Joe and Jamie's Blog

Saturday night Jamie, her sister Casey and her husband Andrew, and myself drove down to Giants Stadium to watch the NY Red Bulls play against Real Salt Lake in an MLS (Major League Soccer) match. This was the first any of us had seen live, we have watched a few on TV before. The stadium wasn’t really packed, only about 8,500 attended which is apparently normal for soccer in this country. The Red Bulls won 2-0. You can watch the highlights of the game here. There was one amazing play by the Red Bulls defender. He stopped a goal by leaping into the goal and kicking the ball out before he or it touched the ground, negating the goal. Truly amazing talent right there, I couldn’t believe it when I saw it.

Overall the game was a fun experience. Our seats where almost midfield and half way up the section, so we were able to see almost the entire field without having to move our heads much. I was able to nab the isle seats as well so we were a bit more comfortable. Glad I purchased tickets to four more games. If you want to read up on the match you can here.

Saturday was an exciting day. Not only did we have the MLS game to go to, but Verizon came to install FiOS for our TV and internet. I am very happy we finally are getting digital cable plus consistent internet speeds with great upload speeds. You can view my post where I was very disappointed with Time Warner here.

The installation process took around four hours for completion. That includes the guy running the cable from the pole to the house, mounting and activating the box on the house, and then checking the signal strength to each TV before plugging in the cable boxes. We are lucky that the FiOS terminal is the pole right in front of our house, makes for an easy setup when you are the main pole for the area.

Our installer Darrell was very neat and knowledgeable. He did an excellent and thorough job. I have some pictures of him connecting the wire to the pole and the box on the outside of the house. I helped him where I could since I am interested in all that sort of stuff. Learned a lot about how they deliver the fiber that day.

I haven’t been home all weekend besides just being here for the install to know how great the TV service has been. I know its nice to finally put our HD TV’s to use. Today I really tested the internet. I have been uploading and downloading files all day to see if the speeds slow down at any point, and they don’t. We have the same download speeds as Time Warner, but ten times the upload speed. We got the internet bundle with the 20/5MB speeds. What is great is they can always increase the speed dramatically if I want and guarantee the speed consistently. Here is the new speed test from www.speedtest.net while on FiOS.

Time to head down to the Time Warner office now and return the equipment.

When we purchased our BlackBerry Storms earlier in the month we were both worried about scratching the screens. I was used to the Treo screen which wasn’t as sensitive as these full touch screens. I hate those peel away plastic pieces that you can replace, they just never look good and get dirty and messy quickly. Plus they cost about $10 just for three of them, what a rip off.

Invisible Shield by Zagg Inc for BlackBerry Storm

I ordered the Invisible Shield by Zagg Inc. to protect our screens. The Invisible Shield is a military grade film that is pre-cut to fit the device. Once applied and dried, it is 100% scratch proof for life. Don’t believe me? Check out the video. I have had this on for a week now and it is 100% invisible. The only reason I know its there is because I put it on. Truly a quality product.

Now I would never try that on my phone, but I believe it. So far any mark I thought I had on the phone I was able to just wipe off the Invisible Shield. It was really tough to get fingerprints off the screen before the shield, but now I just gently rub it with a towel or cloth and it comes off.

If you have a Storm and are interested in this product, it can be viewed/purchased here. Don’t have a Storm but want to protect your phone/iPod/laptop/etc? They have thousands of applications to fit almost everything. Check it out at Zagg’s website. This is not just a screen protector, it can also come with full body pieces to protect the entire phone/device. I chose just to get the screen protector because I can live with the back of the phone having a scratch.

I just ordered Verizon FiOS tonight and it will be installed this Saturday. This means that our Road Runner email addresses will no longer be in service.

Please be sure to update your contacts to our new personal email addresses shown on the contact page.

Jamie will be sending out a mass email tonight with her new email address. Thanks.

When I picked up my new BlackBerry last weekend I decided to go for the Visual Voice Mail that Verizon offers. Why? Well I hate checking voicemail and this makes it simple as pressing a button.

I didn’t know that this was available on other model phones, probably would have gotten it when it came out in August 2008. I did know the iPhone worked like this though.

Here’s a picture of what it looks like and how easy it is to use. Voicemails come in, you just open the Visual Voice Mail app on the phone and press the play button next to the one you want to hear. It’s that simple! I absolutely love it, can’t you tell?

Jamie chose not to get this, she doesn’t know what she’s missing…

Visual Voice Mail

This weekend our phones me their New Every Two date, which is a program through Verizon where they give you a discount on phones every two years. It’s an incentive to get you to upgrade your phone.

Jamie has had the LG enV for the past two years. She wanted to upgrade to either a BlackBerry or a similar PDA/Windows Mobile phone so she had a reliable way to get her email and surf the internet. Since Verizon still has its buy-one-get-one on BlackBerry’s, I figured I would upgrade mine as well. I didn’t really have any issues with my Treo besides the casing near the antenna starting to break, but a brand new touch screen BlackBerry beats the Treo 700wx any day.

After an unsuccessful attempt to get the phone Saturday, we went this afternoon and picked them up. Unfortunately Saturday the Verizon store’s system went down while we were there and they couldn’t check us out. With our discount and the bogo on the phones, we were able to get $400 worth of new technology for $100. Now that is what I call a deal. We even decided to family share the plans together to save a bit of money too. Hey, anyway helps at this point I guess.

So far I am very impressed with this phone. It has a gazillion features built into it. So many that I haven’t put the phone down since noon when I got it. I have always wanted an iPhone, but around here the AT&T service really sucks, so I haven’t switched. Now that BlackBerry introduced their App Store, I think the iPhone finally has true competition. The App Store was the only thing the iPhone had over the Storm. I will wait a few days of fiddling with this phone before I bother to start with the thousands of apps that are available now.

I signed up for the new Visual Voice Mail plan. This negates me hating voicemail. My past post was about how much I hated dialing in and wish they could just email me the voicemails. Well Visual Voice Mail gives me a list of all my voicemails and allows me to choose the one I want to hear. I then just hit the play button and it starts to play. No dialing in and listening to all those messages in a row. By tomorrow I should have some voicemails so I can take a picture of it and post it here.

Pair of Verizon BlackBerry Storm 9530 smartphones

Do you hate when you have a voicemail? I do. I just hate the fact that I have to waste time calling into the voicemail system, entering my pin which it always says is wrong the first time I enter it (which you can see from the screen its clearly correct), and then waiting for it to give me all the envelope information just to get to the pointless four minute voicemail full of things that could have been sent to me in an email. I love the ones where people reiterate what they just emailed.

Why does this topic come up? Well for one I had to clear out my voicemail box today. The bigger reason is this article I read from the New York Times. The article has some interesting stats on how voicemail rarely checked and becoming more of a thing of the past, but emails and text messages are read and answered within minutes of receipt. I always thought that if VoIP phones can translate a voicemail into an email and send it to you, why can’t cell phones do this? Speech to text has been around for years, why don’t we put it to some more good use?