Golf – Oh How I Hate Thee

I suck. I mean really, really suck. Like “Ray Charles could beat my ass in golf” suck. Yet like an addict looking for his next fix I find I can’t wait to go again. Today I thought I would work out some of the many issues I have with my short game and went out to a completely Par 3 golf course.

I hate Par 3′s. I should love them. Easy drive on to the green, 2 putt out and your on to the next hole. Yet something happens to me when I have to use the irons. I have most of the issues figured out with my driver and I bought a rescue wood for the long fairway stuff that I hit half decent. But when I have to use the irons something bad always happens. Either I will top the ball and it will bounce helplessly 20-30 yards in front of me, I’ll take a chunk of earth with my swing the size of my foot, or I scoop under the ball sending it high and way to the right, usually a fairway over from where I’m supposed to be.

After getting my clock cleaned by my step dad today we stopped off at Second Swing Golf to check out the clubs. My irons are nothing special. Tour Model II’s which is probably as close as you can get to the Walmart of the golf line. I found a set of Callaway Big Bertha X12 irons that were really comfortable and took them back in to the area where you can swing at the net hanging from the wall. There is a big black stripe running vertically down the middle of the net and a wooden disk behind it to let you know when you have hit dead center. Wouldn’t you know that I hit the PW, 3, and 5 irons right on the money 90% of the time. Figures, since the clubs were $339 for the PW-3 and they were used. Black graphite shafts and all the weight was in the heads. Really, really comfortable clubs. Probably the best I have ever hit a set of irons. Since everything was 20% off it was tough not to buy these things, but I held off since I didn’t feel like explaining it to my wife and having her ticked off at me for a couple days. So I left the clubs hanging on the wall. There was a sign on the wall that says “it’s not you, it’s your clubs.” I’d sure like to give that theory a test with a nice set of clubs some day.

Golf – Oh how I love thee.

UPDATE 2/16/07 – I have no idea why the post has received so many hits over the last couple weeks, but I’d love to understand what is bringing people to it.

Don’t quit your day job

Last night a bunch of us went out to dinner down at Station Square and then caught a few comedians at the Funny Bone. Dinner wasn’t that good but the comedians made up for it.

When you leave the Funny Bone they redirect you out through another bar area called the Green Room where they were having a karaoke night. I’ve never been to one of these before so we all decided to stick around and listen to some people sing. It’s an interesting mix because you have some people that really can’t sing at all and others that nail the songs like they did the original.

The peer pressure was heavy last night and I got volunteered to go up and sing. I’d never done that before but they had one of the only songs I still remember from beginning to end; Bruce Springsteen’s Thunder Road. The place wasn’t completely full when my name was put in but it was just my luck that a bachelorette party came in right as I was walking on stage. Great, more people for me to make a fool out of myself in front of.

So I got up there and sang. I was nervous at first but calmed down as the song went on. The crowd was nice and was making a bunch of noise, which helped me sing it. When it was over they were all cheering, which is a lot better than I thought it was going to turn out. I’m definitely not a singer but I can carry a tune.

What really caught me off guard was when we left the Green Room and saw that there were speakers setup outside of the building, which means anyone outside in the Station Square area had to listen to me sing. I’m not sure I would have gone up if I had known that ahead of time!

Bruce, if your out there, you have no fear at all – I won’t quit my day job.

Comcast Issue – resolved

I ended up making 6 support calls for this problem and went to a local Comcast office to get a new cable modem. When I brought it home it still didn’t work correctly. I called back in to Comcast in case they had to do anything for it to start working and it suddenly started working and dropped me to an internal Comcast web page for registering my cable modem.

After all of that was done we reset the cable modem and I was back out of service. The Comcast tech mentioned in passing that I had excellent downstream signal but upstream was weak and seemed to be the problem. We agreed that there could be a short somewhere and I would just wait until Friday for the tech to come to the house.

After we hung up I started thinking about anything that I could still fix to resolve this issue. I did not have a bunch of splitters so that shouldn’t be much of an issue, but I do have 1 splitter where the Comcast cable comes in to the house. I took the cable modem down to the entry point and plugged it in. It came up in less than 15 seconds. Now it looked like the problem had to be in my house but I had already checked all the cabling. So I swapped out the only splitter we have and everything is now working perfectly again.

I never knew a simple splitter could fair but the Comcast tech said that they can burn out just like anything else. Either way, mystery solved and I don’t have to wait 4 more days for the Comcast tech to come out to the house. I love connectivity.

Comcast Update

Just hung up from my 4th call with Comcast cable modem tech support. They are going to dispatch someone to my house. The earliest they can get here is Friday – 6 days from now. Now that is customer service. If they actually fix the problem when they come out I will have lost an entire week of Internet connectivity. Hopefully they will adjust my bill. This sucks.

Comcast – pushing me further away every day

Since signing up for Comcast Cable and High Speed Internet(HSI) 5 weeks ago thing have not gone as well as I had hoped. Don’t get me wrong, when things are working, Comcast HSI is fast. Very fast. But last night around 8pm things got very, very slow and then we had no Internet connectivity at all.

