Category: Commentary

Less than 10 days to my break

Phew! It’s been a long while, my darling blog. How have you fared in my absence? 🙂 Well, my Christmas shopping is far from done. It goes without saying that Matt & I are going with thoughtful gifts that won’t break the bank. I wouldn’t want to receive any gifts that broke the bank either. Anyway, my break starts on Christmas Eve until the New Year. That’s pretty awesome. I have been plotting on ways to spend my time and I need to draw up a sheet with the list of activities that could be done.

First of all, I just want to congratulate Matt on getting an A one of his first courses towards getting a certificate in Geographic Information Systems (GIS). He put so much time & effort into it and it paid off handsomely. Cheers, babe!

Second, I’m contemplating the idea of pursuing a minor in Computer Science. Hear me out folks! lol. I think know life is too short and I’m all about focusing on what makes me feel fulfilled & happy. At this stage in my life, I think a change of pace/scene will do me some good and perhaps light the fire under me once again. The exact details of what I hope to study are sort of, unclear, but in time, once I figure out payments et. al, I’ll keep y’all updated. Basically, it’s been well documented that I have an interest in computers and I’d like to explore that part of me. Who knows where it’ll take me? In any case, keep me in your prayers!

Map picture

Third, I finally got some video of my darling niece (Maxine). She’s just too cute for words and I cannot wait to hold her in my arms. 🙂 ‘Well, that’s all for now. It’s getting late here. Cheers! Lest I forget, that’s a map of Lagos, Nigeria. For any newcomers, that’s my city, right there.

Jane

Accessories for my Preciousssss, err laptop and more about ETFs. :)

This, ladies and gentlemen, is the future. 🙂 I kid. This is the mouse that I shall grow to love when my laptop gets here. One thing I don’t really like about HP’s laptops is that the too-slick touchpad. My hands gets rather sweaty so I will need an external mouse. My choices were simply between any Microsoft or Logitech offerings (trusted brands). From there, I narrowed my search to ease of use. If you recall, my HP dv9700t customized notebook will come with bluetooth so I decided to get the Logitech V470 Bluetooth Cordless Laser Mouse. It was a bit pricey, but I am looking toward the future with the purchase of high quality components that will come with solid warranty support. I’ve been toying with getting a dedicated laptop bag, but I will hold off on that and create a makeshift laptop bag from the items we have at home. Yesterday’s post on cell phone contracts led me to check out what AT&T’s wireless service agreement says about early termination fees. Here is the relevant bit excerpted from the “Service Agreement” in the paragraph titled Changes to Terms and Rates:

“[…] You understand and agree that State and Federal Universal Service fees and other governmentally imposed fees, whether or not assessed directly upon you, may be increased based upon the government’s or our calculations. If we increase the price of any of the services to which you subscribe, beyond the limits set forth in your rate plan brochure, or if we materially decrease the geographical area in which your airtime rate applies (other than a temporary decrease for repairs or maintenance), we will disclose the change at least one billing cycle in advance (either through a notice with your bill, a text message to your device, or otherwise), and you may terminate this agreement without paying an early termination fee or returning or paying for any promotional items, provided your notice of termination is delivered to us within thirty (30) days after the first bill reflecting the change. […].”

It’s a bit confusing, but from what I understand from the entire contract, the following conditions have to be met in order to cancel your contract without paying an early termination fee or ETF:

  1. If you signed up today, you have a 30-day grace period in which to cancel your service. Obviously, the majority of people are past that 30-day window.
  2. If there is a price change in services you subscribe to. However, they put a caveat there which is “beyond the limits set forth in your rate plan“. Now, I have the lowest rate plan ($39.99 a month) and I have no idea what the limits to which they can raise the prices to. I intend on calling a customer service representative to get this cleared. Anyway, I currently use the pay-per-use text messaging service and have the internet/MMS on my phone turned off. My current text messaging fees are 20 cents for each incoming and outgoing text message. The way I’m reading this contract, my plan says the fee per text message (incoming and outgoing) is $0.20. If they raise that fee, I have legal standing to demand to be released from my contract. The other caveat to demanding your release is that you have a limited window of opportunity in which you can do this.
  3. According to the contract, you have 30 days from the first bill that reflects this price increase so you have to diligently check your bill in order not to miss this window. From reading tips online about how to cancel your cell phone service, the key things to remember are: staying calm, having the relevant sections highlighted, having your paperwork i.e. bills in front of you and remembering to escalate your call if the CSR is being a twerp.
  4. Nevertheless, there are extenuating circumstances that the determined individual could press in order to get released e.g. moving (if you can prove that your coverage will suffer) and see this CNN blog about other viable excuses e.g. active military duty and such.
  5. Another confusing part about this whole business is the part about “returning or paying for any promotional items“. Does this mean I would have to return my Treo which I got at a discount because I signed up for the 2-year plan? I suspect so. Nevertheless, if you get to that point in your negotiations, my advice to you would be to simply save your contacts to your computer if you have a cool phone like mine (lol) and agree to return your discounted phone. Since you will be potentially signing up with a different phone company, you will be getting a discount on your new phone so don’t be too worried. If you have installed a lot of paid applications on your phone like I have, make sure you have your installation files saved somewhere. If you are lucky, you will get your exact same phone with your new carrier. If not, your files will be useless.
  6. Finally, part of this depends on the customer service representative’s disposition. You see, some people have had their cancellations take place in less than 10 minutes. Some like Ely Rosenstock had it extended over days. Some get stymied and some end up getting discounts or refunds in order to stay with the plan which is not a bad idea anyway. What am I saying? Be nice and hope the CSR is nice too. lol. I mean, I can definitely testify to the power of being nice to reps. If you have less than 6 months left or if you could live with their service for awhile, stick with them and when your time is up, your service agreement will “automatically renew on a month-to-month basis” until you leave or AT&T kicks you out. 🙂

