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It's been a long long time since I updated. It has been pretty busy, but still.
The biggest event was a 3 week trip to Asia I took with Kara and some friends back in November. We went to Hong Kong, Vietnam, and Tokyo, using some airline miles from the British Airways Chase credit card offer. It was really really fun, and the highlights of the trip was Hoi An, which is a town in central Vietnam known for their tailors and paper lanterns everywhere. The other biggest highlight was Ha Long Bay, in North Vietnam, which was so incredibly beautiful. We spent 2 nights on a junk and did a bunch of kayaking.
One of the other highlights was using those miles to upgrade to business class for the 16 hour flight over from Chicago to Hong Kong. We figured if we were ever going to do that, then this would be the best time. And even though it was 16 hours, it's the first flight I ever didn't want to leave. You have this comfortable reclining chair, a 15" LCD monitor with hundreds of on-demand movies, and people to bring you food and drinks whenever you want? What's not to like!
Other than that, there hasn't been a whole lot of new things over the last few months. Did some business trips to San Jose and Rochester, and went to Arkansas for a wedding.
I'll have to update later with some photos and all the Christmas goings on.
Every once in a while when the Republican's get bored, they like to go with the attack line that the poor and middle class need to pay more taxes, as half of American's don't pay taxes. Except that well, there's some problems with that theory:
1) Everyone pays taxes. Everyone pays sales tax, social security taxes, gas taxes, medicare taxes, phone taxes, state and local taxes, and more. Some people, because they make so little money, don't pay a federal income tax, but to claim they get off tax free is incredibly disingenuous.
2) Considering that the top 50% control over 97.5% of the wealth in the United States, I'm pretty OK with letting the other half off the hook for federal income tax.
3) Finally, as The Daily Show points out, even if the government took a full HALF of the entire bottom 50% of what US citizens make, it would still only bring in the same amount of money as putting the tax rate on the top 2% back to the levels they were back in the '90's.
So this isn't class warfare on the rich because poor and middle class people are jealous of them. It's about the facts and numbers showing that the sheer amount of wealth the top 1% has gained over the past 10 years has been enormous, while everyone else has gotten poorer (in real world terms), and thus the tax burden should be allocated to reflect this reality.
Google Voice has gotten a lot better than when I first tried it when it 2 years ago. They finally fixed the annoying delay between sending a text and receiving it, as it used to be HOURS between the two, and now it's instant. That was the deal breaker for me. But recently after almost going over my text message limits again, mostly due to me and Kara texting each other, I gave it another shot and it's much quicker now. It still floors me that no one is offering free texting since it's 10 million percent (not a typo) cheaper than voice.
GV is also far cheaper than anything else for international calling. It's only 5 cents a minute to call Kara's friend in Kazakhstan instead of 19 cents on Skype or 35 cents when we were using Time Warner's phone service. Plus while T-Mobile now has free wifi calling, even after it gets taken away by the AT&T merger, GV still offers free calling to US numbers, so I'll still be set for free calling while I'm home. Which 95% of the calling I do at home anyways is international conference calls with India, Czech Republic, or Scotland anyways, so it doesn't matter what phone number I end up using.
Looking forward to having the day off on Monday!
The guy came, replaced a splitter, and replaced the outside cable, and now I get all the channels, and my Internet is almost twice as fast. And the Tivo lets you look at Signal strength, and it's almost double what it was before hand on all channels. So if you are on Time Warner in Austin and can't see KXAN (NBC) in HD, that's your problem.
Tonight Kara and I are going to see The Goonies at Austin's Urban Mini Drive-In theater. We first went for her birthday a few months ago, and been back a few times since. We don't do the drive in part since it's kinda expensive, but it's only $5 to bring your own chair, and it's BYOB as well. Definitely check it out if you're in the Austin area.
Also thanks to T-Mobile's free WiFi calling I was able to drop phone service from my cable bill, saving about $35 a month. Of course, if (once...) that's stupid AT&T/T-Mobile merger goes through, that'll be the end of that nice little perk. But I'll enjoy it while it lasts.
After that merger, I'll be moving over to Sprint anyways. I've heard WAY too many horror stories about AT&T, and Verizon is too expensive.
I like Friday's. I don't like that the sun goes down at 8PM now. Summer's almost over.
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