Usually I don’t read for please simply because when your “job” is reading you don’t feel like going home and working more for fun. Now before college I wasn’t the biggest reader in the world but I would polish off a book every month or so just as a course of habit. But during school I was always busy reading for a class or a project or something so I never got around to reading for fun. Now however I have no classes and no real work to do so I’ve been actually doing some reading. Currently I am in the middle of the J Curve which is a book about how political and cultural stabilization allow for increased economic prosperity; the book is as you can guess kind of dry but super informative and I find it interesting. However the book I actually finished is Silent Bob Speaks, by Kevin Smith.
Kevin Smith had been doing a weekly column for the British lad’s magazine Arena and when the people at Miramax found out they decided to collect the columns. The book details the casting process of Jay and Silent Bob Strike back along with some random events and it is thoroughly engrossing, if you are a Kevin Smith fan that is. It’s also a quick read at only 330 pages.

So today I decided that since I’m about a month away from school starting; and my life becoming nothing but reading and work; I went and checked out the national portrait gallery with some friends. The main reason why I wanted to check out this museum is due to the fact that it houses the portraits of the presidents and while I’m a big history fan the part I like the most is the presidency. I think this has to do with the fact that I’m more into politics than history and that is the point at which both subjects converge. Below is a slide show with some pictures.

Recently I’ve come to realize that I have a minor problem with obsession. It’s something that has taken me a while to realize but I think that so far all of my obsessions have helped me rather than hurt. Looking back these healthy obsessions have included: JSA (the debate club I was a member of in High School), my college search, Owl Ambassadoring (the tour guide job I had in college), finding a graduate school/program, the GRE, and shaving. These have all allowed me to become good if not great in all of these things. Mind you I haven’t become great in shaving, but I have learned various methods and found the best way to do it.
My latest obsession as mentioned above is coffee. I’ve always been a fan of the stuff and over the past couple of months I’ve been collecting various methods of making the stuff. The point at which I realized that I’ve become obsessed with it was when I noticed I have no less than 5 methods of making it in my apartment.
1.    Instant coffee with hot water
2.    Traditional electric coffee maker from Gevalia Café
3.    Drip Cup
4.    French Press
5.    Espresso Pot
I purchased each one of these for very distant purposes. The instant is for my ghetto mocha’s (1 package of hot chocolate mix and 1 tablespoon of instant coffee). The traditional was purchased when I started working every day and it was just easier to buy something I could setup the night before and have ready the night before. The drip cup was bought after a trip to India where I had amazing filter coffee and this would help me make that. The French press was the result of trying to make coffee on a smaller scale than the electric coffee maker. Finally the espresso pot was purchased in order to, well, make espresso.

since i’ve been hanging around the computer i’ve stumbled upon this great cartoon site and i thought i would share some with you all.

all of these are from: http://bigeyedeer.wordpress.com/

I apologize for the lack of posting on this blog. I full well intended to maintain this site yet the summer seems to have gotten away from me.
The move down to Virginia was interesting to say the least and living down here is a different experience. If I had the time or the effort I would write the following out in my usual long stream of consciousness rambling long paragraphs, but I don’t so here are some quick thoughts:

• •    There is beer everywhere
• •    A lot of the roads are named after southern generals : Lee Highway, Jefferson Davis Highway
• •    The ratio of obese people to non obese people is higher than I’ve seen in most other places
• •    Food is cheaper down here
• •    There are tons of apartment buildings everywhere
• •    The fireworks at the National Mall are disappointing
• •    I’ve seen a double rainbow
• •    There is a Zamboni parked on the roof of the building next to mine
• •    My apartment is 10000000x better than my shithole in the edge
• •    The Heineken Draught keg is not worth the money or the space it takes up, it’s like 90% head
• •    Setting up an apartment is madd expensive

Now it’s no surprise to most that I’m a pretty devoted fan of Bravo’s Top Chef. I’m a big tv nerd and an even bigger food nerd, so combining the two and adding a super hot Indian model/cook (Padma Lakshmi) as the host just makes it magical. I’ve been following every season and this season I must say has been pretty good. However I feel like having a 3 way battle for the final episode isn’t going to fare as well as the older format of head to head battle. I did however like the challenges this season such as catering a wedding, and cooking for 14 hours straight, this next to final challenge was interesting. In this episode the 4 chefs were each given a whole big and had to create dishes for a cocktail party. Now when I say they were given a pig, I mean it was a whole pig, they had to butcher it and then use it. Of the four remaining chefs I like either Stephanie or Richard to win, with Lisa clearly being the weakest chef. Tonight we saw Antonia go home, which I thought was a bad choice, her dishes while weak were not as weak as Lisa’s. However Antonia did just open a new restaurant so I guess she’s not super duper sad to go home.

Padma Lakshmi

In 2 weeks, I will be moving down to Arlington, VA in doing so I have been calling the Power Company, Water Company etc. Now looking at internet/TV, we realized that we would probably be stuck with either 1 or 2 options (not counting satellite because we wanted a package deal). After doing a bit of research, we found out, we could get either Comcast or Verizon fios; but we could not figure out from the Verizon site if we could defiantly get Fios or not so, we were stuck with Comcast.

