… Click on the image to get the full size version or if you prefer, click here for a pdf version.

Many thanks to Gichingiri Kuria for the ubercool poster!

So by the 24th of last month my mind was pretty much made up, I was ditching KDN’s Butterfly for Safcom’s 2GB bundle. I headed over to the Sarit care centre on Sunday at 10:00, with all the required docs(copies of PIN + ID) and was the first in line but spent 45 minutes at the desk filling in the order form and having it processed. Since it was a Sunday, the order could not be approved so I had to wait for a call from them to head back over, pay and pick up the sim card. I patiently waited for the rest of the week slowly eating up my ‘free’ 700MB. On Wednesday, they leave a message that I have to settle my post paid bill in full first then my order will be approved.

Thursday I headed over to the care centre at 4:30 and waited in line for 30 minutes. When I got the front, I explained to the rep that I had come for my data line and to settle my phone bill. She called some lady at head office(?) to get the order for the 2GB line approved and told me to wait five minutes. 10 minutes later the order was still not approved so she called back and was told to wait another five. 10 minutes later it was the same story so I told her I will wait till this week then come back. Meanwhile, people are waiting in the queue as we are playing the call back after 5 game. 45 minutes spent.

Today, I figured the line should be ready and got to the Sarit care centre at 3:30 to find 8 people in the queue ahead of me and only 3 reps serving us. I vumiliad in the queue for 1 hour before getting to the rep at 4:30. At first she could not find the order in the system but after speaking to the previous rep with whom I had made the order, she finds it. It still had not been approved and makes a call to the same lady that the previous rep was calling last Thursday and the wait five minutes for approval bs starts again. Me and the rep sat idle waiting for the approval while ~20 people are waiting in line. 20 minutes later she still could not find the approval and calls back and gets told that the 2GB bundle does not need approval and they can just process it at the care centre directly(!@#$@!). 5:15 the rep candidly informed me that even if I got the line today it will take forever, like in days or weeks, to get it activated. At this point I begun getting hints that she wanted me to leave and just come pick it up later. At first I could not quite understand why till I realized it was 5:30 i.e. end of the work day. I was determined to ignore any such ideas but 15 minutes later, after the rep really insisted that it could not be activated today and that I will not have to queue when I come pick it up, I gave in. I left 2hrs after I entered the place empty handed.

On the way home, stuck in traffic, I heard a safcom ad on Capital saying that Kenya is hot because its covered with the new Safaricom HotSpot product, 3G. I wish I could get some of that.

This is just completely unacceptable. I’ve spent 4hrs trying to get through what should be a very straight forward process. So I’m adding my safaricom stink on a new facebook group to publicize a problem that has gotten to a ridiculous level. So c’mon, show some pamojaness by joining the group and share your experiences, invite your friends to join, blog about the group, tweet the group whatever. In the end, if we make a big enough stink, Safcom might will act.

With that done, I’m also trying to figure out where in safcom to direct complaints. Any ideas?

06/06 EDITED TO ADD: So I finally got my data line today. A rep from the Sarit care centre called at 4:00pm and gave me some references numbers to use when paying(2,000/-). I got there at 5:40pm and there was no queue at all(phew) but I’d forgotten to carry the reference numbers with me. At the desk I just gave my names and she located the order, got the sim and I paid for it and left. 30 minutes total. Back home, at around 7:00pm, I tried the new line but it was not able to connect at all. Just when as I was about to tweet about the problem, I got a call from someone at safcom asking if the line was working and we spent 1:45hrs trying this and that before it finally worked.

Its taken 10 business days total to get the line and the whole experience was nasty. The people from safcom I’ve spoken with have been very apologetic about the whole thing and its cool but I hope safcom knows that this doesn’t seem to be an isolated occurence.

15/06 EDITED TO ADD: Ok safcom have really screwed me up. I found out that they put me in the 700MB bundle instead of the 2GB bundle! This might just be the last straw for me.

19/06 EDITED TO ADD: I’m tired of calling up customer care to follow up on the being put in the wrong bundle issue and I just don’t have the 2 hours to waste at their customer care centres. I’m completely stuck now. This is it, today I close the damned account, go back to Butterfly and wait for Wananchi to reach my area.

26/06 EDITED TO ADD: So on Monday, I got all my voicemail notifications for the past two weeks(!) and among them was one from Safcom on the 17th telling me that my line was ready and that all I had to do was pay for the 2GB. I did pay at lunch time Monday and till now the line is not active. Apparently they’ve somehow lost my payment and are trying to track it down. All I can say now is that something is terribly wrong at Safaricom. Terribly wrong.

27/06 EDITED TO ADD: For the past two weeks I have had to repeatedly call to have the wrong bundle issue sorted then Safcom lost the payment I made on Monday. I think my line is finally sorted but not before a blasting of the customer care reps + their supervisor to get this done *today*. I got a text saying “Your GPRS line 710608516 is now on the 2GB Bundle plan. Thank You”. Is this what it takes to get any service out of Safaricom? Either be jerked around for weeks or serve a tongue-lashing and get results within hours? Today marks exactly 4 weeks since I applied for the line and what I hope is the beginning of an event free relationship.

30/06 EDITED TO ADD: I spoke too soon, again. I had barely done 100MB on Friday only to get a text on Saturday telling me I was over my credit limit! All I could do at this point was burst into nervous laughter. I mean I have tried everything from patience to a fault, firmness in my requests, persistence and finally resorted to rant and rave but it seems nothing will get safaricom to act. So Saturday I didn’t even bother calling customer care and just headed to the Westgate ‘care’ centre and closed the account. So, for now its back to my Butterfly connection and as for broadband, I’m hoping Wananchi will be in my area soon. Irony is, I had initially intended for this post to be a howto use safariom 3g in Kenya.

