apple juice

Do you have a strong dislike for jumk mail in your mailbox, as I do?

If yours comes via “Red plum” or Valassis, here’s where you go to get yourself off the mailing:

http://www.valassis.com/1024/Contact/consumersupport.aspx

On Friday, my new DSL modem arrived in the mail. I climbed up on a chair and re-wired the outside Qwest line to my shiny new ActionTec. After a bit of futzing around with my network setup, I pulled the plug on my Comcast cable modem.

Back when we signed up for Cable Internet service, Comcast was Time Warner in these parts, and we enjoyed decent service with steadily rising speeds for a couple of years. Then Comcast rolled in, and so began the wildly varying speeds (time of day), random disconnections, and really poor Vonage calls. Standard cable modem complaints, all of them. I would’ve switched sooner, but that top speed download of 7mbps is pretty dang seductive. When you’re pulling down a huge file, I have to admit it is pretty nice.

But it finally got to me, and I pulled the switch to DSL. One of the reasons I waited so long is that by some quirk of geography, the top line speed we are qualified for is 1.5mbps. On the plus side, the upload is speed is doubled over the cable modem.

Vonage, in my limited testing, has performed much better since making the switch. The faster upload is surely helping there. Yes, the download speed is slower, but honestly, this connection “feels” as fast when browsing the internet. I don’t know what it is, but it seems to respond faster.

I actually went with a local company for the ISP, VISI. Admittedly it is a bit more expensive than going directly with Qwest, but I was trying to limit my involvement with major corporations. And I when I asked the representative why I should go with them instead of the cheaper Qwest, he said “well, with us, you get actual human service and support, instead of MSNbots”

Works for me.

So to sum up:

Comcast for super basic cable (HD Locals)
VISI for an ISP (it is a Qwest line)
and Vonage for the “landline”

Never a dull moment around here!

A Minneapolis man wandered naked through residential streets on the city’s south side and fought with police before being bitten by a police dog and subdued with a Taser gun, officials said Wednesday.

The city’s south side… aka 3 blocks from my house!

I just missed this all going down yesterday when I came home from lunch. I swung right at the stop light to avoid the wait, and turned up 54th. As I came up the hill I noticed two cop cars, and one guy getting out of his car. Everything seemed under control so I just cruised down to my house.

I should’ve stopped to check it out… that would’ve been the photograph of the century!

Check out the rest of the article at the Star Tribune: Nude man bitten by Minneapolis K9

We’re back from a quick weekend in Colorado for a wedding, and the weather is beautiful today. A nice 50-70 swing in temperature today.

We bought some new running shoes yesterday, so I may make my inaugural run in comfortable shoes tonight, although I have to go to the Metropolitan Airports Commision (MAC) meeting this evening.

MAC promised that in exchange for not moving and then expanding the airport at it’s current location, they would provide window and insulation upgrades for all houses within a “Noise Contour”, an area where the average decibel level was measured to exceed a certain level.

Our house is across the street from the end of phase 1, and would be amongst the first to receive the upgrades when phase 2 started, which was scheduled to start soon. However, now they are going back on that promise, and offering to share the cost of central air (which we already have).

Why central air? The theory being that you can leave your (old, decrepit) windows closed in summer, and not be subject to extra plane noise.

So now I am going to the meeting to see what the deal is. After having just flown into Denver and then back here again, I know one thing. I wish they had decided to move the airport 10 years ago.

What I would like to know is, why does it take 8 weeks to get a couch?

Don’t they have a couch factory that just rolls them off the line, and when we want a couch that is in a certain fabric, they just slap it together?

Well, my experiences with the furniture industry have left me wondering about a few other issues as well.

• How is it that JC Penney Home has a one-day-only 40%-off sale nearly once a week? Who would buy something during the rest of the week?
• Why does Marshall Fields have the exact same couch as JC Penney’s but with a different name on it and another $300 on the price tag?

There are others, I suppose, but for now, I will ponder these questions for the next 8 weeks or so while we await the arrival of our sofa and chair.

I hope they fit down in the basement…

This morning I woke up to some fresh new snow, officially (in my book) the first snow of the year! Yay! Yay! Happy Dance!

I’m hoping it melts again before the cold of the winter sets in, because I still have some yard work to do. (Remember last year?)

Well, “the weekend of the rake” is fast approaching. As I stood outside this morning when I let Yeti out, I could hear the leaves dropping on the ground like giant snowflakes.

The weekend of the rake is fast approaching. We have some additional issues to deal with this year that weren’t a problem the last time around:

• We have a dog now, with associated droppings around the yard.
• We no longer have a truck, so all of the leaves will have to be transported in the back of my Golf.

We’ll see how it goes. I’m pegging this sunday as the day…