We went onto to the Comcast site and debated either the double play (internet/TV) or the triple play (internet/TV/phone). Now I am on a tight budget but I felt having phone was semi-important since we needed a local number for the buzzer. Nevertheless, my roommate said, “how many people will honestly need to be buzzed up? They can call us and we can go get them” And I agreed with this so we stuck to the double play, which was for $66. Originally, we were going to get basic cable and internet but I was unable to find a channel lineup for the basic. Since we were going to get a new LCD TV we figured might as well upgrade to digital. For the internet my roommate suggested we just buy a modem for $49.50 (listed on the Comcast site) as opposed to renting it for $3 a month since in all actuality we would/could use the modem for the foreseeable future and it would be cheaper in the long run to just buy it.

After filling out the information to set up the service on the website (which was pretty well put together except for not being able to compare different channel line-ups for different packages) I was stuck in a chatroom with a Comcast rep finalizing my order. This should have taken 3-5 minutes it took much longer.

First, I was told that the modem had magically jumped in price from $49 to $99 and they were unable to tell me why. Below is a copy of the transcript where they tell me:

Sherwin.29174 is the Rep

Rahul is me

Sherwin.29174 > May I ask if you wish to purchase a modem?

Rahul_ > yes i do

Sherwin.29174 > Thank you.

Sherwin.29174 > Please be informed that the modem cost $99.00. Do you still want to purchase it or rent one instead?

Rahul_ > on the website it said the modem cost 45

Sherwin.29174 > I apologize for the confusion but I am basing the price on what I see in our system.
If I enter the code you have place it reflects as a bundle install rate.

Rahul_ > so it will be 45 or 99

Sherwin.29174 > It will be $99.00.

Rahul_ > for installing the modem and buying it

Rahul_ > if that is the case then why does the website say 45 i’m comfused

Rahul_ > confused*

Sherwin.29174 > Rahul I apologize for that. I try to check for other options.

Sherwin.29174 > I apologize but this is the only price for modem purchase.

Below is a screen shot of the website’s price with the same package that I selected, also note the one time fee’s as they will also be magically be higher.

When I asked how this could have changed in price I got no response so for $99 I decided to just rent the modem. Then the one time charge jumped it was supposed to be $19.95:

Sherwin.29174 > May I ask how many TVs do you wish to connect with Comcast?

Rahul_ > right now just 1.

Sherwin.29174 > Okay.

Rahul_ > but we would like the whole apartment wired

Sherwin.29174 > Okay.

Rahul_ > will there be an extra charge for that?

Sherwin.29174 > Let me check first. I will see your approval before anything else.

Sherwin.29174 > Your one time fee will be $67.05 for the installation and your monthly fee will be $69.00.
The total of $136.05 will be due at installation via check; this is an installation charge, plus one month of
services prior to usage.
Will this be alright with you?

By this point I was too tired to argue so I figured I would just say yes and move on. Also I was never told if they would wire the entire apartment and if it would cost me anything. If they go to charge me for wiring the place I’m going to say forget this and just get Verizon Internet and upgrade my netflix membership.

So let’s see what happens.

UPDATE:

it turns out @comcast cares found this post and just called me on the phone, he is going to look into it and solve the issue for me.

Twitter is a micro-blogging service that has become quite popular over the past year or so. I starting using the website about year ago but stopped since I found it useless, however over the past couple of months twitter had resurgence and I began to use it again. At first, it was simply to keep in touch with the few people I knew but through various contacts, I began to add new people, many of them I have never met and most likely will never meet. The best use of twitter I found was when my external HD crashed, I twittered what happened and received a number of tweets in response with suggestions to help me out.
My main issue with twitter is that it crashes quite a bit. Now it is nice that they maintain the service for free without ads, at least in the US. The Japanese version of the site has a small ad on the side of the page. I would gladly put up with ads or even pay for the site if they could keep the uptime on the services at least 98% of the time. An article by Om Malik he quotes the following prices:

Twitter should charge Scoble, Leo, me, Michael Arrington and anyone else who has more than 100 friends and followers. How about something simple? $10 a month for 1,000 subscribers. 25,000 subscribers means someone like Scoble should be paying them around $250 a month.
Let’s take it a step further. Twitter should limit people to 500 free messages a month. Any more should come in a bucket of, say, 1,000 messages for $10. Businesses like Comcast that want to use the service for commercial reasons should pay for the service, and so should startups like Summize, which want to build their businesses based on Twitter’s API.
http://gigaom.com/2008/05/25/in-twitters-scoble-problem-a-business-model/

I feel that there should be a tier free and paid users, free users should get unlimited messages but only be able to follow 100 people anymore and you should pay for it. I feel like paying for tweets is a bad model.
With all that said, please follow me: www.twitter.com/rahulg86

I swear this isn’t going to just be YouTube clips