Matt D's Blog

Just when you think things can’t get any worse, they go and do so. The market has been total crap since I’ve started investing, and honestly I don’t know really what to do except for sucking it up and getting a paltry 4.x% a year at this point. People with high interest mortgages should give my friend William Flogaus at Quicken Loans a call to see what he can do for you 216-586-8549….aside from that, there aren’t to many opportunities out that don’t require a good amount of start capital to make real profits from. It seems that whatever I invest in goes down the tubes, so I think I might get out of themarket complketely.

After two plus months of not going, last night Leon and I went to the gym again. He had gone a few times on his own during the past few onths, but nothing on a regular basis. We are seriously considering changing our location because there are way too many people in the one we are at, during the 9 PM timeframe.

Today is try 3 for Verizon. There apparently was never an appointment made for me yesterday, but at least this time I got a confimation email. Lets see if I have video by tonight.

Today I played phone tag with Verizon. As I have said earlier, these people need to get their act together.

I originally contacted the 888 number at 10:40 AM. I was told I would hear back from the rep I was speaking with, or from dispatch, in a short while. I called back at 11:40 AM, as I had not heard from anyone. The new rep tried to get me to the order group, but instead transferred me back to the main menu. At this point I am on representative number 3, who says that there are a few departments trying to coordinate with each other to get this resolved, and has a resolve-by time of Tuesday @ 11 AM.I have been told that there is nothing else that can be done at this time.

As of 3:20 PM, I have FiOS Internet active as well, along with the Analog channels of the TV service. I tried hard to get them to send out someone today, but it didn’t happen. As a result, they are sending someone out tomorrow afternoon between 1-5PM, with a request to be after 3:30 PM, as that is when my grandmother will be home.

We’ll see what happens.

The installer arrived this morning at 10:30 AM, literally 3 minutes before I was going to call in and ask what the ETA of my installer was, as my window was 8AM - 12PM. The installer arrives, and starts getting everything ready on the outside - they had not run the fiber to the house a day earlier, as I expected them to. He measured, and found that he didn’t have the correct length of cable on the truck, so he had to go back to the CO (Central Office) to get it. No problem. Comes back, wires it up to the house. Wires up the ONT (Optical Network Terminal - what connects you to the fiber), and proceeds to drill a hole for the power connection to the ONT. Has some fun doing that, couldn’t find the hole the first time, don’t really know where it went haha. Drilled at a downward angle the second time, had no issue. He put putty around any thing coming into the house, so that’s not an issue. Disconnect the phone line from the cable modem, go inside and wire up the new router, and we’re ready to activate the phone. He can’t do anything else until the phone is done. It’s about 2 PM, so he’s making good time so far (Verizon estimates 4-6 hours for just Phone / Internet, and up to 8 hours including TV). We go outside, wire up the phone line, and he goes to his truck to get his laptop and activate things. Says it’ll take a few minutes. I check on him about 15 mins later when I notice that the phone is still out. Says it wont let him activate, need to call in to manually activate. Has more issues. Says will get call back in 30 mins.

1 Hour later, still nothing. Ran to get food. (At this point, it’s like 3:30 PM). Another 30 mins go by, hasn’t heard back yet. Finally, an hour later, he calls them back, and gets on the phone with someone who knows what they’re doing, unlike the last person he called. This person informs him that somehow the order got messed up quite a bit…that it was basically destined to be screwed up - ie unable to activate. He manually activated the phone service, because at this point, while I could call out on Optimum Voice (they reconnected the cable before he went to get food), but you’d get a ‘fast busy’ on incoming - meaning my phone number was in limbo. He got it working, they plugged the phone into the house, and that was the end of the day. He said someone would be back on Monday to finish up the install.

So far, the voice quality is excellent, I’m very happy with that.

We shall see how much else is going to give me problems….I’m looking forward to good quality pictures and similarly speedy Internet though..

We saw the 8:00 showing at UA. Overall I think the movie was suspensful, and entertaining. But in the end, it was kind of short, and left an annoying amount of unanswered questions out there. Without a doubt, it can be considered to be significantly better then a movie like Vacancy.

I’m not sure if this is a Vista issue or a Mcafee issue, hence the title. All I know is that I spent two hours last night trying to “unlock” a Vonage branded Linksys RTP300, which is a Internet telephone adapter / router. We want to be able to use it for our work phone system now, to add cheap regular telephones, rather then $180 ones. It was really easy to do on a Windows 2000 machine at my house. But on Leon’s Vista laptop, it wouldn’t work…Everything was set up right, firewalls off, etc…Ugh. Within 15 minutes of getting it home, it was unlocked.

Getting it to work with our phone system from outside the office is a completely different matter…

Happy new year, all.

I’ve decided that for 2008, I’m going to try and get a few things done.

1) Get my LS converted to electric

2) Get to the gym and get in shape

3) Sell useless crap

4) Post on here more often

We’ll see how well I do. I recently picked up a Nokia N95 which pretty much rocks! It does have a few issues, but I can get over them (mostly media player issues). It’s price tag is what spurred #3, lol. However, it’s VERY useful. It’s my cell phone, media player, PDA, it’s a decent camera, and it’s a SIP phone (Voice over IP) so it can act as my phone extension at work!

Now, however, I’m going to sleep. ‘Night, all.

Today I made a major milestone in the Electric LS project - I received my motor controller - AKA the Zilla! It was packaged perfectly, and arrived in a decent sized box. My grandmoter had commented on how heavy it was, and I thought she was exaggerating…until I got home, that is. It’s heavy! Now to get the motor, and prepare to order the batteries.

