We, of course, colored eggs during Conference on Saturday:
And the Easter Bunny visited before the first session of Conference, and snuck in between sessions to hide the real eggs. Jess had fun finding the hidden candy.
Jess couldn’t find the last egg or piece of candy…
Then it was time to find baskets, which were more rigorously hidden. I found mine in a box:
Jess found hers on the shelf in the closet:
This evening I was cleaning raw chicken so we could bag it and freeze it. When I was done I went to throw away the remnants and to my surprise found a suspiciously new-looking laptop, slightly busted up and sitting in the dumpster on top of everything else:
The protective plastic on the top of the lid was still adhered, and it has fairly decent specs with a “Windows 7” sticker. It doesn’t look worn, just busted. The little pink sticker on it has the date 3-21-10, the words “Best Buy”, and the number 134 (the enhanced image of the sticker is on the left):
It just so happens that the closest Best Buy, in Dublin, is store number 134. Seems to me that someone stole a display model laptop, managed to bust it up, and decided to throw it out (which is illegal in and of itself due to the e-recycling laws). The thief destroyed the screen, but was apparently not smart enough to take out the RAM, or hard drive, or DVD drive, or battery and try to sell them.
I called the police department and reported it. They were supposed to be sending an officer by to pick it up sometime this evening, but it’s 10:00 now and I don’t think they’re coming (** Update: The officer came by and picked it up, and it was the same officer Jess did a ride-along with for her training. **). It looks like this model is currently retailing for about $500. Jess won’t let me mess with it anymore (after looking to see if the RAM and hard drive were there), but maybe the person was also stupid enough to take some pictures of themselves with the integrated webcam before breaking it.
Lacking any other choices than evil Comcast and slightly-less-evil AT&T for Internet service at our apartment we signed up with AT&T. Having cell phones with more minutes than we can possibly use we had no interest in getting land-line phone service. When you look at prices online the DSL prices AT&T offers are cheaper if you bundle it with phone service, but the overall price is always higher. So, when we moved in we signed up for just Internet service.
Our most recent bill has some fine print labeled “Important Information” that informs us that beginning this month our bill would be increasing by $3 a month. I was annoyed with this and called to complain, see if they would leave it at our existing rate, and if necessary downgrade our service to a lower price point (we’re already paying ridiculous amounts for the service we get when compared with the fiber service I had in Utah which was both cheaper and incredibly faster). So it was the principle of the thing.
After fighting my way through their obnoxious voice-only prompts (I would much rather push buttons than try to “explain in a few words why [I’m] calling today”), and waiting on hold for 10 minutes, I got a live person who had no idea what I was talking about. They had never heard of this price increase and apparently couldn’t see anything about my account that says it was happening. So he conferred with someone else who had no idea what I was talking about. Then they discovered that I had originally ordered my service through the AT&T website, which is apparently an entirely different department. So he tried to transfer me to someone else, and I was greeted with, “We’re sorry, this number is not in service…” Awesome AT&T, way to transfer me to a non-existent phone number.
So I called back (voice prompts, + 10 minutes on hold) and got someone else. Who also had no idea what I was talking about at first, but pulled up by bill and read the text. Then she suddenly knew what I was talking about, but said she didn’t think it applied to my account. So she put me on hold. After a few minutes she came back and said she could offer me the same DSL service plus local phone service for $5 cheaper than our current monthly amount! The magic of AT&T’s system. I asked, if this was the case, why did they bother selling DSL without phone service? Her answer was to claim that some people just really didn’t want phone service. This is despite the fact that I can’t find any such deal like this on the website, but I’m not going to mention that to her.
So, she gives me the exact price quote. To be absolutely clear on the matter, I ask directly, “Is this an introductory offer?” – “No.” “Is there an activation fee?” – “No.” “Will I have the same DSL speeds I have now, 6.0 Mbps down, 768 Kbps up? – “Yes.”
Ok, well, why wouldn’t I do this? We might not even bother hooking up a phone. But somehow we can get the same DSL service plus local phone service for cheaper than the DSL service alone. And there’s still no contract.
As odd as the notion seems to me, I’m pretty sure I actually won that phone call. We’ll see if it actually pans out the way it was sold to me. But if there’s any trouble I made sure to get the CSR’s name, so I’ll know who to blame.
[Update]
No, of course I didn’t win. The answers I was given were outright lies. There was an activation fee that I had to call and get reversed. And it was an introductory offer and after 6 months my bill went through the roof. Filthy lying useless company.
Tonight’s competition that I entered was the travel category. I entered one of my shots from Europe of the Eiffel Tower at night. Out of 9 entries in Travel Basic I placed 3rd.
The Eiffel Tower from the Palais de Chaillot at night. Paris, France.
Pacific Gas & Electric is running a massive media campaign about Proposition 16. They’ve created a as-legally-masked-as-possible website entitled “Taxpayers Right to Vote”.
The premise of the propaganda website is
Help protect your right to vote. Right now local governments in California can spend public money or incur public debt to take over private electric businesses without letting local voters have the final say in the decision. In tough economic times like these, voters deserve the right to have the final say about how our money is spent
Sounds pretty dire, but then you realize that the proposition is entirely PG&E’s idea and you immediately have to find out what their motive is. PG&E have publicly stated that they plan to spend $25-$35 million on the campaign. So you know it’s gotta be good for them and bad for us lowly consumers and citizens. From my research it appears that, currently, municipal/county governments can play some political games to combine their buying power on energy contracts and explore energy options as a “Community Choice Aggregation Program.”
The CCA program, established in 2002, allows local governments to purchase blocks of power to sell to residents, and to construct municipal electricity generation facilities, which means that cities and counties can become competitors to private utilities. (Ballotpedia.org)
PG&E apparently doesn’t like this arrangement as it means that the local governments might be able to find ways of competing with PG&E’s monopoly on energy production and distribution. So they’re dressing it up in this “Taxpayers Right to Vote” nonsense and trying to scare people into voting for their proposition which would force 2/3 majority votes for local governments to enter in to CCA agreements.
I don’t even need to understand the situation to know that if PG&E is willing to spend $35 million to get this proposition to pass that it probably isn’t going to be good for me and my electric bill.