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Pheww, this week was a blur, so fast. Went to the Apollo Theatre in Harlem on Wed, with Jose and Nicole. We saw Amateur Night, a lot of fun, some good talent. The crowd was pretty brutal on the contestants . Most interestingly, Jose was asked to come out on stage and had to dance a little, it's a thing they do at first to warm up the audience, they pick people at random and have them come out. He was a good sport and did quite well . After the show was over, I called David and Eva. Eva could not join us because she had to study, but David did join in and we had dinner at Olley's, on Columbia's Campus, pretty good stuff.



Thu evening I stayed at work till late, then joined Nicole and some of her friends at Buddha Bar on 12th and 9th ave around 10:30-11 pm. After that we went to Fig and Olive, which is a block over, and has fabulous tapas and olives (and an amazing pear cocktail,) and after that we headed to the Village, stopped by Corner Bistro.

On Friday we met Christina and Hans. Christina, Hans' sister, is in town for a convention, she is a very talented illustrator. She has actually both written and illustrated a book she is trying to publish. We had dinner and drinks at Bar Boulud (from famous chef Daniel Boulud.) Cool place, very good food. We actual sat at a table right next to actress Fran Drescher. We didn't stay late, everybody was quite tired.

Just chillin' this morning, played some Rock Band earlier, just had something to eat. I watched some American Idol audition episodes, it is fine but of course, after 6 seasons, it's getting a little old. Anyway, still OK.

This year is a leap year, so we have one extra day this month. I was supposed to meet up with Roland after work, but it didn't work out, we'll try again tomorrow. Here is a pic of his cool Vermot house, if everything goes as planned I'll be spending a skiing weekend there in 2 weeks with Nicole. Typical Monday at work, nothing particularly remarkable. Listening to Sandra, my brother gave me 2 of her latest CDs over Xmas. Will likely fix something to eat shortly. IM'd w/ David earlier today, we may try and do a movie later this week, it's a shame we couldn't connect this past weekend. Sort of a rainy day, BTW, but not too cold.

After a while on the phone this week, I managed to get through a level 3 support engineer from Time Warner (which is not an easy task, the trick is to overwhelm the pre-qualification and lower support tiers with technical stuff until they give up because they can't answer and pass you on to the next level.) We did a few line and performance tests and the engineer agreed that download speed was not what it should be (it was between 2 and 4 Mbps, and it sould be 8 to 10 Mbps.) He sent a technician to check out my apartment cabling and signal levels. The guy came in yesterday, he changed a few building connectors, got the speed to bump up to 4 to 6 Mbps, but still was not 100%. He put in a ticket to get a crew to check the cabling for the entire block. When I walked home last a.m. I saw a Time Warner truck parked on Madison and 35th, and workers down the street manhole. I checked the speed this morning, and suprise, it was back to almost 10 Mbps, most excellent . That's what I call efficient service.

See the results straight from Time Warner's internal speed test site: