Well, today is a big day for me. Not only am I sitting around the house all day waiting for Frontier to arrive and connect my telephone (I am assuming that after they connect the telephone there will be some wiring that needs to be done and I will have to run to the city and pick up some hardware to do that with) but also today is the Teamsters Union Vote down at our office in Washington, DC. So that is going to make for a pretty stressful day down there. They have been trying to convince everyone that they don’t want to go union for two months now but we figure it is rather unlikely that they won’t vote for the union.
Dominica’s boss at the hotel called late last night and told her that she didn’t need to work this week because they are training the other new auditor. So she is excited to have some time off so that she can get some things done around here. She is also very excited because tomorrow is her birthday and she doesn’t have to work on it like she originally had to. So that is extra good since everyone is coming down for her birthday party tomorrow night and she won’t have to go straight from there to work. So we can party all night long. 🙂
Andy is getting very frustrated with his job out in Buffalo. It has really turned out to not be what they presented it as at all. They claimed that they were in a hurry to get a project moving and fix problems and that he would be spending all of his time programming and not having to deal with customers. But the very opposite has happened. He was sent to Puerto Rico to be in front of a customer for an entire week and not programming. Now he is stuck just sitting at his desk all day staring at the wall. He isn’t allowed to do any work and he isn’t allowed to do anything that isn’t work so he is not allowed to read or anything which is extra awful because he doesn’t have his own computer or an Internet connection (of course, it would be weird to have an Internet connection without having a computer.) They have even hired a new guy who is supposed to be doing the same job as Andy and HE is in the same boat, just staring at the wall without a computer of his own and no Internet connection and no work. Not a very good environment. Andy is going nuts.
I removed Natalie from the email list at the bottom of the page because I don’t think that she checks her email anymore. I also filled in a few missing days so that August is complete now. I am stuck working in the living room while I wait for Frontier because I don’t know if I will be able to hear them from the basement if they come. I haven’t been in the basement when the door bell has rung before so I don’t know how loud it would be.
Frontier arrived at 10:15 this morning which works out very nicely for me. There was no box on the outside of the house like there was “supposed” to have been, the wire was just sitting out there ready to be installed. At least that wire was there, it would have been really sucky (or total suck, as they say in Canada) if the wire hadn’t been here already. Luckily for me, my neighbor Linda already went through the six month ordeal of getting phone service run into the complex that we are in and the rest of us don’t really have to worry about it so much because of her. She had such a bad time getting phone service installed that the phone company had to give her a cell phone to use for a long time so that she could make calls. She is planning on buying Internet access off of us through our wireless system as soon as our SDSL gets installed. Hopefully that will be soon because we have a lot of stuff waiting on that big Internet line. It would be nice to get our equipment moved up from Washington sooner than later.
It turns out that I was right about the telephone in the house not having all of the stuff that I need to be able to hook up the phone. There is a hole in the wall were I can run the wires out of the house but I don’t really know anything about telephone wiring and it would be nice to know that it actually works before the telephone technician leaves. It costs $60/hour to have the telephone technician do work for you around the house. That is probably better than I would have guessed but it is depressing that it is so expensive! We only charge $45/hour for PC and Desktop Technicians (but we charge a 2 hour minimum and Frontier only charges for half an hour.)
So I was inputting Bringing Down the House and Chicago into the master movie list today and noticed that Buena Vista Pictures (the distributor of Disney, Miramax, Touchstone and Hollywood Pictures) has finally starting putting the year of release on their movies. Up until now, there has been no dates on any of their movies, not a copyright date or anything. Now, they are the only company that explicitely puts “2003 Release” right on the box. For those of use that always want to know what year a movie is from, that is really helpful. Chicago also came with a coupon for $6 off the purchase of a couple different movies includes Gangs of New York which I have been wanting to get so maybe I will stop by Walmart today and pick that up as well. It is a mail in rebate so I will probably never send it in, but maybe I will get around to it.
The other day I picked up another book on the CompTIA Security+ exam so I have been reading that a lot today. The tests from them are really expensive so you don’t really want to risk failing one of them if you can at all help it. I am also waiting to find out if Niagara Telecom is now a CompTIA member because, if it is, I get a big discount on the test.
Well, Frontier got the phone in and I did the inside wiring enough so that I could hook up my laptop and dial-up to AOL. We are getting a 53.333kb/s connection which is like the fastest dial-up I have ever seen. So, whoo-hoo. I am finally able to check my email at home. Only five days short of a month in the new house and I can finally get my email! Still no mailbox out front, though. Ok, I am going to upload early just so everyone knows that I am online now.
Borders in Bowie, Maryland called today. They finally have my replacement copy of “The Map That Changed the World.” It sucks, though, that to get a replacement to a defective product that I already purchased, I have to place a special order and then drive down to Bowie in the next ten days to get it. They make the replacement system much more complicated than it needs to be. I suppose they do this to discourage people from returning things. Mostly, though, it just makes me want to shop at Barned and Noble and Amazon.com a bit more. Now that we finally have the house all taken care of, I can use my credit cards again and I can now shop online like I used to. That will make life a lot better since it is so much cheaper to buy stuff online most of the time.