Last week I bought a new camera..or two. This all started because my grandmother’s Canon Rebel Ti started refusing to take pictures, and I couldn’t understand why. Well, considering it was blinking the battery light, we figured the obvious - the batteries were dying. This was supported by the fact that the camera had been on at the time that I was looking into it. So we replaced the batteries, and…same problem.

So, I decided to try and find a replacement camera for my grandmother, and I once again turned my attention to the Digital Rebel. This time, to the next gen model, the XT. At this point the XTi model is out, but is more expensive. Coupled with the fact that I wanted to get pictures of the floors to my aunt, I got the camera, and had some prints made to see if it was acceptable quality. Honestly, at 8 mega-pixels, a 4x6 looks just fine (duh). You can crop it and still be fine. So I was all set to give that to her, and still be able to use it when I needed to.

Then I looked at B&H, and they had the Rebel Ti Date cheap at just a little over $100, so I ended up buying her a film camera again. I then went home, and opened up the camera…and looked at what was happening when you released the shutter…the problem was, the shutter was not moving, and that was the problem in the first place..I fixed it, but I’m not sure if it’s going to let any extra light in with the way that I fixed it…So I have a spare roll in the camera right now to see if I really did fix it or not…

So, in the end, I got the Rebel XT, the Rebel Ti, and a Canon 70-300M f/4-5.6 Image Stabilizer lens. The lens is kinda huge, but takes good shots.

Wednesday I moved onto my second set of retainers for Invisalign. I must say, that even though I knew it would be bad, I wasn’t prepared for the fact that the entire day I had a headache because my mouth was in so much pain. However, on Thursday it was still painful, and while I still couldn’t wait to take it out during the time that I eat, my headache was at least no longer a problem. Today, it’s only slightly more noticable then how it usually is, so the estimate of 2-3 days of “discomfort” was not off in terms of time, but the severity was a little more then I expected. It’s much easier to take them out now, but not as easily as the last set was at the end of the first 3 weeks. Overall, I’m still happy I’m doing it, as after 12 months my teeth will finally be the way I want them to be.

Nokia is being very aggressive against Apple and the iPhone - they have a huge “open” campaign, with them running a NY Times ad a week ago or so, and today they’ve got the front and back covers of amNY, this time showing an unlocked padlock. I think the symbolism is in direct response to the fact that the new 1.1.1 firmware locked down the iPhone even more. However, much to Apple’s great displeasure, this time it was hacked by a 13 year old. Go figure.

Nothing unusal is happening these days…work is work, and I’m trying to get my computer more organized and cleaned up. Leon lost his phone recently, which really sucks, a replacement phone wasn’t cheap (then again, they never are). The stock market sucks, and I’ve sold off most of my Viewpoint stock…Going to try and get rid of the rest of it today. Because the weather is crazy, everyone is feeling a little sick, and I’m no exception. I’m tired and my throat is bothering me a little. I also got my first delivery of Invisalign retainers yesterday. It’s not too bad really, but of course I’d rather not have it in. However, I’m paying for it out of pocket, so you can be sure I’m going to get my money’s worth.

I read 5 of the 7 Harry Potter books in the last 3-4 weeks, and I’m about to start on the sixth sometime today. Not much else I can think of right now.

I have finally joined a gym…Leon and I finally decided on Planet Fitness for our needs, as they have pretty much the same equipment as Bally’s, except at less then 1/4 the cost…the only thing they are missing is a pool. Honestly, I can live with that.

We had our first workout on Tuesday, and honestly it was better then I thought it would be. Some friends were there to help both of us with what exercises we should be doing, how much weight, how many repetitions, etc. Working on the machines wasn’t too bad. It was what we did afterwards that really got me. I have to say I have a newfound respect for those who do Yoga. It is very difficult, and really makes you sweat! I will say that I did feel more flexible afterward then I have before.

That being said…the next day, I didn’t hurt too much…driving home on Tuesday hurt a little (we did chest & shoulder related exercises), but in the afternoon on Wednesday is when I started to feel it…other then that not too bad.

We went back on Wednesday night, did some stretching, some bicep curls, some light back exercises, and that was about it. This morning I hurt, lol.

We’ll see how the day is.

On the 25th I did something I haven’t done in a while - I went to a concert. Leon bought me tickets for my birthday to see Dream Theater at the Nikon Theater at Jones Beach, with not one, but two opening acts - Into Eternity, and Redemption. I was really excited to go…but not so excited to drive there…We ended up getting going later then anticipated due to some issues that one of Leon’s friends were having, that Leon had to help…but it was the right thing to do…So we left about 2.5 hours before the show, being as I wasn’t sure how long it would take us (it look us an hour and 20 mins..)…the trip wasn’t bad at all really…didn’t run into too much traffic.

We got premium parking ahead of time, and it was a good investment. We got a good space, and wouldn’t have to fight with anyone to get out later - it was right out onto the main road from the lot we were in. We went in, and there was of course a bunch of stuff to buy - all overpriced, and we basically just chilled out for like 30+ minutes. We got our seats about 7:30 PM, which was 30 mins before the show…the seats were excellent. They were orchestra seats, about 30 rows back, which was still good.

The first band started at like 8:05, and right away I could tell I wasn’t going to like them…It was Into Eternity, a band from Canada that was way too heavy for my tastes. Combine that with a singer with a shrill voice who likes to hit high notes, and it wasn’t a good experience.

< More to come later >