Digital fodder about our family.
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Tonight was the 2nd annual Wii New Years Eve Bowling Tournament.
I didn’t fair so well. I actually expected Maria to give me a run for the money, not Maggie or Michael who whopped up on both of us.
We had prizes for high game, best total and best average. It was a complete sweep for Michael.
For years and years I’ve had a standing bet with a buddy of mine that the Bengals wouldn’t win 8 games. I was a Bengals fan, but I could still see them for what they are, despite all the hype. For the most part that’s been a very profitable bet for me. 2005 not withstanding and which by all accounts appears to be a fluke.
This year however I made a different bet with another buddy, a die hard Bengals fan.
When the Bengals jumped out of the gate with thier awesome 0 – 2 start, I bet a buddy they wouldn’t win 5 games.
Specifically the bet was:
[09/17/2008 11:24:49 AM] Matt Disher: Yes, if they win 5 or more of the remaining 14 (end up with a record of 5-11 or better), then dinner at All-You-Can-Eat-Meat is on me. (Wine not included)… 4-12 or worse and it’s on you.
What’s the Bengals record? 4-11-1
That’s equivalent to 4.5 games.
Which as my buddy points out is Not 5-11 or better, but is also not 4-12 or worse.
So it’s a tweener, and the bet is therefore nullified.
Again, thanks Bengals.
# #
#My love affair with cheap host: http://www.webhostingbuzz.com/ is quickly coming to an end.
When I initially started using them I had some pretty signficant up-time issues. They agreed to move me to a different server. The same one that a buddy of mine is using for his blog that has worked out well. During my outages, his site was always still up.
Then out of the blue, on Christmas Eve no less, they decided to move me.
Since I control the dns of all my domains externaly (not with them) all my stuff broke.
If you want:
Use: http://www.webhostingbuzz.com/
All of this is exacerbated of course by the fact that my broadband is non-existant, so that already puts me in a bad mood.
Granted the hosting is somewhat cheap, but it should be a little more reliable than it’s been. Especially when my recent issue was self inflicted by them. A little notice would have been nice. For the price of hosting, I somewhat expect an issue per-year. But they are running well above that now.
# # # #Maria put this together with Molly’s help. Thought some might enjoy..
Giant stuffed animals (not real ones).
What a pain.
In June we purchased a nice/reasonable teenager car (1998 Escort ZX2). Fairly low miles, good tires, with heat and AC for $1500.
Last week it was wrecked, or rather run into in a parking lot incident. The damage wasn’t all that bad, but the suspension was broken.
The person was covered by Progressive. All in all the claim service has been decent. The problem is they won’t use any used/remanufactured/aftermarket suspension parts. So the cost of fixing the suspension pushed passed the value of the vehicle.
Hence, it’s "Totaled".
It’s still a decent car given it’s purpose. Good gas mileage, working AC, etc.
So we’re taking the settlement, minus the buy back ($250) and we’re going to fix it. Cost to fix: ~$1200-ish. that does not include a new bumper, but does include beating out the dent in the fender so it’s not so bad. Remember, teenage driver, to/from school and work is it’s primary purpose.
So, the Salvage process goes like this.
To get the settlement from Progressive I have to convert the Title to salvage. Cost: $5.00.
I then have to bounce next door and buy a Salvage Inspection Certificate. Cost: $53.00.
The car is now Salvage and as such is not licensed to be on the road. (We can’t drive it). It will be fixed tomorrow or Saturday, but we’re stuck. We can’t drive it until our inspection date which generally runs 30 days out. The body shop had an inspection certificate which they claim is transferable so they made the inspection appointment for us for Dec 22nd. So we’re without wheels until then.
We now wait for the car to be repaired, and for Dec 22nd to roll around. We are permitted to drive it to the inspection location (on the certificate).
Once it passes, we then have to go back to the Title agency and convert the title to rebuilt salvage. (Another $6.00). Then again bounce next door to the registrar and pay to have the plate put back on it (Another $4.50).
The little costs add up, but it’s more the time and running around that’s a big pain in the butt.
It seems to me that this whole process could be streamlined for instant rebuilds like ours. I recognize that most of them don’t go this way, but the typical 30 day lag for the inspection for instant rebuilds is a big inconvenience.
Another fine example of how efficient our governments are.
