Luke ‘n’ Bill

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 being that I haven’t written in a while I figured I would update people on the recent going ons and why I’m so freakin busy.

First, at the beginning of the month I moved to Minnesota, actually back to Minnesota to be exact.  It’s been about 6 years since I lived here, but that’s still long enough for Minnesota to require me to take the written exam again.  You can read more about that craziness later on.

After that I had a busy couple of weeks doing a few things….getting moved in, getting things set up to work remotely (while working remotely) and most importantly getting things set up for the engagement.

So if you didn’t know about it already, you do now, Lisa and I are officially engaged!  I’ll let Lisa write up a quick little ditty on all the gory details, but it was a full weekend and we had a blast.

After all that excitement we had our big house warming party that went over good and now it’s finally time to relax…for a couple days.

Download Firefox 3 in late June.  Set a record!

Well, after a few months of planning and a hectic month of lining things up I’m back in Minnesota!

Overall, the move went really smooth.  After getting everything set up and slowly getting everything packed up and ready to go for the move, I started the heavy lifting on Friday (May 30th) by packing up the last of the little stuff I could in my apartment and starting to clean everything in the apartment.  After getting about 90% through the cleaning of the apartment I headed to bed around 2am and set my alarm for 7:30 the next morning.

The next morning (the 31st) I got up early and headed down to the U-haul place.  They set me up with the 17 foot truck I had reserved and I hooked up the car trailer behind it.  Although I did have to leave my car there, even though they told me that they did a ramp for loading the cars onto the trailer multiple times (right up to the point where I needed to put it on the trailer).

So anyways, I got the uhaul and started to pack up the back of it with all the little stuff before Brooks and Jill showed up to help me with the big stuff.  That part went way faster than I thought it would.  So after we got done packing up and loading my car onto the trailer, I quickly finished up the cleaning and was out of there!  (by around 2:00 pm).

This was probably the longest (in actual time) it ever took me to get to Rochester.  The longest trip (in the amount of time it felt like) was when I came over to surprise Lisa for our first date, that trip felt like 9 hours.  But this trip took me about 4 hours.  After a few stops to re-adjust the wheel straps on the trailer and figure out exactly how they went on, the trip was a little quicker.

So around 6 or 6:30 I got in to Rochester.  For the last week it has been a whirlwind of unpacking setting things up and a little bit of work spread in there too.  Now, this weekend it started to feel a little more relaxing and a little more like home.

I suppose this is enough for now.  I think I’m going to try to convince my girl to go down stairs with me and watch a movie.  Although I am kinda enjoying my entertainment now, I’m getting a very nice serenade by my girl on her guitar while I sit here and type.