"Watch your thoughts; they become words. Watch your words; they become actions. Watch your actions; they become habits. Watch your habits; they become character. Watch your character; it becomes your destiny." -- unknown

Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results - Albert Einstein

Just another Sunday
September 23, 2007 - 8:22 pm

As paranoid as my company can be about data security and making sure files are secure... I find it laughable that they had us move in unsecured (no locked) boxes.. but whatever.

I think.. that despite utterly absurd performances from the least likely of people on my opponents team... I think I might have won fantasy football. I think I owe it to fumbles and interceptions... silly things that detract points from his score. I'm astounded I'm close enough for it to matter.. and the delayed updating is maddening. I'm sure Yahoo makes a pretty penny off the $9.99 fee to get instant updates, but I refused to pay. Instead, I tally the scores myself.. use that as a rough guess.

Speaking of fees, I dropped a service, some channels I never watch, from Comcast and the bastards charged me $2.99 to drop them. Wtf? I could see the fee if I called in when I could have done it myself online.. but no, the only way to make a chance is to call in. Oh, and it's the same fee if you add a service.

Sure it's just $2.99 (which is annoying in and of itself, why not must make it $3? The whole .99 thing is really.. well, stupid. No one is fooled by it.), but why should I pay anything? Especially if I'm not given the option to do it myself? You're just dinging me and hoping I don't much care.

I debated trying to weasel out of it with the lady by broaching it as one more reason to consider Dish... but I dropped it. I would consider Dish.. except I get a nice deal on basic cable (the HOA buys it in bulk) and so Dish costs more. I'm going to save the lure of switch to Dish for the when I decide I'm sick and tired of the fees to "rent" my cable modem and cable box.

I'm reminded of a news story from a few weeks ago (might be over a month), but some guy had rented a phone from the phone company for 30 years -- the same phone. An old school rotary one... and each and every month there was a fee for the rental phone. He'd paid some absurd amount of money -- the cost of the phone many times over.

I'm of the opinion the cost of "renting" such things should be capped at the retail cost of the item plus some percentage and then, once that's hit, you own the modem or whatever.

Anyway... enough of my sounding cheap, which isn't the point at all. It just gnaws at me when people do small petty things to take advantage of me and I know they are doing it to thousands of people so while it's just $3.99 a month for the modem (I think) to me.. it's that times however many thousands (millions?) of subscribers Comcast has. It's a lot of money for really nothing... plus they have profit built into all the prices.

Perhaps I'll go see how much a modem costs.. they can only be like $70... so at $4 a month, that's just over 17 months. Hrm, this might be worth a call tomorrow. Why not lower my bill by that amount?

In other, other news... I had something else to say.. but I've lost it.