Roof Replaced

The crews couldn't finish the roof on Thursday. Communication was difficult in general, but I thought they told me they were going to come back on Friday morning to finish. That turned out to be wrong; they came Saturday morning instead. It still took most of the day Saturday for them to finish it up. I think the job may have been bigger than they realized.

Overall, I think they did pretty good work, but I wouldn't recommend the company I used to anyone else. The level of organization and professionalism I experienced from the people in the main office was completely unacceptable. It took more than a month from the time I signed the work contract until the job was finally started. During that time I had to repeatedly call to find out the status of the job since nobody bothered to call me to set up a date to start work or notify me of schedule slips once the date was set. They sent out crews (while very nice) that had no idea where my house was, and when they called for directions the job foreman had almost no ability to communicate with me in English. The company had great reviews on Kudzu and received an 'A' in Cobb Home Reports for whatever that's worth. Maybe my experience was atypical.

Before: Standard, three tab shingles with poorly vented roof.

After: Architectural shingles (supposedly weather better) with properly vented roof.

Roof Repair

The replacement of my roof is underway. The first thing I noticed is that the process of removing the old shingles is very, very loud. I found it interesting to see how the guys work on such a steep surface; they use something that looks like the foam cushion from a couch seat. You can kind of see them under the two guys on the left. I suppose the foam not only is more comfortable, but the large surface area gripping the roof surface makes it much safer.

After The Rain

The rain this afternoon was a welcome gift. The effect of the sunset on the clouds was icing on the cake.

Twizzlerhenge

The polar bear finds Twizzlerhenge.

U-verse

U-verse recently became available in my neighborhood so I decided I'd ditch Comcast and give it a shot. This Wikipedia article is a pretty decent summary of what the service is all about.

In the house it is based around a 2Wire 3800HGV residential gateway. Of the 25 Mbps down and 2 Mbps up of bandwidth, 10Mbps down / 1.5 Mbps up is reserved for my internet connection. I've conducted speed tests using various testers across the net including multiple NDT servers, and the results are pleasantly consistent.

The highest speed I've observed is 9.52 Mbps while downloading the ISO image of Ubuntu from Georgia Tech. My Comcast cable connection could beat that when in its "Speedboost" mode, but that only lasts for a brief period of time. My download speed from Tech did not fluctuate. I prefer having a constant, predictable speed.

The gateway can also serve as an 802.11g wireless router, but I'm not using that functionality. I just set up my 802.11n base station to operate in bridge mode and disabled the wireless on the AT&T box.

The TV service works well, too. You need a decoder box for each TV. They use the coax wiring already present in the house to communicate with the gateway. The user interface falls somewhere between the crap that is Comcast and the perfection that is TiVo; I'd say it's closer to TiVo on that spectrum.

Overall, I am satisfied. I'll post updates if my opinion changes.

Mother's Day

I took Mom and Dad to the Atlanta Botanical Garden for an early Mother's Day activity. There were a lot of families there doing much the same thing.

 
Dad found a frog that he really seemed to enjoy.

Mom, for some reason, was always on the lookout for snakes and other creepy crawling things. She wanted me to take a picture of these to prove that the critters were everywhere.

Twizzler Straw

Today several of us from work went to the baseball game. It's an annual event now. A few of us tried to drink beer through Twizzlers. The volume of liquid you can drink through one Twizzler is really too small to be satisfying. I think you'd need at least four.