My Endless Babble

Dear Congressman Terry,

As much as I enjoy receiving mail from you at MY expense I get enough free junk mail already.

It’s strange, we live about a mile apart, our kids attend the same school so I would think with all the mail you send me lately we would be best of buds.

Problem is I have never met you, I see you all the time but you are the most unapproachable person I have ever seen.

So…. Why do I receive so much “Official” mail from you all of a sudden?

You see it’s strange, I have lived here in your district for almost 3 years yet not until the past couple of months had you ever sent me anything.

You have invited me to your office to talk about whats on my mind twice (Like I said I live just down the road, so why the office?), you have autodialers call my home all the time for “Town Meetings” why do you care what I think NOW?

I received this strange letter telling me about your bill to curb video game violence by blah blah blah.   I really did not pay that close attention because as a parent I can help my children make informed purchasing decisions without the aid of the government.

You see I obviously know why all the love is coming my way, and it makes me sick.

It must be election time.

I realize it’s “Official Business” however until now it’s not been necessary, so why is video game violence so important you need to send ME mail at MY expense?

If you want to send propaganda to justify your seat please use your dime, not mine.

I decided to send Jim Esch $50 to help level the field since he don’t get taxpayer funded mailers or taxpayer funded town hall meetings.

You know I have not the slightest what you are for or against, I don’t know a thing about you.

I do know I am sick of the same things everyone else is, and it’s not video game violence.

So what are you DOING about it?

Send me mail about how you fixed the economy, how you brought home all the soldiers in Iraq or how you brought an affordable plug in electric car to market so my wife can drive to work each day.   You see gas recently became so expensive it was costing us for her to work, so now she is home.

If people in your own neighborhood don’t know what you are for or against why the heck do you need to use taxpayer mail to tell us?

Then again Beau McCoy lives a few houses from me, never met him either.
What ever happened to door to door politics?  Damn Internet.

GRISOFT IS NUTS!

Ok I have been a long time advocate of AVG Antivirus.

I have used it at my 2 last jobs and have bought HUNDREDS of seats.
I have reccomended them to countless people.

In the past couple of years, in lack of a better term, they have gone nuts.

AVG Free has been a lifesaver for so many people too cheap to buy antivirus, made my life as an IT admin that much easier.   That time has come to an end.

Now it seems every year they do a major revision, and require an upgrade.
The FREE Version will nag and nag you to buy, I realize they need to make a buck but this is crazy.
It will not give you an easy free upgrade path, it’s just a pain.   All the grandmas I hook up with free antivirus is calling me about the nag screens.

Now they want you to install all this bloat too, URL scanners, spyware scanners just not the basic product most people need.

So what set me over the edge?   My personal 5 seat copy.
I use the 5 seat copy on my personal SBS server in my house.

You see I purchased AVG back when it was REALLY cheap, like $50 for 2 servers.
On their commercial product I have always boasted “It’s ½ the price, and good twice as long”
Upgrades are ½ price of the retail price you paid.

Not anymore.

2 Years ago my upgrade price was $60, tonight it was $220!
THAT’S RIGHT ALMOST A 400% PRICE INCREASE!

This is a company I always thought had it together, making money I would assume.
With these prices and tactics they are no better than Norton and MacAfee.

What a way to treat a lifetime customer, a 400% price increase.

This is definitely one of those things where I wonder how many other IT professionals will share my feelings with AVG.   I always thought this was a great lead to get commercial customers, bait the IT guys with the free product, and get the commercial sale.

Microsoft has programs like Technet for IT professionals that puts low/free software into their “Sales Persons” hands, the IT guy who does the budget.   AVG has taken theirs away.

Binary Ghost has reccomended Avast!, you can get a copy here…
http://www.avast.com/eng/download-avast-home.html

Goodbye AVG.   I will just protect the desktops and giveup on the server.

What is the Airave from Sprint?
The Airave is the first Femtocell from a major cell phone carrier that uses licensed spectrum. This device acts like a mini cell phone tower in your home or small office (5000sq ft) and routes your cell phone calls over your broadband connection much like VOIP. This is extremely helpful if you have poor coverage in your location, or want unlimited calling in your home to replace your landline, or reduce your minute usage.

How much does it cost?

The device is $99.99+Tax. Standard shipping is UPS ground.
There is a minimum monthly charge of $4.99.
Additional charges for
$10/mo for unlimited calling using the Airave for 1 phone
$20/mo for unlimited calling using the Airave for family plans
(Don’t know if this covers and entire account or just a block of phones on a shared account*)
SOME People have reported getting them free and the $5 fee waived via retentions, I personally have also.

Where/When can I get one?

