This is how much cash we've wasted on cable.

I got an email that my TV guide subscription is expiring. I thought, “OMG! It’s been a year already!?” I need to revisit my last post and see what’s happened!

Well! How did it go? GREAT!

Despite the fact that the days of channel flipping are gone and collecting/watching shows has become more difficult, I could not imagine going back to the way it was. We’ve also spent and saved money on things that we didn’t expect.

First, savings. We never did spend any money on iTunes or Amazon shows. We’ve had other stuff to watch and never felt that we were missing out on anything. Netflix streaming has been keeping us very entertained. We don’t mind waiting a year or less for Netflix to update their TV series selections. According to my previous post, that is a savings of $120 per year. Cha-ching!

Now the expenses. Not that much at all! $25 for a Mac Heist bundle which included a great DVD ripping app. Legal uses only I swear! $30 for OS 10.6, and $20 for another year of TV guide subscription. That all adds up to just $75.

So I’ve saved an additional $45 than I planned on for the year. That means that compared to keeping cable and local phone, I’ve saved $371 last year. This time next year, I’ll have saved approximately $1,200. I said it once, and I’ll say it again…..WOOO!

What have I learned from the past year? Netflix with Roku is AWESOME! We watch more content using those two services more than anything else. Hulu has been very good to us and we watch less over-the-air free HD than we thought. Channels that offer content on their websites (CBS, Comedy Central, etc) have been a little hard to navigate but are still worth the effort. We’ve been watching a lot more free content like Rev3 shows, Twit, TED Talks, and ForaTV.

Speaking of Hulu, we will not be buying into Hulu Plus. Paying $14 per month to Netflix, getting HD streaming, unlimited DVDs, and no commercials is WAY better than $10 a month to Hulu Plus. If Hulu Plus offered HD content with no commercials, we’d be on board. Alas…they f’ed it up. At least they still have a free portal. It has more ads, but less than broadcast TV and cable.

So to sum it all up. We’re very happy with our switch.

WOOOOOO!

I’m sure that you’ve seen the spelling and grammar errors on this site. This is an official promise from me to you that I will double check before I publish.

It’s  bad thing to do and makes me look like a lazy retard. I’ll try to not let it happen again.

Sorry,

Patrick Brumbaugh

I’ll tell more about the trip in a few.

[View with PicLens]

Yeah, it’s really bad, and there is a lot of blame going around.  I think that everyone wants the leak to be stopped ASAP. I think that until the leak is stopped and major operations for cleanup are started, then placing blame is just a waste of time right now. There will be plenty of time for that in the future, and it’s not like the evidence is going away any time soon either.

That doesn’t stop some people from placing blame. The dumbest that I’ve heard is Rush Limbaugh and Sarah Palin blaming the environmentalist for this. He thinks that the environmentalists have pushed the oil companies of the land and shallow waters so that the only place that they can drill for oil is deep water. Yep…bat shit crazy.

Do they (and the people who agree with them) think that you can drill anywhere and get oil? Were they taught in school that the earth’s composition going down is crust, then oil, then mantle, then core? Why don’t they just drill in their backyard? I mean there’s got to be oil there too? Are they so rich that they don’t need all that oil?

The fact is that oil is localized and finite.  There’s a reason why a bunch of research is done before you drill. Drilling is expensive. You don’t just drill without knowing that oil is there. But they seems to think that there are all these sweet sweet oil fields that those crazy environmentalists have prevented the oil companies from drilling on. Those poor companies had to go out to deep water…just to make a living.

Bullshit.

Yeah there are places that are protected like ANWR, but those places are rare and small. The world is 75% covered with water. To have large oil fields on the remaining 25% is already statistically rare.

Oil companies do things like every other capitalist driven entity. They do what’s profitable, and they try to make more profit than the previous year. They weren’t kicked out of the mainland, they went were they can make the most money. Sure drilling out in deep water is hard and expensive, but it’s VERY profitable. They wanted to go out there, they weren’t pushed out there.

On to a different subject, I’m wondering if this will kill new oil rig operations. I mean 30 years ago 3 mile island had a near meltdown, no casualties. Yet that event caused a total ban on new nuclear power plants in this country since then. This oil spill should do the same right? Nope. Some politicians are doing the same “drill baby drill” crap that Palin championed during her VP bid. The issue that I have with that is the follow up statement of, “We need to get ourselves off foreign oil. We can’t be buying oil from our enemies! This is a national security issue!”

Who do you think we get the most oil from? Saudi Arabia? (not an enemy btw) Nope. CANADA. Check out this site. The top 3 countries that we import from are Canada, Saudi Arabia, and Mexico. No only are none of the countries on this list our enemies, but two of the top three are our neighbors!

