A New Hope....

So, our wedding photographer called and asked us if they could use one of the pictures in an insert about "the most romantic wedding locations" in Connecticut. We didn't actually get married there, but traveled the mile out to Avery Point and took pictures there. We said "Sure, go ahead, as long as we get a couple copies". Well, as it turns out we actually were on the COVER of the insert.

We've known about this for awhile now, the picture was actually my facebook picture before I knew it was the one. It's been noted on that picture and in my AIM away message for a couple days now but for those of you that only get your "news" through the website I figured I'd post it here.

Check it out at:
theday.com

There was an little piece, an editorial I think, in the New York Times today that raised an interesting thought. The fact that, in my lifetime, I have never known a United States that didn't have a Bush or Clinton in power, and anybody born since 1989 has only had the actual President from those two families.

During Reagan's time in office (81-89) Bush Sr. was the Vice-President thereafter he was President for a term (89-93). Then Clinton came into the Office for two terms (93-01). Followed by Bush Jr. for two terms (01-current). This in itself ALMOST could be called an aristocracy of sorts. Only 2 families with power in a country for almost 30 years. The kicker would be if Mrs. Clinton were to win, at least one term. Then 2 families would have RULED a country for 24 years (or 28 if she were re-elected). Not saying you should vote differently because of this, just raising the issue. Presidents are limited to 2 terms, but any given family could technically rule as long as they "could". Interesting.......


Note: I listen to it through Audible...which is why I can't remember where exactly this point was brought up

yet another reason to hate iTunes. You have no control over playback speed. Windows media player has this built in, Winamp has plugins for this, iTunes doesn't support this at all..they expect you to open it in Quicktime in order to do this. One more plug on getting you to buy Quicktime Pro i guess. Whatever the case, it's really annoying. Unfortunately, it still makes buying easy, and it still makes podcasts nice.....and as I'm lazy....

So, since his wife is out of town and my wife was teaching lessons, Jon-Boy came over and we had a mini-game night. There were only the two of us but we had our own little LAN party at my place. We ordered some Eat'n Pizza (Chicken, Bacon, BBQ..mmmm...), had some cola, and hit up StarCraft: Broodwar for some fun.

It brought back some memories from my freshman/sophomore year @ Rose, rooming with Jon-Boy, having a good time. During his later years and my later years I don't think I played any Broodwar so it's been 6 years or so since I last played. Even after so long, I still found myself lost in the game, not realizing that an hour had passed .

The first game we got destroyed, but in my defense I hadn't played in awhile though Jon-Boy has played at least once in the last month. The two computer players brought protoss and zerg in numbers and just ran over Jon-Boy (protoss), and then after a little more of a fight, ran over me. We lasted 40 minutes before I gave in. The next two games weren't even fun, we slaughtered them. Then the final game they came at me in numbers first and I was almost wiped out, but as Terran I moved up to where Jon-Boy was and started producing again pretty quick. He held of an initial attack and then I was in there helping. I took over the ground while he was pumping out his starfleet. It took awhile but the end was the same as the last two, utter annihilation of the opponents. Even after an early wipe-out I still managed to end up 3rd out of the 4 players. It was fun times!!

If anybody is interested, I'm guessing we'll do this again in the future!

So, personally as a programmer I would say I've done something like it though not to the extreme or in final code. You never know how long something could take until your about 90% done with it, even more so in the programming world, maybe not knowing for certain how much longer till 95% is done. But, this message was just over the top and excessive. I realize it could take a couple minutes but I wonder what kind of worse case scenario they saw and how often they saw it when they decided to put this message in. So you know I was backing up my iTunes library (added music for the wedding ) onto DVD's and iTunes told me this.




Note: I do not endorse iTunes or any of it's poo... makes buying music easy but mainly makes life hard.

It actually happened pretty much just like he states where he states...