Speaking of being nice to customer service representatives, I learned the hard way how not to be behave. 🙂 I screwed up on an order and I called the hotline. My first mistake was being a bit combative and trying to “bully” the representative into giving me a discount by concocting a story about how it was the company’s fault. Well, she clearly pointed out to me that the fault was mine and she remained steadfast in her refusal to grant me any discount. Well, I ended the call and had a cooling-down session with myself. I slept on the issue and the next day, early in the morning, I called the hotline again. I got a different CSR and I was genuinely apologetic about my mistake. We talked about options and I suggested the option which was most pleasing to me and she agreed with me. She agreed to give me the discount and I was amazed at the difference in response. For the record, this happened with my laptop order. I forgot to add the TV tuner option and now I will be getting it at a discount. I will have to return the laptop back to them so they can put it in, but I won’t be paying the full price for it. So it does pay to be a nice person. I get ashamed of myself sometimes because I read articles on the web that talk about how the customer is always right. Well, some customers are idiots/bullies/inane/smart and I happened to fall into one of those categories (hint: not smart) when I first called the hotline. So, with that expose on cell phone contracts and calling representatives, I’ll be signing out!

Some site changes and racism

First of all, the hawk-eyed will have noticed a theme change. I’m currently using Misty Look by Sadish Bala which is really easy on the eyes and brings so much needed color to my website. I have also activated a comment editing (WP Ajax Editing) plugin which gives commenters a time windows in which they can edit their comments for typographical errors, and the like. So feel free to make use of this very useful feature. I currently have it set for 15 minutes which is ample time to regret edit your comments. 🙂 If you have also noticed, my current theme supports Matt’s Asides which will hold my musings that are too long to go into my Twitter stream and too short to be called a full-fledged post (not that I’ve let that stop me before). lol.

Today’s been a bit slow, but I’ve got an entire day of cleaning up planned. I’ll be rearranging the freezer where we keep our animal parts so that will be fun. Which reminds me: I need to contact our maintenance point man so he will be able to assist me in this task. M’s having his final exams today so please put him in your prayers! I knew he had an incredible work ethic, but I was really impressed just watching him study and work his way through problems. I’m so proud of my husband and I’m sure he’s tired of me saying that. lol. Which brings me to another issue which blew my mind yesterday. Ever heard of Nuwaubianism? Well, Matt had actually told me about this group, but I didn’t take it seriously. In fact, part of me thought he was making it up! Well, I encountered a Nuwaubian yesterday. Just google “Nuwaubian” and you will understand my shock. The Southern Poverty Law Center has classified the Nuwaubians as a black supremacist hate group. Yes, I definitely believe that is in line with their beliefs. My conversation with the Nuwaubian started out nicely, but when I told him about my white husband, his first statement to me was that he wished he could perform a divorce for us (E no go betta for am). My jaw dropped to the floor. He then proceeded to tell me about the supposed “recessive” gene that Caucasians who originated from Caucasus mountains have and that we (blacks) were not supposed to mix our superior genes with whites’. He gave me a mixture of things that would have impressed a non-critical thinker/scientist and I didn’t say much to refute his ill-informed assertions. In this case, I merely bobbed my head as I was running late to see The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian. I’m too tired to even expound on this topic. Just do the googling and you’ll see for yourself. It was a bit sad.

