In addition to picking up an HD DVD player on Wednesday – specifically
the HD-A30 – I also decided to bite the bullet and finally pick up the
Absolute New Frontier at the comic shop. I’d been wanting it for a while and decided that it was as good a time as any to get it over with and buy the thing. The quick flip-through that I gave it confirms that it looks really good: sharp, crisp colors, nice paper stock, and some excellent extras such as character designs and various other goodies.
On Tuesday, shortly after the Verizon tech who’d gotten my Internet working again had left, I noticed that it wasn’t quite as zippy as it been during the brief time that it had worked on Monday. Various speed tests confirmed that I was “only” getting 5 Mbps down. Now, this is a respectable speed, and is five times better than what I was getting from DirecPath, but it’s not the 15 Mbps that I’m paying for.
So I called Verizon once again and was greeted by their automated phone system which ran some tests and concluded that I needed to talk to an actual person. However, rather than transferring me to an actual person, it told me that one would call me within six hours and then hung up on me.
No one ever did call me until nearly 7 PM the next day, but the person who did call had good news, as he had found the problem – I’d been set to the default speed of 5 Mbps – and corrected it.
So now I have the extreme speeds again, and I was able to set up my wireless network without screwing anything up.
David, my Realtor, stopped by on Tuesday to give me a housewarming gift (a nice set of dishes) and to check the place out. He said that while it’s clear that I’m not finished with organizing and decorating the place it’s already nicer than it was when the former owner was living in it.
Certainly it’s considerably less cluttered, and turning the dining room back into a dining room frees up a lot of room in the kitchen, which, while decently-sized, isn’t really big enough to be an eat-in kitchen.
So far it’s been a very slow day at work, as per usual, and more boring than usual, as I didn’t bring my laptop in, so I don’t have my collection of mp3s to listen to, or the ability to do any online tutorials.
I didn’t want to bring in the laptop as now that we’re in the new NOC there seems to be a stricter adherence to the rules, and bringing in non-business laptops has always been against the rules, though most managers have been willing to overlook it on Saturdays.
Now? I’m not so sure, as we aren’t even allowed unfettered access to our workstations – they’re locked inside cabinets.
We have speakers, but they don’t have headphone jacks, so it’s difficult to listen to music unobtrusively.
On the plus side, it’s not as ice cold in here as it was in the old NOC, though the warmth seems to lead me to drink a lot more water. It seems like I’m constantly refilling my mug, much more frequently that I did in the old NOC, and I already drank a lot of water there.
Maybe it’s not the warmth, though. It could be that the water here is better. After all, I’m getting it from an actual water cooler, not the filtered water dispenser.
Either way, all that water makes the fact that there is only one set of bathrooms which are closed for cleaning for over an hour on weekdays that much more troublesome.
