So finally the Kirkland city council has approved the TV franchise agreement for Verizon’s FiOS TV service.
If all goes well, this Saturday I will basking in the glory of both FiOS Internet and TV. The thought of all that high speed fiber data and HD TV goodness is sheer joy. I feel my days of shackled allegiance to Comcast coming to an end.
I’ll post an update of how it goes.
Even better, FiOS is coming. One big fat strand of fiber optic goodness is available at my house. Finally.
Verizon ripped up the yard last September and I’ve been calling and calling asking when I can get my piece of the super-dooper high speed FiOS lifestyle. More recent calls have been met with “there is no fiber at your location, nor are there any plans for it.” Um, no way! It’s just feet away. Gimme!
I finally managed to get to the right person at Verizon who investigated and found that indeed there was a system glitch and FiOS is available with speeds of up to 50MB downstream. Yum.
And even better, FiOS TV should finally turn on Washington state at the end of August. Tons of HD channels that we can only dream of as Comcast subscribers — all in their HD goodness without added bad compression.
Life is good.
A friend forwarded me an e-mail message with one of the more cool calendars I’ve seen in a long time.
Everyone loves popping bubblewrap. C’mon, you know you do.
Now enjoy the satisfaction of teaching that plastic air bubble who’s boss and mark each passing day of life all at the time time.
The BubbleCalendar is just $29.95 and comes in your choice of vertical or horizontal designs.
You can pre-order your 2009 calendar gifts. Handmade in the U S of A.
The latest Windows Mobile update has been released for my phone and I’ve loaded it without any problems.
I still like the Sprint Motorola Q9c that I bought last fall. It makes me happy that for once an upgrade comes out and Sprint is actually allowing me to upgrade the phone software versus having to buy a whole new phone.
There’s a couple of changes that I see right off the bat. I no longer have to use a registry hack to enable the built-in GPS on the phone. Now that works without the tinkering. I tried it out with Google Maps and Windows Live for mobile and both work exactly as they should.
SMS texting now has a threaded view navigation has a new slider navigation that I’m trying out.
Internet Explorer has improved a little with zooming out to see the whole Web page, but I don’t think it has reached parity with the Web browser on the iPhone. New users will also find phone and e-mail account setup easier.
So last week I finally got the chance to make some changes to a spreadsheet we use at work that helps us analyze the hits, ratings, and comments customers leave on the Microsoft Office Online site.
The spreadsheet uses a lot of VBA macros to query a SQL database and then allows us to filter the data down to manageable chunks. I’ve dabbled in code over the years, but never seriously beyond JavaScript, PHP, or some basic Visual Basic. But after I finally got the enhancements working, what a rush to see the thing actually work. It’s amazing what you can do if you just have the right code. I’m hoping these changes will help our writers spend more time creating content than trying to mine our data.