Recently in Geek Category
In between two birthday parties and various football games (U-M loses to Toledo?!?! ND loses, Redskins lose, MSU wins, good weekend for football) and other stuff, I hacked away at some computer stuff too.
Last week, I spent a lot of time trying to convert videos to watch on my iPod Touch. I figured that with winter fast approaching, I'd probably be riding the bus more often on those occasions when I wimp out on riding my bike. As such, catching up on all the stuff I have on Tivo would be cool to do while passing the time. Alas, all my efforts were frustrated by the fact that every video converter I tried managed to freeze up my computer.
I initially thought the problem was with a failing hard drive, so I spent part of the week backing up everything on the hard drive. I then checked the hard drive for errors, but it came back with no problems reported.
My next thought was that it was a heat problem. This was partially confirmed when I ran a tool called SpeedFan that monitored my CPU's temperature. During one video conversion, the computer locked up with the CPU at a temperature of 98 degrees Celsius! That's 208 degrees Fahrenheit, 4 degrees away from boiling water. In other words, hot! So, I popped open the case to take a look, and I discovered that every outlet vent of my case was covered in a layer of dust, preventing the fans from pushing air out, and trapping the hot air inside. I cleared out the vents, and while doing so rediscovered the fact that my CPU fan had a knob I could use to crank up the speed a bit higher, thus cooling the CPU even more effectively.
After this cleaning routine, I was able to grab a show off my Tivo and encode it into an iPod-friendly format. It was a little bit jittery, but not too bad. I'm going to play with the settings a little bit more to see if I can smooth it out some, but I'm calling the geek weekend a success as a result of getting it to work once.
It just goes to show you: if your computer is freezing up, the most likely culprit is the simplest one, overheating. Occam's Razor in action.
Oh yeah, and did I mention, I succeeded in the One Hundred Pushup Challenge! On Saturday night, I powered out 100 pushups! I am still shocked that all my hard work paid off and I accomplished my goal.
I'm going to have to take a break from this tonight, since it's getting so frustrating, but for the past couple of evenings, I've been trying to convert some videos into an iPod Touch-friendly format. There are a couple of reasons for this: I could potentially catch up on Tivo viewing while riding the bus; I could get an AV cable for the iPod and hook it up to the crappy DVD player we got (it is very finicky about accepting DVDs to play) and then have stuff for the kids to watch on those long drives to Michigan for the upcoming holidays.
This is not going well. I've tried just about every converter in the book and every single one of them freezes up somewhere in the middle of the conversion. Of course, most of them seem to use the same encoder behind the scenes, so this doesn't come as much of a surprise. But it's still frustrating. I'm beginning to wonder if it's not something where my computer is limited in what it can accomplish. I even thought I heard an ominous clicking coming from the hard drive last night (luckily I backed up all my important pictures and music, as well as our Quicken files, so I shouldn't lose too much of importance if something craps out. Still, my project has now turned into scouring the computer for things that need to be backed up.).
The one bright side of all this is that I discovered a true gem in the App Store: Mocha VNC Lite. It's free, and it allows you to use your iPod Touch (or iPhone) to connect to a VNC server running on your computer. That's all geek-speak for saying that you can remotely control your computer via the iPod. That's pretty cool for when I don't want to sit in front of the screen watching a conversion tick through slowly. Instead, I can connect via the iPod and watch on its screen as it ticks through slowly. Once I get it set up properly, I could even connect to my computer at home while sitting at a Starbucks somewhere.
So while I still have to figure out the video conversion thing, and I'm still trying to work out a way to sync my wife's Palm with Google Calendar, I've still managed to get some fun things working. Oh, and the iPod is also pretty good at playing music.
You may recall that a couple of weeks ago, I called Verizon to try to reduce my monthly bill for FIOS by committing to an additional year of service. Naturally, they screwed it up. The next day I found I was being charged for online storage and a security suite I never ordered. Then the following week I got a new wireless router from them in the mail, even though it was the exact model I already have! Still, the packing slip said there was no charge, but I made sure to check my bill when I got it. Oh, did I mention that since I only have internet, no home phone, they cannot send me a paper bill, and they have to bill my credit card automatically? Yeah, nice, huh? So naturally I check yesterday for this month's bill, and it comes to a whopping $194.99!!! You guessed it, they charged me $139.99 plus tax for that router they sent me. The best part was that no one in their billing department could even see the bill that I myself could see, and that I could see was being charged to my bill paying account.
After wasting much of my day on hold with no results, I resorted to the Consumerist playbook: the executive email carpet bomb. I found a list of email addresses of Verizon executives, typed up a quick email describing my plight, and sent it away at 3pm yesterday. At 4:45pm, I had an email and voice mails on my home and work phones from Mrs. Brown, who had taken care of everything for me: the router would be removed from my bill, and my FIOS would now cost me $42.99/month. Best of all, I have her direct line in case anything goes wrong again. The only bad thing is that I still cannot get a paper bill and have to auto-pay via credit card.
The whole experience definitely makes me wary of considering them for any bundling of TV, phone and Internet, but I was lucky to get through to the right person who could actually do something about my problem.
Now, if only they could help me with the pennies that Evan managed to shove into my car's CD player, causing it to short out....
Almost a year ago, I had completed my latest freebie spree. Unfortunately, it took nearly all of that year to see any results. But I finally got my $500 Best Buy gift card last week, and promptly used it to order Wii Play, an 8GB iPod Touch, and preorder Guitar Hero World Tour. I was able to pick up the Wii Play at my local Best Buy (Ellie loves the cow racing game), and hopefully the preorder of Guitar Hero will arrive not too long after it's released at the end of October. The iPod Touch arrived on Friday, and I had a lot of fun playing with it over the weekend.
The good: I can use any open wifi hotspot to get online. This includes my house, any Starbucks, and apparently some areas around the Smithsonian. The last two came in handy for getting directions from downtown to a church in Arlington where Lisa had Daisy Scout training. The "find my location" thing is super cool and works very well. It uses known wifi hotspots to figure out your current location and give directions based on that.
The bad: My old iPod used a Firewire connector to charge via the AC adapter. The Touch only uses USB so the adapter doesn't work, and the only way to charge is through the computer. 8GB is good enough for now, but I had to take some music off to make room for apps I downloaded.
I was also able to set up my GMail through the Mail app and used NuevaSync to feed my calendar. The one problem I've run across is that, not having Outlook on my computer, I have no way to get calendar data from my wife's old Palm m100 onto Google Calendar or the Palm. Well, that's not totally true: there is CompanionLink, but I don't know if it's that important to spend $30 on the software. So if anyone has a free solution for me, I'm all ears.
All told, I'm very happy with the Touch, and looking forward to playing with more apps, as I've only had a short time to play in the App Store so far. I'm also checking out how to convert video to the correct format to play on the Touch, so that maybe I can catch up on some stuff that's recorded on my Tivo. So far though, that's been a frustrating experience and the converters I've tried repeatedly crash before finishing the conversion.
I'm having way too much fun with my new iPod touch. And I've hardly used it for music yet. I downloaded a couple of apps and set up my email and calendar stuff. I'm even typing this (slowly) on the Touch. Pretty cool!
In honor of the yearly "Talk Like a Pirate Day," I present my favorite pirate video.
I've been futzing around with a new website setup lately. Since the comment spammers, despite not being able to actually post comments, caused my host to force me to turn off comments on this blog, I've taken a look at some other options, and I think that Wordpress MU is going to be able to get the job done. I hacked around for a couple of evenings and lunch breaks, and came up with the fine site you can see here. Let me know what you think either through email or, gasp, leaving a comment on that site! I think I've managed to work out most of the idiosyncrasies (WP stripping some of the HTML on entries I imported from MovableType, style and layout issues, etc), so also let me know if you see any funkiness.