The official date is August 17th.
You can get them via retentions right now, most if not all stores will give you a blank stare when you ask for one. No training has been provided or scheduled in the corporate stores I went to at this time.
Telesales/ecare/chat will have the same response, if you want it early you need to get with Retentions.

Are there special limitations I need to know about?

The device has a GPS receiver to make sure it is in a licensed Sprint area, the frequency it uses are the exact same as your current cell phone. The GPS receiver will more than likely need to be placed next to window, depending on your building or home it may just work if the signal is strong enough. This signal is sent by Satellites owned by the government, not Sprint so the coverage is universal. If you can see the sky, it will work.

The device will use a “Line” on your account, so if you are maxed out on phones, you can’t get an Airave.
The $4.99 charge per month is to subsidize the cost of the device, much like your phone. It costs more than $99 for Sprint to produce the device.

Your going to need a low latency HIGH SPEED internet connection for this to work, services such as Starband, Wildblue and DirectWAY will not work.

You can see if you have acceptable latency by opening a command prompt and type “ping 208.67.220.220″ you should see something like this…
If the Time=**ms is less than 150 you should be ok.

Reply from 208.67.220.220: bytes=32 time=36ms TTL=55
Reply from 208.67.220.220: bytes=32 time=41ms TTL=55
Reply from 208.67.220.220: bytes=32 time=35ms TTL=55
Reply from 208.67.220.220: bytes=32 time=38ms TTL=55

How many phones can use the device?
50 Phones can register 3 concurrent calls.

Is there a way to limit who uses the device?
Yes, in your online account you can specify the phone numbers to use the device or allow any. HIGHLY recommended if you live in a dense area such as an apartment building or office complex to keep other businesses off your device.

How does this work with my home network or current VOIP?
The device uses ports UDP 53, 500, 52428, and 4500.
If you already share internet with multiple computers in your home you should be fine, make sure you have an open connector on your “Router or Firewall” this device is usually made by a company called Linksys, Netgear, Dlink or Belkin.
Vonage and other VOIP services traditionally use port 5060 for their service.
The device needs to be hard wired to your network, WiFi will not work.

How does the device interact with my phone, what do I need to do?

The device will automatically hand calls between your phone and the cell towers, you don’t need to enable anything on the phone. Any Sprint phone will work, Nextel Iden phones will not.
To take advantage of the Unlimited feature the call must START on the device, you can leave and the call will remain unlimited (If it don’t drop). If you are in a call and walk into your home, that call will continue to use your minutes.

What about data?

The device will run at 1x speed, not EVDO or EVDOr.a
Your phone will try to pull the EVDO tower until it can’t since it’s on a different frequency.

Hopefully this FAQ will help you with the Airave without reading the 75+ pages in the Airave thread!

If you have updates or revisions send me a PM

*This is important because if you have a business account with 50 lines is it $20 for all phones? If you have multiple SERO lines does the $20 cover all lines?

You know this is just stupid, let’s bail out the banks!
Oh and the home owners who were too stupid to keep up on their payments, they need a break too.

What about me?
I want a fair shake!

You see I bought my house at the top of the bubble, I did get in when inventory was high and paid about 15% under value on my home.

I had no down payment so I did a 80/20 loan, being somewhat smart I did get a fixed rate loan on both, figured I would take a couple of years and fix up the place then re-finance.  It was a brand new home.

Well it’s been almost 3 years, I did my part and made 100% of my payments on time… duh
Dumped 10k into upgrades
Will have my 800sq/ft basement finished soon.

Problem is my house is not worth it, as a matter of fact my “House Twin” down the street just sold for 20k less than I paid for mine, this being 45k less than the original asking price, or 25% less than it’s value 3 years ago.

So I’m a tad hot, I expected to re-fi my home and capitalize on my improvements & the “deal” I got.  Refinance with a traditional mortgage then dump the 2nd.   I should be easily 25% vested in this home now.    I have made every payment, paid my taxes, paid my home owners insurance just like I was supposed to.

Why can’t I get the loan I deserve?   Because some dumbass bought more home then they could afford and can’t make the payments?   And now THEY get the break?

This is stupid, if you really want to bail out the home owners give them the break not the banks.
I have a somewhat nasty rate on that second mortgage, my calculations say I could save $300/mo with a re-fi.   Wonder what I would do with that money, probably waste it on crap.

Here is my plan, level the playing field.

Any morgage that’s behind as of a date or with an interest rate higher than 6%…
(Say 2 weeks ago to keep idiots from getting behind now)

• Restate all loans with any interest rate higher than 6% now to a new 6% rate.
• All homes currently behind have 30 days to make 1 payment at the new rate to prove you care.
• Your missed payments are put back in the loan, so if you owe 10k in back payments and fees, it’s put back in your loan and spread out over 30 years.
• If you were behind you can not be late more than 14 days 3 times in the next 12 months or you loose your house.

