I love my iPhone

My first two weeks with the iPhone 3G are over, and I don't know how I got by so long without it. Right now, I'm writing this on my way to the metro. Last weekend, I was walking the dog, listening to music, took a call from Jenn, stuck in traffic on I-95. I was able to talk to her, look up her location on google maps, check the traffic and direct her to an alternate route, all from my iPhone.

It's like waking up in the future.

Home improvement projects always seem to take longer than I expect.

After months of living with paint swatches all over the bedroom walls, we're finally putting our final color up in the master bedroom. Before we painted, we pulled off all the baseboards to re-route the cable tv jack. Jenn and I started together and got two walls done early last week, and Jenn continued while I was in New York. While Jenn was away this past weekend, I got the last walls' two coats on. We still have to paint & replace the trim, and do some touch ups, but I can see the beginning of the end.

HMS Home Warranty is a Rip Off

I'm extremely disappointed with our first home warranty call.

We got a home warranty when we bought our house. Last month when our Ritetemp programmable thermostat broke, I mistakenly thought our HMS home warranty would cover the repair. Instead, when the repairman arrived, he told us that our warranty would not cover replacing our programmable thermostat with another programmable model. We would have to use a plain replacement model, or pay an additional $325 for a new programmable one.

I thought this sounded fishy, so I called HMS and spoke to Quan in their Customer Service Department. She assured me that that was not the way it was supposed to work, and to have the repairman call the authorization department. After half an hour passed, I called home and my wife told me that sure enough, the authorization department would not pay for a new one.

I called again, and spoke to Karina, who told me that it was HMS' policy to replace the defective unit with one with comparable features. At this point, I tried to clarify that a programmable thermostat and a regular thermostat did not have the same features, and that's why they had different names. The different name, I stressed was due to the central nature of the programmability. She continued to refer to their offer of 'replacement' that I had to remind her that what she meant was a downgrade. But this is apparently the same to HMS.