And yet, there it is: Sid and Marty Krofft's MySpace page, complete with "Krofft Kwikies," 4-5 minutes versions of the original episodes of all your favorites: HR Pufnstuf, Land of the Lost and more. And yes, the special effects on Land of the Lost are just as freakin' hawesome as you remember.
This is going to kill the rest of my lunch break....
The first Land of the Lost "kwikie" is embedded below.
Found via io9, the cool sci-fi blog.
By now it should be well known that I am a big Joss Whedon fan, as well as a big geek in general. So I have to share his latest hawesome work, Doctor Horrible's Sing-Along Blog. There's a teaser trailer out now that you can watch below. I love it. Nathan Fillion as the "superhero," Neil Patrick Harris as the evil supergenius. Too much fun. Enjoy.
Politics really piss (pisses? what's the conjugation there?) me off sometimes. This picture of Barack Obama taking his kids for a bike ride has been roundly mocked as "nerdy" or "geeky." The reasons given: the helmet and the tucked in polo. What the hell is the guy supposed to do? If he wasn't wearing a helmet, he'd get absolutely blasted. No one looks good in a bike helmet. (Side note: it seems odd that he only has one strap going under his chin. All bike helmets I've seen have a triangle shape coming down from the helmet, meeting under the earlobe, then a single strap from there under the chin. Strange.) I suppose you could argue his fashion sense for tucking in a polo, especially into jeans, but damn people, I wear a freakin tucked in polo nearly every day at work. It'd look pretty sloppy if it wasn't tucked in.
It's unbelievable to me that this kind of shit is what people are focused on while the dollar is tanking, gas prices are through the roof, and soldiers are dying in Iraq. But please, let's go ahead and criticize the man for wearing a fucking helmet and tucking in his shirt instead of focusing on the issues.
Bike geek side note: some people have noticed that the bike didn't seem to fit him particularly well. I'm not totally sure on that, but I'm not an expert. In one of the pictures, his leg does seem to be almost fully extended at the bottom of the pedal stroke, so he might raise the seat only slightly. More likely, he probably just needed a slightly taller frame, and he would have been good to go.
Update: And yes, I am White and Nerdy.
From Michael Pollan's piece in the New York Times:
The "cheap-energy mind," as Wendell Berry called it, is the mind that asks, "Why bother?" because it is helpless to imagine -- much less attempt -- a different sort of life, one less divided, less reliant.
Go read, then at least make an attempt at imagining a different sort of life.
So not only is my Guitar Hero 3 for Wii arriving later today, but it was also a "lightning deal" on Amazon today. For $10 less than what I paid for it yesterday. Luckily, they were nice enough to give me a refund of the $10 after I called them up to request it.
Did I mention it's getting here today? I'm on my way home now to go mow the lawn before it gets here.
Good: Evan, after having back-to-back sleepless nights thanks to a 102 degree fever, finally got a reasonable night's sleep last night, allowing his parents to sleep a little better too.
Bad: I got paged for work at 4:30am.
Bad: My adopted daughter from the playground is moving to France in July. They had said there was a possibility of moving to Brussels in the next couple of years, but not Paris, not July! I will miss them.
Good: Guitar Hero 3, in spite of me choosing Super-saver shipping from Amazon, is being delivered today! Squee!
In sad news for the residents of Vienna, Va., the Examiner reports that the city will swap out its traditional July 4th fireworks display this year for a laser light show. An accident at the Vienna fireworks last year injured about a dozen spectators, so city officials voted to spend $22,000 on a non-flammable alternative. No word yet on whether Vienna will also provide marijuana and a Pink Floyd soundtrack.
In other news, I noticed that Amazon had Guitar Hero 3 for Wii on sale today for $15 off the usual price, so I jumped at the chance to use my Amazon gift certificate (thanks bro!) and birthday money. No Pink Floyd on there though, only Poison and Guns N Roses.
So in spite of the fact that I missed out on eating a whole pig at a bonspiel this weekend, I was able to ad-lib a pretty decent alternative weekend. Drive to Chicago on Friday to hang out with my buddy John. We went to a place called Hopleaf for dinner, and I had moules-frites, very yummy, accompanied by a couple of Belgian beers (Tripel Karmeliet and Kwak, with Goose Island Bourbon County Stout for dessert). We went back to his place after and played Rainbox Six Vegas 2 and Rock Band for a little while. OK, so we were up till at least 1:30am (Central) playing. And I have the blisters from playing the drums to prove it. Fun though.
On Saturday we went to the Cubs game. Those rooftops have seriously gotten ridiculous. A couple of them even have luxury boxes built-in. Fun time, Cubbies actually won almost in spite of themselves. Afterward, we headed to Goose Island down the street, and I had the Dead Goat Porter (nice and chocolatey) and the Cubby Blue (with blueberries, not bad). Back to John's for more XBox and more blisters, plus the Final Four beer tasting.
Drove up to Michigan on Sunday morning and met up with the family at Zingerman's Roadhouse for brunch. Grillades and grits were delicious. Then it was off to the Tigers' game for the nightcap. A bit chilly, even though they claimed it was 50 degrees. I managed to find a Leinenkugel's Summer Shandy (citrusy, I could dig it during the summer) at a beer stand, after bailing out from the beer hall after choking through the smoke for a few seconds. Come on Detroit, let's go smoke-free like Wrigley! We stayed long enough to watch the Tigers give up 6 runs in an inning (followed by the now obligatory "Fire Millen" sign to send up a cheer), then headed home.
After a quick IHOP breakfast, I left Michigan at 10am, only to find the Pennsylvania Turnpike completely closed from exit 75 to exit 161. The detour naturally took us on a two lane road that narrowed to one as we drove through a 5 stoplight town. So instead of getting to curling at least an hour beforehand as planned, I arrived 5 minutes early after wolfing down a quick burger. Naturally, we won our first game only to lose the second, and I stumbled through the door after 1am and collapsed in bed after a long day.
Still, it was well worth the trip, and I had a very fun birthday. Thanks to all who helped make it a good one.
Has "Starbucks coffee tastes burnt" become a cliche? It seems to me it has, when every person I know, even those who don't really drink coffee, say that about Starbucks. I just don't think all those people have actually drunk Starbucks coffee (coffee, not lattes), and even if they have, why don't they try a lighter roast?
Discuss amongst yourselves.
Tor is launching a new site, and they are giving away free eBooks from their catalog. All you have to do is sign up for a newsletter, and you'll get the link to download the books when they become available.
The next one is Old Man's War by John Scalzi, previously reviewed right here (4 stars). Scalzi himself is very excited about the new site, so sign up today.
I just saved an extra $6 on my holiday shopping! How? By using Amazon.com's 30 day price protection guarantee. I filled out a form, and literally 10 minutes later, I got an email informing me that I was getting a refund.
If you want to get a price drop refund, just follow these simple steps (blatantly stolen from FiveCentNickel):
(1) Visit "Your Account" and look at all invoices from the past thirty days.
(2) Click on the item names to pull up the current item description/price and compare to the price that you paid.
(3) If you paid more than the current price, copy down the order number and go to:
» Returns and Refunds Contact Form
(4) Check of the item(s) in question and then click the e-mail button. Select "Refund Inquiry" as your subject.
(5) In the body of the message, tell them that the price dropped and that you want to be credited for the difference. It might help to mention the item name as well as old and new price, but I’m not sure that’s entirely is necessary.
That’s it. And keep in mind that this even works if you used a coupon and/or "Buy Both & Save" deal and the regular price later drops, even if the new 'regular' price is higher than what you paid after the coupon/discount.
Here's a tool to help you keep track of your purchases and any price drops: PriceProtectr (with the obligatory vowel dropped). You enter the URL of your item, and optionally when you bought it and what you paid for it (the tool will automatically fetch the current price for you), enter your email address, and they'll monitor the price for 30 days and let you know if it drops.
First, I'm absolutely puzzled about this Guitar Hero thing. No one has fessed up to buying it off my wishlist, so I'm baffled. What's also strange is that Amazon shows that it ships in 1-2 months, while I have seen it in stores at Costco and Microcenter, but the Wii version is completely out of stock everywhere (tip: sign up for Nowinstock.net's email alerts. They have a GH3 for Wii one too, and I could have bought it from Costco.com or Amazon yesterday if I hadn't already been in hot water for buying the Wii).
I canceled the last of my freebie signups today. I've qualified and been confirmed for a $500 Best Buy gift card and a $500 Visa gift card so far, and I think I will try for a $500 Lowes card next, since we need new doors for our basement and upstairs. You can see what I signed up for on this spreadsheet (the first two sheets are what I did). To summarize, for the first card, I paid $13.94 net, which included 50 songs from eMusic (I bought Spoon's latest and a bunch of versions "Jingle Bells" for Ellie, eMusic is also very easy to cancel by logging into your account on the website). I gave away the cat litter (and they canceled my trial via email without me really asking them to). Today I canceled Critic's Choice, even though I was tempted to keep it so that I could buy some gift cards for Christmas at a discount. On the second card, I actually made $6.35, thanks to the $20 Exxon gas card that Great Fun sent me. They were also the most annoying to cancel, though it wasn't horrible. They just offered more stuff for staying signed up, but I really wasn't interested. Grant Consultant canceled via email, real easy. And Rising Star was a tiny bit of a hassle just because it required shipping stuff back to them.
So there you have it, all told, I spent $30.58 out of pocket, got a $2.99 refund and a $20 gas card, for a net $7.59 spent. And for that, I should be getting $1000 worth of gift cards in a couple of months.
I'm obsessed with this freebie thing now. I've done 2 $500 gift card offers, and the first one has now been confirmed, all I'm waiting on is for it to be shipped (which I hear takes quite a while). (Update: I've actually been confirmed on both gift cards as of today, so I've got $1000 in cards waiting to be shipped. Rock. I should also mention that it's been very easy to cancel everything that I didn't like so far, but I may just be lucky on that front.) And adding to my great scheme, I've got another offer lined up for a "free" iPod touch, which coincides nicely with my plan to sign up for a free one month trial of Blockbuster online, which we are going to use to get some DVDs for our drive up to Michigan at the end of the month. Funny how things work out like that sometimes.
Now, does anyone need any kitty litter? Because I have a box of it that I'm not using....
Just ran across a list of "friends and family" discounts for various stores that are coming up this holiday season. Of particular interest to some would probably be the Toys R Us 15% discount code (orders over $150). I'm eying the $60 portable DVD player from Radio Shack this Saturday myself.
I have a couple of things that I have been looking for that I was hoping would be on sale during the holiday season: portable DVD player(s) for the minivan and new cordless phones for the house. We didn't find any particularly great deals on DVD players, but a couple of places had these Panasonic DECT phones on sale for $50. I had actually planned on trying to go in to Sears this morning, figuring it would be less crowded than Circuit City, and buying the phones. But lucky me! Sears put them on sale yesterday on their website. Yes, their Black Friday deal was released on Thursday, on their website so I didn't have to fight the crowds. I almost biffed though by checking "store pickup" instead of using their free shipping. Store pickup would have involved actually going in to the crowded store! So instead, we'll wait a couple of extra days to get them shipped to us. And then hopefully the battery will last more than 30 minutes, and we won't get crazy static all the time.
Now, to see about that DVD player. We're going to need it if the 8-10 hour drive up to Michigan for Christmas is going to be tolerable...
I mentioned a while back that I caught the freebie bug again, but that this time, it wouldn't involve selling out my family. Not too long afterward, I tried out a couple of the offers: a $500 Best Buy gift card for 3 offers, and a $500 Visa card for 3. The cat got out of the bag last week, literally, when the kitty litter trial I signed up for showed up at our door. Did I mention we don't have cats? Needless to say, Lisa was a bit confused. At any rate, it's going really well so far. All my offers have been credited, and I sent in my confirmation forms. Now I just have to wait, and also make sure that I cancel the trials before they charge me again. So far, even that has gone well. The kitty litter people canceled my trial when I really only asked them how long the stuff was going to take to get to my house. I was also able to cancel the "Grant Consultant" trial over email, and the "Rising Star" deal was easily canceled over the phone with no hassle (I just need to return their CDs now). I also received $20 in gas cards from signing up for "Great Fun." So far, I've spent $16.93 on one gift card, and $10.74 on the other, and gotten that $20 in gas back, so net, I'm out $7.67 at this point, and while I still have to spend a small amount shipping CDs back, I'll be just over $10 to potentially get $1000 in gift cards. Not bad for a couple of hours of my time. Now the most frustrating part, the waiting, begins.
I know it's going to take a while to get the gift cards, butt I do really wish I had the Best Buy one right now, because they have a nice deal on this 26" LCD HDTV that I might have been using the card on. Oh well, I knew I was going to have to be patient, so hopefully I'll get something in time for maybe the Super Bowl, otherwise, I'll settle for my birthday (yes, 5 months from now).
Sometime before the end of the year, we're going to end up buying a minivan, most likely a recent vintage Honda Odyssey or Toyota Sienna. We'll take a look at what kinds of deals we might be able to get for a new one as end-of-year closeouts, but we're not above buying used either. I already had our Intrepid in for an appraisal and CarMax offered about $1700 for it, so I figure we should be able to get $2000-2200 somewhere else, possibly.
The thing that I'm looking at now is the Smart car, which is finally being released in the US early next year. You can put a $99 reservation fee down now for one of their little beauties, which run from $11k to $16k. They should also get somewhere around 40mpg, comparable to our Civic hybrid. Coincidentally, our hybrid could fetch about $12k to $14k as a used car sale. When we visited Rome for our anniversary years ago, these little Smart cars were everywhere, and we just loved them. The only caveats are that it's not exactly a practical minivan backup (only two front seats, no back seat), I'm not sure how well it would do in the snow/ice (though they claim it handles well), and I'm not sure I'd be able to fit my curling brooms for those drives up to the club (though the front passenger does fold down for more room). I suppose we could always just keep the Intrepid around for emergencies. Hmm... What do you think?
I put in a new plugin (on my blog at least) that enables AJAX commenting. This just means that when you hit the Submit button to send a comment, it will automatically appear on the page. I also enabled registration, which may be necessary for becoming trusted (I haven't figured that part out yet). The good news is that you can still leave comments the old way, by commenting "anonymously." The other good news is that there are many different ways to "register," including creating an account on this server, using existing Vox, LiveJournal, or TypeKey IDs, or my favorite, using your OpenID.
Let me know what you think, and if you have any problems.