Some setup information, for you people that don't know I am a couple (3) years out of college and I help out with the Jay County High School Marching Patriots band over the summers, also sometime last week my AIM away message said something like "I'm married....who'd have thunk it!!!" and Jon-Boy replied:

mowjak: I would've thunk it, ever since the first time you said "hey, there is this cute guard chick at band" at which point I asked you to get out of the car, then you said "it's okay, she's a junior", I still insisted you should probably get out. finally you said a Junior at Taylor, so I realized she was 21 rather than 17! whew!

Cast:
Me: Played by myself
NISL: Nice Internet Sales Lady played by herself



NISL: "Thank you for your order, have a nice wedding!!"

Me: "You too!!" (in my mind...DOH..she's not getting married...stupid, stupid, stupid...)

Me: "I mean..errrr...you're not getting married....you have a good day"

NISL: "I knew what you mean, you have a nice day, too."

This last Wednesday Verizon finally released the xv6800, only 6+ months after some of the competitors released their version of HTC's Windows Mobile 6.0 based PPC Phone. There were forums and threads all over the internet saying this and that but the majority said that the reason for the delay was the phone was failing testing @ Verizon. This is rather believable as Sprints Mogul was having some major bluetooth problems. I can totally understand pushing back a release for quality reasons, I wish I could have pushed back some of the software releases at my company for quality reasons. There is a saying though; "Sometimes you just have to shoot the engineers and ship the product". Us engineers would definitely tweak and add and tweak and change forever if allowed.

But anyways, I was ok with the delay for quality reasons, if getting a little impatient still. But then, when I could finally get online and use my New Every 2 and get this phone for dirt cheap ( >$200) all h3|| brakes loose! The only place the phone is available is online so I get online and start the process. It gets to the billing address for the payment method, mind you they have NO control over what addresses the credit card and banks allow you to use as this billing address, and I start running into problems.

They have no ways off forcing all banks/cc companies to force their customers to conform to any rules yet they force, FORCE, you to put in a completely valid (USPS verified) address that is NOT a P.O. Box. So you know I live in Eaton, IN where the ONLY way I can get mail is through a P.O. Box. I have a street address for 911 purposes and Fedex/UPS have both shipped multiple things here (lots of wedding presents and a few of my own things ) but the United States Postal Service refuses to deliver mail to my door and does not recognize my street address as valid (no 4 digit extension on the zip-code and such). Since a most online and billing things won't let you use P.O. Boxes I've been using my street address as the billing address and have had ZERO problems till now.

So you start to see the quandry, there's no way I can even change my billing address to a valid USPS address with it not being a P.O. Box. It still irks me that they force that and they have no control over it but I was cool, picked up the phone and called the Customer Support number (for the first time). She pretty much tells me there is nothing she can do and is no way for her to force her way around the address issue but maybe Internet Customer Service can do something so I get transfered (conference call actually) to a lady from Internet Customer Service (why they heck do you have seperate CS departments anyways??). She says there's nothing she can do and if I'd have called her she would have forwarded me to the normal CS service. They tell me to call tele-sales the next morning and see what they can do or to talk to the Post Office as there is NOTHING THEY CAN DO!!

So the next day I call tele-sales and present my problem and once again I get a "we can't force our way around it, there's nothing I can do" speech and I get transfered back to a CS person, even though I said I'd already tried them; they still couldn't do anything supposedly. The only new advice offered is to go into a store and ask there if they could get me something.

I decided to try the Post Office and called their general support line (not local). This lady was a REAL treat. She told me, with no icing at all, that it wasn't there fault or there problem and blamed it on the government and said they couldn't help me. I told her in no uncertain terms I didn't give a rip (maybe my voice was raised ) and that if they would deliver mail to my home I would have a valid USPS mailing address, I sure as h3|| didn't ask for a P.O. box.....she just hung up on me. I was rather livid, both at Verizon and the USPS at this point. I decided to sit back and relax and let my heart rate lower.

Alas, next I decided to believe the Verizon CS people and I soon found myself sitting in a store watching my name on a queue of like 20 people. Don't even get me started on cell phone stores, thats a whole other matter. But when my turn came (a rather short period of 20 minutes, the shortest yet for me) I explained my problem and was told once again that since it wasn't available in stores yet that they could do nothing about it, then the real kicker I thought; he said that once it was available in stores they had no obligation to match online prices. Sure, i understand this, if they can screw you out of 100+ dollars they should!!! grrrrrrr. He did give me a number for tele-sales, which was different than any one I'd called before, what a helpful guy!!

