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?
Over the past few months the internet has really dragged at the house. It has gotten so bad that it takes me hours just to do simple downloads from the web server that I used to do in minutes. I can’t even stream radio and get on a server at work without my email disconnecting and the stream stopping. Watch an online video? HA! It’s more like watching someone stutter for thirty minutes.
So after numerous speed tests and quadruple checking the network at my house, I started up a chat session with Time Warner to troubleshoot my Road Runner modem. I have emailed them before, but they just pretty much ignored what I said and said I was getting what I pay for, which I wasn’t. Now I am paying for a 10MB download and 512KB upload. Yes the upload is horrible but the next level plan is too expensive. I was getting 1-1.5MB download speeds and 256KB upload speeds. So 1/10 the download speed I was paying for. To me I left I was on dial-up on crack, which still is slower than a turtle.
Seven technicians later and after following their stupid instructions (they refused to listen to me after I repeatedly told them I was a network admin and not someone who knows nothing) I finally was told I had to move to the next department, which was phone only. That right there was a waste of an hour and a half plus eight trips to the basement to reset the modem. Needless to say I told every single technician to check the modem for fragmentation and errors, but none of them did. I pick up my phone and call the number I was given to call and I get that lovely computer lady “This call cannot be completed from your area”. Now I was furious. Not only did I spend over an hour with idiots that refused to listen to me, but now I am directed to a phone number that doesn’t work at all. I was then given the main number, so I called that.
After being on hold for near thirty minutes, I get someone in Texas who cannot help me at all. She transfers me to the New York office, only for me to be on hold some more. Finally I get someone. Before I am sent on a wild goose chase I left my frustration out until she gets the point I’m pissed off and had enough. I tell her to check the modem since no one else has yet. She puts me on hold and comes back thirty seconds later and says “Your modem is no good, you need a replacement”.
I nearly threw the phone through the wall. I spent over two hours on chats and on the phone to have someone do what I said to do from the very beginning. UGH. Since the Time Warner office is a few blocks from me I chose just to go down there rather than wait a few days for a technician. I somehow squeezed out a thank you and hung up.
Today I went down to the Time Warner office and exchanged my modem. I came right home and plugged it in. Below are the before and after speedtests. I am now getting 20MB+ download speeds consistently, as my 512KB upload speed. I am happy now, but I really cannot wait until my Verizon FiOS gets here. We are ordering it this week and scrapping Time Warner, just like every smart person with FiOS in their area should do. Not only is it better TV and internet, it’s cheaper.
Moral of the story, don’t ever call Time Warner support unless you know nothing about the internet and networks. If you do, you will only wind up with a migraine, a broken cell phone, and a cell phone shaped hole in the wall.
Speedtest results with the old modem:
Speedtest results with the new modem:
Speedtests courtesy of speedtest.net
As promised in this previous post, here are some pictures of the painted pantry. This took a lot longer than expected, and still isn’t fully completed. Too many birthday’s and busy days at work I guess are to blame. I still need to move the refridgerator to paint behind it and finish painting the cabinet doors so I can hang them. I’ll get around to most of that this weekend…hopefully.
Happy Birthday to me! Sad that I have to blog about my own birthday, (grrr Jamie) but that’s another issue.
I am 24 years old now, getting pretty old I guess. I asked for a simple birthday, just a nice family dinner, wanted everyone to save their money really. There isn’t any need for a big hoopla in between 21 and 30 anyway. To celebrate, I asked to go to O’sho Japanese Steakhouse on Route 9 in Poughkeepsie. We all haven’t been there in many years, so it was time for a visit.
The dinner was great. By some stroke of luck we got our own table which was nice. We all were stuffed by the end of the meal. I felt like the guy from Monty Python’s Life of Brian (hope you all know what I mean). Everything that came off that hibachi was delicious, couldn’t get enough of it.
After we took some pictures in the rain of the building for this blog, we went home to digest some food before cake. A few hours later we sat around the table and had cake while I opened my presents. Everyone hates shopping for me because I either want stuff that is really expensive, I already own everything they think of, or the gift that they want to get me is technical so I would have to ensure they purchase the right one. I am a big movie buff and own quite the collection of DVDs, up near 400 last time I checked. Like usual, I only asked for some DVDs for my birthday. Love getting a whole bunch and adding to the collection.
To my surprise, my parents got me a very awesome gift. They gave me tickets to the 20 Mile Super Speedway Program from Stock Car Racing Experience at Pocono Raceway. This program puts you behind the wheel and driving a 600 hp Stock Car on the 2.5 mile Super Speedway for 8 laps, reaching speeds of 165mph. I am in 100% complete control of the car by myself. No instructors or experienced drives in the car with me, just me and an exact model NASCAR stock car. I don’t think awesome is quite a powerful enough word. I have to go through a few hours of lessons and training first, but I just can’t believe I get to drive the thing! I also get to go on a three lap ride along in the beginning, which is fun in itself. Can’t wait to experience 160mph G-force going through a turn with a 20+ degree embankment.
Enjoy some pictures from the night.
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