Since I’m a Puget Sound Energy customer, I get access to a very nice little utility which they call EnergyTracker. This interface allows me to track my energy usage through a number of views, and I thought I’d share some screenshots.

The daily view shows me the energy usage for the last 8 days — this is quite useful if you know exactly what’s been turned on and turned off for each day. For instance, the sudden dip in the graph above reflects the heat being lowered or turned off due to higher outside temperatures in Olympia.

Average Day is fairly self-explanatory.

This Billing Cycle reflects usage throughout this month.

The abrupt dip at the end of the Last Month’s Usage view is the Christmas break.

This one’s particularly interesting (at least to me), since it shows a number of dates when I wasn’t actually in the apartment. It’s pretty clear that the apartment was empty in July and August. Anything past that is my usage — seems like, overall, we’re using less energy than the previous tenant.

I really like this little utility and check it fairly often. It’s a nice way to see how different actions affect the billing.

I wanted to update my initial review of Netflix with more information, and will likely continue to do so for a few months.

Partly due to class and partly due to the fact that Amanda and me are both still watching stuff we got for Christmas, our usage of Netflix’s service is relatively low this month, but delivery continues to be quite expedient.

I discovered, by way of Netflix Customer Support, that we are charged $19.50 instead of the promised $17.99 due to in-state sales tax. Netflix doesn’t make any mention of the application of sales tax anywhere in their web site (that I have so far been able to discover), but it does make sense — it’s just irksome that it’s not disclosed.

The difference between this month and last month is that Amanda now has her own queue through Netflix’s profile services (which just recently launched) — thus, her movies are marked here as “Amanda”.

The service has seemed a little skittiish lately (at least in terms of their web site) — the Recommendations features seem to go down randomly, as does the new Friends feature.

Overall, with four DVDs rented, we have a cost of $4.87 per DVD rented. This is comparable to Blockbuster in-store rentals.

Sean and me seem to be in the same situation girlfriend-wise, except I’m living with mine and not paying enough attention to her. Arguably worse.

Perhaps Amanda would disagree with me on that point. I don’t know for sure what she thinks of that.

Happy New Year from the Pacific time zone!

I’m hoping this year is a much better year than 2004, though, of course, that remains to be seen. A few resolutions:

• Be a better boyfriend to Amanda and a better friend to others.
• Try to be more social and participate in more diverse activities.
• Create a comfortable home.
• Get a job involving web design or writing for the summer.
• Cut down on the amount of stuff that I own in order to promote happiness.

Hopefully, I can keep some of these. We’ll see.

Hello, and welcome to the j’lly y’ar end rawndawp. I’m your host.

So, I suppose the biggest news of the last few days is my score at Ms. Pac-Man. Yes, I’m aware of the pitiful nature of this, but I managed to set a high score (after something like 10 tries) on a Ms. Pac-Man arcade machine at Little Caesar’s in south Bellingham (across from Fred Meyer). The previous high score was about 31,000, and I trumped it with a high score of 41,240. Yay.

Yes, it is pitiful that that’s all that’s really interesting in my life thus far.

I keep doing further research on M.F.A. programs in Creative Writing, though I have yet to really start doing this research seriously. I’m 85% sure that this is what I’d like to do after college, but I’ve got a little time left to make that decision before I have to go full-bore into an admissions process. My planning is sort of vague at the moment, but I do know that I’m remaining at Evergreen until the end of Spring 2006. By then, I’ll definitely be graduating. I’ll apply for (but may not get) the Assistant to the Director position that the Writing Center hires for yearly. We’ll see, but that’s where I’m headed.

If I don’t get that, then there may be a slight comic interlude between graduating college and going on to grad school. For that, I may be targeting schools not on the West Coast, but I don’t think I’ve even made that determination yet — I’m casting a wide net.

Amanda and me are both looking forward to going back to Olympia for Winter Quarter. Amanda’s in The Science of Fat with two faculty that I’ve had that are both top-notch: Sharon Anthony, from my first year program Trash, and Brian Walter, from last year’s program Data to Information. She should get a lot out of both faculty. I’m enrolled in The Novel: Life and Form with Thad Curtz, whom I’ve heard many positive things about. I’m not sure about the idea of reading 170 pages a day, but I’m sure I’ll cope.

Well, happy 2005, and I’ll see you then (maybe before, if I decide to keep typing)!

This entry is to pretend as if there’s actually something better to do than sit here.

Oh, and while I’m at it.. here’s my dream couch, only it’s in dark green.

Two interesting items in the Business pages of the Seattle Times today:

Foreign Exchange: Dollar Falls against Euro
The Associated Press reported that the U.S. dollar is now $1.3548 against the Euro ($1.35 = 1 Euro). Typically, since these used to be comparable currencies, the ratio was roughly 1 to 1, but now the gap is obviously increasing. Without being a professional economist, but with a pretty good background in basic economics, I’d say that this will spell trouble for the U.S. economy within the next year or so, especially if the U.S. dollar continues upward against the Euro. In broad strokes, this will affect foreign trade, and may force countries other than Cuba and Iraq to switch to a monetary standard that measures against the Euro. Both Cuba and Iraq have done this in the past — it will probably happen again.

Semi-related tangent: to my knowledge, any third world country that has switched to the Euro as a monetary standard has been targeted by the U.S. for terrorist actions.

Washington State Minimum Wage Rises
The Seattle Times reports that Washington State’s minimum wage goes up to $7.35 on January 1, making Washington the highest in the nation for minimum wages. Note: yes, that sentence is awkward, no, I don’t care.

This is important — though perhaps not positively important. The negative aspect is that companies will have to pay more to operate in this state, despite the clear positive benefit to Washington’s population. Ach, conundrums.

It’s much easier to be prolific in blog postings when you actually have time to be prolific.

Amanda and me left Olympia on the 18th after having breakfast at the historic Spar Café on 4th Avenue downtown. Sitting on Olympia’s heritage register, the Spar has a very eclectic old-town feel. The service was abysmally slow, but the food was good and the environment cozy. It’s an odd combination of a building, housing both an eatery and a tobacco merchant within the same space. We also stopped by Orca Books before getting on I-5 and coming home to Snohomish. I had a few packages waiting for me, most of them my class books. The only book I’m missing for next quarters class is one that my faculty hasn’t even decided on yet: I’m still waiting on the edition we’re using for James Joyce’s Ulysses.

Since we got back, I haven’t done much. Amanda went back up to Bellingham on Sunday, so I’ve mostly been relaxing with my cats and trying to get some stuff done. Not much progress in that arena, but it is a break, after all. I have been looking into graduate programs for an MFA in Creative Writing, and have requested some information from, of all places, the University of Iowa. We’ll see what they send. I had that information mailed to my apartment, so I won’t see it until we go back on January 2nd. Hopefully, my former roommate will be moved out by the time we get back. The University of Arizona has a very honest assessment of what people looking for an MFA in Creative Writing will go through in today’s job market.

I started using Netflix on November 21st, and thought it might be appropriate to provide a review. I’m using their three-out-at-a-time program ($19.50/month as of account activation, dropping to $17.99/month at the end of my current billing cycle). I figured this might be cheaper than trying to rent all these movies through the local Blockbuster. I’ve managed to rent quite a few movies this month:

Overall, with 11 movies rented during this time period, the cost comes to $1.77 per DVD rented, much cheaper than Blockbuster stores (which averages $3 to $4 per rental, if not more). Overall, the service is great, and due to the closeness of the nearest Netflix repository — which, for me, is in Tacoma, about 30 minutes north — I get my new DVDs the day after they ship. Great service, highly recommended.

The story begins on a rainy day (like any other rainy day in Olympia, Washington), when I’m told by my soon-to-be-former roommate that, in order to retain ownership of the Comcast high-speed cable connection for my apartment, I need to go down to the Comcast offices in Olympia and present photo ID at their counters.

