Samsung Rogue

I'm staying with Verizon because of the discount I get through work. Otherwise, I would have switched to T-Mobile to get the myTouch. Since the carrier choice was made for me, I chose the phone: the Samsung Rogue. I have to admit, it's much better than I thought it would be. I swore I would never get a candy bar phone with the argument that I always wanted something to talk into that the flip phones provided. I also thought I would never get a touchscreen because fingerprints on a screen annoy the hell out of me. Well the phone is great. The microphone is crap in windy situations but so are most phones. I did find though that the LG flip I had did better in the wind tunnel that is the corner I live on.

The touchscreen takes a bit of getting used to but once you do, it's very accurate and responsive. I only had one slip up when I sent a text to the wrong person.

A few notes:
The button sounds in the browser are controlled completely separately from the phone sounds. If you set the phone to All Sounds Off, the browser still beeps when you click on items.

The games only have a few uses before they expire. So while they're nice to have, they're not much use.

My favorite feature: When a call comes in, you can "Ignore and Text". This is great. When you're in a meeting, you can click ignore and text so the phone quiets, then gives you a list of pre-written text messages. "In a meeting, call you back in a bit." Such a great concept.

Garage sale wrap up

All in all, the garage sale was a success. We opened a day early, on Thursday the 13th, and it turned out to be a great day. We had about 70 people come through, and almost all of them purchased at least one item. Our collection of stuff consisted of a small amount of clothes, a fair amount of books, some jewelry, 5 bikes, electronics, 15 pieces of luggage including laptop cases and small carry ons and a lot of glassware like dishes, cups, candle holders, vases, etc. We sold two bikes (out of 5), a number of books and DVDs, priced at $1, but no dishes, luggage or clothes. The glassware didn't move at all this year. Friday was a very slow day. We saw about 20 people all before noon. Saturday turned out to be a great day. We had two rushes of people in the morning and one right after lunch. We sold some clothes, most of the books, the last of the bikes and some more of the electronics. All totaled we made $1200 over three days. The weather was great, we got to spend some time outside AND we made money by clearing out our closets! Chalk that up as a W.

Exchanging British Pounds in Chicago

I normally do all of my foreign exchanges at the Chase in the Loop on Dearborn. Today I learned that the chase in the loop only deals with paper money, however. They told me that Harlan J Berk at 31 N Clark exchanges coins. They do exchange almost any coin but it's at a severe discount due (66% of the current exchange rate) to the high cost of shipping the coins back. They exchanged the coins and the proprietor told me to "buy chocolate" in the future. It has a better "return."

After three long days it's finally done! Time to count the cash!

Our signage

Gabby working the garage sale.

RCN Cable

I used to be an RCN customer in early 2000 and loved the service back then. It was cheap and good. It had all of the features, channels and options that Time Warner or Comcast did. Unfortunately, I had to switch to Comcast when I moved because it wasn't offered in my building.

It's been 6 years but I'm back to RCN. I had it installed on July 3rd, which is amazing because I thought they would be closed because of the holiday. They said they were installing on Saturday the 4th as well. Wow. The technician was great. Courteous, pleasant and knowledgeable. The install was fast and I was up and running in about an hour.

I'm saving about $80 per month from what I was paying Comcast and I get the same package: phone, internet and tv. I still have an HD tuner with DVR, my internet speed is 10 Mbps and phone is just because my cell phone gets crap reception in my building.

Overall, it's great. Good features at a good price. My only gripes are that RCN's DNS servers suck. I get a page not found for major sites like Google and Yahoo. I switched my router's DNS entry to OpenDNS and the connections are better. The cable box interface is hoakey. It almost seems like it was outsourced to a small developer that made it up as they went along. It's slow too. The menu seems to react a minute later after a button push. Maybe it's the same developer that did their website. The site is a joke for what I consider to be a major company. The javascript is poor at best, they don't know how to handle special characters in their drop down menus and it doesn't have error handling that works. Worse than those problems was Comcast's call center person trying to do a hard sell on me as I was trying to cancel. She was so obnoxious, basically telling me that I'm an idiot for leaving. She literally, "That's ok though because I know you'll come back." Not will I not go back, but I'm telling everyone to switch to RCN if they can!

I'm very happy I switched. Especially since I get the science channel now!