For a while I’ve been touting about how great direcTV is. I guess it does have its drawbacks.
Time Warner has a building less than a mile from me. If I need to talk to anyone or get some new equipment or something I can drive there in less than 5 minutes.
DirecTv is a little different. It’s a national company that sub contracts locally. The other day I needed an upgrade and a dish realignment. I scheduled them for Thursday from 8-12. 12 o’clock comes around and I don’t hear anything from anyone. I call DirecTV’s support number and it’s so irritating. They make you speak your phone number and go through some voice automated menu. I finally learned how to say “operator. operator” and then pressed 9 to get to an actual operator. It gets so mad to. It says “I understand you want to talk to an operator but tell me what’s wrong so I can get you to the right person!”
Once I got the operator on the phone they had no way to directly contact the local installers. Instead they would send an email to the local installer and then the local installer would call me.
The local caller dispatch did call me back 20 minutes later but they never talked to the actual technician. I went through this all day and in the end I think they found out they assigned my work to someone who wasn’t working that day. I got $50 credit for wasting hours of my time.
When I rescheduled, the tech called me 10 minutes before his shift started at 7:50 am and 10 minutes before he arrived. When he got there he realized the equipment he had wasn’t compatible with my “swim” system so he had to call his buddy to get him a new box from the warehouse which took 2 hours. The tech was pretty nice, he even killed a wasp nest in my connection box. He didn’t seem scared at all. I guess he’s seen a thousand wasp nests.
After he fixed my dish and had everything installed I signed everything and then he left. I didn’t check my connections right away. When I did finally check my setup, I instantly noticed that the box he gave me wasn’t HD. The tech gave me his phone number like he was bad ass at customer service but when I called him, he didn’t call back or pick up. Guess he was just bluffing. I figured he couldn’t help me anyways.
If I had a problem with equipment with Time Warner I could have just gone to the headquarters and got the right box. Instead I had to call DirecTV back and say “operator, operator, 9″ and ask for a DVR upgrade to HD. They decided that I didn’t need a tech this time so they were going to mail me my upgraded box and then I would have to mail my old box back to them.
Something to be said about local representatives too I guess.
In a previous blog I talked about how right before the IPad was released, they cleaned up all the apps in the app store. That meant no more lingerie, no more innuendos, no more crass humor.
Of course this was happening as I was planning to release my Strip Poker app. It was going to be an app that would update you with girls, sexy outfits, and lingerie outfits periodically.
Almost the day after I pushed the button to submit my Strip Poker app, I read in the local paper how all these apps got cleaned up.
Anyways, for those of you who were curious about what it looked like. Here it is. The girl is actually animated a little bit if you play it on your Iphone.
I also had it where you could go to my website to see the final nude product.
So in my entire life I have never gotten a wart. That is, up until like 8 months ago.
It’s the weirdest thing, I blogged about the wart on my wrist a while back. At first it seemed like a wound that wouldn’t heal and I would constantly pick at it and it would always come back. When I first went to the doctor and even realized it was a wart it was already on its way out. Of course by then I didn’t know that warts can be highly contagious on one’s own body.
Before that wart on my wrist went away, I had apparently spread it to my knee. It got to my knee because I often rest my wrist on my knee when I read in the shitter. So one wart goes away and another appears. And this one is a monster. I think it was bigger than the diameter of a pencil eraser and as high as Mount Everest. I tried filing it down and freezing it and I tried compound W but this guy was just too powerful and stout. I felt like I could tug on it like a baby’s arm.
I just couldn’t take it anymore so I had to bite the bullet and go to the dermatologist and see if he could do anything for it.
At the dermatalogist’s office the nurse asks what my issue is and I tell her blah blah. She says where’s the wart can I see it? I’m a little embarrassed cause it’s gross so I show her and she has this weird fake reaction like “Oh.” Like you know “Oh” with a little bit of “oh that’s interesting and not gross at all.”
The doctor comes back and talks to me and says we can “de-bulk” it and freeze it which might leave a scar or just try to freeze it without debulking it. I could car less about one more little scar next to my already big scars on my knee so I tell him to debulk that bitch.
This is what is all involved.
1. Numbing it by sticking the wart with a needle.
2. Taking a razor blade and cutting the wart down as far as he can.
3. Cauterizing the wound
4. Freezing the wart
I’ve actually forgotten if steps 3 and 4 are swapped. I did this last Thursday. So far the wart hasn’t come back and I don’t have signs of new warts yet.