First reaction: bullshit. That’s so completely counterintuitive that it’s just not funny. After several hours worth of volleying e-mails back and forth trying to get online access to the Comcast account — “humor me and let me try online” (since my roommate has the passwords) — I give up and decide to go in today. “But I reserve the right to yell at someone,” I tell Amanda, “this is incredibly stupid.”

So I go to an appointment with a Writing Center tutor this morning, then help Amanda bring stuff back to the apartment. After that, we decide to catch friendly Intercity Transit’s route 47, going through Capital Medical Center and presumably right past Comcast’s customer service offices on Yauger Way SW. We get off a stop earlier than we had to and walk down the road to the Comcast offices, then walk in and wait for a couple minutes for a counter to clear up.

“Hi, I was told by a Comcast support representative that I needed to come down here and present photo I.D. in order to transfer ownership of a Comcast account.”

“What’s your phone number?” I give it to the woman at the counter. “We don’t have a record of that phone number.” Well, of course you don’t, my roommate opened the account. “Do you know that phone number?” No, he recently changed that phone number. “Do you have the address?” Yeah. Here you go. “Where’s your roommate?”

Well, at this point, I felt like perhaps I should be shoved into a back room with one light over a table and have Comcast support techs screaming questions in my face, just like a real interrogation.

“He’s not here.”

“Well, we can’t do that without the roommate here. We can call him.”

“We don’t know that phone number.”

A couple minutes pass with conversation going roughly in the same direction.

“Well, we can’t transfer your account because you have Comcast high-speed internet and we can’t transfer those.”

WHY COULDN’T YOU SAY THAT IN THE FIRST PLACE?!?

“Well, we can start you with a new Comcast account, but you’ll have to pay fees. Oh, and you’ll have to return the modem.”

“Why do we have to return the modem?”

“It’s leased.” Oh. “If you promise to bring back the modem, we’ll give you a new install kit and a new modem right now.”

Well, it’s not my problem to return the old modem, so.. “Yeah, okay.”

After about another five minutes of exchanging information and waiting for the woman to give us the modem and wish us a happy holidays, we catch the bus back.

Part II: Installing the Freaking Modem

We get home and I try to check my e-mail, only to find that, in order to start my account, they shut the current one down immediately. Okay, no problem, I was going to have to unplug the modem after I checked my e-mail anyway, so that just made me skip a step. With Amanda’s help, we install a cable splicer, plug in the modem, reboot my laptop into Windows XP Professional, and put in the Comcast install CD. After a few false starts, everything starts alright and goes through the setup, right up until we need to select a user name.

“System Error . . .”

Apparently, the service for initializing user names was unavailable. Okay, no problem. We restart the install, go through the process again, and get right back to that error.

Argh.

Now I restart the install again, and, lo and behold, I can’t even start the install anymore — the install CD can’t contact Comcast’s registration servers.

Now I’m getting a little annoyed, Amanda picks up the phone and calls Comcast, and after being passed around a bit, we get a technician who knows something about our situation.

“Plug in these proxy settings into Internet Explorer. Now, go to this internet address and try to register that way.” We do, and we get to the same user name screen and the same error we had on the CD. “Hold on,” I can imagine the tech saying as she puts Amanda on hold. Some conversation ensues, and a few minutes later the tech picks up again.

“Does this user name ring a bell?”

“Why, yes, yes it does.” Apparently, our original user name request went through, but the install system didn’t want to tell us about it. After a couple more minutes, a modem restart, a system restart, and another internet test, it works fine and we hang up with Comcast.

But now I had to deal with the router. I switch cables around, turn on my wireless connection, clone the MAC address with the router, and retry the internet. Whoops, I cloned the wrong address. I go back, type in the correct MAC address, then restart the modem again.

And that’s how I’m now paying setup fees and monthly fees for Comcast.