Luke ‘n’ Bill

So as I posted the other day, Lisa and I went to Valley Fair for a fun afternoon.  We had a blast on all the rides and also had a great time people watching and of course making small talk with the random strangers and not so stranger people (guys we know from here at IBM).  But there was one part of the day that kind of bummed me out

I didn’t really notice the guy in front of us on the log flume until we started to get to the front of the HUGE line (longest line of the day) and I could see that everyone was all paired or tripled up with their group…except for him.  He looked like he was in his late 20’s or early 30’s and possibly had some very slight mental/physical defects.  He didn’t make eye contact with anyone and didn’t seem to be overly happy but just got in and rode the ride.  Afterwards he got out ahead of us and I didn’t see him meet up with anyone at the end of the ride but didn’t see him walk off.

I’d like to think that maybe he was with a friend or group of friends who maybe didn’t want to wait in that huge line just for the log flume, but I can’t help to stop thinking that he was really just at Valley Fair…alone.  No friends or family to enjoy the ride with him.

I don’t really have any deep thoughts to go with this, it just bummed me out and I couldn’t really get it out of my head.  I just have a hard time looking past that stuff or getting it out of my head.

So over the last week and a half I have gone through heck trying to get internet set up at our house.  Here’s the story.

So initially we started with Charter’s cable internet.  Internet is descent, seems to drop sporadically, but would come back up instantly and ran descent rates.  Somewhere around 3.7 mbs down and 700k up I believe (through speedtest.net which usually hits low anyways).  So it wasn’t a huge deal, but their customer service sucked.  Take forever to get them to hook things up but you usually don’t have to deal with them, which was a plus.

However, I decided it would be a good idea to get on the same backbone as work (Blend Interactive).  That way transfers and bandwidth for things like video conferencing would be faster.   So I looked into it and it seemed like a good deal…lined things up and was impressed by their ability to get things installed and sent out by the following Monday (this was a couple thursdays ago).  So Monday comes, they put the temporary cable in (they didn’t have a phone line hooked from the box on the back of the house out to the box by my house) and I hook up the modem/wireless router.  Alls good, the world is happy…except for of course the middle east, but they prefer to be unhappy.

Wednesday morning I wake up, modem’s not connecting to that there internet.  Problem.  TIME WARP to 1 week later, 8 or 9 calls to Qwest, 1 modem/wireless router, and 2 more visits by the service technician later and I’m sitting there for an hour while the service technician is here for the 3rd time, trying to figure things out.  I sat downstairs with him for an hour….just in case he needed my input on something or whatever, while he waited on hold.  Which is just said, nothing better than to have your tech guys sit on hold for 3 hours while they’re at the clients house.  Anyways, finally after he had gone out and waited in his truck on hold for a while, he was finally told (opposite from what he had known previously) that other people in the area had been having the same problem.

So they are/were trying to fix it and this morning when I got up, it looked like they had actually fixed it.  However, I paid for (and was originally getting close to) the 7mbps service.  Currently I’m getting somewhere between .9mbps and 3mbps.  So we’ll see how long it takes for them to actually get it fixed.

Are they really running things on such a knife’s edge, that every internet provider is on the verge of sucking beyond belief?

Well this weekend Lisa and I went on what we decided was our first official family vacation to Valley Fair.  Lisa makes it a yearly summer trip and but this was the first time I had been since my confirmation class went back when I was a sophomore or so.  So it was definitely nice to have my very own professional tour guide for the park.  We went on all the good rides including….. Steel Venom (twice)which was freakin sweet, especially in the front seat!  Wild Thing, (twice) which is much better in the back seat, especially for the first plunge.  Power Tower again a great time and plenty of other wild water rides and roller coasters that were entirely too much fun.

Possibly the best part of the whole place is that it’s only and hour and a half away now, so going there is just a day activity instead of some big ordeal like it used to be.

The Chinese are ready for anything…primarily a good old “Revenge of the Nerds” attack.

I just couldn’t stop laughing when I saw this picture over at autoblog.com.  Apparently it’s originally from  Xinhua.