Matt's Blog

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Don’t know if I’ve posted about this before, and I’m not a huge gamer by any means, but some things I get excited about and this game is one of them:
Guild Wars 2

So DirecTV has just gotten too expensive for us while we are reviewing our budget over all, so in response we are headed to strictly antenna. Monthly Bill = $0 which is a nice change for us. We are signing up for Netflix though, so we can get the streaming movies feature and have it stream to my iPad, Wii, and PS3. So this whole transition has happened today. So I have spend a few hours today re-wiring the house so that the antenna that is in our upstairs master bedroom can feed the rest of our TV on the 1st floor and the basement. Its been quite the process, but I’ve come to a stopping point, I’ve found that even through the indoor antenna that I got off Craigslist has a pre-amp in it, I still need to purchase a bigger amplifier. I’ve found an excellent site to inform you of what you may need to purchase in your area based upon signal strength.:

http://www.antennaweb.org/

I’ve already email two people from Craigslist to review purchasing their amplifiers. I really hope to get all this behind us soon, we are spend quite a bit in making this transition. But its to get our monthly bill down from $90.53/month to $8.99/month. So I think its going to be worth it.

We are quite happy with the steaming features of Netflix just not the variety available to stream. There is a difference between what you can receive on DVD and what’s available for streaming. Streaming contains much smaller selection. I just figured for kids it would offer more of a selection to be chosen since streaming is such a great feature for moms.

ok going to bed, eyes are closing while i type this

Well once again I am without DSL. This would be the 3rd time I have had my DSL modem replaced by AT&T. This time though it is going to take them 4 work days in order to ship me a new one. Thankfully my work has given me a Sprint MiFi card and it works pretty good in my house. Just really frustrated that I can’t take advantage of my employee discount for Comcast at home, because AT&T service isn’t worth it. I unfortunately have not other option here, AT&T has exclusive rights to this community. I don’t like that exclusive rights stuff, isn’t there a law against monopolization? (Ok so there is one cable provider in the area, but all of there lines are underwater and they still don’t have it fixed after a year…..)

This is ridiculous, contractors. So this post is a rant. I’m fed up with hearing about contractors taking over a business because they won the bid, then tanking the business. So I just heard from a good friend of mine that works a very very large computer company and he is praying and hoping he can get out soon. This is based on my limited knowledge of the situation, but contractors have come in to the consumer sales division of this company and have really ticked off the consumers. Ticked off in the sense that they hang up on the consumer if the customer doesn’t want to add any additional features or accessories. You ask why do they hang up if the customer knows what he/she wants? Well that’s because if they end up agreeing with the customer then that would hurt their sales margin so much that they would rather just tick them off and hang up on them, hoping they call back in and get another contractor that would sell them that product. Well its caused the computer company as a whole to drop drastically in sales. But hey they won the bid to come in and assign temporary workers to do consumer sales, so the contractors must be doing something right? I’m just positive that they have caused the company to go under and hurt the company’s image. So my friend that I referred to at the beginning is not one of the contractors, instead he is one of the last remaining true employees of the company and is wanting to get out, because they have cut his pay down drastically after the new contract went through.

Well this actually correlates with contractors that win government contracts too. I am working with another school district in our nation that has outsourced all of the IT staff to contractors. Guess what that means? The school district doesn’t have to show the salary figures for any of the IT staff for they are all under one contract, therefore separate company. So for the line item it just states, IT Budget $4 million = Outsourced to Company XYZ. This allows for two things, one the school district doesn’t have a clue how much the Contracted IT Director is actually making, in turn they don’t have to tell the public that he is making more then the Superintendent. Guess what the School district is now in debt millions of dollars because they have no control over the IT staff, curriculum staff, teaching staff, or janitorial staff because they are all contracted out…. See the issue. No accountability to the upper-management or the public in this scenario. This happens all over our country and these figures are purely fictitious, so it doesn’t point to any one school district. And by the way with previous job, I know of one city government that was doing the same with their IT staff, it was all contracted out so the tax payers didn’t know how much they were getting paid. Yea the IT Staff is getting paid well for a city job, but on the same case the city is going broke and causing taxes to go up, therefore causing people to move out. Vicious cycle that I am seeing now.

Have you run into this?

So this is for my technically minded people. This is an example of how I wanted to find a MS Windows 2003 Server evaluation. So I took two ways of approaching it. First I went to Google and search for two different phrases: “microsoft windows 2003 download” then “microsoft windows 2003 evaluation”. The first search returned a website that was just another search site within Microsoft. So I had to go and enter again the criteria I was looking for via drop-down menus. Selected “Windows Server” then “2003″ then “Evaluation”. One would assume that this would give you one very easy response back because that provides enough detail to Microsoft to understand what I want today. Instead I receive a response that pertained to downloading the Part II of an Evaluation Technical Report document. What in the world???? Second response was for seeing how the innovations in Windows 7 and Exchange Server 2010 can help you…. again what in the world?? What do either of these pertain to my very detailed drop-down selection?
So back to my Google search, I was trying to search for “Microsoft Windows 2003 Server evaluation” and it responded with the appropriate page within Microsoft’s website, but I’m still waiting on that page to load…..
Yes I’m needed 2003 b/c that is what my client has, not 2008….

So last month I started another blog to detail out some of the difficulties and solutions we have found in moving to the Mill Creek community. Just thought I would let you all know.

http://millcreeksubdivision.wordpress.com/

So I just found out this morning that I will never be able to LASIK thanks to a new found eye disease. It called Keratoconus and can be researched here: Google Health – Keratoconus

I’m going to be doing more research but he suggested that I get Hard-contact lens for it will help with my cornea. So yea pretty bummed out right now, for I really really wanted to at least have the option even though it might have been years before we had $4000 for the surgery.

Well I’m into studying for my 3 of 4 tests to get my Apple Certified System Administrator certification. I get very very tired of studying. I think I can last about 30 minutes then take a 8 minute break. (It’s enough time to complete a little game of Modern Warfare 2 on the PS3, yes I know ridiculous!) But right now I’m studying the Snow Leopard Server Essentials and learning about Mail Services for Mac OS X Server. Very good stuff and simple to understand, I’m a little partial to the author since he is one of my friends.

We had a little more snow this morning, so we might have about 4-5 inches on the ground right now, which to us is really not that bad at all. Sun is out now and melting the snow. I think I’ve said this once before but they clean/snowplow the streets quickly in Chicagoland and really allowing us to get around easily. I think with how cold it is up here is another reason every one is fascinated with coffee up here. I think they have three main coffee shops: Starbucks, Caribou Coffee, and Dunkin’ Donuts. I’ve even drank more coffee up here then I ever did while in TN.

Our church is going through a serving campaign right now. It is an excellent series and many collaboration projects occurring at the same time. The Sunday morning service is wrapped around what you have learned in your devotion, then there are small gr0up discussions surrounding this as well. And since it concerns the theme of serving they have setup many venues for you to get out in the community and serve for at least 90 minutes during the campaign. All of it was written by the Senior Pastor. Very neat.

You’ll need to read my wife’s blog to figure out all the interesting things I have been doing around the house. I have had my working hands busy this month.

Well I guess it’s tax time! Do I really have to report all the money I got from the consulting job? (BTW I know its a yes, I made over the IRS limit, crap!)

Since the iPad was introduced I have been skeptical and concerned. But still nonetheless very excited to see what Apple has planned for this device. Well I thought I would share what the developer at Panic software wrote about the release of iPad:

http://stevenf.tumblr.com/post/359224392/i-need-to-talk-to-you-about-computers-ive-been