Tone Parsons

Just a quick note to say that I’m still alive.

It’s been a crazy, busy two and a half weeks since my last post. I’d go into the specifics, but I don’t want to bore you with all the gory details. Suffice it to say, the time has been memorable.

Oh… and for the first time in a year, I was able to get my baby (a 2000 Yamaha Royal Star Boulevard) out of the garage and onto the street!! Sure, I spent more time washing it than I did riding it, and my ride really only went to the gas station and back (well, the back part was slightly scenic in nature), but damn… I RODE!!!

Isn’t she just beautiful?

Total ride time was about 20 minutes, but I plan (back and drugs willing) to ride as many times as I can (no matter how short the ride may be).

After fussing around with things for a bit, I got the crap modem that Comcast sent me to play nice with my internal network.  Actually, I followed some advice from a guy I work with and had everything up and running in a few minutes.  Then we began the speed tests to see how fast it is.

Holy shit…. yeah, it’s fast!  It’s upload was faster than my DSL download, and the download speeds were so fast that I nearly went back in time!

So… today, I began my evil plan to do away with my phone service.  I began by calling Qwest (the phone company) and asking them to shut of my DSL service.  That took 20 minutes and several transfers to get completed.  They kept asking why after 7 years would I want to drop them.  I kept explaining that cable internet was faster, and that made them run a test on my line to see if they could upgrade me to a faster service (no, my phone lines are too noisy).

I think they also suspect that I have a second course of action planned (which I do).  I’m going to be signing up with Vonage on very shortly and dropping all the packages from my phone company.  When I can call anywhere in the USA, Canada, Mexico, or Western Europe, with no restriction on minutes used, for $24.99 a month… how can I say no to that?

Life is good (and very fast!!)

I have DSL at home from Qwest.  For years, this has been my gateway to the internet, and for the most part, it’s been reliable (if you don’t count the first year and a half).  But lately, I’ve been thinking of mixing things up and finally made the plunge… I ordered Comcast Internet service.

The plan is to dump Qwest completely and go with a cable modem and Vonage for my phone.  I did the math and discovered that the yearly cost is about the same, but I won’t get any long distance charges on calls made to anywhere in the US, Canada, Mexico, or Western Europe.  Since my wife is Canadian, this can save us big money on calls to her Dad and friends up there.

The cable modem showed up yesterday, and after dinner, I started the process of setting it up.  While hooking the modem up to my PC directly was a no-brainer, getting it to work with my routers is a different story (Linksys WRT54G’s).

So, I hopped online to chat with the fine technical support reps at Comcast to see if they could help me out.   They can’t/wont.

The first tech I chatted with disconnected me after rudely stating that what I was asking isn’t supported.  The second was about as helpful.  The third time I joined a chat, I got someone who called himself “Brian” (I have no idea if that’s his real name).  He was actually helpful to a point.

Of course, that’s about the time that my Comcast Internet went down, and stayed down for an hour.  Nice!

I’m going to try it again tonight, but if I still have problems configuring my network to play nice with the Motoroloa Surfboard SB5120 that they sent me (or if it continues to drop the connection), I may just cancel the service and call it good.  I will,  however, contest any charge that Comcast tries to lay on me (other than a pro-rated 2 day fee).

…. or not.

The weekend was good, if you count having a 3 hour blood test good.  I had to fast from friday night until saturday morning (which really wasn’t a problem… except I really wanted a beer on friday night!).  I showed up at the lab for my test around 8:30 and they called my name at 9:00 am.

They drew nine vials of blood, made me drink this horrible crap (it tasted like Sprite syrup… very thick, flat, and no carbonation).  Then I got to wait an hour so they could draw more blood.  This was followed by waiting yet another hour, and another blood draw.  Finally, I got to wait one more hour, and (you guessed it!) one more blood draw.

It was finished around 1:00pm, and by then, I was plenty thirsty and hungry (I wasn’t allowed to eat or drink anything except the syrup crap during the process).  I’ll get the results on August 27th when I finally get to see my neurologist again.

Wheeee!

Oh… and my primary Doctor upped my morphine, so I’m all kinds of drugged at the moment.

I did, however, get a few things accomplished this weekend.  My youngest has to attend summer school (as he did better in World of Warcraft than he did in school last year), so we got him some new clothes, shoes, etc. for school (which started today).  I also put the finishing touches on our sprinkler system in the front yard and trimmed back some of the shrubs.

As for work… well, I’m trying my best! I’m supposed to be working from home two days a week, hopefully they’ll allow me to do that this week.  I’m hoping to work from home tomorrow and wednesday.  If the webcam is off, that’s why.