Give the people a chance to pay for their homes, cut off the insane crazy interest they are trying to collect and I bet people can pay for their houses again.    No more ARM’s for houses!

The banks knew that rates would rise, they knew people would not be able to pay.
So why are we here, force the banks to make a reasonable profit and stop rapeing the people who are paying!

Want to save the homeoners?   Let’s try not setting them up for failure.

Now aint that simple?

With prices going up on everything I have some limits before I stop buying them, here are mine.
What are yours?

12 Pack Of Coke/Pop/Soda   $3.00
Value Meal $5.00
Taco $.99
20oz Bottle Of Coke/Pop/Soda $1.25
Cigarettes (Don’t smoke anymore but relavent) $3.00
Candy Bar $.75
Cellular Phone $45/mo (No Data)
2 Medium Pizzas $20.00
Movie Rental $3.50

Apparently the DOJ thinks Verizon should have to dump the markets where they overlap coverage with Alltel.
http://uk.reuters.com/article/mergersNews/idUKN2333484120080723

This is a good thing.

Obviously it was bound to happen, in Omaha Verizon has the old US West license and coverage was somewhat bad out of the metro, now they have added Lincoln as they bought some of the old CellularONE network to pick that up.

Dark Purple equals Verizon network, light purple is the Alltel network.
I love people who always say how great the Verizon network is in Nebraska….haha

So who is going to buy it?

• T-Mobile  -  Highly unlikely, they use GSM technology.
• Sprint - Already has same coverage
• US Cellular - Already has same coverage
• Cricket - Already has the same coverage
• Qwest - Now this would be the most logical, without too much research they can pick up Omaha, Lincoln and all of the Dakota’s at a minimum, 3 states of their footprint.   Problem is they are to stupid to do it.I bet they could find the money, they will say “it’s not all 14 states” and let it go.

So who is left?   MetroPCS.

MetroPCS is another Cricket type service however not quite as Ghetto.
And I would put money on them buying the network.
You get a little more liberal roaming agreements (you still pay by the min) but what is really cool is their family plans.

Eat this Cricket, 4 phones unlimited talk time for $100/mo.

Watching Cricket and MetroPCS beat each other up for the undesirable customers of the big 3 will be fun to watch, and might be good for the “Unlimited” plans in Omaha.

Another fun quote from Alltel.com
Be assured for the duration of your contract you will continue to receive the same great service you have come to expect from Alltel.

So it sound like your contract is up plan on getting a crappy Verizon plan and giving up those things that make Alltel good like My Circle.   You can bet Chad is looking for a job too.

Decided to take SG1 on it’s first mission tonight, no tornados (but thats ok!)

Just as I gave up to head home I did get some cool shots, still working on how I will get them on the site.
I collected a ton of information, found how stupid I am, and realized that getting accross the Missouri river can be a PITA.

More to follow…

Not that I really care but AT&T released the iPhone today.
If you are in Omaha you can feel good you got the latest technology on the worst network in Nebraska.
Not to mention you will have to run it in EDGE mode since Nebraska has no 3g towers.

AT&T has long neglected the Cornhusker state, I joke that their phones don’t work inside cars or buildings, sometimes not even in wide open spaces.

What I see to be the bigger story the Infamous Sprint SERO plan is officially dead.
THERE IS SOME HOPE!

Someone at sprintusers.com found this link, try as you may it might still work!
http://nextelonline.nextel.com/NASApp/onlinestore/Action/DisplayAisleLanding?token=hDCZCTYLnbtqQKYL29qDCCPUWXo

UPDATE:   Put a fork in it, it’s done.

I got the DVD for the Discovery show “Storm Chasers” this weekend and I realize it’s a bunch of fluff but this is going to be fun.

Personally I enjoy driving, as my wife will tell you my favorite part of the trip is the drive.   Being a former wanabe truck driver I guess it’s still in my blood.

I feel the information out there is overwhelming, how to learn to forecast then not get in anyone else’s way seems to be the highlights.   The information is scattered everywhere I ordered a book however Amazon has had it backordered for 2 weeks, finally broke down and found the author and ordered directly from him @ http://www.weathergraphics.com/chasing/. From what I can tell he also runs the site www.stormtrack.org kind of a strange forum, you have to apply to be a member.   There is a wealth of information there however you can’t ask questions unless you are a member, kind of a catch 22.  I applied, hopefully someday I will be worthy but then again they have no idea who I am and you can’t ask again, if you know of another forum let me know I can’t find any.

I also bought some books, Extreme Weather by H. Michael Mogil and Adventures In Tornado Alley with pictures from Mike Hollingshead up in Blair!   Hopefully some day I will get to meet him.