PS: Grabbed the video from the mythbox and was able to upload to google video thx to the google kixp pipe and the somewhat usable local upload speed I’m getting on butterfly shown below

PPS: Those should be Kb/s not KB/S

I came across this article about 2 yrs ago and since then I’ve always wanted to try out the mythtv bit but with a shoestring budget and no spare hardware lying around I never got my chance. So when the machine became free and I realized that its just perfect for SD video(besides, we’re not going to see any HD here for 10 yrs most probably), I just had to do it.

Heat & noise are the main concerns when building a mythbox and if you’re going to be having the thing sitting next to the telly then aesthetics may come into play. Initially I had planned on doing a separate frontend/backend system with clunky pc1 sitting in some backroom and a neat looking frontend in a htpc case. Available funds quickly brought me back to my senses and I settled for having both the frontend and backend on pc1 and just focussing on getting the hardware I needed to keep it cool and quiet.

The stock cpu fan and the power supply fan were too noisy and just had to go. I also had to get a tuner card, remote control, ir receiver & blaster and the telly already has a VGA port so the only extra hardware I had to get was:

Thermaltake Big Typhoon CPU Cooler (product page)
	This thing is HUGE! Its 12cm wide and sits 10cm tall. Check out the images here. It basically looks like something that should come with a pair of ignition keys. I had to fudge the board around the case since the power supply couldn’t fit with it in the way so I had to punch a couple of holes in the case to move the motherboard a bit further down. Regardless, its doing its job pretty well and that’s all that matters anyway. The cpu gets to 47 degrees max compared to the recommended maximum of 67! It would run much cooler 40-43 if I had a proper tuner card that has an mpeg encoder on it but since I went for the cheapest I could get, I’m doing the encoding in software and that’s taxing the cpu a abit. The machines runs at a cool 31 degrees when idle. Its also really quiet. Its rated at 16dBA so its just barely audible at over ordinary environment noise.
Thermaltake 430W Power Supply (product page)
	Here I was just looking for a replacement power supply. The stock one was already dying and was noisy. Nothing much to say about it other than its doing its job well and quietly plus its got enough juice for future expansion.
Microsoft MCE Remote (product page)
	It was either this or building my own. Its an ok remote + receiver + blaster. I can do most of the mythtv stuff with it and its channel changes on the STB are working ok. One problem I have with it though is that it could use a couple more buttons(a separate menu key for starters) or maybe mythtv just has way too many key bindings
ePro Internal PCI analogue TV/FM tuner (product page)
	This thing is cheap and it sucks! I picked up form Bloomerg for just 1,500/-. At the moment I’m getting video from the STB via the composite video port but I’ve been unable to get the tuner working for the FTA channels. It has a philips tuner and works with the saa7134 driver and I’ve tried all sorts of modprobe options but I just can’t get the tv & radio tuner to work. Bah, FTA channels are completely worthless anyway other than for the first 10mins of news at 9 and besides there is the net for that

So far the mythtv experience has been great. Its great to be able to watch those Heroes episodes away from the comp, pause-rewind-forward live tv and stream recorded programs back to the comp. I don’t have any really exciting/unique screenshots so just take a look at the ones with the full feature list here 

What I have is the most basic setup imaginable; just a single tuner card and both frontend and backend on the same box. Its exactly what I wanted for getting a feel of the thing before putting in more cash. What I would like to do next is build a neat little frontend, get a bluetooth keyboard with built in mouse and dump the crappy analogue tuner for a couple of dvb-s cards.

 In a somewhat related story, you know you’re watching too much telly when you see this news title

and you’re wondering why in the world is Warner Bros advising investors on Kenya :) 

Its basically their bambanet offering (2,000/- for 700MB & 12.50 per MB after that) and if you’ve already got the Huawei modem, just head over to the safaricom website and grab the firmware update to get the new service.

Link. I’m shocked to see such a poorly written article up on the BD!

So far things things are running smoothly. I’ve been able to complete a system update of about 200 megs,  pull down my podcasts (~70megs every other day), I’m getting at least 256Kbps for local traffic and the general browsing experience, though not spectacular, is comfortable. This is what a relatively busy day on the link looks like: 

I also got the 30 day subscription for 2,900/- through  MyISP. Compared to what’s on offer in the market, 2,900/- is  a heck of bargain given the service quality.    

 On reliability. The thing has been down thrice in the past two weeks: both Sunday afternoons and Wednesday evening last week.  I didn’t try calling for support but next time it happens I’ll give it a try and see how that goes.

Security. I’ve noticed that someone has been port scanning me but its nothing a good shorewall config can’t handle. I just drop all traffic initiated from the Butterfly end.

AMD is a picture of a tall (6.5 feet), lean, kenyan man, whose stamina, endurance make him take the 15 mile marathon easily without breaking a sweat.

Link 

OS - Tiger (hope to go Leopard soon. I really need the virtual desktops) 

Web browser - Safari (for normal browsing), Firefox (for development) 

IM - Adium, Skype

IRC - Colloquy

Media - iTunes, VLC 

Photos - iPhoto

IDE - Eclipse

Office Suite - Mac Office 2008 (I have to admit that M$ got something right with office)

PDA Sync -  Missing Sync (yah yah I know, windows mobile )

Virtualization - VMWare Fusion 

 What are you using on your mac?