Shopping

Do you get on the Internet? Obviously you do, or you would not be reading this. I've been paying $50/month (used to be $40) for my DSL. I love my DSL connection, but that is way too expensive. I can't get the lower speed connection (and lower price) that they offer, because I don't have a land line phone to connect it with.

Well, I just found out about Clear. They promote themselves as mobile internet providers, but they do offer home service as well. I'd love to get the mobile service, but home service is all I need and saving some money right now is super important.

I'm thinking I might sign up for their low end 768 Kbps/128 Kbps service. Not nearly as fast as what I'm used to, but for $20/month for the service and $4.99 per month for the hardware lease, that is half of what I am currently paying. When I can afford to upgrade, I will upgrade to their 6 Mbps/512 Kbps plan, which is still only $40/month for the service, still less than I currently pay with a faster download (and slower upload).

Their mobile plans are reasonable too. They have three plans, $30, $40 and $50. You can get a $10 monthly discount by signing a 2 year agreement. They are all 4 Mbps/384 Kbps, but differ in the bandwidth you get to use. The low plan gives you just 200 MB per month, the mid plan 2 GB and the big plan is unlimited.

The plan that I really want is one of their combo plans, the fast internet and the frequent mobile. That would get me connected at home and on the road, when I needed it, for just $40/month (with contract).

Before I signed up, I wanted to know how it worked. I didn't want to pay for the equipment, so would my current equipment work? Are their any other charges? Like with DSL, you pay the service provider and you pay the phone company.

Unfortunately, I will need to get the equipment from them. That is the $5 charge mentioned above. My equipment is not WiMAX compatible. Now what is WiMax? Basically they will be connecting to me via a cell tower. Cool, eh? With the home service, I don't think I can pack up my equipment and drag it along, I think it is just for the house, but it still comes via the tower. Their are no other charges though. Just the $25/month.

Hmmm... I've sometimes lost my cell connection here. What if I can't get good connection here? The guarantee I could not find on their site. That worried me, so I used their chat service to ask a representative. Here was the response: "If for some reason, the service doesn’t work you can cancel with a refund within 7 days." I wanted to make sure that was from when I hooked up service, not when I signed up for it. So I asked: "It is from the time you sign up with us." Too bad. That does not get much time to check out their service and make sure they are going to work well. Should be 30 days, imo. At least 14 days.

What about security, is it safe to do my banking over this connection? That was on the site. They claim it is very secure, using the OFDM Transmission protocol. Don't know what that means, so I looked it up. According to Wikipedia it means "Orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing". After looking at that article, I still don't really understand, but it sounds secure. Hey, I might be a tech, but I don't know everything!

You want to sign up? Well, you might be out of luck. They are expanding, but currently only offered in Portland, Oregon. Normally our city is not one of those chosen to be beta testers like this, but I'm not complaining this time. They will soon be in Atlanta, Las Vegas and Grand Rapids, MI.

Basically, I decided to sign up, but I think I'm going to go to the kiosk I saw at Lloyd Center the last time we were there and talk to the people there. I hope I can get the equipment from them directly, so that I actually have 7 days to try it out and make sure I'm happy.

I first came across Dragon Naturally Speaking several years ago at one one my technical jobs. Back then, it was cool, but it was so hard to train that unless you really needed to be able to talk to your computer instead of use the keyboard, it was not useful. Now, it is another story. Now, it is so easy to train, that I have considered getting it. Imagine, being able to just talk into a microphone and have your computer type everything you say, without ever touching the keyboard. You can even control your computer, Star Trek like, with it. Although, you do have to use a standard set of commands and not just talk to it like a person.

My sister's boss uses it. He has Parkinson's, and the program gives him a little extra ease in his daily life. He runs a very successful small business and is able to do so, because of the help of tools like Dragon Naturally Speaking. It is not just for those that need it anymore though. It has come a long way and unless you can type at 150 words per minute (I certainly can't) then it would be faster to read it and let the program write it for you.

