Update
It’s time once again for an update…
Work has been crazy. Yup, I think I’ve established that… Black Tuesday this week. Training on Monday. Guys from India over for three weeks for us to train them. I sat in on their training part of the day today to pick up what I could about our Unix team and how they operate. Fun, fun, fun. But at least I don’t have any looming deadlines at the moment…
Tomorrow morning I’ll be flying to TN to visit my sister, brother-in-law, niece, mom (who’s flying in from NC), and cousin (who’s driving down from MI). Woohoo, can’t wait!! Nanette’s going to be a year old on 9/2, so we’re celebrating her birthday a couple weeks early with a mini impromptu reunion.
Let’s see… Oh I’ve added a “Quote of the Day” thingy on the side bar (props to Deepak at Blogger Hacked). It randomly cycles through a few quotes I’ve collected over the years (currently 47 of them). I’m still working out the finer points of how to get it to cycle through all 47 of them, with a new one only being displayed once a day… So stay tuned.
In other news – we had been planning to move when our lease is up in November. We’re sick and tired of neighbors that don’t have any respect for each other, among other reasons… But in the past week or so we’ve changed our minds about what we want to do about 20 times. I think at this point we’ve decided to sign another 6 month lease, and focus on getting our ducks in a row so we can buy a house. We are soooooooo tired of living in an apartment, it’s disgusting. The poor dogs think they’re in heaven when we go visit Missi & Jami and they can run around that huge back yard and come and go as they please through the doggy door. Plus (when the weather isn’t oppressively hot or pouring down rain) we’d like some space–other than a tiny balcony balcony–to enjoy being outside. Coming to this decision is a very big deal for me. I’ve been deathly afraid of the commitment and responsibility of owning my own home for years… But I guess I’m finally growing up. (that and I realized just how much money I’ve flushed down the toilet renting apartments for the last 10 years)
As far as our experience so far with U-verse…. Initially we loved the internet and hated the DVR. (I may be repeating myself here, and if so I’m sorry – I’m too lazy to go back and see what I’ve already said about it right now) The TV programming is pretty nice, we get more channels than we did with DirecTV, and I LOVE the video on demand. If we keep this TV service, I may end up canceling our Blockbuster Online service. The internet still ROCKS! And we’re slowly coming around to the DVR. There are pluses and minuses for each service… DirecTV we can still use our Tivo, but the service goes out every time a cloud thinks about coming near us. The U-verse DVR isn’t Tivo (lol that about sums it up – anything less than Tivo just sucks), but there’s more programming, VOD, and we can record 4 things at once. So…. We haven’t made the final decision which TV service we’re keeping, but the decision will be coming soon since I’m paying for both at the moment. (and that is money wasted that could be put away for a down payment on our new home!) We tried buying a Harmony remote to see if that improved the DVR experience (advanced functionality is cool and the shape is similar to the Tivo remote), but I ended up returning it. I don’t know if it was our combination of hardware or what, but response time with that remote was worse than the original DVR remote. (don’t freak out, I used a gift card I got from work to buy the remote!)
Oh. School. I don’t think I’ve updated anybody on that… I’d been planning to take some classes at UTD to get my Undergrad Certificate in Information Assurance. But… I’ve been seriously doubting the value of getting such a certificate. It seems to me that my time and money might be better spent if I started studying for some certifications (such as Security+ and maybe eventually CISSP). But the more practical reason is that I put off paying for the classes until the last minute, thinking I could use my Visa. But apparently UTD only accepts Mastercard and Discover. I vaguely remember hearing something about this once upon a time, but since my whole courseload at UTD was financed with student loans and scholarships, I hadn’t run into this before. Because of these two things–and the intense stress work has been for me recently–I dropped the fall courses. I may enroll in the spring , but that’s up in the air.
I guess that’s it for now. I’m really just putting off having to pack – I’ve been “starting” for days now… but it’s getting down to the wire and I’m actually going to have to do it soon – or go to Tennessee with no clean clothes. lol
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This entry was posted on Friday, August 17th, 2007 at 5:20 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
