More FIOS News

I got home from work today to see the Verizon fibre installers finishing up the initial fiber run from the box in the alley over to my house. It looks like this is really going to happen. Though it looks like there’s going to be an issue that I’m going to have to resolve tomorrow. The fiber guys said that my copper connection will be cut when the fiber installation happens on the 6th. If that’s the case there’s going to be a significant service interruption on all of my services, including this blog!. I’m brainstorming a way around this now, and hopefully I’ll have a solution because the clock is ticking.

FIOS

Well it looks like I’m going to be getting my FIOS (Fiber To The Home) installation done on April 6th. I’m really excited about this because the bandwidth is 15M/2M, which is a heck of a lot faster than the 1.5M/384K DSL that I’ve got right now.

Doing the fiber happy dance!

UPS Follies

So I’ve got this APC SmartUPS 700RM that I’m wanting to use instead of the APC BackUPS 350 that I’m currently using. The SmartUPS is better all around, with better communication, longer battery lift, better power filtering, etc. I did a battery test on it yesterday and it failed miserably. The darned thing wouldn’t stay on the inverter for more than about 1 second. So I pulled the batteries and checked them with a meter. One’s showing 11.3V and the other’s showing 12.4V. Can you say dead batteries.

No big deal, I figure I’ll just head down to Fry’s. I didn’t realize it was western Easter until I got there and the parking lot was empty. D’oh! It looks like I’ll be picking them up tomorrow. I’m just wanting to get this thing in place before our lovely severe weather season starts knocking out power left and right.

Compact Flourescent Lightbulbs

I’m continuing to make the house a little bit more energy efficient, bit by bit. This weekend’s project was to replace the 8 60 watt incandescent bulbs in two of the ceiling fans with the compact flourescent bulbs. The problem was that both of them had dimmer switches on the light circuits and compact flourescents don’t play well with dimmers. So I picked up a couple regular switches and replaced the dimmers. In the process of swapping them out I found something that kind of bothers me. The house wiring is 12ga. copper but the wires connecting that to the dimmers is 16ga. aluminum. Needless to say they’re gone and won’t be coming back. The new bulbs are in place and the energy consumption of those two lighting fixtures is now about 25% of what it was. That’s nice since both of them are on quite a bit in the evenings.

Blue Ocean

Today is The Feast of the Annunciation. It’s the one day during the Great Lent when fish is permitted, so it’s been kind of a tradition that we go out for sushi. Alex suggested a new restaurant, Blue Ocean, on the corner of SH 121 and MacArthur in Lewisville. I’ve got to say that the food was excellent and the service was impeccable. This is definitely a restaurant you’ll want to check out if you’re in the area.

Resident Evil: Apocalypse

I finally got around to watching the second installment in this series tonight. It was good eye candy, lots of blood and gore, things getting blown up, and they brought those damned dogs back! It’s worth the price of a rental.

Texas City Refinery Explosion

I just got an e-mail from a friend in Galveston about the BP Amoco plant in Texas City that just exploded. He’s OK, they’re all in shelters now. The news reports haven’t said what kind of chemicals were involved, but if it’s a gasoline refinery I’ll bet that gas prices here in DFW will jump by tomorrow morning.

The Last of the Winch Stuff

I sold my old tires today and used some of the money to pick up the last of the winch equipment. Eric over at 4 Wheel Parts helped me out and saved me a bunch of money. I’ve now got a couple shackles, a snatch block, a tree strap, and a bag for all of it. After that I rerouted and wrapped up the power cables to keep them a little safer.

Abandoning A Piercing

I finally bit the bullet and took out the curved barbell in my navel. It’s been red and nasty since I got it, about 11 months ago, and just hasn’t healed. Reece over at Love-N-Hate Studio in Lewisville helped me out because the balls on the barbell just wouldn’t turn. According to him the jewelry was of poor quality metal, which is probably why it was having such a hard time healing. So now I’m just trying to heal it up. I don’t think I’m going to do another one, but it’s nice to know that it wasn’t really me not taking good care of it.

Robots

Ufie Movie Night’s screening was Robots. Very cute. The writing, in places, wasn’t the best, but the animation was great and there were plenty of funny scenes. Definitely a movie you should see, if nothing else just for the trailer for Ice Age 2. That was histerical!