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Monday night, fairly long day at work. My parents will be here tomorrow afternoon. I will work from home so I can go pick them up in the afternoon.

It's been nice all day, but it's fairly warm right now, about 86 F outside.

Bill said him and his niece Lee will be visiting in August. That'll be fun.

Yesterday I spent most of the day trying to finish unpacking what I had left. I didn't finish until late. I got something to eat and walked across the street to this club called Katwalk, pretty cool. Talked to Jamie, one of the bartenders, very friendly. I only stayed for a while, but the place had a nice atmosphere and the decor was awesome, I will have to go back . See their logo below.



Got up late today. I am going to have some light breakfast, and I may do Outback on 23rd for lunch (since there is no Longhorn in NYC)

The process of migrating telecom services from my old to my new location has been surprisingly hard. I'm still having trouble, here's what's happened to date:

- Verizon treats a move as a cancel + new installation. This means you have to go through all the hassle of resetting service from scratch, as if you never had it. I had to be on the phone for 50 minutes with a rep to do this (!)

- They could not keep the same land line phone number, so I was assigned a new number (very bad, with number portability these days they absolutely should be able to move numbers from one CO to another, it's just not convenient to them. Even the cable company or Vonage could have provided service with my old number at the new location)

- My old plan was no longer supported. I was forced to pick a new calling plan which offered less features and higher costs every month - outrageous

- A day after the phone service was activated at the new location, it went down. I was told there was "a problem at the CO" (no more details) and it would take 3 days to get it fixed. No apologies or further explanation. I was offered a forwarding service, but I would have to remember to disconnect it myself once the line is fixed, or call yet again. Many of my incoming calls are international, so a forwarding service to a cell phone is really no good.

- The DSL service took 2 weeks to transfer, so I had no broadband at home for that long

- Once transferred, and despite me insisting on this when I placed the order, it only transferred at half the speed

- When I called to upgrade the DSL service, it was Friday evening, the technical department told me it had to be handled by billing (go figure) and that I needed to call the next day

- When I called Saturday morning, and after going through the aggravating voice recognition bot for the millionth time, I was connected to a recording saying the department is closed until Monday

So, at this point I don't have a phone line and my DSL is only half the speed it should be (after I committed to a year of service.) Next, I bet the billing is going to be a mess, they may even "penalize" me for not staying a year connected, even though moving and carrying the service with me, still qualifies me.

On the other hand Time Warner's service has been very good, bordering excellent. I am strongly considering porting all my services over, including phone. I would not recommend Verizon for home phone and broadband services to anybody.

UPDATE: A Verizon bot called and said the service to my land line has been restored. I tried it. Of course it still doesn't work. Called again. It turns out the tech assigned "accidentally" closed the ticket this morning instead of returning it to the Central Office. It has been re-opened. The disappointment continues.

This cute WB summer show I've been watching, The Beauty and The Geek, finished this week. Chuck and Caitilin won. I am sure there will be a second season, it's been fairly successful. It's funny and fairly entertaining.