Matt Rubens

Moving is hell. Fortunately, the hilarity of dealing with Comcast provides a brief respite.

I called Comcast today to set up an appointment to return our cable modem. In an apparent attempt to simplify the process of getting in touch with your local Comcast office, the phone number for every branch is the same: 1-800-COMCAST.

The “conversation” went something like this:

Robot: Please enter your phone number
Me: 650-XXX-XXXX

Surprisingly Helpful Customer Service Representative: How can I help you?
M: I want to return my cable modem in Cambridge, MA.
SHCSR: This is California Comcast. You need to call Massachusetts Comcast.
M: How?
SHCSR: Oh, the system just chooses which state to send you to by looking at the area code of the phone number you enter. But, it doesn’t care if the rest of the number is real or not. So, try calling again, and just choose any phone number you want that has a Massachusetts area code.

I did, it worked, and I successfully returned the cable modem. But, this is a pretty broken system. I’m lucky that I’ve had co-workers (in Seattle) that were from MIT and had (617) cell phones — otherwise I wouldn’t have known any area codes in MA, even after living here for three months.

Using area codes as a proxy for geographic location is inane. Comcast, with all of their digital voice initiatives, should be well aware of that. Hell, the New York Times had a story about this two years ago, and it wasn’t exactly breaking news then.

Just for fun, here’s a snippet from said NYT article:

“How long before Ludacris’s ‘Area Code’ ceases to make sense?” asked Mr. Rojas, referring to a song in which the rapper uses only area codes to refer to locations where he has had sexual encounters. “That song only works if people know where each area code is located.”

Let’s hope Ludacris isn’t courting any of the lovely Comcast employees — attempting to call them could lead to some unwanted confusion.

Fake edit: Looks like this isn’t the stupidest thing Comcast did today.

Update: Andrew Parker feels my pain.  Sup, 650-to-617 brother?

Best birthday cake ever.

I just got an email this morning about a limited beta of the “Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud”, designed to be the S3 of computation.

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) is a web service that provides resizable compute capacity in the cloud. It is designed to make web-scale computing easier for developers.

Just as Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) enables storage in the cloud, Amazon EC2 enables “compute” in the cloud. Amazon EC2’s simple web service interface allows you to obtain and configure capacity with minimal friction. It provides you with complete control of your computing resources and lets you run on Amazon’s proven computing environment. Amazon EC2 reduces the time required to obtain and boot new server instances to minutes, allowing you to quickly scale capacity, both up and down, as your computing requirements change. Amazon EC2 changes the economics of computing by allowing you to pay only for capacity that you actually use. (link)

We’re already having a great time using S3 in our top-secret-startup, and utility computation would be our Holy Grail. I wonder who at Amazon I need to name my first-born after to get one of these beta accounts… Maybe building SIPs gives me enough street cred?

It’s good to be here.