Speaking of Narnia, I honestly was a little underwhelmed. To tell you how underwhelmed, I would have willingly sat down to watch the first version of Narnia. Narnia: Prince Caspian was a little too obvious in telling the audience that it was about Christianity. Here’s what I got from the movie: there is only one right way i.e. the way of Christ. That I agree with, but I just wish they had packaged it (for lack of a better word) nicely (or better than they did in the movie). It was so obvious that they were trying to send that moral lesson that Christ was the right way. For instance, they couldn’t defeat the enemy by their might. Neither could they defeat the enemy by enlisting Satan a.k.a. the white witch. It was only when they brought Christ (Aslan) into their ‘lives’ that they were able to be victorious. It wasn’t all that bad. It’s just that as a wannabe Christian, I know the “drill” and I just hated to see it repeated verbatim. There weren’t any new or eye-popping figures. I guess I should say they simply re-used the old animals which is fine, but I wanted something more I could gasp or coo over. lol. Call me silly.

Blogorrhea. :)

So sue me. I realized I had more to talk about and I hit the “write post” button. I finally bit the bullet and called an old aunt of mine. It was one of the best moves I’ve made in a long while. We had a long chat and it was our first since the new year began (I think). It’s amazing how absence does make the heart grow fonder on both sides. I definitely intend to keeping in touch and M & I are now talking about the possibility of a road trip!! It’s only about 10hrs to my aunt’s place and we could literally be there in a day! This led us (M & I) to discuss the pros and cons of taking our car vs. renting vs. Greyhound bus transportation/Air/Train, etc. Being a cheap skate, I immediately vetoed any flights because I dread losing my luggage or undergoing any TSA hassles and the obvious expensiveness of taking any air flight these days. At Delta Airlines website, it’ll cost ~ $234 per person for a roundtrip flight which is right around where I thought it would be. That’s almost ~ $500 for both of us. We are not willing to spend that much on transportation for a flight experience that will be less than fantastic. The option I’m more fond of is traveling by bus (a.k.a. Greyhound). However, I have since run a cost analysis and it seems that the Greyhound option is only ~ $100 cheaper than the air flight. Given the large number of transfers (around 2 – 3), the dinginess of the Greyhound buses coupled with the long bus ride (over 21 hrs) make this a rather unattractive option. The third and most fun option is a road trip. 😀 Now, the obvious demerits of taking our personal car on a relatively long trip (over 20hrs total) include:

  1. Racking up the mileage on a car we are trying to preserve (it’s at 158,000 miles right now). I’m talking a little under 1,300 miles total.
  2. Prohibitive gas prices may take the ‘cheapness’ out of this option. Right now, I think M gets over 22 miles per gallon. This means we will run through around 59 gallons of gas. At $5 per gallon (I suspect it might even climb higher depending on how soon we make the trip happen), the cost of fueling up the car will be the price of one person’s round-trip flight to my aunt’s state of domicile. So, our fuel budget for the entire trip will be ~ $300.
  3. The car might not like being stressed out so much (wear and tear). It’s got some issues, but M’s been working to straighten out the kinks. These adjustments would have happened with or without the road trip.

Nevertheless, the benefits of taking our personal ride include:

  1. Freedom to move around. We can rest as we please or even quit the journey without fear of losing our money. 🙂
  2. We will be able to explore the areas along the trip. Ideally, this will happen on our way back when we can be more relaxed.
  3. Our car now has a bike rack which M procured from a friend of his (Addictive Cycles). It’s a used Thule bike rack to be mounted on the roof of the car and it came with the trays to hold the bikes for a very good sum of $200. We totally got a great deal on it. I mean, if we had purchased it new, we would be talking about dropping over $500 for all the parts we got with the roof rack. Check the website out! The point of this: we sure as hell are carrying our mountain bikes for some kick ass biking while we are away from home!

As you can see, the pros outweigh the cons and as my people say, the majority carries the vote! Well, not so fast. How about renting a car? Well, for starters, no roof rack on rental cars. That’s a biggie. Additionally, check out the prices for the privilege of renting their cars:

So, the only ‘advantage’ to taking a rental car is that it will save our car from the wear and tear. However, I’ve heard horror stories about people getting charged for dents and things they are pretty sure didn’t happen on their watch. I don’t want to deal with the hassle of making sure I document every ding and stain on the car before taking it out. The point: we are willing to take the risk on our old car. 🙂

Enough about the road trip. M’s dad also got me a bike pedometer to track my speeds and mileage on the bicycle. It’s rather nifty and it’ll be good to help me accurately tell how much exercise I’m getting. For instance, my altered route yesterday was over 9 miles. I got my heart rate up a couple of times, but I was already tuckered out from some earlier expense of energy. M & I missed out on the group ride I had previously talked about and I felt pretty lousy about it. Still, M cheered me up and we made lemonade out of lemons. And it didn’t turn sour on us. 🙂 We ended up at a bike shop (The Hub Bicycles) and got me a nice Camelbak Rogue pack (for storing water and liquids on long rides). Surprisingly, the store price of ~ $50 is actually the average price I’ve seeing online and that’s a refreshing change. M ended up getting a pair of bike shorts because he finally got tired of his threadbare shorts. 😀 Alrighty, that’s enough fodder for one day. Have a great Sunday all!

