Alltel’s been pushing their “My Circle” plan a lot lately. Man, I wish I would have stuck with them! Why did I drop them again… let’s see… oh, I remember! Back when I was with Alltel, this was MY circle:
The shaded area around my store is pretty much the only place my phone got service. Note that UNO, where I went to school, a mere MILE away, dropped calls pretty much consistently (or just didn’t pick them up in the first place). Five “software updates” later, I was told that I needed to buy a new phone – less than a year after I bought my first one. That doesn’t work for me.
But not that it matters… the people I call the most have Verizon anyway, just like me. That’s good enough for my circle!
Yesterday I got to see the new Superman movie early with my team at Microsoft. Fun time! I left Microsoft around 6pm for my temporary housing on the west side of Seattle, and 45 minutes later, I made it home. Not a bad commute, but not something I’d want to do every day. Thank goodness I lived on the east side!
Today, I was shopping down the street from Microsoft for some stuff for my new apartment. I drove past Microsoft around 5:30, and 45 minutes later, I arrived at my new east side apartment. Whaaaa???? (And for those of you who don’t know the geography, it goes Redmond, Czechoslovakia, Holland, Venezuela, Africa, Beirut, Hanging Gardens of Babylon… Kirkland.)
All Eddie Izzard quotes aside, I’m a little concerned. Everyone I talked to about my commutes said how cool it would be to avoid the highways to and from work. Well, I did, without much improvement. Maybe I just took the wrong back roads? Or I need to be on the freeway a short while? Or maybe I just need a really good radio station to listen while I suck up the long commutes?
Like Jenn, I’m always quick to do a comparison of driving styles and circumstances when I arrive in new cities. I find that driving styles reflect the general mood of the populace. In Omaha – deliberate, calculated, thought out. In Pittsburgh – well-meaning, and generally polite, but easily angered at small transgressions. Can’t let a honk go without a response (often resulting in mini honk wars).
Driving in Seattle – laid back. Passive. Reactive. People who have lived here who-knows-how-long pass five signs notifying them of their lane ending, only to merge over at the last second, as if it came out of nowhere. The people cut off by this passive gesture slow down to let them in, not at all phased. More occurrences, and we’ve got heavy traffic.
I’ve been driving during all different times of the day, (7am - 10pm), and I’ve always encountered stand-still traffic. Yeah, it’s a big city – but I think it’s also indicative of that passive attitude. The flipside, though, is that Seattle people have come across as laid back and agreeable. So I’ll put up with the traffic.
I’ve hidden the blog entry. I’ve removed any recommendations that I wrote on various websites. And they’ve entirely lost my endorsement. If you’re looking for a web host, you need to stay away from Bliksem.
This story should give you an idea of why I’ve pulled a complete 180. Normally I like to give people the benefit of the doubt, but this is ridiculous. What’s worse, that same story happened to my good friend Jason only a couple days ago.
Like mine, Jason’s website had problems when Bliksem swapped servers. Only when Bliksem went to restore his, it was over 6 months old. Bliksem said that they do weekly backups (although, in retrospect, the fine print doesn’t make it a guarantee), so he asked if there was a more recent backup. He proceeded to get a call similar to the one described at computerbob.com where the owner, Jav, berated him for half an hour about how Jason was being disrespectful and how he was willing to cancel the account on the spot.
I’m glad that I was in the middle of a move when I had my beef with them (and the number on my account had been disconnected), otherwise I probably would have gotten a similar phone call. I feel fortunate to have gotten out when I did, and I feel awful that a friend of mine had to deal with that on my recommendation. So here’s me striking back.
First of all, Bliksem, customers are already paying you. If you don’t want to deal with customers, then there are plenty of better web hosts who would love to have more people paying them. Secondly, do you really have nothing better to do with your time than to call up customers and yell at them? Maybe instead you should try to fix the damn problem and offer your customers a bit of customer service. You’re not winning anyone over by being pompous and condescending. Shit happens in pretty much all lines of work, and sometimes customers are frustrating. But it’s just bad business to turn around and yell at the customer.
For the rest of you… just stay away. You don’t have to go to my web host but follow Jason’s, computerbob’s and my recommendations… and just stay away.
I put a deposit down on my apartment yesterday. It’s a one bedroom (an upgrade from the studio in Pittsburgh), but its very spacious – tons of closet space, a huge bedroom, and an awesome patio that’s part of a shared patio but I have a little niche carved out just for myself. The apartment is at Avalon Juanita Village in Kirkland, Washington, which is on the other side of Lake Washington from Seattle.
The floorplan looks something like this but that isn’t exactly what mine looks like. I did take a couple of pictures though… first is the living room and a view of the patio outside. Second is a kitchen (I’m sooooo glad to have a full kitchen after living in the Arlington):
And the best part, hands down, is the three sushi restaurants in walking distance. I went to Salmon Creek for lunch yesterday and it was – in a word – DELICIOUS. I had tons of salmon, including the Mariner roll which was a shrimp tempura roll with spicy salmon and ginger on top:
I’ll be moved in by early July, so it’s time to come visit me and eat some sushi!
I’ve made it to Seattle, and am chilling in temporary housing. I’m about to go explore, but I will share photos of the road trip and Seattle shortly. In the meantime, by request, here are photos of the new digs in Omaha.
I’d been pondering dropping Bliksem for a while. Vince had told me about Site5 a while ago, and I was really interested in what they offered. Sometimes all you need is a little push, and my blog going down and apathetic support staff did it for me.
So, Site5! Feature-wise, the best I’ve seen (better than Bliksem). They have a slick interface that incorporates everything for my account – billing, domain renewal, help requests, and site management – in a way that is the most intuitive I’ve seen in my hosting experience. Their help responses are relatively immediate as well – the responsiveness isn’t perfect, but it’s better than where Bilksem was earlier this week.
If you’ve tried to scope things out here in the past day or so, my apologies for the troubles. My web host had a tiny hiccup in the server that hosted my website. After being jerked around for most of the downtime, a highly disgruntled email seemed to shock them into action – the problem was fixed within 30 minutes of my last email, proving yet again that nice guys finish last until they start complaining louder.
The Sierra Club has an online article with a mileage calculator that figures out how much money and gas you’d save per year if federal fuel standards kept pace with current technology.
If you’re frustrated with high gas prices, try out the calculator, check out the brochure, and sign the petition.
There’s been a lot of buzz about the recently-announced cuts in anti-terror funding for New York, culminating with a rant from Jon Stewart on the Daily Show tonight. Comments typically include a fair amount of Omaha-bashing, since Omaha received a 38.2% increase in funds while New York received a 40% cut.
Now, I think the cut in New York’s funds is a travesty (even though, after the changes, New York is still receiving 15x as much as Omaha). The points many commentators are making are valid – especially the notion that New York does, in fact, have national monuments. But I’m not sure that Omaha-bashing is helping to prove your point – really, it’s just illustrating your ignorance about Omaha. Not that it’s my decision, but if Omaha were to give it’s entire increase to New York, they would still suffer a 38.5% cut.
There are plenty of legitimate points to be made in this argument to support New York. I’m even fine with people thinking funding increases for less-likely targets is out of line. Just quit the Omaha bashing. It’s not helping.