We met with our third bowling coach last Friday and this one seems like a keeper.
First off, he’s not trying to make you a clone of himself. It seems that just based on body types and strengths and weaknesses, everyone just can’t bowl the same. On the ladies tour most of them bowl pretty similar, but on the men’s tour, a lot of these guys have completely different forms and they’re all pretty successful.
For example we asked him how important it was to slide. Our last coach thought it was one of the MOST important things in the world. This guy was like some people almost wear a tennis shoe to stop and there was this one guy (throws out esoteric name) who would slide like 2 feet. Both guys were successful. I asked him how important it was to not bang the ball. He said some guys make it sound like a whisper but also not necessarily important. He said based on the ways bowling alleys are made now anyways, some alleys just sound really loud when the ball hits.
Another good thing about this coach was that he used props. He made use of a sling with a bowling ball to just let us feel what a natural pendulum feels like when you’re not trying to grip the ball. He also showed us on a nerf football what a good pure spin is made of.
The coach also evaluated Mandy and determined that her 11-12 pound ball was too light and upgraded her to 14. He figured that the way the ball was drilled, she was gripping the ball too much and her thumb was too far out.
Anyways, armed with an improved swing and Mandy armed with her new balls we played pretty well in our league last night winning 5-2 to get third for the season. We didn’t qualify for the playoffs like last year but it’s not a terrible finish.
Just to recap so I don’t forget. The best thing that I took from my lesson is keep the ball high in front to get a natural back swing. Don’t rush the back swing and let the ball drop before you start your forward motion. Pulling the ball down before gravity naturally wants to pull the ball disrupts the swing. Makes a hitch in your giddyup. Also, I used to lean forward a lot because I was trying to get low and straight. Power and momentum comes from keeping upright. Oh and I also will not bowl straight down the right side anymore. It just took form to bowl up and in. I now like to bowl towards the right a little and hook in harder. It’s much easier to aim for your dots that way than to aim up towards a straight dot.
After what I think is a 12 year relationship with Time Warner Cable, I am about to drop all ties to them.
I remember when high speed internet first came out. I had a big desk top computer right in the middle of the living room and a big ethernet cable hooked up into it.
I remember when HD first came out and the non TIVO DVR bundled right in. It seem all was well with me and Time Warner, but it would not last.
First my HD cable service was really poor. For some reason the box would reset all the time. The DVR was really weak too. The resume show function never worked right and would just start at the beginning of the program. I eventually dropped TW HD for Direct TV which I love. So the signal was out for a few minutes yesterday when it got really cloudy. It’s actually pretty rare when when the weather is so bad I don’t get a signal and Direct TV has the NFL network. Plus direct TV has more HD channels. I used to watch the Ultimate Fighter on SPIKE in non HD when Direct TV had Spike HD the whole time!
But what’s worse is the internet service. For a while it worked great. Then I serveral incidents with them.
The big one is when Mandy’s computer got a virus and started sending out spam. Instead of contacting me, they just turned off my internet service. When I finally got someone on the line the only notes on my case said I had been referred to the abuse department. I tried to call the abuse department during business hours and they were never there. Took them days to get back to me. If they had only bothered to call me first it could have all gotten resolved but I don’t think they ever planned to contact me.
Then lately my signal would grind to a halt everytime I booted the cable modem. The only advice they had was for me was to clear out my cookies and clear my cache and reboot. I’m like, this is happening on 5 different computers, do you really think my cookies is causing this problem?? You know it could quite possibly have been a setting on my router or my computers that were causing the problem but since I’ve switched to ATT DSL, I’ve been flying through the internet using the same equipment. If it was actually a problem with my computers or network I would think I would see similar problems.
If not for Mandy’s old RR email, I would have cut off the service already. I’m still keeping it for a few weeks while she’s transitioning her email. You know back in the day, you could only get an email from your ISP but now with Gmail and Yahoo mail, ISP email is pretty worthless. And it’s actually not a good idea to have an ISP email either in case you want to change providers. Of course stupid Time Warner thinks they can hold me hostage with this email and will shut it off as soon as I officially cut off the service. They won’t even let us pay extra for it.
But it’s lame anyways. Did you know you can’t use their SMTP send mail server unless you’re on their network? For example, since I switched the router to use ATT now, Mandy can’t send any email from her computer using her Time Warner email service. She also was never able to send any email from her IPhone using this email either. If she took her laptop to a hotspot she would also still not be able to send email unless she logged into their web client. Of course GMail has no such restrictions and is free.
