Jeff Bollinger

My hometown now has a music video.  Pretty funny.

On Sunday November 18th at 6:23 AM Andrew Stafford Bollinger was born weighing 7lbs 6oz.  Besides being a little early, everything went as planned and both Lisa and Drew are doing great.  Carter wasn’t too sure of the whole brother thing at first, but he’s been slowly warming up to the idea

The folks at Facebook must have read my earlier post griping about their lack of an auto-login feature.  Details below:

Now you can stay logged in to Facebook.

Check the “Remember Me” box when you log in from your personal computer, and stay logged in to Facebook for as long as you want.

Yesssssss.

Since I was a kid I’ve always been interested in how things work.  One particular interest of mine, strange I know, is how utility networks work.  My wife thinks I’m strange, but I often stare at telephone poles trying “figure out” what each of the components are used for, transformers, phase monitors, CATV nodes, etc…  I’ve even done research on how city sewer systems work :)  Ever wonder how your sewer waste gets to the treatment plant when your down hill from the waste water treatment plant?  A lift station of course!

I just think it’s amazing how expansive and complex these transmission networks are and yet their seemly so simple and reliable to us consumers.  I received an email today about a conference in St. Louis in September called “Introduction to Electric Utility Systems for Non-Engineers“.  Looks pretty sweet.  If I had an extra week of vacation and $2000 to spend I’d be there

On a somewhat related note, check out this company who does maintenance work on high voltage lines with a helicopter.  They even have a few videos.  Crazy stuff.

<rant>

About two weeks ago I started the saga with Charter to schedule the transfer of service from our existing home to our new home we’re moving into to.  A complete Debacle.  I’ve called 8 times now, been transferred about 20 times between departments, been cut off twice, and given out my information about 50 times.  Some reps can’t find my current address, most can’t find my new address, a few have told me I can’t transfer my phone number between houses since they are in two different billing systems.  Finally tonight they called me back and left me a message that they have the transfer scheduled, but… my exact same phone service will be $12 more a month at the new address.  Say what?  So if I stay put at my current house, it’s the same price, move across town and it’s 12 bucks more?   

Charter is clearly dropping the ball with their customer service. 

Why do I need to numerically enter my phone number right away and then the first question I am asked by every step in the process is tell me your phone number?  I even had one guy ask me 3 different times in a 5 min span what my home phone number was.  I just gave you my damn phone number!

One of the reps I talked to tried to up-sell me to a new package that was the same price.  I asked him what type of agreement I would have to sign and he apparently spoke so little English that he didn’t know what the word agreement meant. 

I am seriously considering other options for my phone, TV and Internet at this point.  Problem is there aren’t that many great alternatives now in the St. Cloud area after Charter bought Astound.  For Internet I either need to use Satellite or DSL, which are not as fast or cheap as cable broadband.  For phone, I basically have one option, Qwest.  I don’t know what the St. Cloud City Council was thinking when they approved this merger.  Sure people have other option for TV, but for true broadband Internet, there are few alternatives that I believe are as reliable as cable delivered broadband. Now we have one big lame company company controlling the local cable market with little incentive to improve their service. 

</rant>

Updated my Facebook status tonight (important, I know) and all of sudden my status is a block of PHP code.  What’s even more interesting is a few of the comments in the code:

// If this user has a Merman attached, then we are actually

// updating the Merman’s status if

WTF?  Apparently Facebook developers refer to users as Mermans.  Nice.

If you’d like to learn more about Mermans,  a group of Merman fans have created a wikipedia entry just for you! 

Here’s the text:

Jeff is $PARAM_STRING, ‘clear’ => $PARAM_INT)); // Stupid magicquotes please go away $post_status = stripslashes($post_status); if (($post_status || $post_clear) && !check_form_user($user, true)) { print ‘Your session has timed out. Please log in to update your status.’; my_exit(); } // If this user has a Merman attached, then we are actually // updating the Merman’s status if (user_has_obj_attached($user)) { $user = operson_user_get_obj($user); } global $first_object; if ($post_clear) { mobile_set_status($user, ”); } else if ($post_status) { $error = mobile_set_status($user, $post_status); if (!$error) { $post_status = str_replace(array(”\r”, “\n”), ”, $post_status); $post_status = txt_set($post_status); $post_status = render_with_period($post_status); $post_status = render_wrapped($post_status, 14, ”, ‘ ‘); echo $post_status; } }

We’re back from our annual vacation to Westwood Beach Resort up in Brandon, MN.  Was a relaxing week filled with wakeboarding, cruising around in the boat, eating way too much, chasing around Carter, and just being lazy.

Managed to get in a round of golf with my dad and ended up with this blog worthy photo.  Chip shot into a tree and the ball just stuck there.  Not knowing the exact rules I ended up taking a drop next to the tree with no penalty shot.  Turns out I should have either hit it as is in the tree or dropped with a penalty shot.  O’ well, next time I get it stuck in a tree I’ll be climbing it.

Just about every site on the planet allows you to auto-login minus financial institutions and such.  So why in the world does Facebook not have an auto-login feature?  Annoying as heck.  If you’re really fed up with it you can download this grease monkey plug-in to do the work for you.