December 16, 2005
So after much trial and tribulation, my DSL service FINALLY went on. They had told us December 9th, but it wasn't live when I tried it then. Mary Lou called them a couple of days ago and they told her sometime before December 27th…a date they referenced in an email from the DSL group even though the web and phone check system still said the 9th. Anyhow, I worked all night on Wednesday which allowed me to work from home on Thursday afternoon. Before dialing up a connection I popped the phone line into the DSL and was happily greeted with a blinking "DSL" light. I did what I call my "DSL Happy Dance" (it's not a pretty thing folks), ran the installation routine that sets up the account and I was good to go. Goodbye crappy dialup service from LocalNet and their bad DNS issue and constant disconnects!
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I've suffered through a return to dial-up Internet access for the past several years. I've now gotten the ball rolling on switching back to a high speed connection -or have I…
Several years ago I had a high speed Internet via my cable operator. But due to one of my many unemployment incidents I got rid of it to save some money. Then a couple of years after that I cut my cable service to just the local broadcast channels for the same reason. As a sidebar, I have to say we really don't miss it that much and at $7.00 a month it's hard to not be happy with the decision.
Anyhow, my life has finally rebounded to the point that I'm gainfully employed and I started on convincing my wife of how nice it would be to have a high speed connection again. She reluctantly agreed. But because we've cut our cable service to the minimum we can no longer get a cable ISP connection without upgrading to the standard service again. I don't have the need or desire to return to a $80-$100 a month cable bill so the answer was easy: DSL.
Verizon offers DSL in my area and I know others around my neighborhood have it. Thus it was a viable option. I'm not currently a Verizon customer so in order to get DSL I had to also our switch phone service over. With the cost of my current phone service and dial-up access it's only going to be about $20 a month more. So the call was made, the switch was on…
For about 2-1/2 weeks that is! The cut-over date came and went and nothing happened. Calling Verizon revealed that our order had been cancelled. Why? Blah, blah, blah. In short they blamed my current provider for not releasing the line. This proved to not be true. (I guess I should also note that they lost our initial order right after it was entered because the rep didn't save it. He had to call back and reenter it again.) Thus the order was reentered (again) and I awaited my new cut-over date. The catch here was that they wouldn't send out the DSL package until we were ported over and they could verify DSL availability. So the second cut-over date came and went without anything happening (again).
Once again the order was cancelled! As it turns out they had been enter the wrong code on the order! I guess at this point I should also note the phone service is in my wife's name and she's the one that's been doing the leg work. Me? I've been doing the whining and complaining at home! ;) So being the shrewd businessperson that she is, she spoke to a supervisor and squeezed them for a free month's service and a waived "installation charge". This is on top of the initial discounts and what not she had gotten out of them the first time. So now we are (hopefully) entered into the system and should be switched within the next 10 days. Color me skeptical…
It just amazes me how hard companies will work to NOT take your money. Hello? If I had another option I would pursue it, but I don't. Thus I still hold out hope that this will come to pass and I shall be surfing the Internets with appropriate response times!
Several weeks back I was led to Google's new "Individualized Google". Actually I don't even know if that's what it's called, but that's the best I can come up with from the "ig". (Feel free to correct me if you know otherwise.) Anyhow, I played with it a bit and found the drag and drop aspect of it to be really cool, but beyond that I didn't really have a need.
Then a couple weeks after that I had some more time to revisit it and play with it some more. And the verdict? After about a month of use, I'm addicted to the new Google drug! I haven't yet made the switch there as my homepage, but I'd say it's not that far off. Currently I use my Links page and also used to use my RSS Feeds page often. But I've created a lot of FireFox bookmarks that let me quickly navigate/search for things on the sites I visit the most, type addresses in directly or simply Google my way through life. This has made a portion of my Links page obsolete. And the contents of my RSS Feeds has largely been integrated into the new "ig" page as you can specify RSS feeds as part of the customization. This works well, but I have had some problems with RDF feeds not working. But most of the things I follow regularly do work. Goodbye RSS Feeds page? It also has a very nice weather widget and that has largely obsoleted my Weather page also! But as winter approaches, that will likely get used again because my default zip also pulls in the current radar image for me.
And to further pound another nail into my personal website, yesterday I learned about Google Reader! I only played with this for a few minutes, but it quite possibly will become my news reader of choice in the future…particularly if they give me a widget on my new homepage.