I ripped everything we have apart to make sure it was nothing obvious on our end and then I put in a call to Comcast Technical Support. Evan was slightly helpful but clearly reading from a script. All he could do was agree that I had packet loss and wanted to setup a tech to come out to the house. That has to be scheduled and he put me on hold while he went to find the next available time one could come out. After being on hold for a couple minutes the phone dropped in to a fast busy. Evan had dropped me. I’m sure it was not intentional. Things happen. But I thought I would test their support since they had asked me for my phone number 3 times earlier in the call process. Wouldn’t you expect that they would call me back? If I was to call them back I would probably never get back to Evan and I’d have to start my troubleshooting process all over again. So I waited for a while and decided to just go to bed hoping my HSI would just magically start working in the morning.

But it didn’t. So I called in again and talked to someone else that was just a little more helpful than Evan but still wanted to send someone out to the house some time next week. Some time next week? I’ll be a Verizon DSL customer if it takes a week to get someone out here. See, my problem with all of this is that I can’t seem to get Comcast interested in looking at their own systems. They want to come here where the problem more than likely isn’t. The only thing left in my house that can be an issue is the cable modem itself. Fine, bring me one of those, but still look at your own systems. My service is not 100% down, just 87% down according to the packet loss I am seeing. So I decided to hold off on scheduling a visit with the Comcast tech for now because I truly believe they are doing something in the area and I am not the only one having the problem. Most of my neighbors are DSL customers so I am looking for a Comcast neighbor that can tell me if their service is working or not.

While all of this is going on I still have cable television though. Comcast has been OK, but the picture is nothing like the picture I had for 9 years with DirecTV. I switched for the HD locals, which are beautiful, but the analog channels are terrible. I am not impressed with the non digital channels. Some are so bad you would swear I had the old rabbit ears hooked up to my TV. How the heck do you get ghosting from cable channel in 2005?

So on a scale of 1-10, which 1 being the lowest and 10 being the highest, I would give my Comcast swicthover experience a solid 3 out of 10. There is no doubt in my mind that people stick with cable because they just don’t know any better or they don’t really understand the choices that they have. It’s a shame really. We deserve better.

For internet service, I am hoping that the Verizon FIOS service, which is rumored to be available at my central office in September, becomes reality. 15Mb downstream and 2Mb upstream for 50 bucks a month. You can go cheaper and get 5 down and 2 up for 40 bucks a month, but I want the 15 down. This probably won’t matter to most people because most don’t use the Internet like I do. For me I want constant connectivity. Very little down time. When it’s up it better be fast. FIOS should bring that goal to my door in 30 days. I can’t wait.

But if my internet is down, how am I posting this? Remember, I shut all of my servers down and moved my site to an external host. That was a great move or this site would be down as well. To do the posting itself I am connected to the internet via a Verizon EVDO service. Consider it wireless broadband. Very high speed with no cable or DSL. Still just a little pricey for me, but it is with you wherever you go. I think it’s great.

Let’s see if my HSI service is back to normal before FIOS comes to my neighborhood. Ain’t competition grand?

Flossing won’t help this time

My youngest daughter has never had an easy time with brushing her teeth and flossing. She has a terrible gag reflex and will do just about anything she can to get out of brushing well. She tries hard though.

Tonight she was brushing her teeth and flossing for a long time when she finally came to us and asked for help. She thought she had some popcorn from her bedtime snack stuck in her teeth and she couldn’t get it out. She tried and tried and even had my wife in there trying. I finally went and grabbed a flashlight so that we can see what was going on in there.

Ends up she didn’t have popcorn stuck in here teeth; she had a new tooth coming in. A new molar. So she’s pretty excited about a new tooth since she just lost one of her other teeth, but she was really getting annoyed at the “red stuff” that was coming out of her mouth when she was flossing. I guess we’ll explain that one to her when she is more awake.

Bye bye open Wi-Fi

Tonight I finally got around to shutting down my completely open wireless network that used all Cisco access points. I have now completed my transition away from hosting, DSL, Cisco access points, 802.11b, and the OpenBSD firewall over to an external host, Cable modem, Apple Airport Extreme and Airport Express base stations with AirTunes, 802.11g, and the Airport Extreme’s natting. I haven’t ruled out keeping the OpenBSD firewall running since it has worked flawlessly for all of these years and it gives me much more flexibility. For now it is shutdown.

I also got to shutdown 2 servers I had running the basement in a room that was supposed to be a bathroom. That room always had a hum to it because of all the computing power that was just beyond the door. Now it is eerily quiet. All of the files on those 2 servers are now on my Mac Mini. That little experiment went perfect. My wife is thrilled and can’t wait to see if there is any difference to our electric bill.

The last thing I need to tackle is backing everything up. Right now I am just copying things from node to node, using the Backup application that comes with .Mac to backup to DVD, or just backing things up to my .Mac storage area.

For the first time in 4 years I am now just a regular user. Sweet.