Well, after a grueling weekend we’re finally moved into our new place in Seattle. It’s a pretty nice 4 bedroom house from the 1930’s dead smack in the middle of Seattle. It’s nice to be around pe… well.. culture and convenience.. again.

Of course I tried to make sure that high speed was hooked up as quickly as possible. We moved on Saturday (and technically Sunday since we were unloading the truck till 2am) and Comcast sent folks out to hook up the cable box the next day.

I was out with the kids picking up some more things from the old house because I figured they weren’t really going to show up. That left Stacia at home. When I got back she was standing on the lawn and two big guys were leaving. She had a fairly sour look on her face as she came up to talk to me in the car. I was preparing to be annoyed because they didn’t put the jack in the downstairs closet like I’d wanted when the guys drove away and she started to lay this story on me.

Apparently the first guy showed up and he was cool. Asked where we wanted the jack and where the cable modem was - we brought ours down from the old place. So she shows him to the basement and goes back to unpacking up stairs. He goes back and forth between the basement and then to outside.

About a half our later she hears the cable guy come in the front door and goes into the living room and there’s this BIG ASS Samoan guy filling in the door and the other guys in front of him. He says “Oh.. my buddy is here.” (Edit: She said he didn’t speak english very well.. fragmented.. so I don’t know if he was samoan *shrug*) And then they start to ask her all the same questions again. The guy has already been there a half hour or more and asked all these guestions. So she starts to kinda get worried cause they’re acting dumb and kind of moving in towards her.

They’re asking her were she wants the cable modem hooked up and basically the gist of it is “show us where down in the basement.” So at this point she just freaks and points to the basement door and then just puts keeps her head low and pushes way around the big guy at the door and into the front yard. She stays out there for another 45 minutes pretending to pull weeds.

Just before I got home they finally came up out of the basement and told her that it was all hooked up and that the battery on her laptop had died. Ermm… when had they asked to use that.. it was in my office on the other side of the basement. So they big guy gets in his truck and the other guy has her sign the work order and kind of awkwardly talks about drilling holes through the foundation and if that’s what we wanted to do. Then he just kinda walks away and gets in his truck… which is where I came in.

So that was all kinds of freaky. I tried to comfort her with the idea that these guys are there with a company van and they’re out on a job so if they tried anything their names would be all over it. I didn’t try to down play her fear or concern - hell, fear is nature’s way of trying to keep you alive. But… I have to hope that’s the case.

Once she was calm I went inside to check out what they’d done. Her laptop was in the corner of the basement all hooked up to a rats nest of wires and I went into my office to find my laptop “tossed” onto the desk and hanging off. I’ve got a password on mine so I imagine they were annoyed, put it back, and grabbed hers.

All and all the kind of experience to leave a bad taste in your mouth.

So… I took apart what they’d done. Pulled my vonage box out of the closet and all the spurious other devices and slapped the network together. Wireless is pretty nice. Here I am in the middle of Seattle and I’ve got 2 real signals. Mine and an open linksys which I think is my neighbors but has a poor signal strength.

This is good. Trust me. I was living out in bum fuck egypt and I had no less than a dozen APs all crammed in there on all channels. I shit you not. It was terrible. Not to mention the entire neighborhoods signal dropping for minutes at a time randomly. Thank you Everett Naval Station… Oh yeah… I know it’s you.

So for giggles I ran speedtest.net on our connection:

Works for me.

Oh well.. I’ve got more stuff coming now that we’re settling in. I’ve had a new laptop bag for a while and I’ve been waiting to do a writeup on it until I see how I like it. It’s a Crumpler “The Horseman” model. I’ve got some likes and some dislikes. You’ll see.

Laters