But hey, what the hell do I know. Politicians and companies clearly know what’s best.

Aaron responded to my email in a way that I didn’t expect. Perhaps it’s because I cc’d the president of the company.

He’s totally right when he says, “I’m sure not everyone likes every commercial they hear, or see, and we can live with that. You are entitled to your opinion, and we value yours along with everyone else’s.”

That’s what I expected him to say the first time. I know that you can’t make everyone happy, and I don’t expect them to try. I will not be responding back to his email because I don’t think that there is anything else to say.

Well, except one little thing.

If he thinks that writing emails, and posting them on the web is “dwelling on the issue”, then he doesn’t realize how much time it actually takes to do this stuff. I’ve spent about 45 min in writing emails, replying, posting on the web, proofreading, passing this onto friends, etc. Even all that was while I was watching TV and generally doing nothing. I wouldn’t have spent hardly any time if he just responded like he did above in the first place.

This may or may not be representative of Dennis.

I’m sure that you have a car dealership in your area who’s ads are pretty annoying. In my area there’s a dealership named Dennis that has ads that are really awful to me. I decided to send them an email about one of their ads that featured the owner’s kids.

Here’s my first email.

I will never be a customer nor will I let anyone in my family be a customer of Dennis. Why? Your advertising. Specifically the ads with children.

I’m sure that those ads were calculated to appeal to a certain type of
customer. They have elicited the worst response in myself and many of
my friends and family. I will never buy a car from any Dennis
dealership. I will not even consider looking on a Dennis lot for a new
or used car, and will tell others to do the same. Whenever I hear the
beginning of a Dennis ad on the radio that I recognize, I change the
channel.

I wish that I could say what I hate about the ads. I don’t have kids,
but I love kids. I have many nieces, nephews, and cousins that are the
age of those kids. Their (the children’s) attitude, the reactions of
the adult, the general writing and delivery of the script, the
message, it is all lost on me. What ever it is about these ads, they
make me change the channel, reaffirm that I will never be a customer,
and write this email.

I don’t anticipate you changing your advertising, nor do I anticipate
anything that could change my mind. I just thought that you should
know.

Thanks for your time,

Sure I was a little rough, but I just wanted to get it off my chest. I was expecting them to respond simply, “Thanks for your input, but there’s no accounting for taste.” They’d be right. It’s probably just me.

I was surprised that I got this from Aaron, General Manager/Vice President of Dennis.

Thank you for your impassioned response to our advertising. I wish everyone would give us imput on our approaches to business, but alas most other people are busy with the other important things in their lives, like RAISING KIDS. You on the other hand where never one of the majority of people that was able to meet someone and be able to share one of life’s greatest enjoyments. For that I’m truly sorry.

Maybe you might want to consider some of the other reasons people do things rather than reacting to advertising. Over 5,000 people per year find the Dennis experience to be superior to others they have tried, and over 17,000 per year use our service, parts, and body shop venues. They do this based on the level of service we offer at competitive rates. They don’t let things like whether or not we’ve portrayed the acts of children correctly, but then, many have children so they can relate.

Let us take a minute out to reflect and appreciate your lot in life. There that’s done now we can get on to the really important things in life, like living. We do wish you well, and hope your automotive travels all go as you planned, but should they not, I hope you don’t have a relationship with an automotive agency and have it go bad only to find you made your choice on whether or not they misinterpreted your vision of how a commercial should be percieved..

Such is the fate of the commercially impaired…

regards

Did I deserve that? Perhaps, but I didn’t think so. Here’s my response to Aaron

Aaron,

I tried (and evidently failed) to be as impersonal as possible, but you’ve obviously taken this personally. I never made any personal assumptions about the people in the ads (because they’re characters) nor the people at Dennis, because I don’t know any of them, or you.

You on the other hand made a few assumptions about me which were all completely false. I’m sure that your current customers return with good reason and that you try your best to make them happy. You wouldn’t be in business long if you didn’t.

Let’s remove the ads from this conversation. I can tell that based on our recent emails, you seem to be a person who is quick to judge, patronizing, rude, unprofessional, and posses a bit of a superiority complex. I don’t feel this way against anyone at Dennis, just you. Unfortunately this only reaffirms my original sentiment, except now I have something physical to show to my family and friends and post on the web.

I hope that you take your own advice and not dwell on this. I won’t, and I hope that you are yours are well.

Thanks,

So that’s all. Take it for what it’s worth. If I get any more correspondence, then I’ll post it here. Lord knows that I’ve been so busy with new job, training, wife graduation plans, etc. Any thing that I can post on the blog is welcome.