So, as a last ditched effort I called this new tele-sales number and wonder of wonders, I got a guy that didn't automatically say "not my problem, no can do". Though, over the course of 20 minutes I got put on hold like 10 different times; he kept saying "i have to talk to, xxx, let me see what I can do". I was starting to loose hope already, then after the 10th time being put on hold I suddenly find myself talking to a new customer service lady. I was like "here we go again". Though, once again this lady didn't come right out and say the normal bs about whose fault and lack of ability. She tried a few things and soon I found myself once again talking to an Internet Customer Service lady. I had already tried asking for supervisors and managers and had gotten nowhere and so while this last lady was trying to help me I googled and found some big wig verizon emails and numbers.

But as I was starting a scathing email to the VP of Customer Service this lady said the magic words I'd been waiting for...."We can definitely get you set up here". WHOA, what did I hear. She then proceeded to tell me that they had the ability to get around the valid address thing and that she would get my order shipped out that afternoon. I was flabbergasted!! Why had none of the other people I talked to known about this work around. Was this lady a magic being or something?? So she got me taken care of and I was to receive it the next day in the mail...i was excited!!

Finally, to add insult to injury, I find out that it DIDN'T get ordered in time and DIDN'T get shipped out. I called the CS and they told me some supervisor hadn't OK'd it in time. But they said IT WOULD DEFINITELY get shipped out on Monday and I'd have it Tuesday....(right now it's Saturday)....

lets just say I'm not optimistic about seeing this phone before Christmas....

While it's not smart to have your coffee sitting next to your computer, I don't care if it IS in a travel mug that closes, it's definitely not smart to have coffee next to your computer when you have a cold. During violent sneezes one is not entirely in control of ones movements.

Luckily, this time, only my lap and my dignity are damaged; not my laptop.



*takes a sip and sits coffee back down next to laptop

Well now, let me tell you from experience, TONS! I really have no clue how many people actually read my blog and who those people are. (Besides you DaddyV!!) Sure, I have tons of logs and pretty graphs made hourly that say X number of people have clicked on this or viewed that or downloaded that but IP addresses and counts don't give me much info as to specific people.

Anyways, what has happened... If you haven't heard I purchased a house in the metropolis of Eaton, IN!! If I haven't heard from you in awhile I should inform you that I have a rather large inground pool so if you want to rekindle that friendship from way back make sure you get in touch soon and start buttering up early!! I've already have numerous offers of pool boys, lawn boys, etc. We're slowly but surely making progress inside. Not so much that it was in bad shape inside, more that that the choices made by the previous occupants do not coincide much with what we would have made. So lots of paint, some rearranging, some new wainscot, and misc. adjustments to random things have been/are being made.

I currently live almost entirely in the sunroom in the back. Maybe it's habit as it's only slightly smaller than the barn in Terre Haute. I haven't been upstairs in a couple days I'd say!! The biggie is that I can bake things now!! That was my biggest beef with the Barn, lack of proper kitchen. I make use of the basement because thats the bathroom I'm currently using and thats also where all my stuff is currently stored. I use the main floor for the washer/dryer and thats also where I've set up my old sound system, so I've listened to a number of my old LP's there. Upstairs just doesn't currently hold anything for me!!

On other notes I handed candy out to my first Trick-r-Treaters last night!!! Emilie ended up getting here just as the last ones left and it started raining so she didn't get to help but it ended up taking me like an hour to make brownies (from a box!!) because I kept getting interrupted!! It was fun and I saw lots of wierdo kids, let me tell you!!

All this is above and beyond all the wedding things running through my mind nonstop these days. It's starting to hop a little more as time ticks away!! Less than 58 days at the moment!! thats like...TWO MONTHS!! Exciting times...

Oh yeah...and above and beyond all that work has picked back up even more. Things are starting to roll again and I could probably just work 24/7 and not keep up with things...fun times...