You ever look into a fat person’s shopping cart and see what they’re eating? Or maybe in a restaurant you take a peek at what a fat person ordered?
But do you also notice that you don’t really care what a thin or fit person eats? I think the reason is that a person is fit not because of what they’re eating, but really because of what they’re not eating and how they’re working out. For a fat person, it’s directory related to what they’re eating.
Since I’m carb conscious I noticed the fat person had a packed shopping cart of some of things I noticed were tortillas, loaf of bread, and a stack of tostadas.
Last week my bowling team and I go to Fogo De Chao in downtown Austin for our annual bowling banquet dinner. I’m joking about it being a bowling banquet. We basically just take our winnings and treat everyone to a nice dinner. This year we had about $300. I figure this was more fun and bonding than just giving everyone $40.
At the end of the night, Dae, Mandy, and I go to our car which is in a paid parking lot and prepare to leave. As we get ready to back up, a car pulls in right in front of us. Two guys get out and appear to be approaching us. One guy is really douchy looking and is wearing sunglasses. He knocks on our window. I basically just want to back out and leave because what could this guy possibly have to tell me that i want to hear. Mandy thinks perhaps they need help or something and we should hear what they have to say. Either that or we were about to be car jacked.
I open the car door and the guy says can we have your parking ticket? I am flabbergasted by the audacity of the request and yell out, “get out of here!” and close the door on him and proceed to leave. He’s flipping me off, so I flip him off and it’s a flip off fest. I honk the horn and we leave.
Can you believe this guy? The parking fee is $7. Why in the world would I pay $7 and let him skate to pay nothing? What’s in it for me? To be nice? That’s not being nice. That’s being a sucker and getting bullied. Maybe if he offered me $3.50 I’d understand the request. I’m glad in my confusion I didn’t let him take my ticket. On top of that, the parking attendant was right there anyways. What a dumbass.
Mandy and I actually went to a local homeowners association meeting last night.
There was a CAP METRO guy there that was really boring and he spoke for a good 45 minutes. Given the chance he would have spoken for another hour. He was trying to sell the train, sell the bus system, justify what CAP Metro did with their budget, and tell us CAP METRO’s plan for the future. I wanted to freak out from boredom but there was no escape route except to walk out right in front of him which in a polite society is really tough to do.
After he was done a local officer spoke for a little while and was extremely interesting. He spoke about how they caught some of the people robbing our neighborhood by finding 10 known criminals and basically stalked them till someone did something and they did. He told us how he just made detective after trying for like 15 years. He told us how this one crew broke into a house with an alarm and took all the flat screen tvs and left all the small electronics. One tv was on a stand and one was mounted six feet up and they took them carefully without ripping any cables out of the walls. He said they weren’t the normal gang banging kids.
He also told us how GPS’s are the number one thing that’s stolen. The lady that sat in front of me has a daughter that had her car windows busted to get a GPS. I guess for some naive reason I thought people didn’t steal GPS’s anymore because they were kind of cheap now. Guess I thought wrong because I had mine stolen as well when I didn’t lock my door.
One lady said she hopes crime goes down because the recession is getting better. I wonder if that’s actually related or if theiving scum could care less what the status of the economy is.
Last summer I wore sandals to work almost every single day. By the time winter came, my feet were incredibly dry. I had to start buffing them with a buffing stone. To this day, I’m still feeling the effects of last summer drying of the feet. I’m only wearing sandals to outdoor activities now. No more sandals at work.
It only recently occurred to me why the IPhone and the IPad doesn’t support flash which is basically on any fancy web site. Hell, even the stupid logo on my blog is flash. I used to think it was because it was too difficult to implement flash on these devices but that’s not the reason at all.
I believe Flash started out as just a tool to do animation on websites. Now it can do an infinite amount of things. It can pretty much do almost anything a full blown application can do. If you play any Facebook games that are written in flash, it’s actually pretty amazing.
Apple knows this and doesn’t want any games or application to be introduced to their devices without going through their app store. If they supported Flash then I could just go to a website on these devices and do any number of things that Apple doesn’t approve of and won’t make money off of.
This seems to go against everything the Internet stands for. It’s actually pretty crazy that we follow all of these rules but we do to use their products.
I would never want to be trained at the gym by a fat trainer. A fat coach I can handle because they usually mange the trainers and deal more with strategy. I don’t like a fat trainer because either their methods don’t work, or they’re unrealistic and they can’t handle their own designed workouts.
