Stupid USPS keeps wasting my time

Normally I’m the first person to defend the USPS. I’ve generally had good experiences with them. I’ve only had a few packages permanently lost in my entire life. This time, however, I must complain.

When I send and receive parcels I nearly always use delivery confirmation. The way this works is that the carrier scans the package using a handheld scanner when it’s delivered. This way the seller can confirm that the item arrived at the destination. This is useful in situations where the buyer claims the item was never received and asks for a refund or a re-shipment. With DC you can just point to the confirmation of delivery on the USPS website and the would-be scam artist gets shut up.

Signature confirmation is like a much more extreme version of delivery confirmation for more paranoid sellers. It’s more or less the same as what happens with any UPS delivery. The carrier must give the parcel to a human being at the address and get the signature of the human being. If there’s no human being to accept and sign for the package, it doesn’t get delivered. With DC it’s possible that someone other than the intended recipient will steal the package (eg. it’s left by the mailbox and the neighbor steals it before the addressee arrives home). Signature confirmation is a pain in the neck if you’re the recipient for obvious reasons: you must physically be at the address and answer the doorbell when the mail carrier arrives. When you’re like me and your mail carrier arrives anywhere between 1:30 pm and 5:30 pm depending on the day of the week, it’s a terrible inconvenience to wait around all day.

Registered mail is about equally inconvenient as non-registered signature confirmation parcels if you’re the recipient. It’s better for the seller though because supposedly registered mail is handled in a more secure manner than non-registered mail while in transit. I don’t know the details, but registered mail automatically requires a signature so for the recipient it’s more or less the same hassle as non-registered mail with signature confirmation, regardless of class.

Anyway, I always try to use only ordinary delivery confirmation. Regardless of whether we’re talking about media mail, parcel post, first-class mail or priority mail, I always try for just delivery confirmation when ordering packages. Ordinarily my mail carrier just leaves the DC parcels outside the mail box and I pick them up when I get home. The last three parcels I’ve ordered with DC, however, have all gone straight to the post office and I’ve had to go pick them up. I find that very annoying. DC is DC. There’s no requirement, as far as I know, for a human being to physically accept the parcel if it’s just got DC. That’s the point of the handheld scanner, if I’m not mistaken. That’s also why signature confirmation (which ensures a human being accepts the parcel) is more expensive. If DC required a human being to accept the package, there wouldn’t be much use for signature confirmation since it wouldn’t add any protection that DC didn’t already provide other than the name of the specific human being who accepted the package.

Anyway, it’s just annoying that the USPS would suddenly start requiring a human to accept parcels at the exact time that my apartment was destroyed. It’s enough of a pain in the neck having to travel to the remnants of what was once your home to pick up the mail without also having to travel to the post office, wait in line, and show an I.D. every time a piece of mail with delivery confirmation is sent to you. I’m starting to wonder if maybe the USPS started blacklisting addresses of destroyed homes.

In defense of USPS, I do understand how some people might see this as a an upgrade to the DC service, since requiring the addressee to travel to the post office and show identification makes it much more likely that the intended recipient gets the package, rather than some neighbor or even somebody else (such as a family member) who lives at the same address. Of course, it doesn’t stop an impostor from picking the package up using a fake or stolen I.D. card, but it’s still much more secure than leaving the package at the mailbox.

I don’t see it as an upgrade though. That’s because I’m not ordering any sensitive materials. If I were, I’d use registered mail with signature confirmation or maybe FedEx.

Anyway, hopefully this is just bad luck I’ve had on my last three parcels and not an indication of an actual change to the way delivery confirmation works.

I wasted my entire stupid day troubleshooting this stupid Arris modem

So I’m living elsewhere temporarily while my apartment is being demolished. I’ll be here until it’s rebuilt. Who knows when that’ll be. But that’s not the point. The point is that I have Time Warner Cable here and I’ve had the chance to use Road Runner for an extended period of time now. I’ve used Road Runner at friends’ homes several times in the past and had opportunities to do speed tests and the like, but I’ve never had the chance to use it on my own terms, with my own computers and home network equipment. I’m very upset at somebody — I know not whom — about a grievous oversight in the instruction manual for the DOCSIS 3.0 modem/router TWC gave me. The trouble is that I don’t know who to blame. It’s an Arris TG862G. Frankly, I had never even heard of Arris before they gave me this thing. The installer, who mentioned, by the way, that he has FiOS at home, said that the device is both a modem and a router, but that TWC doesn’t let customers change the SSID or the passphrase on the network, so if a customer wants to change that information, he or she must use his or her own router. I didn’t really care, since I do have my own router and I figured I’d just have to live with a suboptimal home network split on two different subnets (192.168.0.xxx on the Arris router and 192.168.1.xxx on my router). I didn’t think I was able to have TWC put the Arris in bridge mode since the TWC connection is on the account of the owner of the place in which I’m living (though nobody else will be using the connection). I figured I’d either do the 2 subnet thing or I’d simply use my own router as a switch and actually use the Arris router as a router. I figured I’d decide once I logged into the web configuration pages on the Arris and saw what features it had. If they compared favorably with my own router I’d just go ahead and use the Arris and use my own router as a switch (I have a real 24-port switch, but it, along with most of my stuff, is in storage until the apartment is fixed)

Anyway, the reason I’m angry is because either Arris wrote bad instructions or TWC made a slightly modified firmware for the Arris modem with an annoying feature. The manual says you can access the web GUI at 192.168.0.1, which of course is similar to most routers. I connected my computer directly to the Arris via Ethernet cable with nothing else connected to the modem but the coax cable and the AC adapter. I set my computer to get an IP address automatically to rule out the possibility that some pre-existing configuration on my computer was causing problems. I typed in the address, waited… and it timed out. After trying all sorts of other combinations (10.0.0.1, 192.168.1.1, 192.168.1.100, 192.168.0.100, etc…) I finally figured out today (2 days of web searching later) that you can only access the web configuration GUI if you unplug the coaxial cable from the Arris modem first. If you have the coaxial cable plugged in and you try to access 192.168.0.1, it’ll just time out. The fact that this isn’t mentioned in the manual is a major oversight which caused me a huge pain in the neck. All I wanted to do was access the port forwarding settings page, which should be the simplest thing in the world but because I lacked this simple bit of information I had to go on a wild goose chase of searching through forums and support pages, none of which actually mentioned this. Hopefully posting this information will save somebody a bit of time configuring his or her Arris cable modem/router in the future. I just wish I knew whether it’s Arris that made this feature or if it was an adjustment that TWC does to the units they send to customers. I know that Comcast uses this same modem for some of their customers, so I’d be interested in learning if they also suffer from this “feature”.

P.S. The connection tests about 35Mbps/5Mbps to test sites in the NY/NJ area.

I’ll be offline for some weeks

This is the only water-related picture I have handy at the moment.

my apartment is flooded by Hurricane Sandy. Most of my hard drives are undamaged because I managed to move them to high shelves, but a few were submerged. Anyway, the damage means the place is not presently safe to live in, though it’s just as well since all the furniture was ruined. Once the place is fixed and I get some furniture I’ll be back online.