Letting the cables sleep

Well, two men from my local cable company came out to the house today to try to see what's up with my mysterious internet problem.

After much trial and tribulation, they came to the conclusion that:

1. Plugging my cable wire into the surge protector is a bad thing (though I don't really see why).
2. My splitter (I have a cable going to the modem, and also into my meadia center computer) wasn't too good (again, I really don't see why, but whatever).
3. I have a plug in coaxial cable going from the splitter to the modem, when a screw on coaxial cable is better (O.K. I agree with them on this one, since I was too lazy to go out and buy a screw on type, and the plug in one was working, I just let it go).
5. The last cable guys that came out put a filter on our cable because the cable to our house was causing a lot of "noise". This noise was also creating havoc to our whole neighborhood, which caused sporadic outages to various people, but most notably us (they told me an ideal noise range was in the 40's, ours was in the mid to high 50's, and sometimes peaking into the high 60's, which usually kills the internet connection completely).

So after much testing to find the cause of the noise, we find that the main cable that runs to our house from the outlet box is corrupted! I wonder why they never found that out in the first place? This corruption was causing headaches for not only us, but would cause residual noise for everyone else, making all our cable suck. Well, at least we know the cause now. The bad news is that the guys were incapable of feeding a new line to the house (they were just looking into the internet situation remember?), so they rigged up a temporary line (unfortunately, the line is above ground, so it kinda looks like we are stealing cable), and they tell me that it may be a month before the cable installer technicians will be able to come out to replace the undergound line.

Oh well, as long as I have my sweet, sweet internet access!