I have used the software a few time, but I don't own it. The truth is that I do most of my work late in the evening when people in the house are sleeping. Sometimes I'll get up early to work. If people are sleeping, I can't very well be sitting here talking to myself. Although, I suppose that if I was not talking loudly, like I do when I'm making audio or video files, that I might be able to.

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Do you want to sit on Santa's lap? Don't want to go to the mall? Well, I sat on Santa's lap over the internet. It's a little cheezy, but it kept me out of trouble, and from studying, for a few minutes. I really want a guitar. I don't care if it is a good one, I just want to be able to play things like Clementine and Happy Birthday for my students. I'd like to eventually get good enough to be able to play and monitor my students too, but I'd be happy just to be able to play right now.

If you want to go see Santa, you should go tell him that you have got a wish and would like to tell it to him. I personally don't want much for Christmas. I would rather someone give to charity the money for what they would give to me. Well, at least that is what I want to want. Really I love to open the gifts and see what I get just as much as the next child.

I may not have much. I'm working hard right now to keep our bills paid while I finish grad school. Even though we don't have much, we have a lot more than many people. We have a solid roof with constant power, heat, even high speed internet and two cell phones. We never miss meals because we can't pay for them. Other people are not as blessed. This Christmas, and every day, we need to assist those who are less fortunate. I still really like opening presents!

Feel free to watch my cheesy video below and see what I look like sitting on Santa's lap. Oh, and if you create your own, you can enter to win a $500 check from Santa. I entered, I'll let you know if I win!

My wife really likes candles. The problem is that most candles are made out of petroleum. As I'm sure you know petroleum is not exactly environmentally friendly and takes millions of years to make. We need to reduce out dependence on this industry, so cutting using soy candles instead is a nice start.

Soy candles last significantly longer (up to three times) than petroleum based candles. Other types of natural candles, such as beeswax, can also claim long burn times, but soy is the most cost effective. Soy candles are also cleaner. While their might be a little soot, you should not have the thick black soot that you have with petroleum based candles. Petroleum candles can actually put out more smog than a car.

Candles are great, but can be a very dirty light source. If we are going to help clean up our environment, we have to look at every thing we do. Are our candles clean? Is our dish washer efficient? Are our cleaners phosphate free? There are so many things that we need to keep in mind. It would be nice if the manufacturers would do a little more to make sure that we get eco-friendly products, but we can't wait for them. We have to do it ourselves. A simple thing to do, if you burn candles, is make sure you use soy candles.

If you are a retailer, consider loosing your smog producing stock and replacing it all with soy. Wholesale soy candles are inexpensive and a great alternative to your current stock of petroleum based candles. The more we support the local farmers who farm the soy and the more we stop using products from the oil industry, the cleaner our environment will be. We are shepherds of the Earth.

Printing can be very wasteful. The paper comes from trees, petroleum based inks let out volatile organic compounds (VOCs) that can damage the environment and the process of making paper is not very pleasant. But when we need to do brochure printing or business cards printing, or whatever else we need to print on paper, our businesses need to be able to do that. Without everyone using a PDA of some sort, there is no way to go completely paperless. What are we to do in order to keep our business and personal needs met and still keep our environmentally sound desires satiated?

Of course, the ideal of a paperless society is a long way off, and we may never get there. We can't produce enough sustainable wood products to meet all of our paper demands, but there are a few things we can do to help reduce the environmental impact. We can make sure our printers use recycled materials and we know what type of recycled material they use, we can make sure they use soy based ink, instead of petroleum based inks and we can make sure their paper comes from a mill that uses less water, contains their waste, and uses fewer volatile chemicals in their production of paper. We, as consumers, need to hold our printers to green printing practices.

There are two types of recycled material for paper, pre-consumer and post-consumer. Pre-consumer recycled material means that the wood chips from the wood mills (ie, sawdust, etc) is used in the production of the paper. This is good to use, but not a big shift from what they were already doing. The better type of recycled material is that used post-consumer. That means that you and I read the paper, we then put it into the recycling bin, it gets carried to the mill where it is shredded, pulped, and turned into new paper. A certain amount of pre-consumer wood is usually used to give it more strength, but we want a high amount of post-consumer paper used as well.

