Puppet Noir
Seems like things are going at full steam over at the Henson company. A new muppet movie, a new FRAGGLE movie, and now “Happytime Murders Puppet Noir“.
EPIC!
Just thought I’d share the good news.
Fiber to my curb
Throwing caution (and non-installable cable) to the wind, I signed up for AT&T’s new fiber U-Verse service this week. As you may remember from last time, a tree had fallen on my potential for cable internet and the estimate to get everything in the neighborhood back up and running was the end of the month. That just wasn’t going to work. It was too expensive to begin with and not having it for a whole month wasn’t sitting well with me. With freakish timing, mere minutes after finding out the diagnosis from Comcast, a rep from AT&T called saying U-Verse was now available in our neighborhood. That’s really all it took.
The install is scheduled for the week of the 20th, but it wasn’t all magic pie and fairy dust getting there. I had to go through four different customer service reps, a couple of calls to a manager and a couple of revisions to my package to get to that point. Seems there was a sticking point about my credit card. I don’t have one. I don’t believe in them, as a principle. They required one for the install, as a security deposit option for the hardware. I gave them my debit card number and apparently they can tell it wasn’t a non-bank issued card. I went round and round with them about it. They kept saying that a “real” credit card is more secure and a bank card isn’t. I pressed the managers on the fact that my “bank card” is in fact a real card that I get cash back on, get points from and has exactly the same consumer protections as a “real card.” Eventually I won and thus the service was scheduled.
What amazes me is the speed and depth of the package. Compared to the Comcast package, it’s really quite stunning. Here’s the break down:
Channels:
Comcast: 72, including local
AT&T: 200, plus local
Internet:
Comcast Cable Modem: 5mbps down, 384k/up
AT&T Max Elite: 12mpbs down, 1.5mbps up
Phone:
Comcast: VoIP, which kills bandwidth
AT&T: Regular phone line, not over the fiber
DVR:
Comcast: 1 DVR per TV, extra charge
AT&T: 4 Stream DVR. 1 box, 4 TVs, 4 recordings at once.
Price:
Comcast: $99 for 6 months, plus DVR charge. $110 now, $160 after.
AT&T: $89 for 12 months ($10 disc on internet). $99 after.
Bonus:
Comcast: wanted to charge $35 to “move” the service.
AT&T: $200 VISA gift card for switching!
Bye Bye Comcast. Hello sweet sweet fiber to my curb!
Of course getting connected again is only part of my house projects. I also hit up Lowe’s for about $100 worth of supplies yesterday.
I replaced a shower head, extended a gutter drain spout, got about a million random light bulbs, got a new dryer vent hood to keep all the little critters out of the dryer (old one broken in the storm), got replacement pieces for things like light fixtures, the mailbox and some furniture and I still have to go back for more later. I’m actually kind of enjoying it. Random patch jobs and little repairs are about the extent of my handiness. I’ll need to defer to the experts (father and father-in-law) to show me the way in terms of installing things like ceiling fans and light kits. But I did hook up the gas washer and dryer, so, really, how hard could that stuff be? lol.
So much to do, so little time.
Big update
So, where were we? Oh yeah, life. Post-storm life has just been moving at an insane clip. The week following the storm, after cleaning up and clearing debris, I spent the remainder of the time packing for our move to the new house. Yes, after all that, we still had to move. Apartment leases are just wonderful like that. Plus FEMA had already reserved our apartment for a displaced family, so we needed to be out as soon as possible. That was OK with me, we were already partially moved anyway and I had the week off (NASA was closed) so it was a good use of my time. So, I packed, cleaned, packed and moved what I could by myself until that weekend when we recruited some help from friends.
Then, last Monday it was back to work for a whirlwind week of catch-up followed by more packing in the evenings. Finally, last weekend we got more help from friends and were able to move the last of the furnature and boxes. We were completely out by the 30th and living in our brand new house. Of course, there are boxes piled up to our eyeballs, but that’s all par for the course.
We’ll be unpacking at least until Christmas. I kid you not.
We’re also having a bit of trouble with the utilities. Seems that cable can’t be installed because the drop from the poll to the neighborhood is lying under a pile of trees and broken fence pieces. Of course, it’s in the neighbors yard, who are renters and haven’t cleaned up anything yet. Comcast doesn’t do debris removal and won’t touch it until it’s cleaned off. So, my options are to wait until the end of the earth for the neighbors to pick up the fallen tree OR find a chainsaw. I’m going with option B. My Sears card is tingling.