I've got almost everything squared away on the website upgrade now. The main page has all the links back to the sub-pages, and is aggregating new stuff nicely (notice the splash of color in the entry titles to correspond with the source?). I figured out the category archive bug that was confusing me, so now the category archives show everything in the category, instead of the past N entries. My own page has all the junk on the sidebar I used to have, minus the book widget, which I still need to figure out. That one may take a while, because the plugin I used for that has changed dramatically, and it also didn't import the old records like it was supposed to (though it didn't destroy them either). I may have to dust off some SQL-fu to hack my way around that, though there is also a different plugin that may end up doing something similar to what I want.
As a reward to myself, I'm going to be picking up a FREE bar and 4 barstools sometime this weekend. I honestly have no clue what they look like, nor do I care. It's a free bar, and I want it. Now I just have to get my neighbor to let me borrow his truck so I can go pick it up! Woo! Man, I hope it doesn't suck.
Let me know if you see any bugs or glitches. Hopefully you feed readers didn't even notice anything (well, except for my stupid triple post about the upgrade).
I don't think that anything crazy will happen, but just letting everyone know I'm going to be upgrading to MovableType 4.01 soon, so my apologies if I screw anything up. If anything, the only thing you'll notice is the formatting of the page getting all screwy. Wish me luck!
Geseundheit. Looj is the latest iRobot creation, a robot that cleans your gutters. At $99 and fall coming up soon, I'm so tempted to get one... Not looking forward to cleaning the gutters, that's for sure.
So I watched Bionic Woman last night and this morning. Sort of like the Heroes premiere went, it was largely a setup episode to get Jaime her bionic body, and introduce the Katee Sackoff character (she just wants to be loved, is that so wrong?) and a few others who will come into play later (her boyfriend's possible evil dad). It has potential, but I was pretty disappointed in the performance of Michelle Ryan. She was pretty good in the action scenes, but was fairly bad in anything that required, oh, acting. Hopefully she'll get better, but she's no Jennifer Garner.
I still have the Chuck premiere on Tivo to watch. But I did watch the Prison Break premiere, which was the best premiere for that show so far. Too bad the audience didn't show up for it (down 2 million viewers from last year).
Just for fun, check out user buckshotwon (aka Adrian Pasdar) on YouTube. Some good behind the scenes videos there.
SunRocket finally acknowledged that they are going out of business on their home page. At least they stopped taking new orders! They also finally sent an email to customers about the situation, offering two companies who are taking on SunRocket refugees: Packet8 and TeleBlend. Packet8 has been around for a while, and they are offering the $199/year plan. I've never heard of Teleblend before, and it looks like they are brand new, and possibly are some of the same people that were behind SunRocket (they magically appeared right after SunRocket went under), so no thanks. While we were gone, we got our equipment from Verizon VoiceWing, but I haven't had the chance to hook it up yet. Our SunRocket stuff still seems to be working, which is good, but who knows how long it'll last. So for now, at least, we'll be moving it over to VoiceWing. I will let everyone know when and if they need to use a new number.
I also got a Verizon flyer for the FIOS triple play: $99/month for TV, phone and internet. When we got home yesterday, one of the DirecTivos was on the fritz, but easily revived. Unfortunately, it has been doing that more frequently, and I worry that it may go kaput soon. It would be an excuse to switch services, so I am going to look into how much it would realistically cost to move everything to Verizon. The Verizon flyer is so poor that it doesn't even tell you when the $99/month rate expires, just that it requires a two-year internet commitment. It also doesn't say how many boxes it includes, since you have to have a cable box to use it. Technically, it could be cheaper than our current services, but maybe not, once you figure in taxes, extra boxes, etc. I did notice that Tivo has a new lower priced HD unit, and selling off the DirecTivos on eBay could help fund that. Hmmm...
So there you have it. Keep trying the old phone number for now, until we tell you otherwise. And if you don't get through, let me know!
Well, there seems to be no hope for SunRocket, so I reluctantly signed up for Verizon's version of VOIP today. Their landline service just costs way too much. For $20 I get everything I would get for $45 on their landline service. What the hell? Stupid phone companies... At any rate, I will be trying over the next couple of weeks to port our old phone number to VoiceWing, and we'll see how that goes.
In the meantime though, I've managed to snag an invite to GrandCentral, Google's latest acquisition. Their pitch is that you give out one phone number, and it stays with you wherever you go. It basically just forwards calls to the number to any other phone numbers you would like: your cell, home, work, whatever. It's very flexible too, as you can designate which numbers will ring which phones. So, for example, our neighbor around the corner probably wants to talk to Lisa at home, not me at work, so I can set it to only ring the home phone when they call. Vice versa, if I'm waiting for a window company to call me back, I can have it ring me no matter if I'm at work, or on the way home. And if no one answers, Grand Central is the one place to check your voicemail, which you can do online, or have it sent to you in an email. You can also designate certain numbers as "spam" so that they don't get through to you. I used this feature a lot in SunRocket.
My GrandCentral number is 703-539-5150, if you want to try it out.
Oh, and I do have invites to share, if you are interested in trying it out. I got my invite from an anonymous stranger at InviteShare.com. Now if only someone would invite me to Mint.com!
Un-frickin-believable. SunRocket, aka our phone provider, is going under, according to the New York Times. I heard rumors on Friday, but didn't really buy into them until just now. I'm still stunned, and I don't know what to do. Obviously, I'm a bit wary at this point of signing up for another cheapo VOIP service, but we'll have to figure out something. Unfortunately, we are also going on vacation to Michigan for the next few days, so I probably won't be able to take care of anything until I get back. For now, if you can't reach us on our regular phone number, try my cell, or Lisa's (yes, we are aware that is a California number. Deal.).
You know what really pisses me off is that they didn't tell anyone about anything, all the way up to the bitter end. If I had known even a week ago, I could have made plans to switch to someone else. But now, it looks like we are stuck in limbo, and we may even end up losing the phone number we've had for the past 6 years. Dammit this pisses me off!
We were psyched last week when we got our refi check. Ultimately, I planned to open a new savings account for this money, but I was lazy and decided that I would open the account online rather than try to make it over there with Lisa during their regular hours (9-4). Big mistake. Our credit union has now had the money on hold since last Wednesday (we technically deposited it Tuesday, though it was almost 7pm by the time we deposited), and is not going to release it until Thursday. I called up to complain and find out what's going on. It was a local business check, which should have eliminated two of the normal reasons for a hold (the other being the large amount, which we couldn't do anything about). The first person said they would call and have a copy of the check faxed over from where we deposited it, and then a manager would take a look and see if the hold could be released. So much for "Check 21," the revolutionary law that was supposed to make everything electronic and make check processing faster. Instead, two banks that are physically located within 10-20 miles of each other can't even figure out if the other one has the money. That rep said she would call me back after getting the copy. 3 hours later, no call yet, so I called again. The second person said that they don't call over, that it's the member's responsibility. So I asked if the first person lied, and she got all flustered and said the original person would call me back. Finally, the first rep called me back to say that she hadn't heard back from the service center yet, and she called again and it should be 15-20 minutes until she finds out. At this point, it's pretty much pointless because the hold is being lifted after COB tomorrow, but it's the principle of the thing, as it often is for me. It just bugs me that I put this big fat check into a non-interest earning account, with the goal of getting it into an interest earning one fairly easily, and it's turning out to be the complete opposite. This is exactly the kind of thing that makes me switch to a different provider.
Update: They finally called back about an hour later and said that the hold had been lifted on the check. Now how hard was that, really?
When I first fell in love with Michelle Pfeiffer....
Lots of good links here
And YouTube has all your favorite songs. Reproduction, reproduction! Where does the pollen go?