Highly honored

It’s funny how once the ball gets rolling, it doesn’t stop. See, after accepting one job offer, I recently got contacted again for another job interview for a research position. I turned down the invitation to interview for the job and the professor responded that he wasn’t surprised I got snapped up so quickly. Needless to say, I’m flattered and at the same time, wondrous. God has been amazing to me and my husband. I cannot thank him enough for opening doors for me at a time when lay-offs are happening left and right. I mean, I just feel so blessed right now and my husband’s family (and mine) are just so happy for me. My mother-in-law & I went to TJ Maxx to ‘celebrate’ with some shopping therapy while M & J had their midterm exam. lol. She totally spoils me and she got me some gorgeous dresses that bring “grown and sexy” to mind. I went to see my former boss and told him about the good news i.e. getting the job and they ribbed me about the job because it could possibly qualify as one of those Dirty Jobs, but I’m excited about the learning opportunity this presents. 😀

In tech news, I updated my WordPress version to 2.6 and I’m loving my Plugins management section. I mean, not having to manually activate my plugins? Genius! 🙂 Upgrading was easy except for the part where my “Add Media” section of my TinyMCE editor disappeared! I mean, everything else seemed to work fine and the only thing I did different from all my other upgrades was use the gzipped version on the WordPress download site. Some plugins like Podpress and WP Polls caused my “Write Page” or “Write Post” screen to go nuts and these problems didn’t get resolved until I backed up my MySQL database and re-uploaded all the WordPress 2.6 files again. So, I’ve got all my plugins up and running & my “Add Media” screen is back. I’m also particularly excited that WordPress will support Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) because I’ve recently gotten the privacy-paranoia bee in my bonnet. Using an SSL means you cannot get snooped on by bad people. I’ve currently got The Onion Router (TOR) up and running on my PC and I use it for sensitve issues. 🙂 WordPress is definitely the easiest content management system I have used and I have not had any major issues with it.

salmonspaghetti

Little B is doing really well and he is going to be one tall young man. He’s got an excellent gene pool so no worries. Mrs. JW and her hubby are also doing a fantastic job of teaming up and being the best parents they can be to the little smacker. 🙂 That’s my pet name for B because he smacks when he eats. I just got done riding for about 15 miles and I had M take a short video of me. I’ll upload the video and update this post. He also prepared an absolutely delicious meal of spaghetti with sauteed salmon. Can you say yummy-licious? He is quite the cook, I tell you what!

Update: I’ve finally uploaded the video (thanks Google Video!) and here it is in all its glory:

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An exhilarating ride and Independence Day

Ever heard this unattributed quote: “Life should not be a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in an attractive and well preserved body, but rather to skid in sideways, chocolate in one hand, martini in the other, body thoroughly used up, totally worn out and screaming WOO HOO what a ride!”? Well, I felt like that about 2 days ago. M, John, M’s dad and I visited a state park with our bikes and we hit the trails hard. I felt that competitive spirit in me rise as I saw a couple of riders and egged on by M, I caught up to them. It was fun and I cannot wait to do those kind of long rides again. 🙂

A belated happy independence day to Americans far and wide. This year’s celebration was memorable in that there was B who experienced his first 4th of July celebration after being born last week. I do wish I got a bit closer to see the fireworks. J whipped out his grilling tools and cooked up a delicious storm. I stuffed myself and I’m aching from it this morning. J’s edema during her pregnancy was apparently a whole lot because in a space of 1 week, it’s fair to say she’s dropped over 60% of her pregnancy weight which was due to water! She looks pretty darn good for a new mom. I took some pictures of the little tyke which didn’t turn out too well, sadly. However, J has invested in a Canon camera which takes fantastic pictures. My trusty old Fujifilm’s not doing too shabbily anyway. As proof, here’s a picture I took yesterday using the macro setting on the camera:

I also have to commend the WordPress authors for the ease with which I was able to insert these photos. I think it’s fair to say this version of WordPress is the best I’ve used so far.
As far as my movie watching madness, I’ve chugged through: (i) Fantastic 4: Rise of the Silver Surfer: I’m glad I didn’t pay $8 to see this in the theatre. As I’m renting more movies and discovering how awful some movies are, my tolerance level for movie fluff/fillers is dropping drastically. Remember how I had to fast forward through the painful love scenes in Mr & Mrs. Smith? Well, I found myself leaving the couch and going about my business while watching Fantastic 4: Rise of the Silver Surfer and only coming back when it sounded like they were on the move.
(ii) Bourne Ultimatum: I loved this movie. I’m a big Robert Ludlum fan (God rest his soul) so I definitely went into this biased. I’m glad to say this movie didn’t disappoint. If you rent this movie, make sure you check out the bonus features and watch the footage of his choreographed fight scene with Desh (an assassin in the movie). 🙂

I’ll leave you with another gratuitous flower shot: