Rottweilers Ate My Laptop

Rottweilers. Computers. Cameras. World Domination. Not necessarily in that order.

Rottweilers.
Computers. Cameras.
World Domination.
Not necessarily in that order.

Archives for July 2010

Saturday Pet Blogger Blog Hop, Week 9

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It’s the ninth week of the Saturday Pet Blogger Blog Hop, co-hosted by Life With Dogs, Two Little Cavaliers, and Nip and Bones. Join in, if you would, please! We missed a few weeks when last month went to… well, more like away from… the dogs.

Neil at Life With Dogs asks about holiday plans. I’m happy to say that our plans include relaxing, catching up, and more relaxing. That is, when the dogs are not involved in defending home and property from the “war” they are sure is going on. I mean, if there is no war, then why are things exploding? Although we will try to be safely indoors with television or music playing during the loudest part of the night, it’s still bound to be quite a long weekend until they are satisfied that we are at peace once again.
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First impressions: CLEAR 4G Wireless Internet

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I actually did have a topic planned for today, but since our Comcast high speed internet went down as I started to write, that topic has been shelved for a bit so I can give you my first impression of CLEAR’s 4G High Speed Mobile 4G Wireless Broadband service.

CLEAR is a relatively new player in the Chicago area, and we’ve been receiving promotional mailings for some time. The most recent one mentioned some special package rates, and also a 14-day free trial period. Since the Comcast service was so thoughtful as to go down while the mall was still open, it seemed like a good time to start the free trial with CLEAR.

This is actually sort of a second look, because Mom has had CLEAR service in Honolulu for almost three years now. At the time we set it up for her, the company was still called Clearwire and the service had not yet been upgraded to 4G WiMAX (that happened in January).

I decided to test the On-the-Go mobile internet because we have another provider’s mobile service contract expiring in December. I was given a 4G Mobile USB modem that will work with both PC and Mac. I’m testing it right now on my Sony VAIO laptop running Vista. Setup was super easy, as promised. So far, so good. Speeds are listed as up to 6Mbps down/1Mbps up; I don’t think I’m getting a full 6Mbps at the moment but it’s pretty healthy. I’m watching a YouTube video in another window and I’m not getting any unwanted skipping or pausing.

Back to Comcast for a second. We’ve had a lot of very brief periods of downtime this week, and today the service was down for about five hours. Every time I call Comcast when the internet service is down, they tell me that my modem is the problem. So far, it has never ended up being the problem, and it gets really annoying to be told it’s the modem when I’m usually 99% sure it is not. Including tonight. Only once did I get a support person who acknowledged that it might actually be a problem on the network and hunted it down.

When the service is working, it’s very speedy, though.

We’ll see how this trial goes, and hopefully it will help us make a good decision on whether to keep Comcast for home and switch to CLEAR for mobile only, or switch to CLEAR for both home and mobile. If you’ve tried both Comcast and CLEAR, please leave a comment with your thoughts and experiences!

(NaBloPoMo | July ’10: 2 of 31)

Changed my mind… writing on!

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I changed my mind about waiting until fall to try another month of NaBloPoMo daily posting. This was largely influenced by the fact that we just finished uploading and approving all pages for the summer issue of The Total Rottweiler Magazine.

Since this is a late-breaking decision, I don’t have a good topic, or for that matter, any topic in mind. I’d use NaBloPoMo’s writing prompt, but since the prompt is “What’s your favorite movie?” I think I will have to pass. If you knew me way back when, you know how long it took me to pick five movies for a desert island. I don’t think I can narrow it down to one before the day turns over.

So for now, enjoy a very, very brief preview of Axel’s upcoming frisbee video:

(NaBloPoMo | July ’10: 1 of 31)