Other than that, everything is going pretty well. The house is great. I can’t wait to get unpacked and make it feel more like home. Then I plan on doing all the crazy fun things I can to “hack” the house. I’ve got a 1000ft box of Cat5 and a 30 port switch to wire the house with, instructions to make home made mosquito traps, a bunch of old X10 stuff to install, and plans for building all sorts of crazy things like charging stations and peg board wiring things. It’s going to be awesome.
Matt out.
We’re Alive
Well, it was a hell of a storm, but we made it through. I’m borrowing an internet connection so I’ll make this quick.
Our apartment suffered only minor damage but lost power, phone, and cable Friday night. Phone came back up first on Monday. Power on Wednesday and we’re still waiting on cable. We spent 5 days, 4 nights without power. We had enough supplies to make it until Tuesday when we moved ourselves to Friendswood which had power.
Our house in Friendswood, somehow, survived. The street and most of that town looks like a war-zone. Trees are down everywhere. It looks like someone marched across the area in tanks and randomly shot up houses. Streets were flooded until Tuesday when the water went back down. The house itself was surrounded by trees and every single one of them fell down, thankfully into the street and not ONTO the house itself. We’re missing a shingle or two and there was a ton of debris, but it faired ok.
The in-laws house wasn’t so lucky. The large pine tree in the front yard fell onto the top of the house. It was removed and roofers are estimating the roof to be a total loss. The fence along the back and sides of the property is complete gone. Non-existant. The have power and phone, so utility wise it isn’t doing so bad.
The area itself, like I said, looks like a war zone. Trees, powerlines, signs, billboards, anything over 15ft tall is basically laying in the street. Just now, on Thursday, power crews have gotten power restored to enough gas stations and grocery stores that are able to fill the need so we’re seeing the lines for food, water and gas start to shorten.
Other areas of town are just as bad or worse. Parts north of us, who should have had a signifigantly weakened storm once it made landfall, are still without power or even water.
I could go on forever, but the situation simply isn’t good. There is, at this moment, about 60% of the area without power. The latest estimate is that 60% equates to about 1.3 million people. It’s gone down from the 2.x million on Sunday.
We’re extremely lucky. Houses not far from us are completely gone, Galveston is completely gone, whole sections of the state are without power.
Life is starting to return to normal, little bits at a time. There’s a TGI Fridays that opened nearby, which was taking cash and making hamburgers for people. You should have seen the line.
I’d love to say that we’re 100% ok, but the area won’t be back to completely normal for quite some time. Businesses were really hit hard and “non-essential” things won’t be open for some time to come.
This was a real tough one, but we survived. No one was hurt and that’s the important part. Houses and fences can be repaired, people can’t.
One last thing, it bothered a lot of people down here that once we got power back and were able to turn on the news, the lead story in the national news was this financial bullshit. Houston was the #2 story. At the risk of sounding like some “victim”, this is some serious shit going on down here. People are barely hanging on. And somehow we’re #2. Sorry, but I’ve got to call that out. I’d love to see some Wall St. types try and live through something like this.
Anyway, I just wanted to give everyone an update. We’re alive, we made it, and we’re fixing and getting back to normal. My office will be closed until Monday, so that’s when I’ll be back in the office with (possible) internet and I’ll give everyone another update then.
Matt out.
Ike
Just wanted to let everyone know that we’ll be hunkering down for Hurricane Ike. They’re evacuating some of the surrounding areas and most of Galveston, the island to our south. We’re close enough to Houston city limits that we aren’t in the mandatory evacuation area and they’re telling most people to “shelter in place.” We’ve got a propane grill, peanut butter, a couple of cases of water and all that good stuff, so we feel pretty confident we’ll make it through ok. We do however live in a first floor apartment, so we’re a little concerned about the water. But I’ll be keeping an eye on it and making a judgement call on that as we go. This area isn’t prone to flooding, and hasn’t flooded before in big storms, but you never can tell. We’re also concerned about the new house since it’s surrounded by large trees and our home owners insurrance hasn’t kicked in a won’t because they don’t sell or activate new policies when there’s a potential danger in the gulf. Isn’t that awesome.
Anyways, just wanted to say that we’ll be here, in the thick of it, so be thinking about us. And if you don’t hear from me for a week or two, that’s probably because I won’t have any power.
See ya on the other side.
New Theme
Smashing put up a new theme this morning and I kinda liked it. There’s still some tweaks to be made (like why the damn XBL picture is lining up funny), but I think it could work. More on the house in the coming days, including photos. Very busy, be back in a jiff.
Working on it. Gonna need some tweaking.
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