First off, we got the FiOS installed yesterday. Michael worked from home all day so he was able to meet the Verizon techs and stick around for the 3-4 hours the install took. The install was pretty labor intensive, they had to run a cable from the FiOS box on the utility pole to our house, into the basement, mount the equipment in the basement (3 boxes, we’ll have to take pictures, Michael can identify them all), get an Ethernet wire run from the basement to our computer room on the second floor (Michael crawled around in the basement to fully acomplish this). Michael said he was bombarding the techs with questions and they were able to answer them all, either they knew the answer or knew how to obtain it – quite a difference from the Comcast techs Michael had to deal with this month.
The speed? We confirmed that it is 15/2mbps. It is fast. Big sites (Livejournal, Yahoo!…) pop up immediately – no noticeable image loading lag. We’re now pretty much at the mercy of the upload speed of the servers serving us, which is a pretty cool feeling. And since we’re still hosting our websites from home they’re much faster now too – yay! I’ve been pining for faster speeds for my websites for a while and was seriously considering paying for hosting again, now there is no need. Unfortunately I couldn’t enjoy the new found speed for very long last night, we had a nasty thunderstorm and after the power flickered a few times I decided it was best to turn off my computer and chill out in my bedroom with a book instead.
Monday was a busy day. I took it off from work to run a bunch of errands. In the morning I was on a Secret Mission, which will not be discussed until a later date!
I came home around 11AM to meet Michael and headed to Norristown to get our MD marriage license application notarized. This was a surprisingly pleasant experience aside from the typical downtown Norristown traffic. The security guard at the courthouse door was nice, the women we asked for directions from in the courthouse were delightful, the woman who notarized our application was efficient and friendly, even the toll-taker at the parking garage was in a pleasant mood. It feels so good to have such an experience on a hot day, especially when I expected the process to be much more difficult and time-consuming.
From the courthouse we headed to Montgomeryville, grabbed some lunch, and then Michael dropped me off at the Montgomery Mall so I could go to LensCrafters, he headed into the office for a bit. I’ve needed new glasses for a couple months now, and finally got tired of squinting. I got an eye exam and got a new pair of glasses and a pair of prescription sunglasses. The new glasses are very similar to my old ones, a bit smaller. The sunglasses are a great thing, no more sun glare headaches while driving! The world is much nicer when the sun isn’t burning out my eyes.
My glasses were finished around 5, Michael picked me up and we went home to feed Caligula and then went out again – this time to Sly Fox for the MontcoLUG meeting. Michael was able to get a projector from work to use for the meeting (yay!) and 9 people showed up, which is not bad for one of our meetings. The presentation on SVN went well and it was a great meeting. It was really nice to see
Monday and Tuesday were plagued with highs in the upper 90s, the humidity was terrible. The thunderstorm last night seemed to take all the super hot weather with it when it left. They are saying the high today will “only be 86” phew. There is some stuff I need to do around the house that really didn’t feel like doing in the super hot weather, we haven’t even eaten at home in a few days.