And thanks go out to Daimler-Chrysler’s marketing department for a fun evening. Last week I got an e-mail offering me free tickets to a sneak preview of Sahara tonight. It was a fun movie, and I was pleasantly surprised to see that it wasn’t a copy of National Treasure. The story line was interesting and it was fun seeing the multiple sub-plots diverging and coming back together.
I thought it was worth the price of admission, but then again I had free tickets!
The installation’s done. I’ve now got a 15/2 connection to the world. It’s running fine and I’m just waiting for all of the cached DNS information to expire so that e-mails and web traffic will start flowing back in again.
The installation was a breeze and the installer was professional and knowledgable. There were a few quirks, though. Because I needed static IPs I had to get one of the business packages as Verizon doesn’t offer static IP addresses on any of their residential plans. Due to that I had to call in to Verizon and spend darned near 2 hours getting them to open a ticket to move the voice service off of copper and on to fiber. That was the easy part, only taking about 20 minutes. The hard part was convincing Verizon to cancel the DSL circuit. Since I only had the circuit through them, with August.net providing my IP connectivity, it was a little harder than it should have been to get to someone who could disconnect it.
None of this will be an issue if you have Verizon DSL (circuit and IP) and go to a residential FIOS offering. It’s the business package that throws everything for a loop!
After a pretty bad day and as a treat for getting more of my paper done than I’d expected I sat down to enjoy one of these Genuine Pre Embargo Counterfeit Cubans that Tiger Bob gave me. It was a 1958 Gourmet Figurado, and was delicious. Smooth draw, a slightly uneven burn, but that’s OK. Flavors of berries and leather in the smoke. I’ve got one more in the humidor and will be looking to see if some show up on Cigar Bid.
My winning bids from Cigar Bid came in yesterday and I was shocked, shocked I say!, to find mold on one of the Puros Indios Maxima Reservas. Cigar Bid was extremely helpful, and is shipping me out a replacement 5 pack and a return label to ship the others back.
That’s good customer service.
I’ve started on the coolerdor for my cigars. It’s funny, all of the parts for this were bought at Wal Mart, for less than $20. A liter of propylene glycol, some wet floral foam, and a Ziplock plastic container. I’m doing the salt test to calibrate the hygrometer now and should be able to start storing cigars in the cooler in a few days.
I ended up at REI today and managed to snag a Hydrapak Overflow 3l camel pack on closeout for a steal. Since I’ve been riding the mountain bike a bit more and Texas summers get a little on the warm side it’ll be nice to carry some hydration around with me! Plus it’s going to get a good test when I ride up to Illinois in June.
I got together with the Ufies to go see Sin City tonight. It was an interesting movie, but I really should have read a little more on the background because there were things I didn’t follow as well as I should. The cinematography was excellent. I was very impressed with how they made many of the shots look like they were somewhere in between live action and a page from one of the graphic novels.
The movie’s pretty violent and gory, so if you’re on the squeamish side or that’s just not your thing you probably wouldn’t like it. But if not, it’s definitely worth the price of a ticket!
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.
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!
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.