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_self
TimeWarner/RR is dysfunctional (In case you didn’t know)
December 30, 2008 in Commentary, Opinion by MAD | No comments
I’ve generally been a fan of TimeWarner / RoadRunner. It’s always been a good value for speed/performance vs. Price paid. In the past they’ve always seemed to be better service wise than say Zoomtown.
Now bear in mind, we kind of live out in the sticks in never land Trenton, OH, in between Middletuckey and Hamiltuckey.
When we moved out there (10 years ago), RR wasn’t an option, nor was Zoomtown, so we survived with Dual ISDN, which wasn’t cheap, but got the job done.
About 6 years ago, RR became available when TimeWarner purchased out local cable provider. We’ve had reasonable service since, er at least uptill last year or so.
We’re out in a pretty flat area, and lighting strikes near us are not uncommon. We’ve gone through four or five cable modems in the last 2 years.
In the last 6 months it’s gotten pretty bad. Our cable, specifically our RR was very intermittent. The proverbial crap hit the fan around the 12th of this month when our RoadRunner went out again.
A call to tech support yielded the standard troubleshooting that we always do before we call them. Reboot the router, unplug and reset the modem, etc, all to no avail.
Of course they couldn’t get a tech out for a couple days (like 3). So we again played TimeWarner Courier and swapped out our cable modem. But this cable modem couldn’t be provisioned. They couldn’t even see it.
So we accepted the appointment for 3 days later.
Later that evening, it magically started working. (hurray!). When they called two days later to verify our appointment, nothing was wrong, so we canceled.
Less than 48 hours later, it rained like hell and guess what? Our Roadrunner quit working. “ding ding ding”… Houston we have a problem. So we called tech support, repeated all the troubleshooting steps, tried like hell to explain to them that; hey, when it rains our road runner stops working but no one would listen.
We accepted the appointment for 3 days down the road. Magically less than 24 hours later, things dried up (or more likely froze) and viola, we had working Road Runner. But we decided to keep the appointment. We were told that 3-4 days is pretty standard, if we needed faster service than that we should have RoadRunner Business which is same-day service.
So, I ordered that, what the heck, it’s faster and gives me a static IP. Paying an extra $30 a month seems like a lot but when you consider all the BS we have to go through every time we call, that is money well spent in my opinion.
While waiting for the appointment on the 19th it became more clear that the wetter it is outside, the worse our roadrunner (and cable) service was.
When the tech finally arrived on the 19th, he declared all of our inside wiring ‘crap’. He also said the tap on the pole was bad, but he fixed that, and sealed it up with silicone. He ran a new temporary wire from the pole to our house and said someone would be out to burry a new wire in the next couple days. Funny though, we still had no service. I asked him what the deal was. He said “Your inside wiring is bad and I’m not an inside guy. I also can’t spend any more time here, when you get the new cable buried your troubles will be over”. The guys should be here tomorrow, they work on Saturday and Sunday.
Of course the weekend came and went and nobody showed up. During the week of Christmas we had Road Runner for a few hours here and there when things were dry or frozen. Which unfortunately wasn’t very often.
On Saturday the 27th the guys finally showed up to burry the cable, and burry it they did.
But when they left, we were in worse shape than before. Not only no RoadRunner, but not Cable TV either. Nice… The cable wire bury guys said they’d get someone out today, but then reneged and said Tuesday was the best they could do.
A call to TimeWarner resulted in yet another appointment, no sooner than Tuesday the 30th, which was the standing appointment for having our inside wiring redone.
On top of that, RoadRunner Business could not be installed while there was a repair order in effect for our address.
We tried, to explain to the folks at RoadRunner, that:
A: It does NOT rain in our house. We clearly have a moisture issue, or an issue farther down the line.
B: We at least had cable, until they buried the new cable, now we have nothing. Rewiring the inside of our house will not fix any of this.
They would not listen, so we waited patiently for Tuesday (today).
Of course the first guy shows up to do what? Rewire the inside of the house. We quickly re-diverted him outside. Check the signal AT the house.
Of course this was bad, so we traced it back to the pole and the tap. He allegedly re-did the tap and we now had cable, but no RoadRunner. Those signals were not present at the tap. He now needed to call a linesman.
The line guy showed up a couple hours later. What did he fine? A tap that had been struck by lighting, had water in it and was bad. He replaced that and we were good to go. This should have been done two weeks ago, but no…
We now are waiting for our RR business installation. Which I’m less convinced it worth it. But if it helps us avoid this two week run-around in the future, it will be money well spent.