A couple of weeks ago, I caught a bad movie on Sci-fi called Dragon Storm. I thought I recognized one of the actors, and sure enough, I pegged him as Maxwell Caulfield, Michael Carrington from Grease 2. The crap that is stuck in my brain...
I managed to ride my bike to work today, on the actual day, unlike last year when it was pouring rain and I wimped out. There's still a chance of rain this afternoon, so we'll see how that goes. It was a good day to ride, nice and cool, and I left early enough that there weren't a huge amount of cars on the road.
Last night, I made butter. After reading about it on Z Recommends, we asked Ellie if she might want to try it sometime. She didn't believe us that butter was made from milk/cream. So naturally, we had to show her. She didn't want to shake the container, so I ended up doing it all. Evan helped a little, but then fell asleep on my lap to the rhythmic shaking. After shaking for a while (10 minutes maybe? I wasn't keeping track), we had whipped cream. After shaking it really hard for another minute or so, the cream had separated out into butter and buttermilk, and we drained the buttermilk a couple of times, and then we were done. The butter from scratch was delicious on our Zingerman's bread (Mother's Day gift for Lisa). And Ellie was... mildly amazed.
I'm going through the process of getting our house refinanced right now, and as a part of this, I needed to get documents faxed to me. Yeah, I can use the work fax machine, but sometimes I just don't feel comfortable with this, especially when I don't know when the fax is coming. K7 offers a free (!) voicemail/fax number for this exact purpose. All you need to sign up on their website is an email address. You set up a PIN, and decide whether you want messages stored on their site and/or sent to your email (I chose to send it to my email). After you sign up, you're assigned a random number in the 206 (Seattle) area code. If you don't use the account for 30 days, the number expires and goes back in the pool, but you can re-register and get a new one if needed. For me, we should be done with the whole thing somewhere around that time, so hopefully I don't have to worry about it.
I tested it out by sending myself a fax from the work machine and it worked fine. The only strange part was that I had to press "Start" once the phone picked up to make it aware that I was faxing. A minor issue, really. I just got a "Good Faith Estimate" faxed to me from one of the banks, and the quality is quite good, about the same as a regular fax. The emails are sent with TIFF attachments, which store multiple pages in a single file. These can easily be printed out if needed.
Shelly is too good at these trivia games. The first Unplugged performer was, in fact, Squeeze. My cousin Bill went to a Glenn Tilbrook (former Squeeze member) concert in 2001 which led to this article/book by David Segal.
But the greatest Moment was a solo show by Glenn Tillbrook, the former lead singer of the now-defunct British band Squeeze. Just him and an acoustic guitar. Near the end of the evening, at the tiny Iota Club in Arlington, he posed a question. How many people would like me to play the next several songs in the parking lot? It was nearly unanimous. We trundled out the door, maybe 50 people, led by Tillbrook, who took his place on a ramp in the rear of the club and played -- unamplified -- the Squeeze classics "Pulling Mussels (From the Shell)" and "Goodbye Girl" while people danced under the moonlight. It was my kind of ecstasy. Then the cops came and shut it down, after complaints by neighbors, which made it even better.To be in that parking lot was to feel like you were in on something that was sublime but fleeting. It's hard to explain, but I can sum it up with the highest praise in the history of high praise: You just had to be there.
Do you have a favorite Live Concert Moment? I, sadly, do not really have one. Everything these days, as David Segal says, is so prepackaged and preplanned, that even the encore is disingenuous. My favorite live performer of all-time is, oddly enough, Garth Brooks. The man knew how to put on a fucking show. He is closely followed by the Saw Doctors, and Elton John with Billy Joel. One of my favorite moments was the Bill Kirchen concert at Nottoway Park last year, when Ellie received a real musical education.
What about you?
This is awesome. Highland Township in Pennsylvania is eliminating the franchise fees it collects from cable subscribers as a way to combat the rate increases from Comcast. From the article:
Comcast purchased Adelphia Cable in July and gained control of cable in the Gettysburg area. In January, it increased rates by about 2.6 percent for the average customer and moved Hallmark, CourtTV, Country Music Television, Oxygen and Shop NBC to the more expensive digital cable lineup.
Highland Supervisor Carl Keller wholeheartedly supported eliminating the fees.
"It's just ridiculous what (Comcast) is doing to us now," Keller said.
So of course we never made it out for our picnic on Friday. As I was leaving work, I realized it was just too damn cold for a picnic (oh, how I long for the days where it's too hot for a penguin). Instead, we headed out to pick up our Easter pictures, and stopped for lunch at Chutzpah, the New York deli near the mall. Great choice. I blew the Lenten meatless thing all out, and had their Sailor sandwich (pastrami with knockwurst, grilled onions, and melted swiss on rye). Didn't even come close to finishing it, but man, it was good. The better news is that not only do they have a location closer to our house, but that location will be open for dinner now.
After lunch, we ended up at the bowling alley, a nice safe indoor, WARM activity. You know I'm getting old when I hurt myself bowling. I think I have some sort of carpal tunnel issues, because the first ball I threw must have come out of my hand funny, and yanked my two fingers a bit out of whack. Now, I have occasional shooting pains when gripping things with my right hand. I suspect it has something to do with holding the kids mainly with that arm, and I'm hoping that if I'm careful it will get better. Still, how embarrassing to get hurt bowling!
On Saturday we had our annual Shriners Easter egg hunt. Ellie did a lot better grabbing them off the ground quickly, and we didn't even have to dip into our safety stash (in case she didn't get many). She had a good time watching the puppet show too. And of course, Saturday night, MSU won the hockey championship!
On Sunday morning, we heard Ellie's door rattling open, and she wandered out into the dining room where her Easter basket was sitting. She stopped dead in her tracks, and ran back into our bedroom and whispered to Lisa, "Mama, I want some breakfast.... And the Easter Bunny brought me Crocs!" We had gotten her special Disney Crocs for our trip to Disney World, and obviously she was pretty excited. She loved all the stuff she got, making it kind of like a mini-Christmas. She was even better at finding the eggs this year, though it took her a while to find the one we always hide right at her eye level on the china cabinet.
We wrapped up the weekend with a yummy Easter brunch at our friends' place. They are way too fancy for us, so we love it. Mimosas and ham, can't beat that.
Oh, and don't forget that the Islanders made the playoffs on Sunday after a heart-attack inducing last second (literally) goal by New Jersey to send the game to overtime. Thankfully, the Isles came away with the win in the shootout, eking their way into the playoffs where they are bound to get crushed by the Buffalo Sabres who have MSU alum Ryan Miller in goal. Nothing like middly mediocrity for my New York teams. Squeak into the playoffs, out in the first round.
For your Monday amusement, Bring Your Own Big Wheel racing down Lombard Street in San Francisco (the famous twisty street).
How cool is this? I took a chance and signed up for SunRocket through this website CrazyRefund.com. I had no idea what to expect, but they said they would give me $80 back if I signed up for Sunrocket with their link and stayed signed up for 32 days (past the free trial period basically). This morning I got an email from PayPal saying they put $80 into my account! Wow, and I didn't even have to check up on them! So, in essence, we paid $200-80=$120 for 15 months of phone service. Awesome. That money will soon find a happy home in our new online savings account. I am a money saving fiend!
Our old phone number is being transferred over to SunRocket by April 9th. This shouldn't mean anything to anyone trying to call us. The old number was forwarding to SunRocket anyway. The only difference will be that the caller ID when we call other people will go back to the old number. Our old phone company immediately sent me a "Please Stay With Us" letter offering $100 to stay. Uh, guys, I'm saving well over $250 over the next 15 months by moving to SunRocket ($255 before taking into account all the long distance charges, taxes and fees). And after that, they're still going to be over $15 cheaper every month. See ya!
I get really annoyed when I see all these self-professed "life hacker" or "financial advice" web sites spouting their nonsense on how you can save $600 a year (or whatever) just by brown-bagging your lunch! I already do that bitches, give me some useful damned advice!
And so I present to you The D's financial advice for the day. Are you tired of your bank's crummy interest rate on your "savings" account? Then don't use them! We just opened an account on HSBC Direct. It's an online savings account. What this means is that there's no physical branch to go to, which is not a problem, since they give you an ATM card, and you can deposit or withdraw money by linking your online account to your regular bank account. It also means that they save on the overhead of having to pay tellers and they save by not having branches all over the place, so they can offer some nice savings rates. The regular rate is 5.05% APY, which means that a deposit of, say, $2000 will be worth $2101 at the end of one year, far better than the measly 1.6% APY our current savings account earns. But until April 30, the rate on new deposits is 6.00% APY. You can't beat that with a stick.
Consumerism Commentary has a good roundup of rates to be had. You can even get 4% on your checking account if you switch it to ING Direct!
Now wasn't that more useful than me telling you to bring a sandwich for lunch every day?
Michigan is home to the world's only floating post office. The J.W. Westcott II mailboat delivers mail to vessels on the Great Lakes passing through Detroit.
Also, there is a blog called "I did not know that yesterday!" It aims to inform you of things you did not know yesterday. But I did not learn about the floating post office from them.
On Monday, I received my SunRocket "Gizmo" from UPS. This after emailing customer support at 9am on Friday, receiving a reply at 4pm that they were "backordered" on the gizmos, then having it ship out later that night. After opening the box and reading the "Quick Install" instructions, I was baffled. The colors of the ports and cables they mentioned were not matching up with my gizmo. I went online and found the real instructions, and was able to hook it up fairly quickly. Not exactly inspiring confidence so far. Luckily, the service is up and working fine.
I did run into a few snags along the way though. Back when I had our basement ceiling exposed, I ran a lot of wiring around, and tried to get everything centralized to the utility closet. All the TV cables run back there, and I thought I had all the phone lines run back there too. Turns out I did not, and the kitchen phone line, the one line we use for our cordless phone (i.e. the only one we ever use) was wired to the outside, not to the "home run." This meant that after I thought I had hooked up the gizmo correctly, whenever I would pick up the phone to dial, it was dialing both the landline and the VOIP line. This got really confusing when I would hear "Your call could not be completed as dialed" at the same time it was ringing.
I finally figured out the problem, but the wiring was too far under the ceiling for me to rewire the correct way. All I could do was cut the kitchen line, and move the cordless phone to a different phone outlet. This is not a huge deal, but it does leave the kitchen phone outlet mounted on the wall looking pretty bare and silly.
After figuring out the wiring, I set up our landline to forward all incoming calls to the new SunRocket line, and disconnected the landline. You may notice that calls coming from us show a different number on the caller ID for a while, but if we end up sticking with SunRocket, I will switch our existing number to them, so that should only be temporary.
At any rate, last night we made several calls (Disney planning and such) and no one seemed to notice anything untoward about the connection. I believe it even passed the wife test, which was "I like to make phone calls that I can hear the other person on the line and I like to keep costs to a minimum." Check, and check.
The Grooming Lounge has two locations in the DC area, one in Georgetown, and one closer to me in Tysons Galleria, aka Tysons 2. They bill themselves as "the country's premiere destination for quality men's grooming products and services." I had never heard of them until Lisa bought me a gift certificate for their hot lather shave. Since we were heading out on Saturday night, I decided that Saturday would be a good day to give it a try.
Walking into the Grooming Lounge, you are greeted by a well-dressed gentleman who takes your coat and escorts you to the waiting area. The waiting area is just two short benches with two small LCD TVs to get your SportsCenter fix on, but just next to it is the bar. Yes, a full bar is waiting for you. The host will ask if you want a drink, so be ready and order something other than a rootbeer like I did. I noticed they had Maker's Mark, so maybe you'll want to try some of that.
After a short wait, your "shaver" (for lack of a better word, the person who will be shaving you) arrives and takes you back to your barber-style chair. Only this chair has a neat twist: it pivots and full reclines so that you are totally comfortable during your shave. The shaver (whom I will call Becky from now on, since that's who did my shave) will ask about how you normally shave, whether you are sensitive in any particular area, and then explain the journey upon which you are about to embark. Then it begins.
First up is your first of seven (hopefully I remember all of them) hot towels. The hot towels help get your beard and stubble nice and wet, and open the pores as well. Following the first hot towel is the pre-shave face wash, which contains lavender, aloe and rosemary oil. I should mention at this point that at no time did I feel anything other than masculine. They're not going to let you walk out of there smelling like girly flowers or anything. You're a man! It's not girly at all, it's just indulgent. Becky scrubbed my face, removing any layers of dead skin, and getting all the grime and dirt off. This was quickly followed by another hot towel. I should also mention at this point that they never really rinse your face with water. They remove the previous application of face wash, lather or whatever with the hot towel, patting your face with the towel gently, and never rubbing the towel on your face.
After the second towel came an application of their shaving oil. The oil was a mix of meadowfoam, peppermint, and avocado oil, with a clove scent. I could feel it tingling my face, all over my day-and-a-half old stubble. Then it was time for the third hot towel. This was followed by more shaving oil and their hot lather. Time to shave? Not so fast my friend. Time for a fourth hot towel.
After the fourth hot towel, you start to wonder if you're ever going to feel a blade. Well, now it's time. After another application of shaving oil and hot lather, the shaving begins. Becky shaved this pass with the grain of my stubble. In retrospect, all that time she spent rubbing my face with oils and soap and lather, she was figuring out how the hair on my face grew, and by the end, she was more familiar with my face than I was. The Grooming Lounge uses Mach 3 razors with more hefty handles than you will find in your local store. They believe that there is some benefit to having more than one blade, but that 18 blades is probably too many. The first pass, again, went with the grain. Be prepared to stretch your face for the shaver, as they don't want to stick their finger up your nose to get to the hard to reach areas.
Next came the fifth hot towel. After this towel came some more oil and their own shaving cream. The cream is heavier and thicker than the lather. Becky used some water to moisten the cream and prep each area she was working on as she shaved. This set combined the across the grain pass with the against the grain pass, assuming that I am remembering everything correctly. Yes, against the grain. By the time she got to this point, my stubble was almost non-existent, but the against the grain pass got it right down to nothing.
After the sixth hot towel, Becky applied the fragrance-free aftershave with olibanum, almond oil and lavender. She noted a couple of the spots that she was going to finish off, and let me run my hands over my face to check it out. Very impressive! I didn't even notice anything wrong with the spots she noticed. She cleaned up those spots and applied the after shave, and it was time for one last hot towel. This hot towel was immediately followed by a cold towel, to close up the pores and get rid of any lingering stuff on my face. Finally, one more application of the aftershave balm, and I checked out my face in the mirror. Beautiful.
Becky gave me a soft sell on all the products she used on my face that day, as well as some stuff I can use with a brush, if I ever get a new one (the Calvin Klein piece-of-shit had the bristles come out of the handle after about 2 weeks of use, and no glue will keep them in the handle). I checked out with my gift card, which conveniently has enough money on it to pay for the shave and the tip, well earned by Becky, and I was on my way.
How good was the shave? Was it worth $50 plus tip? You're damn right it was. Look, it's not something I'd do every day, every week, even every month. It's definitely an indulgence for special occasions. If this place was around when I was getting married, the groomsmen would have all been in there getting hooked up for the wedding. I, according to Lisa, will be going back there for an anniversary shave. It's that good. Lisa stripped Evan down, and compared the baby's bottom to my face. A close call. My face was extremely smooth, but has been weathered by 32 years of living, otherwise, it was smooth as our baby's bottom. I had three other women touch my face that night, and all three were ready to send their men to the Grooming Lounge.
You can buy all of the products I mentioned (except the hot lather machine, and you're on your own for the hot towels) at their website. All but the lather part is included in their "Greatest Shave Ever" kit. I get nothing for referring you to them, which is a shame, because I'm gonna be pimping this place to everyone I know. I can't personally vouch for their $50 haircut, or $30 manicure, but the Hot Lather Shave is well worth your time and money.
I decided to go with SunRocket for our VOIP service. Their current plan is $199/year with 3 months free, and they have a 31 day trial period, with no activation or equipment fees. I also found a site called CrazyRefund.com that purports to offer you $80 cashback if you sign up through their link (and stay signed up for 32 days), which knocks the price down to $7.93/month. I have no idea if it will actually work, but I figure it is worth a shot. They did respond to an email I sent them asking about how I would get paid, so that much is good. I guess I'll find out in a month or so.
Right now, it seems my order is still processing through SunRocket, so I have no idea when I will actually get the "gizmo" and be able to try the service out. But you can call my new temporary phone number and leave me a voicemail. The cool thing is that it will send me an email with the message as an attachment, so I don't have to wait till I get home to check it. They also have a lot of stuff that you can control from your account's webpage, like blocking certain numbers from even ringing the phone. So beware, or you'll be blacklisted!
Just last month, I switched all my email over to Google Apps for Your Domain. It worked very well, as I was already using GMail for my email as it was.
While GAFYD was nice, it didn't entirely integrate with all of Google's services that I used. It has Calendar and Mail, but not Docs or Reader. Well today, Google unveiled a new version of Google Apps that integrates Docs and Spreadsheets. You can also upgrade to their premium version for $50 per account per year (that'd be $100 for me, since it's just me and Lisa). The premium version includes 10GB of storage for your email! (Google Apps limits you to 2GB, and does not dynamically add to that storage like regular GMail does) Not too shabby.
The New York Times article linked above claims that this is Google's attempt to really go after the business user that is sick of Microsoft Exchange and Office. I can't say whether that will happen (I imagine smaller businesses will switch, but larger ones with a big infrastructure will stay with Microsoft), but I'm glad they added documents to my account. This makes it super easy for me and Lisa to share documents if we ever have the need.
Now that we have an Internet connection which is actually capable of handling VOIP, I'm revisiting the topic. I have a standing referral/recommendation for Vonage, but I was wondering if anyone else had any opinions. I'm browsing around and looking at ViaTalk and SunRocket as well. Leave a comment letting me know your experiences.
I arrived home on Friday evening to see the Verizon van in front of my house, and the installer getting all the equipment out. Awesome! This guy braved the icy conditions to run the new fiber-optic line from the telephone pole straight to my house, and hooked everything up by that evening. He was rewarded with homemade chocolate chip cookies that Ellie helped make. A couple of quick tests showed that my connection is now 5.18 mbps download, 1.87 mbps upload speed. So now instead of downloading at 40-50 k/sec according to Firefox, I'm downloading at 500k/sec. My podcasts in iTunes take at most 3-4 minutes, and that's when 3 are downloading simultaneously. I am very happy, to say the least. This'll definitely work for VOIP, and I'm cancelling my old DSL today. Seriously, it is faster than my connection at work.
On Saturday, we had Evan's official Christening portrait done. Relatives should expect their copy in the mail sometime in March. Very cute. We also hit up Costco, for a very rare quick trip, and then braved the crowds to check out Wegman's. Wegman's is much loved by Northeasterners for some reason. To me, it was a packed, difficult to navigate annoyance. Maybe it would have been different if we had known where things were like we do with Whole Foods and Safeway, but as it is, I'm not planning on going back there any time soon. It's really far away from us, and we've got almost all the same stuff locally at the Whole Foods. And Whole Foods has more competent cashiers. The Wegman's cashier spent half her time ogling the cart fetcher ("Omigod, here comes the love of my life. He is soooo hawt!").
We decided on Sunday to head downtown and try to catch the Chinese New Year parade through Chinatown. We got there in plenty of time, but then ran into a parking crunch. I knew we should have taken Metro. There was some gymnastics meet or some such at the Verizon Center, so all the close parking was taken, or cost $20 for the "event." When we finally parked at the outrageous price of $17, and arrived in Chinatown around 2:30, the parade was already over! Poor Ellie was disappointed, as she wanted to see the cool dragons (we had seen some the day before at the mall after Evan's pictures). So instead, we joined the other hipster parents and went to the National Gallery. Seriously, you have never seen such a collection of MacLaren and Peg Perego strollers. I really wanted to shoot myself for being one of them. At any rate, Ellie enjoyed the impressionist paintings of ballerinas (she's starting ballet in April), and especially enjoyed the gelato (the only food place that was still open at 4pm).
We finally went back home after a long couple of days and had our barely Chinese stir fry with Japanese soba noodles and watched the PBS Chinese New Year special which featured a lot of dancing, including a really cool glow-in-the-dark dragon dance while Evan watched in his Chinese outfit that we bought in Hong Kong years ago. Yes, pictures of that are definitely forthcoming.
Character arrays must be large enough to actually hold the string you are trying to put into the array. Bad things happen otherwise. Only took me almost a full week of troubleshooting to remember that lesson. Damn it.
The Verizon guy is on his way over to our house to install FIOS right now, so I'll be heading home soon. Hopefully this will be something to make me happy going into the weekend.
Our second trek out of the house today was more successful than the first. We had rescheduled Evan's appointment, and while I couldn't make it up the hill in our little Civic, I was able to build momentum to go down, and then back up the other side, and took the circuitous route to the doctor. Evan is okay, no RSV, just a bad cough that should clear up in a few more days.
By the time we made it back home again, the plows had finally made it to our street, and it was clear as a bell. Except for the giant pile of snow they left at the end of the driveway. I had fun smashing through that, with snow spraying up all over the windshield.
By the time we got home, I had also gotten a call from Verizon saying they needed to reschedule the FIOS installation. No surprise there, but it was nice that they at least called to reschedule, and within the 8-12 window when they were supposed to show up. I couldn't tell you how many times technicians from the cable company or whoever just didn't bother to show up or call. At any rate, we're hoping to get it done Friday afternoon.
Ellie and I just came back inside from making snow angels and shoveling the rest of the driveway. The snow is really heavy because it's so wet, so my back is aching pretty good right now. It's so heavy that Ellie barely made a dent when she flopped back into it to make the snow angel. She just kind of rested on top of the snow. And now she walking around the house with her snow pants on, for some unknown reason. I am a lucky guy to have such cute kids, and a wonderful wife too!
It was a crazy weekend, for sure. The first time both sides of my family have been in the same room in a long time, and Lisa's family were all there too, including the Lisa's aunt's 16-year-old step-daughter who kept giving me flashbacks to the 80s with her Tom "Top Gun" Cruise sunglasses and her Madonna "Like A Virgin" tights under skirt outfit. Everything went very well, thanks in large part to Lisa's obsessive planning skills. She managed to get everything fine-tuned so that all we had to do once we got back from the church was throw some fruit together, and start eating.