Hit me again Google, I need another fix! ;)
I used to post to my blog several time a week and occasionally daily. So what happened? What happened is my job has eaten my lunchtime! I used to surf around to read the news and visit a few sites to gain some fodder for my amusement. But my responsibilities at work have grown to a point that I often work while I eat my lunch. Thus my casual surfing time has dwindle greatly and my in turn, my ability to spin new content here has been hampered.
So what have I been doing? I've basically quit riding my bike since August with the exception of a couple of rides. This again is a work related casualty as every couple of weeks I have to pull an all-nighter which throws my whole schedule off. Additionally I often work late now and need to make up family time so I stay up later and don't get up in the morning as I should.
I've recently started getting up early again, but only stretching and lifting some weights. I'm feeling like a big slug these days and I'm starting to have some pretty serious lower back problems…worse than I have ever had. I know getting back into shape will help, so now I have to make it happen. I still hope to go back to riding outside this season as I've lost a lot of some of the best weather ever for this time of year.
I have managed to get a few odd jobs done around the house including the final coat of polyurethane on the kitchen trim. This has been a job on hold for the past two years because it's a hassle and my wife doesn't like the fumes. But with her and the kids out of town for a few days I pounded it out in a very, very long weekend of work. But it was worth it because now the kitchen is finally complete and it looks great!
I've spent some time with my parents who came to visit for several days a couple of weeks ago on their way up to Maine. They just passed back through this past weekend and headed back for Illinois this morning. We loaded them and the kids up and went out to the pumpkin farm Saturday, but only came back with apples. They hadn't started hayrides out to pick your own yet so we will possibly be returning in a couple of weeks.
I've been working on the next release of PolarBlog (Homing Pigeon) which is the release which will finally allow posting to PB via email. Alan can now start warming up to do his happy dance. ;) I've done a major overhaul of the Installer/Updater Utility that should make things easier for both user and me. I discovered a bug in the recent RSS generator changes I made so a fix for that will be in this release. And I had a request this morning to add some additional CSS to control the comment page which should also be in this release. I'm hopeful to get this all wrapped up this month.
And as you've probably guessed, I've been working a lot! And although it probably sounds like I'm complaining about it above, that's not the case. This is the best job I've ever had and I very much look forward to going to work everyday. One of the benefits was that I got to go to php|works in Toronto. Not just me, but also seven of my coworkers as well. Only three days, but jam packed with lots of useful leaning.
So there you have it —what happened. And it's likely to stay this way for the foreseeable future. So get used to seeing more of my (lame) writing and quick Snapshot posts.
Can anyone tell me they still think invading Iraq was a good idea? Come on, we went there with a weak case against WMD's that proved to be false. Then the administration started to spin it as part of the "War on Terror" —which it is…now. But originally it was about WMD's and Saddam. The real War on Terror was being fought —and won, in Afghanistan. We then ruled that a "check" when we should have made sure it was a "checkmate" before even considering turning our attention to Iraq. So we went ahead and started a war that nobody needed and those of us with half a brain wanted. We forged ahead and when we found no WMD's we rolled it into the War on Terror —which it wasn't…up to that point. I say "wasn't" because when we invaded there were not foreign fighter in the country. It wasn't until we rolled into town that we became the shit for the flies. The situation there is certainly far from stable and the future is even further from certain. And now I've finally seen some beginning to call it for what it appears to be coming; a civil war.
Don't get me wrong, Saddam was a brutal dictator and he needed to go. But do you really believe he was such an urgent threat to the United States that we really needed to start a war that some of our greatest allies advised against? Yeah, what do they know. Saddam was under our collective thumb and was going nowhere. He was contained and wasn't a serious threat to anyone since the end of the Gulf War. Which is when we probably should have taken him out of power. So now what? We've grown these incredibly huge balls to compensate for the ones we didn't have back in 1991 when we should have!
And before you start blasting me about my "liberal views", I'm a registered Republican. But unfortunately my party has been hijacked by the far right and likely isn't every coming back. And no, I don't support the far left "lets bring our boys home" mantra either. That's not realistic. I'm not sure how we can ever fix the situation and bring them home —God knows they didn't deserve this one. But we can't just cut and run. When your let your dog out of the yard and he shits on the neighbors lawn, you're still responsible for cleaning it up.
The best thing that is likely to come out of this —beyond Saddam being removed from power, is that George W. Bush will go down in history as one of our worst presidents ever.