I have decided SG1 will not make a worthy storm chase car, I finally got it 100% mechanically sound.   I am looking into the 97 AWD Caravan in Gretna as he still has it for sale.   Tons of miles but they run forever.  It’s white and that is good for the whole ghost thing, would be silly to have a vehicle called Storm Ghost that’s brown.

I’m going to work on www.stormghost.com this week, I want to get my storm chasing info over there ASAP for others looking to get in the game.   Like I said this info is scattered everywhere, what I learn I want to share.

I have been learning the new camera, it’s been hard!   Hope to post some of my pics real soon.    I did get some ok shots of that “Thing” that hit Omaha last Friday and some fireworks on the 4^th.   They turned out REAL cool.

Anyone remember Wal-Mart before they were evil?
Then again you may be saying Wal-Mart is not evil, it’s cheap.

Before 1990 the town I grew up in, Lincoln, NE (Pop 200,000), did not have a Wal-Mart.
We had K-Mart, all 3 K-Marts are closed now.

Now my Mom LOVED the Wal-Mart craft department so from time to time we would drive the 30 miles to Seward, NE (pop 6,300) to shop for needlepoint.

The city of Lincoln would come up with any excuse necessary to keep them out, “That dirt is too brown”, “too much sun on that property”.

At the time I wondered WHY? Wal-Mart Rocks! Today Lincoln still keeps their Wal-Mart’s (2) in check neither has a self checkout to keep those jobs they would replace.

So why do I think Wal-Mart is evil?
Every time I shop at Target I think of how much nicer it is than Wal-Mart.

Then I think about the prices, food is MUCH more expensive sometimes 30% more than Wal-Mart. So I try to justify the 30% and come to the conclusion that I am not really helping solve anything by paying the inflated price.

Anyone remember the scene in National Lampoons Christmas Vacation where Clark (Chevy Chase) and Eddie (Randy Quaid) are at the “Store”?
Obviously they are in a Wal-Mart by the design of the signs and layout, in particular a clear as day price tag over an isle pallet with “Made in America” as Eddie loads the cart with Dog Food.
Each time I see this movie I remember the stink over Wal-Mart buying China goods and the PR campaign to quell public resentment that came with it.
Where is that now? Where are those signs?

You see we decided to accept the low quality China goods; problem is Wal-Mart moves so much of it no matter where you shop it’s all you can buy.

Those American jobs are long gone, plants shuttered.

So if you are getting a warm fuzzy shopping at Target, you’re still buying the same crap, with a different label, in a building with higher rent.

Target is not nearly as efficient as Wal-Mart so in reality you’re helping a small sector with your increased cost.
People such as the Marketing department, your local TV affiliate running Target ads, and the property owners.

So is Wal-Mart evil? Not really, we did it to ourselves.

I have no idea how many jobs have gone to China to support Wal-Mart, we bought the stuff it’s our fault.
My Mom who loved the needlepoint is in risk of losing her manufacturing job she has had for 30 years, even with 30 years on the job she has trouble holding a day shift position because of jobs that have moved out of the US.

Last night I was doing the traditional fireworks extravaganza and as 50% of them were duds or malfunctions and I thought, where did this crap come from, China? Duh. They don’t even care about Fireworks anymore; these are probably the crappy of the crappy jobs now, where 20 years ago it was a great export for China. Stupid American burn his face off HAHA!

Watch that candy on Halloween and Easter, read the labels because if it’s not a name brand, it’s from China.
That’s the last stand, we can make our own damn food, don’t buy Chinese candy for Christ’s sake.

I don’t think we can fix this now, we can’t make anything ourselves. We have to hit rock bottom before it will get any better and who knows where that is. Companies who made our electronics, such as Motorola are about to fold.

Heck Wal-Mart is even killing the Sunday paper and competition in general.
There was a time when you would look to see who had what on sale before you went to buy it.
No longer necessary because 9/10 times Wal-Mart’s everyday price is the lowest, why shop around?
Wal-Mart doesn’t have sales.

I watched a Dateline type news program a few years ago when they asked a Wal-Mart exec “Would Sam Walton Be Proud Of Wal-Mart Today?”    What do you think?

Wal-Mart made it ok to buy China, they let us give up on American goods.
You can’t buy American even if you wanted to, and when you can Wal-Mart has dictated the price and killed the quality in the process.

So even if you buy that can of Green Beans at Target, Wal-Mart made the manufacturer drop their overall standards to save you a dime.
Target just stuck you with a $0.30 up charge for the pretty store.

They rotted the core, there is no coming back.

Wal-Mart is like Cancer, there is no cure.

Screen Capture Credit To TripleJ THANKS!