Lord Gonchar

So I’ve posted a lot about TV and specifically my hate for Time Warner and their lack of ‘getting it” and my love of AT&T U-Verse and their abundance of ‘getting it’ in the past couple of years:

New TV – (June 2007)
Cable Box Woes – (July 2007)
TV Service Woes – (September 2008)
TV Service Woes Remedied – (September 2008)
Neither Side Gave In – (October 2008)
Temporarily Disconnected – (January 2009)
I Want My U-Verse, Fuck You Time Warner – (March 2010)
Fuck You U-Verse…no, I still love you – (March 2010)

It all makes for a fun little story if you read them all.

So what does this have to do with anything?

Today I wake up and pop open my e-mail like any other day and there it is…an e-mail from AT&T letting me know that U-Verse is now available at my address. All those months of putting my address into the availability checker and asking them to notify me when available finally paid off. I think I came a little.

Hopefully, I’m not counting my chickens before they’re hatched because God knows with my luck in this area that something is bound to go wrong. But tonight, I’m putting together a package and scheduling an install date.

Giggity!

A few years back my wife and I saw Weird Al at Kings Island pretty much on a whim. If you’re my age, you grew up in a time and place where Weird Al was probably part of your culture in some way, so it was kinda cool to finally see him live. I’m not sure I’d call myself a fan, per se, but I dig what he does to some degree and can appreciate the silliness.

So when I happened to see he was coming back around this past spring, I snagged some tickets for the whole family. This time we saw him at the Fraze Pavillion. It was out first time there (and we’ve lived here 4 years now) and we were impressed with how nice it was. Bonus that it’s just a few miles down the road. Kinda crazy that we have the Nutter Center (seats about 12,000) and the Fraze Pavillion (seats a little over 4000) both less than 10 miles away. Pretty much any act coming through Dayton stops at one of those two places. I need to make more of an effort to get out and see some live entertainment.

At any rate, Weird Al was as enjoyable as you’d expect. Good stuff. We had seats in the 4th row, but they were a little too far to the side of the stage for my liking. I think I’d have rather sat a few rows back, but more centered. It was a perfect summer evening for an outdoor venue though and that alone made for a nice night.

I just realized while posting this that I didn’t take a single photo. Sorry. You’ll just have to imagine it.

We finally went ahead and did it. We cancelled our Vonage service after nearly five years. It has nothing to do with Vonage (although the price did seem to keep creeping up) and everything to do with landline phones feeling obsolete. Hell, in the course of updating the house and getting it to our liking we’ve covered two existing phone jacks – long before we knew we would do this. I dunno. It just seems like something that isn’t needed anymore. I can now continue to make the house phone jack free as we update.

It just felt like the house phone never got used. In the past month there’s been exactly six calls to the house landline and in every case it’s a sales call (for some reason Time Warner started calling recently) or a reminder on an appointment. No one made a single outgoing call. It was like paying for nothing. So I ported the landline number to Verizon and added a line to our plan. This simplifies changing the house number for things like the school, doctors, bank accounts and such. I activated one of our old phones on that line, tossed the phone on the desk and presto! We have what amount to a home line. It’s just that it’s a cell phone with the old house number and it’s just $9.99 a month on Verizon.

So yeah, the future is now. We’re flying free and I feel liberated, man. Liberated.