So this morning, I get a call that the mail server isn’t responding. /var somehow got to read only, a reboot was attempted (which tried to write to /var) and now no one knows what’s happening or what state the server is in. It turns out that it started a forced fsck that could take hours. If it failed, something else will need to be done. Perhaps it will need to rebooted into single user mode and the fsck run manually. Who knows.

Do I get ready to go to work? No.

I just VPN into the network then run the VMware client utility. I now have everything available at my finger tips! Performance logs, disk I/O information, a freaking console! I’m able to do EVERYTHING that I could if I were there. I ended up babysitting fsck on 3 large volumes for about 10 hours, but the great thing is, I never had to leave home.

VMWare is AWESOME! Now I want every server to a VM.

To be fair, I was a little nervous but never worried. I know he’s a good pilot, and it didn’t take a lot of twisting my arm to get me to go up. What kept me from going earlier? How about $100 an hour? Yeah I wanted to save up a little.

So we meet up and head out to Port Columbus, Lane Aviation. They rent a few planes there and the one that we got was a Cessna 172. Built sometime in the 70′s, this was/is the most popular small aircraft in the world. It’s got 160-ish horsepower, will cruise at 130-ish knots (140 mph), and go about 750 miles on a tank. To be completly honest, it’s not a looker…at first.

Whenever something takes you up in the air, performs perfectly well, and then brings you back you look at it a little differently. Sure it had cracked seats, bugs on the windows, rusty spots, pealing paint, a few dings here and there, and oh yeah, built in the freaking 70′s. Despite all that, I grew to love it.

We go through the pre-flight checklist which I was not paying a whole bunch of attention to because there were big jets taking off behind us. Everything checked out ok, so we crammed ourselves inside and began to go through the engine start up procedures. It started up like  charm, smelled a little stinky at first, but then leaned out. We taxi out the tarmac and then call ground control on the radio.

Of all the things that confused me, the radio was it. Sure when your flying there are 3 axises, G forces, and looking out for traffic to think about. But all of that is NOTHING compared to the gibberish of radio speak.

“Alpha niner echo. Requesting a po-boy on rye for VFR and TLD”

“Roger alpha niner echo, proceed to runway charlie echo tango who’s your daddy.”

“Alpha niner echo,  thank you.”

That’s just getting in line to take off! Then you got to talk to traffic control to tell them where you’re going, then back to ground control to take off, then traffic controll to say you’re ready. Once you’re in the air you gotta sqwak a number on some other radio so they can see you because you’s a small plane, and then talk to them again when you leave their airspace.

Then you get little “heads up” messages that terrify you because it sounds like you’re going to run into something. “Traffic on your 2 o’clock at 5,000 feet and 5 miles.” That just means that there is another plane now where near you. Thanks for the heart attack.

I’m being over-dramatic of course because I want to tell a good story. To be honest, all those things did happen, but they weren’t scary at all. Why? Because as soon as you reach even 500 feet altitude, the whole world looks cooler. We have so much farm land in Ohio. It’s a different feeling than being on a large plane. You’re surrounded by windows, and while banking, you can see everything.

It’s a weird feeling to actually use the controls. The plane tilts right to left much faster than you’d expect. When using the rudder (big vertical wing in the back) it’s scary at first because your ass is sliding. Everyone knows in a car, that’s bad. In a plane, that’s normal. Hard to get used to. I did get a little nauseous, but I think it was from the banking, the heat, and my inexperience. Once her flew the plane straight, I felt much better.

Landing was the oddest part for me. This little plane can go soooo slow before it falls out of the air. I’m used to commercial jetliners using most of the runway then slamming the breaks just to slow down. This plane felt like it stopped just a few seconds after it touched down. I bet it was only going 50mph or so at landing. It’s true what they say. You have to really try to crash these aircraft.

Will I do it again? Hell yes.

Will I get my own license? Maybe. I think I’ll have a better idea after a few more times up. It’s expensive. $10,000 for the basic license. Is it worth it? I think it might be.

Check out the picture below.

[View with PicLens]

Why do you have to do the things that you do? You push out new hardware specs on your computer products with no fan fare. You’re not a computer company any more huh? Ok, I guess that selling millions of iPhones will change your focus a bit.

You could have had the best machines on the block for the price, but you just HAD to get that extra $100-$300 out of people huh? Well hey, you’re a business and I get that.

What bothers me the most is that it seems that you always are one step away form greatness. The new iPod Nano. Video! Great! Not in HD. BOOO! FM receiver? WTF!?

That’s just what Apple does from now on I suppose.

It’s just….disappointing.

And I can’t wait. God bless you “Sunny” and all hail Hulu!