Saturday, November 19, 2005

What's with Today, Today?

Things have been going good for a change. I spent the week trying to work and unpacking. We have gotten the majority of the work done, with just a little bit of work left. We will finish the downstairs tomorrow in preparation for Thanksgiving.

I bought 14 shrubs (nandina, iris, daisy, and breath of heaven) to replace the ugly dead plants that came with our house. I have planted about half of them so far. It is fun, but hard to keep my attention on. Today we started tree shopping for a tree to go in the middle of our lawn. We are trying to decide on a red maple, or a white crape myrtle. We want something with little upkeep and that will not cast too much shade on our grass. After that we will have about 20-30 more trees to buy for our backyard. I found walk-on bark for $25 CY delivered, so that will be good since we will have about 15-20 CY of planters that will need that and dirt.

I wasn't able to work for Thursday or Friday because my nextdoor neighbor's internet stopped working for some reason. I ended up ordering the lowest tier of DSL service, since that is all they offer in this area (long story behind that, but I don't want to get into it), for $20 a month (I would have had to pay $250 to cancel the contract I was in, and I wanted to keep my e-mail addresses). Then, because that is not fast enough for my work, I also signed up for cable internet at $30 a month. Together these cost less than what I was paying before ($62) so I am happy.

That brings us to the fun story for tonight. I always knew I didn't like cable internet, but now I know it from experience. Here is a chronological order of things I dislike about cable as they happened to me:

1. They scheduled me for Friday morning
2. They never came
3. I called and found out they wrote down my number wrong (4527 instead of 4524)
4. They scheduled me for Saturday morning
5. They gave me a used modem
6. They spelled my name wrong (Seely)
7. I had to do an install off of a CD to start to get it to work
8. It did not recognize that I had a working network set up
9. It changed my network settings
10. It broke my connection to my server
11. The program existed when I entered in the wrong account number
12. It told me I had to get my account number off my first bill
13. The program required that I use a proxie
14. The program completely broke the next time I ran it
15. The first level tech I spoke to couldn't help me
16. The first sales person I was transfered to couldn't help me
17. The second sales person I was transfered to couldn't help me
18. The second first level tech I was transfered to couldn't help me and told me to hang up because at this point the routing was messed up and he was in SoCal

Good Things:
19. The third first level tech I spoke to knew exactly what he was doing and had me up and running in a couple of minutes. What ever he did completely negated items 7-14, and the connection works just the way it should, with no special set up required.

I'm still annoyed about the other stuff, but not so much since I have working internet that is fast (4mb/386k, soon to be 6mb/768k, soon to be upgraded thereafter to 8mb/1mb as money allows). So now I can do my work just the way I need too, not to mention play my much missed Halo 2 online. Monday night I will try to play FarCry with Sam.

Things are slowly becoming normal again.

1 comment:

Jen said...

Hey, so I read your comment on my blog the other day, and I'm glad you "came out" as a secret reader. I really needed to know that others were reading my blog, because I don't always "feel the love" from my regulars. You inspired me to want to write today, so I mention that and you in my post for today. I've read your most recent posts, and when I have more time, I'll read it all, so I can get a better sense of you as a person. I am also going to start reading your wife's blog too...it's cool you both blog..I wish my hubby did it, and I have tried to recruit him to be a guest writer, but he didn't show much interest. It's nice to know that you are a Christian like me, and I am going to appologize ahead of time for anything you think I shouldn't be saying or thinking. Since I have decided to treat this like a diary, and say whatever I want I am probably going to (and already have) written things don't represent the Christian faith too well.
It's hard because I have a reader who is a democrat and I am sure we'd butt heads on some issues, so I don't know how much I can write without offending her. Then I have another reader who supports gay rights, so I feel like I can't say anything negative about gays, and then there are some girls who read it who are promiscuous, so I feel like I shouldn't preach too much. I just have to pretend I don't know these things so I can be myself, because that's the reason I'm blogging. Oh, nice to meet you!! -Jen