utenzi

The Kindle that I mentioned yesterday arrived today. Pretty damn fast. This is the box it came in. Nice and compact. Amazon is getting pretty good with its packaging. As you can see in the picture below, it was extremely easy to open. Just rip a tab on the end and then lift the lid. That was it. The painful part was setting up the wireless network that I needed to download books onto my new Kindle. A few weeks ago I "switched" from Roadrunner to AT&T but I never bothered to actually do it. So tonight that was the task I had to do so I could play with my new toy. I was impressed with how easy the AT&T setup should have worked. Unfortunately I have a Linux OS and not Windows or Mac. Let's just say that things got complicated and I had to call up the Helpline folk to find out how to work around the OS problem. It took a while on hold but once I was connected to a human, he just had me input website IP numbers directly and that made everything work just fine. It still...

Had a lightning strike near the house last night. The thunder roll lasted something like 12 seconds and some stuff in my kitchen was knocked off of shelves. The electricity was only out for about 2 seconds but my Internet service was out for 9 hours and just came back online about 10 minutes ago at 7:10am. I wasn't able to sleep last night so I was checking frequently. I finished the new John Sandford novel, Storm Prey, at 3:45am and was quite impressed with it. My favorite recent novel by Sandford was a Prey novel in which Sandford overlapped his two series (Prey series and Kidd series) but this book was close behind. In this book the main character, Lucas Davenport, is shaken when his wife, Weather, is an unwitting witness to a robbery and the rest of the book revolves around the robbers trying to tie up loose ends. One of which, of course, is Weather Davenport, but there's plenty of other problems for the robbers as well. All of which supply a lot of dead bodies and a few cl...

My Roadrunner was out all day yesterday (I changed the date stamp on this so it'll appear as having been written on Wednesday). I noticed the lights were out on the cable modem when I woke up but figured that it was an interruption in CATV service and it'd be back soon. Nope. When I got home from work 9 hours later the modem lights were still out except for that one flickering light that should be steady. Not a good thing. So... I started a phone call that just kept going and going and going. It was like that EverReady Energizer Bunny but even more annoying---if that's possible. I ended up talking to three people, from the accents they seemed to be in different countries, and each time I had to go through the whole trouble shooting spiel. Very time consuming. The end result is a diagnosis of "dead modem" and a service call between 1:30 - 3:30pm today (Thursday) to swap it out. That was at 8pm my time. Wednesday. At a few minutes before midnight the cable modem ju...

I'm thinking of changing my broadband provider. Right now I use Roadrunner, in fact the new availability of Roadrunner in my area 4 years ago is what made me decide to switch from satellite to cable. Now that I have satellite tv again (so as to better serve my lovely high-def tv set), I'm thinking of getting rid of Roadrunner. That's the speed of my current connection over there on the left. At least it is at 3am. It's probably slower during the day. If you want to check your speed try this site . Due to my living out in the boonies, there's not many options for broadband Internet service. That's why I went with Roadrunner 4 years ago. What I'm thinking of going with is the cellular connection from Verizon. Now in more populated areas there's a regular service from Verizon which has a nice price. Unfortunately it's not extended this far out, so what I'd have to use is a $60/month USB thingy that would connect my laptop to the Internet. I suspect...