VOCs are damaging to the environment. Besides, we need to cut our reliance on unsustainable materials, like petroleum. Soy is a better solution. You can shred up the paper with soy based inks and feed it to your worms, spread it on your compost pile for bulk, use it as cat litter or bedding for small animals and much more. All these things would be dangerous with petroleum based inks.

The first two options are easy for you to check into. The last is not so easy. We often do not know what the mills do. We do not know if they dump their hot, chemically laden water into the river their next to. We don't know even what mill the paper came from most of the time. As consumers, there is not much we can do here, but the business owners that deal with these mills can insist on clean practices. They can refuse to work with mills that do not lead environmentally sound practices. And they can let us consumers know that they expect their partners to follow environmentally sound practices. The problem is, they need to define what is environmentally sound. What they call environmentally sound, I may not agree is such a great practice, but that is another article.

With the government mandating that all television broadcast must be digital by February, it leaves many of us wondering if we need to buy a new television. Our TV was purchased in 1991, so is not digital. Our VCR and DVD players are much newer, but I confirmed that neither of them have digital receivers. So I'm looking for a new TV.

I've looked at the local places and can get a decent one for around $500-$700. A bit more than I want to spend, but if I can manage to save up the money, I will. I thought I'd look at some of the large plasma screens that are available. If I'm going to spend that kind of money, I might as well spend a little more and get a really cool screen.

I found a 46" Sharp Plasma Screen for $750. It is just a little more than the 36" I was looking at for $700 and a lot bigger. But this is really out of my price range. I would love to have a screen like that, it would be awesome to watch Veggie Tales on a big screen TV with Dolby 5.1 surround sound, but I plan on spending that money on stuff I can do to keep Emma active, rather than sitting on the couch. I've sent away for the converter box coupons. The converter box costs about $60 and the coupons are for $40. That means that 46" screen will cost $730 more than the converter box. Maybe some day I'll get the big TV, but we don't watch TV enough to pay for cable, let alone a big TV.

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Halloween is a very fun holiday. You get to dress up and play like you are something you are not. Since I accepted Christ into my life, I've wondered about some of the ideas behind Halloween. I've decided that it is a fun family time, as long as you keep it a celebration of those that have passed and not of witchcraft and pagan values. For most, it is just a fun family time, it is just a few that can taint the otherwise enjoyable holiday.

Halloween costumes are a lot of fun and something I want to be able to enjoy with my family. We usually don't dress up, but we dress up Emma. I am trying to talk Elizabeth into dressing up this year. She has suggested dressing the dog up, so I think I can talk her into dressing up too. Now that I'm a teacher, I think I should at least dress up for my students.

Emma wants to be Cinderella for Halloween. She loves Cinderella. Elizabeth wants to dress Marley up as a clown. Elizabeth suggested that I should be Emma's Prince Charming. She says "If I dress up, I would want to be the fairy godmother, but we need to do costumes, and that is not easy."

This is true. Dressing up can be a lot of fun though. We just need to plan exactly what it is we want and then go find it. If you like, you can go to a costume store, and they may have exactly what you want. You can also look at thrift stores and even just around the house for what you want.

I was given a link to a site for more furniture. I realize that I am not going to get anything for a while, but it is still fun to look. Once again, in looking at the prices I was taken aback by the amount one is expected to spend for furniture. I don't want to spend much, maybe I'm just too frugal to spend that much, but I like to be able to eat as well.

Well, if you buy a dining room table what are the chances you will be buying another one any time soon? They are a once a decade, or less, type purchase. So spending a little extra a getting the one that you are going to be happy with for the next 10 or 20 or 30 or more years makes since.

Are the ones there going to do it for you? I can't answer that, you will need to look around and see. I saw some dining room tables I liked all right, and some I did not. I happen to like the dining table we have, so I'm unlikely to get another, but perhaps you need one and can find something cool that will make you happy.