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Tuesday, April 08, 2008

Comcast Call:Trying to Cancel (it worked, I think!)

Apr 8 2008:

I am going to attempt to call comcast and get my service canceled.

11:02 am Placed call

11:04 First human, John
11:06 Actually seems to be getting things done, just needs the nebulous "confirmation code"
11:12 It seems that the official comcast policy is to not change my bill until after the disconnect.

John told me that I should pay the prorated amount, then wait until the cancel for the other charges to disappear. I can't believe that it is comcast policy. (I asked him)

update:
To be clearer
They can not change the bill, ie, what I am supposed to pay, until after it cancels. So right now, I owe them 66 dollars. When prorated it will be 53 dollars. The will not send me a new bill (or change it online) to reflect the fact that I am canceling service. Once they cancel it, I won't owe the money. As it stands, I seem to owe the money. Does that make sense? If not, you can see what I am dealing with.

Thursday, April 03, 2008

Quotes you thought you knew

I assume that everyone has heard the Kennedy quote:

"We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard"
I assume less readers are familiar with the rest of the quote:
""We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills..."
I think that the last part is key to the whole quote. When I read that it finally made more sense why he was talking about doing hard things instead of easy things.

We (as the United States, or as Mankind) need to do hard things. We need to be continuously pushing the boundaries of the possible. The idea that hard things organize our society and measure us is powerful. Right now, the best of our energies seems to be going into fixing Iraq. People are losing confidence in the economy and the government (although, I don't think that the economy is bad, nor that the government is owed all of the current criticism).

Let's do something big. Shrink the gap. Go to Mars. Use Space Based Solar Power. Beat cancer. Cure malaria. Cure communism and damning fatcats.

Anything the commenters would like to see accomplished?

Wednesday, April 02, 2008

No NSF for me

I didn't get the NSF fellowship.

I will have to find another way to bring peace to mankind.

Tuesday, April 01, 2008

Qualifying exams

I passed the Phd qualifiers. Now the real journey begins.

Protesting awards

Airbus was about to start work on the new tanker project.

Then the award was protested.

I wish there was an easy way out of this mess. You need the ability to protest a contract award. You also need faith in the person doing the awarding so that every award is not contested.

In this case, the protests seem sort of dumb, and it is wasting tax payer money.

Can you believe that they were actually about to start work? That is REALLY fast.

Boeing wouldn't have even had a plane available for modification for quite a while.

It takes too long to develop a new weapon system, and all of these scandals and protests only increase the time. We need to move toward acquisition like we did with the Predator, where it was not 20 years. Incrementally they have been improving that system and now we have the Predator B.

Tuesday, March 25, 2008

Mass media catches up about Social Security...

Mass media caught up with uniquelyjoe!.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080325/ap_on_go_ot/social_security

I suppose since no one listened back when I talked about it they had to release another report that said the same thing.

Wednesday, March 05, 2008

Columbians with the right attitude

Chavez being crazy again....

favorite quote:

Contenting themselves by calling Chavez "crazy," Colombian truckers lounged in the shade drinking beer and saying they hoped the crisis didn't last long.


They have the right idea. Hopefully his latest episode of acting like a child passes soon.