How about a fat chef? Does that mean their food is so good they can’t stop eating it? Does it mean that they use really bad ingredients that wreck havoc on your body?
Both of those things are probably true. The food network has a ton of tv chefs. They range from skinny like Giada pictured below
To the less skinny Paula Deen.
and to the pudgy Guy Fieri
Giada is unusually skinny for efch. On her show she cooks mainly Italian dishes but she also cooks a lot of light things like fish and salads. She also cooks a lot of pasta so I’m not sure how she can stay so skinny if she eats her own food. Maybe she doesn’t eat a lot. Paula Deen cooks a lot of southern cooking and Guy cooks a lot of burgers and really heavy foods. I think they can’t help but be a little overweight if they eat their own food at all.
I kind of prefer to go with cooks that aren’t so heavy because their receipes sort of reflect it.
Simon told me this story once that he used to have poop every morning at school. It took him a while to figure out that the milk he was drinking in the morning had a lot to do with this.
I don’t think I am truly lactose intolerant. I used to think I was. A friend of mine, who is truly lactose intolerant, can’t have any diary product at all because it makes him nauseous and sick. He can’t even eat a piece of cheese. Me, I eat cheese all the time.
I will though get a little gassy from some dairy products like straight milk. This week, I noticed I was getting a little bit of the water butt in the morning. I thought maybe it was from a night of drinking or something. Turns out, it’s from this low carb ice cream bar I was eating. We have two kinds at home. One that is very milky and one that has a chocolate shell that tastes less milky. The very milky ones have been getting me kind of gassy. I’m gassy right now.
Mystery solved. I will be going back to the one with the chocolate shell.
Chances are everyone has heard of the Double Down sandwich from KFC. It’s bacon, special sauce, and cheese surround by two pieces of the colonel’s fried chicken.
The bread is supposed to be like a bun. It’s technically only five hundred and something calories but it has a ton of salt and fat.
Personally, I love KFC chicken and would rather just eat a bucket of chicken rather than this thing they call a sandwich. It’s not like I ever took home chicken and put cheese and bacon on it. Although I must admit I’ve put jelly and ketchup on it before. But not at the same time.
Since I’m watching supposed to be watching my blood pressure and cholesterol, I guess I’ll pass on both for now.
I bought a new “entry level” bike this weekend. I really wanted to only spend like $200 bucks but the cheapest thing they have at a bike shop is about $400! When I got that reality check from Sun and Ski Sports I left and went to Academy instead which I assumed would have plenty of bikes in my price range. There was a Schwinn for about $200 but it had a 21 inch frame which was way too tall of a bike for me. It was kind of embarrassing sitting on that thing in front of the salesman and asking if there was anything smaller and he tells me no. The weird part is all the men’s and women’s adult bikes had a 21 inch frame which was way too tall for me! Aren’t there any men under 6 feet tall!?
So I left Academy and went to a different bike shop and the cheapest thing there was $359. They had frames of all sizes and I ended up getting a 15′ frame. The last bike I had was a mountain bike and I hated that thing. The tires were super thick and I could always hear them vibrating against the pavement.
I just want to ride on concrete streets. I can’t imagine why I would want to ride on some dusty trail and crack my head open. That’s so 90s.
So I end up getting this bike to ride around the neighborhood. I’ve tried running before recently in my neighborhood and can’t really run for more than 20 minutes. That’s a mixture of running and walking and I get out of breath fairly quickly.
With a bike, unless I’m going up hill, I can ride for an hour or more. It really doesn’t take much energy at all to ride on flat streets. It was taking so long for me to get my breath going that I ended up forcing my self to go up this big hill twice. That’s just kind of what takes to get your heart rate up on a good bike.
Nevertheless, it’s a hell of a lot easier to get myself to do cardio when it’s a bicycle rather than jogging.
I think this is why my swing is off sometimes. I’m going to have my team mates tape me tonight to see if this is part of my problem with aim.
The point of this video is that your aim will be off if you back swing in towards your back out or outwards away from your body. It needs to be in a straight line.
I’m still struggling to improve with my new bowling form. Last weekend on television, they had some women bowling. Women bowlers, similar to women basketball players, usually have better fundamentals because they have less strength or speed to do certain things. Sometimes guys overcome fundamentals by just powering through. One woman in particular, Stephanie Nation, is really skinny and bowls really smoothly and consistently. She makes it look effortless. Right now I just want simple stroker form and perhaps I should try to emulate her.
