A carnival of technology

It turns out that “flat-packed” is not the same as “light.” I finally broke down and got some furniture at Ikea, so I now have things on which to put my TV and shot glass checker set. I ignored the warnings on the inside of the box against carrying the boxes alone, and I think I may have pulled something in my left arm. I guess I’ll have to avoid carrying around 80lb boxes for a couple of days. Putting the coffee table together was a bit of an adventure, since I didn’t realize that I was missing the legs, middle pieces, assorted screws and the Ikea tool until I got home. Ikea customer service helped me out, but not before chastising me for not bringing back the parts I had. I was told over the phone that I didn’t need to drag the big, heavy sheet of glass back down the stairs, so I didn’t. Everything’s sorted out now, so whatever.

Hooking up the TV was another adventure. I put it on the table, got out my Michael Graves designer surge protector and my 50ft coil of coax cable (if you’ve ever wondered how much cable is too much, 50 feet is too much), and then I realized that the RCA outputs on the DVD player don’t match the coax input on my cheap TV. I slipped into Best Buy and got a cheap signal modulator before they closed, and the guy in the TV department knocked $5 off the price since one of them had been opened and returned. Works fine, so score. However, I still haven’t hooked up the rabbit ears, since the giant coil of coax was the only cable I had. So I still don’t know if I can pick up TBS out here. Oh well.

In music news, I’m probably a little late in getting to this, but I really like Interpol. Like nearly every review of them states, they kind of sound like Joy Division. They have two albums out now, so hopefully the similarities will end with the music.

I hope everyone is having a happy last week of December. Only four more days and you’ll be screwing up the date on your rent check! Hurray!

Apparently residence in the suburbs north of Atlanta comes with a subscription to a newspaper distributed by mail, the Northside Neighbor. As far as I can tell, it’s free to residents living near the neck of Fulton. It sucks. I can’t find a copy editor listed among their staff, and it might explain a few of these excerpts:

Zingo’s drivers actually take a individuals home in their car…

Shoppers looking for a simple striped scarf can hit the malls but if they want something different like karma spray then Sandy Springs is the place to shop.

…the NBCA has never requested traffic calming studies through his office, but might have asked for the studies through another outlet in the city.

I admit that number three is questionable. I use the guidelines from Lyne Truss’s Eats, Shoots & Leaves, which state that you can only get away with such a comma splice if you’re famous. The confusing flow of the sentence is further highlighted by its position in a correction that occupied about 5 column inches on the front page.

I’m not terribly concerned that I’m receiving a poorly-edited weekly newspaper by mail—there was a monthly tabloid in Smyrna that I also ignored,—but its choice of a broadsheet format, especially considering how inconvenient it is distribute by post, says to me that they’re trying to be a legitimate source of local news instead of merely a couple of pages of ads and an article on what the Protestant churches are up to this week. Still, it seems uniquely useless. Even the opinion page, which I was hoping would be a source of poorly-rationalized entertainment, also failed to rise out of the mire of mediocrity. It had two stories that read like news, one feel-good story about some guy who made furniture and died recently, and one actual editorial about that air-marshal who shot that guy. It feels like they’re not trying.

I think the excitement of moving has mostly ended now. The boxes are unpacked, addresses have been changed, utilities have been transferred, and everything seems to be settling in nicely. I never did get a response back from contracts@MosheLink, but I did receive a bill for some bizarre partial payment for service through December 17th. I know that I entered some sort of contract, since anything DSL requires some sort of contract, so hopefully that weird bill was just the required end of it. If I get another one, I might have to drive out to their office in the ass-end of nowhere and knock some heads, or something.

I’d just like to take a moment to reiterate that Speedfactory sucks. I only used their service due to a lack of alternatives. They were one of the few providers in the area able to service locations like the Smyrna apartment isolated in the distant reaches of the phone loops, since they resell Bellsouth service, and they are one of the few such services that provide static IP addresses. I knew that I wasn’t going to have a fun time as I printed and faxed their online order form, but I didn’t have much choice. They require PPPoE, their customer service is some guy in an office in North Cobb, the modems they provide are consistently poor quality (I got to see and experience several examples of these while living with Moshe as he attempted to find the next useless piece of junk that Speedfactory would be buying), and the DSL link had a habit of going down right around billing time. But still, they’re better than going with Bellsouth or Comcast.

Other changes of address I still need to make are for insurance (I’ll be doing the same thing I did last time and visiting the one AllFarmStateCo agent in the area who’s open on Saturday) and my vehicle registration. The Georgia DDS should be mailing me a new license soon, so I figure I’ll wait on that before asking for a new plate sticker. I also still haven’t gotten the final gas bill from the old apartment. I guess that I ought to check on that.

In other news, Sandy Springs went and officially citied up the wild expanse of unincorporated Fulton county between Atlanta and Roswell. They kicked things off by adopting every Fulton county ordinance (since after midnight on the 1st they no longer counted (home rule!)), except for the ones allowing strip clubs. They also passed a moratorium on new strip club licenses. Boobies are in danger! Maybe I need to start going to city council meetings.

Sometime in late 2004, I was pulled over on Cobb Parkway just inside I-285 for failing to turn on my headlights at night. I received a citation from the City of Smyrna and had to appear in the Smyrna Municipal Court. Before hearing any cases, the judge went through a Powerpoint presentation explaining the process of the courts and the rights afforded defendants by Georgia law and the US Constitution. He emphasized how the Georgia courts had impressed upon “the inferior courts,” seeming to pause on the adjective, how everyone needs to be clearly informed of their rights. The presentation was translated into Spanish as the judge went along. While informing everyone of their right to representation by a lawyer, the judge emphasized the importance of having a lawyer for those who planned to enter a not guilty plea, choosing his words in such a way that the entire point could have been expressed as, “We will destroy you.” This is my impression of the suburbs.