Month: October 2006

Is Wired still published?

With such intelligent, well-thought out, and even-keeled writing as found in “The Day the Music Died”, is it any wonder that Wired fell out of relevance years ago? Are the people who work for that magazine so completely out of touch with the world of today? And yes, I find both sections of this “article” to be ridiculous.

But Jeph puts it best: “Of course, this guy isn’t a REAL journalist. I mean, he publishes articles on the INTERNET.”

(thanks to QCJeph)

It’s never easy

OK, so we bought this house. Alright, that’s not really news. I told you that months ago – around when we bought it. Did I mention that it has a boiler? Ha, I bet you didn’t know that. Alright, you probably figured out that it had a furnace or boiler or some other device for making the house warmer than 40 degrees. But did you know that said boiler is about as old as the house and as big as a fridge?

So, everybody that’s figured out where this is going, raise your hands. You must all be homeowners, too. No, I don’t think we’re looking at a getting a new furnace right now (even though ours uses as much gas just to turn on as modern ones use for an entire month of keeping a house toasty), but that doesn’t make us any warmer than we currently are. It really seems to be a much simpler problem – but then problems always seem much simpler, don’t they?

This past spring we had a new (to us) oven installed by PSE&G. Basically I’m willing to fiddle around with the electrical wiring around the house that could send me flying across a room or pissing sparks for a week, but things involving flammable subjects speak to the not-so-handyman in me and say “call an expert.” So the guy hooked up the newish oven and offered to look at ol’ Bessy down in the basement (that’s my nickname for it – at least in this sentence). I should have known this was some sort of extortion racket going on once he immediately noticed that the low water shutoff valve wasn’t connected (alright, the fact that there were absolutely no wires coming out of it was probably a big hint). Regardless, he shut ‘er down and told us to have someone fix it before the cold weather creeps in months later…

Months later, the cold weather crept in (I really wanted to say creeped, but Firefox informs me that isn’t a word – unless I just add it to the dictionary. That feature certainly makes spell checking seem pointless.) and I found myself needing to get that little wiring problem fixed. Yes, I have comfortably sunk into my stereotypical husband lifestyle, complete with wife unit nagging me to fix all of the things that I assure her I will fix. So sue me.

A friend of Lisa’s came to look at the beast and assess the situation fir us. I will now add for insurance purposes that this “friend” is licensed to perform such tasks (assuming we were to move our house 50 miles north during the work). Of course, there now seems to be another problem with a broken valve or pipe or transmission or something – how the hell should I know? So I call up our home warranty hotline (I just love that concept – if your house breaks just send it in and will fix for you in 3-4 weeks), and they manage to get someone out relatively quickly (the delay was really my fault, so we’ll ignore that it happened). Of course this guy is saying that the shutoff valve problem is a pre-existing condition, just because it was like that before we bought it… Anywho, they might not cover the problem, and the day turned into a game of phone tag that I was not invited to participate in.

Now we’ve got a furnace/boiler/nuclear reactor in the basement that is turned off because it wasn’t designed to not burst into flames on it’s own, and can’t be turned on for one of two reasons – and the reason they’re going with is the one that they won’t pay for. Somehow I see this being resolved in late March. In the meantime I am building small fire pits in the middle of each room. I can only hope that our smoke detectors don’t work either.

Dear 1050 ESPN Radio

Dear 1050 ESPN Radio,

Thank you for getting rid of such a high-quality, well-produced, nationally-syndicated show as Colin Cowherd’s The Herd in favor of another loudmouthed, obnoxious, know-it-all prick like Max Kellerman. That’s right, the same sexist jackass you got rid of 2 months ago when you realized his friend Brandon Tierney was twice the radio personality he could ever hope to be. But at least I now know that 10AM – 2PM on 1050 will be filled with people you would leave a bar to get away from, because ignoring them just isn’t enough. In other words, I can safely delete 1050 ESPN Radio from my saved stations in the car to avoid possibly stumbling upon Max telling everyone what a genius he is for coming up with another sophomoric idea, Stephen A. Smith screaming at the top of his lungs to pretend he has a point, or Jim Rome saying anything *shudder*.

Thank you for freeing up my radio for something far more worthwhile: music… or commercials… or silence.

– Me

The one about TV

Maybe I’m just becoming a crotchety old man now that I’ve hit my thirties, but I’m sick of paying for things that should be free. Or at least not so expensive. If you beam a signal at my house, I should be able to do whatever the crap I want with it. Or something like that. It was thinking like that that got me to cancel our cable television. Well, not so much cancel as stop paying for it. And then pay for what I got because collections agencies suck.

A couple weeks before the wedding, I decided we really needed to buckle down on some expenditures, so I just tossed the cable bill. Wouldn’t it be great if doing that were enough? Well, it was good enough for me. And two days after the wedding, it was good enough for Comcast, too. I am amazed at how long they will let you wait to get service that you want to pay for compared to how quickly they will respond when you no longer pay for said services. I figured we wouldn’t use it for the two weeks we were in Hawai’i, and it wasted our time and money anyway. Especially considering we no longer used Netflix as a source of excellent movies and instead watched things like The Punisher and Seinfeld re-runs non-stop.

I picked up a crappy little antenna at radio shack so we could at least catch local stations from time to time, but my long term goal is one of these babies. That’s right, I want to snag HDTV channels from down in Philly. We’ll see how successful that is, but at the worst it would cost me the same as about a month with the cable company – I think I can deal with that. Actually, we already have an antenna up on the roof that should give us decent reception for now. The problem is getting access to it. I managed to shimmy all the way across the rather steep incline over to the chimney, but the sucker is just out of my reach, and I can’t find anywhere to connect the coax.

In the meantime, Lisa and I just have to wait a day after any shows we follow air a new episode so that I can procure a copy via nearly legal methods over the ‘net. It’s even better than DVR because the commercials are already taken out for us. So now we are keeping up with the following shows:

  • Prison Break – That’s right, we finally got into this one just in time for the second season. What a shame, considering the second season isn’t that great. We’re still watching, but interest is waning.
  • Lost – Ah, the classic. I wasn’t thrilled with the season opener, and the second episode looked iffy, too, until *SPOILER*Sun finally shot that woman – thank god for some bloodshed! Oh, sorry for that…
  • House – We still love it. Yes, it’s formulaic, but the characters are fantastic.
  • How I Met Your Mother – Got into this one late in the first season. It’s cute and funny and Neil Patrick Harris just plain rocks. I’m holding out hope that Alison Hannigan’s character is on her way out as I don’t really like her.
  • My Name is Earl – We just caught the first episode of the new season and I had trouble holding back the laughter. Actually, I’m sure Lisa will testify to the fact that I didn’t even try.

I’m hesitant to even talk about the new series (Heroes and Jericho) that we’re really enjoying after all three of the sci fi/mystery/thriller shows from last year went belly-up. There’s also the mid-summer ones that we got into (Kyle XY and Eureka), although that somewhat fizzled (largely because Lisa couldn’t get into Eureka at all). I’m wondering why I ever thought it was necessary to pay for 200+ channels that I never watched and another 20 channels I shouldn’t have watched.

He lives!

I’ve been redoing my whole blog reading process – seeing as how I haven’t kept up with any of them in a couple months (to go along with my crappy updating process over here). It’s given me a chance to figure out who is no longer updating and which sites just plain suck. While clicking through all of the links, I found out that Apropos of Something re-opened its doors. In fact, Jess has been writing somewhat steadily since June of this year.

If you don’t know why this is so exciting (and I’m sure this post is totally conveying my excitement), just take a gander at the Apropos Comics.