Watch the follow through and the smoothness. This Feldman girl is a big strong chick. She really cranks the ball. I have never seen a women throw like that.
I left my car door open the other day and someone stole my crappy GPS that pronounces street names like a strange foreigner.
The house across the street got robbed several months ago. After that incident we updated our security system but that doesn’t protect anything that goes on outside of my house.
Sometimes I just sit at work and wonder if someone is robbing my house. To remedy this, I installed a web camera that constantly takes pictures that I can view from the internet.
This kind of helps me with that feeling of not knowing what’s happening at my house. I figure maybe I can see the car that attempts to rob my house and I can call the cops or something. My security system should be a good deterrent but this could me identify possible crooks. I actually wanted a better camera that I can install outside but I had no idea how I’m supposed to wire something through brick.
Here’s my camera catching the trashman getting my trash.
I read in the paper just a couple of days ago that a college student named Peter Cho died at Hamilton Pool in Austin. He was swimming in about 22 feet of water. It was a very sad story. He was swimming with his brother who realized that he was getting weak in the cold, deep water so he called out for some help. After he got some help he realized that his brother was no longer swimming behind him. He drowned.
Clearly these brothers were confident swimmers to be swimming in such a deep water hole. One of the brothers realized he was struggling and called for help, the other brother couldn’t be helped in time. I can’t swim as everyone knows and I always thought the first thing you learned was to float on your back to survive. Clearly this is not a guaranteed tool to save your life. My mom took a couple of swimming lessons and that’s all she learned. I kind of think unless you’re already kind of swimming, you can’t be drowning and then all of the sudden revert to your float on the back technique.
This summer, I was really really thinking about taking some swimming lessons at the local Y. I actually can’t wrap my head around learning how to swim and swimming in deep waters. I almost feel like I’ll fail at learning how to swim or if I do somehow seem to learn how to swim at the Y I would never ever actually just jump in the lake and swim around. It seems like science fiction to me at 35.
Confident swimmers sometimes drown. I knew someone personally that drowned who I was told was a great swimmer. People aren’t drowning left and right but it’s not that uncommon. You should have seen Peter Cho’s dad. It was ridiculously sad. Cho’s girlfriend was in the group with them. Cho had already been accepted to medical school. It was the first death at the pool since 2001.
My initial reaction to the IPAD was that it’s silly. Since it’s as expensive as a midrange laptop, why wouldn’t you just have a laptop? You can only install App Store things on the IPAD much like you can on the IPhone. It doesn’t support flash. You can get 3g for it but you would have to pay a separate monthly fee. Some positive things about it is it doesn’t require a boot up time like a laptop, it has a long battery life, it can use WiFi, and it’s light.
I didn’t realize it was ingenious until Howard Stern asked, “Can I play chess on it?” No, he actually can’t because you can’t install non app store apps on it and because it doesn’t support flash games or java games. I’m actually not sure about java games but I’m guessing you can’t. They told him he probably can’t play chess games on it so then he says, “Well then I don’t want it.”
The ingenious part is, if the Ipad does gain popularity, that chess web site that he plays chess on will probably just make an app for it that he could use with the IPad. If it’s not for free, Apple will take a %20 fee because you have to have it approved on the app store. If it’s free great but in the end, if you want to come to the party, you will have to play by Apple’s rules and then they will call the shots.
Developers comment all the time about how unfair Apple’s approval process is and yet they bow down to it because they have to. Look at me, I hear people are making money developing IPhone apps. I look into it and I find out you have to have a Mac. So I go buy a Mac. I look into it some more and I find out I can’t test on my personal IPhone so I go out and purchase an Ipod touch. I then find out that I have to pay a fee to get a developer’s license. I go and pay for that. I find out that I have to learn Objective C to program, so I kind of learn that. They zombied me and I didn’t even know it until I was too far in!
The bottom line is, whatever the IPad can’t do now, it will.
I poo pooed it calling it just a big IPhone which it is but don’t you sometimes think there are certain things I can’t do on the IPhone because it’s too small? For example, I asked Mandy if she would use a medical software on her Iphone. Well she wouldn’t because it’s too hard to type and you would have to scroll around on too many screens. On the IPhone, I think it’s a completely different game. That’s the land rush. Create an App on the IPad that you wouldn’t be able to use well on the Iphone and create it now while it’s early.
Uncategorized | tdo | 
June 1, 2010 11:07 am | 
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