The Christening was a good excuse to get all the family together and to see everyone again. We tend to see each other mainly at weddings and such, which happen regularly enough. My two remaining grandparents are the big impetus for doing the religious stuff. They are the ones who go to traditional Latin mass and refuse to take Communion from anyone but the priest. It's interesting that without ceremonies like this, we'd probably have to make up something else so that we could get everyone together for a party. For me, it's not about the religious aspect any more, it's about having our families welcome our new child into our big family.
Non sequitor segue: This is just one way that my generation (so-called Generation X) is different from preceding generations (Greatest, Boomers). When we were younger, we were considered slackers, until around the time Time magazine ran a cover story taking a new look at us. More recently, Time took yet another look at us, and realized we had grown up and were raising our kids in very different ways than our parents probably raised us. Whether we are all "Alterna-dads" or "hipster parents" or "grups," we have different ideas about how we want our kids to grow up.
The crazy thing is that for one day, four generations were in our house sharing the joy of a new child, and nothing else mattered.
After months of anticipation, it appears that Verizon will be installing FIOS, their fiber-to-the-home broadband service, at our house on February 14th. Unfortunately, due to the time it took for them to roll it out to me, the price will be a bit more than I thought it was going to be. But prices on VOIP telephone service have gone down as well, so it will end up being a wash. I'm still a little pissed that they were running a promotion during the last week of January, which is now expired, which would have netted me a $100 Amex gift card. Oh well, you can't win em all. I may try to sweet talk someone into it when I get the chance.
One minor rant about it real quick. I previously mentioned how I "pre-ordered" FIOS. I called them up, and the rep told me someone would call me back by February 15th with a "priority" installation date. Only there was no way I could figure to check on my pre-order status. Instead, when I called the number, the rep just offered to sign me up for a pre-order again, and said if I had already done so, I had to wait for the call. The problem? If I went to Verizon's own FIOS page, I could sign up at the same time the rep was telling me I could still only pre-order. Here I am, a proactive consumer who wants to order their product, and they keep telling me it's not possible. Not exactly the picture of competence. Hopefully FIOS will make up for it.
Trivia: Verizon pronounces it FY-ohs, but acknowledges that the word is Irish Gaelic for "knowledge." The Irish pronounce it "fiss," which is what I'm going to call it from now on.
I was listening to the new "George 104" station [side note: 104.1 used to be the last remaining classical music station in DC, but recently they changed formats, but did one of the coolest things a big radio station's done in a while: they gave all their music to 90.9 WETA, and asked them to switch back to classical. 90.9 is a public radio station and had previously switched to all-news. So classical lives on. Since I'm not a classical kind of guy, I support them by listening to George 104: 70's, 80's, and whatever we want], and on came a familiar drum beat and guitar riff. I could have sworn it was going to be Wild Thing by Tone Loc, but it wasn't. Do you know which song from 1978 he sampled? Post your guess in the comments, then click the Wild Thing link for the answer.
I know you're all on pins and needles wondering if I went through with my insane diaper order. Well, you can stop wondering. Here's the order:
Subtotal of Items: $114.15
Shipping & Handling: $43.02
Super Saver Discount: -$43.02
Promotion Applied: -$30.00
Total for this Order: $84.15
2 "Huggies Baby-Shaped Fit Diapers, Size 3 (16-28 Lbs), Disney, Pack of 144 Diapers"
Health and Beauty; $30.59
1 "Pull-Ups Training Pants with Wetness Liner for Boys, 2T-3T, Mega Pack (44 Training Pants)"
Health and Beauty; $15.99
1 "Motorola Mini USB Travel Charger for RAZR V3 , KRZR K1/K1m, SLVR, PEBL, and Q Phone"
Wireless Phone Accessory; $6.99
1 "Huggies Baby-Shaped Fit Diapers, Size 5 (Over 27 Lbs), Disney, Pack of 112 Diapers"
Health and Beauty; $29.99
Somewhat annoyingly, they forced me to have three separate shipments if I wanted Super-Saver shipping. Not a big deal, really. To my surprise, they shipped out the diapers the same day I ordered them, and they arrived at our house the next day! They don't pack them in a separate box, they just slap a label on the side, and out it goes, so I guess that's why they got here so quick. I'm still waiting on the Pull-ups, but obviously Evan doesn't need those for a while. And now we have a boatload of diapers in the basement waiting to be used. Evan must be tuned in to these things, because he picked yesterday to have a ginormous blowout poop. He set a new record by getting it all up his back and into his hair. It's so much fun being a parent, ain't it?
Who sees this and thinks, "Bomb!" Apparently, everyone who lives in Boston. I would have laughed at the little guy flipping me the bird and cheering up my commute, but I'm not as paranoid as a lot of people are post-9/11. Like Boston's mayor:
“It is outrageous, in a post-9/11 world, that a company would use this type of marketing scheme,” Mr. Menino said in a statement. “I am prepared to take any and all legal action against Turner Broadcasting and its affiliates for any and all expenses incurred during the response to today’s incidents.”
Or, you could train your bomb squad to recognize what is a bomb, and what is a Lite-Brite children's toy.
The building where I work has a little coffee stand on the first floor, and every day around 3pm, we head up there for coffee and a snack. Yesterday, I decided to add a couple of pumps of Hazelnut syrup, because it's free. And somehow, the coffee just tasted off to me. I wasn't sure if the coffee itself was too bitter, or what, but I suspected that they had slipped in a sugar-free syrup on me somehow.
So this afternoon, we went back up again, and I went over and checked on the syrup's label. Sure enough, sugar-free. So for all of you who doubted my beer reviews, that goes to show you just how sophisticated my palate is. Either that, or sugar-free syrup just really tastes that bad.
Anyone out there actually watch the State of the Union? Really, what's the point in listening to a lame duck president trying to sell his policies to a hostile opposition-controlled Congress? So no, I didn't watch a minute of the speech.
Instead, I watched "Heroes" on my PC in HDTV. As I mentioned before, I bought a cheap HDTV tuner card, added the Philips Silver Sensor antenna, and I was able to tune in all the major networks with no problems. The only remaining issue was the software. The NVidia PureVideo decoder was the only one that allowed smooth playback of the HDTV. I tried a bunch of different PVR software packages (the one drawback of the cheap HD tuner card is that it did not come with any bundled software, which might have made this step easier), before settling on GB-PVR. It could stand to be prettier (downloading a different "skin" may help in this regard), but it does have a decent interface, and was the only one that I was able to use to download a program guide in order to schedule recordings. So I scheduled Heroes to record a "season pass," and waited for it to start airing again.
On Monday night, my PC recorded Heroes without a hitch. Last night, I watched the episode during the State of the Union address. At two points during playback, there were some glitches which I attributed to the fact that I was doing other things on the computer while it was recording. But these were very minor blips, all things considered. The other drawback is that the 1 hour episode of Heroes took up about 8 GB of space on my hard drive. Until I'm able to get a second, bigger hard drive, I will really only have space for about 5 hours of HD recordings at a time. That's not too bad, as I could probably record Prison Break, Heroes, and Lost in HD and watch them each before the next episode airs. It would also be nice to have a real HDTV to watch them on, but I realize that's a long ways off.
Part of the point of this exercise was to see if it would eventually be possible to wean myself off of basic cable/satellite TV: Sci-Fi, cooking/home shows for Lisa, Ellie's kid shows and ESPN (noooooooo!). With cable TV show