September 9, 2007
Assorted things gone wrong
I'll just continue complaining about assorted things since various things continue to go wrong.
So this past Thursday I received a letter from Rooms To Go, which I assumed was for our financing of the new furniture that Liz bought. Instead the letter began with something like 'You made a wise decision to purchase Debt Shield...' which is some credit card insurance that will pay off some or all of your debt if you lost a limb or die (I don't think you get anything for less than losing a limb though). The worst part is it costs $.99 for each $100 of your balance each, so for $2100 in furniture they make a little over $20/month just to guarantee if my arm falls off they might pay some of that balance. This is of course something I had not agreed to, so Saturday I took that in with the lampshades (because they arrived with a ton of dents in them) and complained. Apparently it WAS on the credit application (which I didn't receive a copy of) at the bottom in a separate section that I didn't remember much about because I DID NOT sign that section after reading it over. Apparently not signing doesn't mean anything since they still signed me up for it anyways. Now I'll have to call and cancel something I never signed up for anyways.
So Friday after dinner we went to HEB to pick up some groceries so Liz could make a Bundt cake from her Weight Watchers dessert cookbook. The place is already overpriced, but at the checkout the girl asked Liz if she wanted any stamps. Liz told her yes (I need to send out some bills), and we were charged for them, but we never ended up getting any stamps. So much for that!
As for the Bundt cake itself... she attempted to make it on Saturday, but in the end it tasted very strange, like it almost tasted right, but then the aftertaste was like it was missing something, like maybe sugar. It was a bit worse than the chocolate mousse, which had a somewhat sour taste (from the sour cream in it), but at least that was edible after getting use to it.
So that's what went wrong this weekend. What went right was we had a good time Saturday night at Liz's co-workers house, and today we visited Adam and Dusty at Adam's pool. I managed to get a crapload of old junkmail and bills sorted into shred and toss piles. It's amazing how much paper piles up over a couple of months, specially for most of the bills that I pay online anyways.
Oh yes, as a reminder, I heard that if you originally registered your number on the national do not call list back when it started that will be expiring soon. You'll need to re-register your numbers again. Even though it wasn't that long ago, I still re-registered all our numbers just to be sure. http://www.donotcall.gov
Posted by Plocmstart at 9:47 PM | Comments (0)
September 3, 2007
Labor Day Randomness
So tonight Adam and Jen came over, we had some burgers on the grill, then after the rainstorm that came through we went out to the last Round Rock game of the season. It was Jen's first game there, and I guess my third. They were playing the New Orleans Zephyrs again, the same team they played at the last game I went to.
During I think the second inning there was a fly ball that ended up bouncing off the stairs next to our seats and hitting Jen in the leg. I guess it hurt quite a bit, but the ushers came by and took her up to get a couple ice packs and eventually also gave her a free shirt. Round Rock ended up losing tonight, and then we went to Dairy Queen and picked up some ice cream which we ate at home.
My cold seems to be mostly gone, still coughing a bit though. Hopefully it will improve overnight rather than get worse like it usually seems to. Maybe I need to get up a couple times a night and cough up everything that settles down in my lungs so it can't build up over the entire night.
Posted by Plocmstart at 11:09 PM | Comments (0)
Upgrade Time
Trying to upgrade to the latest version of this thing, since I use it so often and stuff. Maybe this time the result won't look like crap.
Posted by Plocmstart at 12:17 PM | Comments (0)
YAWN
So it's been nearly a year since I've posted anything on here. I'm amazed I remembered my password to edit stuff here. I was randomly Googling for myself and was thing remined that I actually have a blog of sorts, and I can post crap on here and maybe someone will read it if they're bored (I wonder if Copus still stalks this page). So I guess I can summarize the past year:
- continue work at NI
- 2 people in group leave company to go back to school
- boss #1 switches to another group
- I take over development of somewhere between 4 and 8 C-Series modules while the other 2 engineers left in my group work on single specific projects
- boss #2 arrives around February
- I continue what I'm doing, in June we finally get a new engineer in the group.
- Boss #2 leaves for another group
- Boss #3 takes over and decides the group should be reorganized.
So in the end I'm still doing what I was doing to begin with, but it's been pretty random as far as the management goes. In the non-work world:
- New kitty in February.
- Bought a house back in May.
- Been working my butt off all summer.
So that's about it really. I've been wanting to get back into doing some EE stuff as a hobby, but my new office at home is still a mess because I need someplace to store a bunch of boxes. Once I can get organized then I can figure out what exactly I want to mess with. Right now I'm thinking of something in terms of home automation, or maybe some crazy distributed set of sensors to track how well my AC is doing. I did buy a projector and installed that on the ceiling of the loft, but I still need to run cables for that so they aren't running across the floor.
This past weekend we picked out new living room furniture. That should show up on Friday. They had no interest till something like 2012 so no big rush to pay that off.
For the number of minutes I use my cellphone I decided to switch to prepaid with T-Mobile. I ended up getting a Nokia 6103, but sadly I discovered that at least the outer display is a very poorly designed piece of crap since within 2 weeks it developed a large crack that rendered it useless. This past weekend the crack managed to get worse. I can only guess that from it being in my pocket with my wallet that it got pressed on too hard, but I've never had a phone so delicate that I couldn't keep it in my pocket without damaging it. Heck I even still have my very first Spring PCS phone (one of the very first digital cellphones from '98) and that still works perfectly fine, but this crappy cheap Nokia phone can't even handle being in my pocket for 2 weeks without becoming heavily damaged.
Yes, hopefully Google will pick this up: Nokia 6103 = CRAP.
Well that's my rant for the evening. I have somewhat of a cold this weekend, and it happens to be one where we have Monday off. I always end up sick on the long weekends for some reason....
Posted by Plocmstart at 12:23 AM | Comments (0)