The 4th, the gym, Millie the dog and a rousing trip through the Supermarket! If you are interested in seeing my Fireworks video before I post it here later in the week, you can do exactly that here.

Oh yea, maybe not so much safe for work in the beginning. Just a few cuss words, nothing to get in a snit over.

Before we begin, today’s discussed will be focused on Verizon FiOS, the fiber-optic service provider, not Verizon Wireless, the cellular telephone service provider. Differences will be explained as we go.

Woke up this morning to a complete lack of communication. No internet, not telephone and no cellular. This is that big of a deal for me because I frequently forget to pay my bill. So, the calls start at 6:30, but of course, Verizon doesn’t open their customer service phones until 8:00 AM local time. Something I do not understand because I talked primarily to people that were in the Central and Eastern time Zones today and I’m pretty sure their day does not start at 10AM.

Moving on.

To make an excruciatingly long story short, after talking to 10 different people from 3 departments and 6 call centers, I finally get a Verizon Wireless employee on the phone. She helped me, not only with the wireless portion of my bill, but also guided me through the nightmare that is the Verizon customer service department until I was finally able to get a person on the phone that could help.

Start Time: 8:30 AM Finish Time: 10:30 AM

It’s a amazing how a company can be so completely different. On one hand you have Verizon Wireless. I dial 611, get a person (every time) that helps me with whatever problem I have (every time). Not a script reader, not a person in a foreign call center (I always ask), but a person that has been empowered by VZW to assist customers with whatever they require. Brilliant.

On the other hand we have Verizon the Telephone Company. They still run things like they did back in the day when everyone had telephone service, rotary phones and nobody had heard of cable teevee. They have bureaucracy. They have numerous departments filled with people that can’t help because it’s taken care of in another department. They are still using equipment left over from the GTE days (one of the employees in one of the call centers I spoke too told me this). They do not have a system in house for accepting payment. They are, in short, antiquated.

And, to make matters worse, they have a billing system that doesn’t work, or they have employees that don’t know how to make it work correctly. For example, I signed up for the One Bill service to consolodate my FiOS and VZW service onto one bill. Saved a few bucks in doing so as well. But, as I mentioned above, I am wont to forget to pay the bill. With VZW, you get a text message that says your bill is due when you start getting late. Still forget? No sweat. 3 minutes with an automated system to make a payment and everything is good to go in about 5 minutes after that. No so much with One Bill.

Miss a payment, everything gets turned off. No real warning. Then, when you try to get try to make payment, unless you have the special phone number, it’s a frustrating experience, getting bounced from department to department, repeating account information and the last 4 digits of my SSN until, finally, someone directs me to the pay-by-phone “service” that costs $3.50 to use after you enter (I’m not kidding) almost 40 digits into the system.

So, today’s top tip. If you are a VZW customer and a Verizon FiOS customer, skip the One Bill service.

You can thank me later.

Our own Michael B, head plumber at donburnside.com, got a promotion to Chief Petty Officer.

Congrats Michael!

Get Windows 7, 50% off!

The Sound of Young America

via from this.

I aspire to one day to be half as smart as Merlin. And, if you listen to this 27 minute talk you’ll know why.

My Week with Safari

Safari 4 was released last week. Finally including proper tab controls and a few other features that really peaked my interest. So, on the Mac, I decided to make it my default browser for a week.

Keep in mind that I have been using Firefox since before it was called Firefox. Plugins, hyper-lever control over the behavior of tabs and a great experience are tough to match. And, for me, Safari doesn’t quite fit the bill.

The new Safari is pretty rockin’, don’t get me wrong. It’s fast, it displays webpages well, has pretty ok tab controls and the new coverflow feature on new tabs is very cool. But, and this is a big but, there are a few issues that are forcing me to switch back to Firefox for full time browser duties.

First up is weird behavior in Gmail. Weirder still is that things happen (or don’t) seemingly at random. For example, in the image above, I was trying to mark that message as spam, but I couldn’t click the Report Spam button. Other times the message window won’t get focus, so when I start to type who knows what’s going to happen with the Google Keyboard Shortcuts kick in.

Next up is Facebook. The same thing happens there as does with Gmail. Buttons not clickable, comment fields don’t grab focus and sometimes, the site won’t load at all (eventhough it will in Firefox).

I was thinking maybe this is a Webkit issue. But, using Google Chrome on the EeePC under Windows is perfect on both of these sites, everytime. I’ve never had an issue.

I’ve had these issues before when I was using Fluid.app for Gmail and Facebook, both on the iMac and the Macbook. As cool as Fluid is, I had to stop using it because it was too unreliable on the 2 sites that I use the most.

Much like Safari is now.

I’ve been hiring my services out for a week and I must say, it’s not too bad. Yet.

Started the week with a laptop screen replace, a laptop hard drive replace and 2 systems that the owner wants new hard drives and power supplies installed. Sweet, hardware calls, I can do that!

Followed up with a nasty virus infection, Windows barfing on 2 DVD drives and some Skype talk, finishing with some speed issue trouble shooting resulting in a little bit of registry editing (honestly people, uninstall Real Player already) and upgrading-to-IE8-from-IE6.

Next week I’ll be checking out T1 issues at a retail store and helping out a small office to get their equipment/hardware consistent and check out the overall workflow.

Not bad for the first week. Not bad at all.

Off to brush up on my hard drive imaging skills. Been a while since I’ve done that.

It’s sleek, it has apps and it’s running on “America’s largest and most reliable network.” Folks, I got my hands on what could be Verizon’s iPhone.

It comes in a larger size — up to 32 gigabytes! It also includes a separate battery for the modem and it’s even slightly smaller than last year’s version, though it has a bulky 3G modem attached to the back.

via

Ok, so it isn’t a Verizon iPhone, but with Skype and a Mic, it’s pretty close, right?

Fess up. Who’s gettin’ a 3G S?

In escrow right now, so don’t bother to ask if it’s available.

About 13k sq/ft on Lake Arrowhead, this is the nicest house I’m sure I will ever see. Completely custom built, this house is the very definition of huge. Besides the overall square footage, it took 750 cubic yards of cement to built the foundation. The master bedroom, complete with cedar lined closet and dual-shower/jacuzzi inclosure, is a tad over 1600 sq/ft.

On the main floors (yes, floors), the bar tops were hand built from oak, soaked in the lake for about a week and bent in a custom jig. All of the walls are covered in oak, as are the stairs. The carpet on the floor was custom made for this house. And the rock fireplaces where hand built, using materials found in the area.

The kitchens (yes, kitchens) both have full size Sub-Zero refrigerators with custom built doors. The front kitchen features a huge island with conductive stove (trust me, it’s cool). The back kitchen features Wolf restaurant-grade stove, griddle, grill and convection oven.

All of the rooms are equally impressive, with oak walls, custom built furniture and partial cedar lined closets. Really, it’s very nice.

And built entirely by my Grandfather. He designed it, drew the original plans, supervised every bit of the construction and did quite a lot of the work himself. It’s truly an amazing house.

I have more photos in my flickr stream and will be posting a little bit of video soon as well.