Basketball update 7/16/09

Jake’s team won last night. We are now 3-1. The kids are having fun. I like the fact that no one kid is dominating and that all are involved. Hopefully, the wins will continue. While winning is not the only thing, its generally more fun to win.

On the other extreme, Josh’s team lost. They have some excellent players but there’s little teamwork and almost no defense. It just shows how playing as a team makes a difference. Great talent, mediocre team.

I think I hate Compusa

I went to Compusa last week to fix the kids computer. I’ve been working on it intermittently for a few months, trying to figure out why its overheating. I swapped out most of the parts, added some internal fans, to no avail. It still overheats. But the experience at Compusa has a left a really bad taste in my mouth. They charge $49 to diagnose the computer or $129 to fix the computer. I asked if I could have it diagnosed first and then have that applied to fixing the computer – no, if you diagnose it, its another $129 to fix. I never heard of a diagnosis not being applied against fixing an appliance. Then, they wanted the money up front. I’m paying for a service before its performed. That means if they don’t fix the computer, it will be hard to get my money back.

Two days later called and told me they fixed the computer but that they couldn’t reproduce the problem. Why they would then be able to tell me that they’ve fixed the computer? What did they fix?

This is also a significant difference that I’ve found between hardware and software people. Software developers won’t try to fix a problem until they can reproduce it. Hardware people will often find something to fix and assume they’ve fixed the problem.

In any case, the real issue is Compusa’s policies. To me, its bad business. Its clear that its not about taking care of the customer. Its about the money. Its a store I will avoid in the future.

BTW, the kids found over the weekend that its still overheating. That means I’ve go to go back. This is going to get old very quickly.

Family Update – July ‘09

Thursday Samantha went to college orientation. She’s going to go to Palm Beach Community College in the fall. She wants to get a degree in Education. She worked in the spring as a counselor in an after care program and really enjoyed working with kids. We are thrilled that she’s decided to further her education.

Wednesday we won our first game in Jake’s summer basketball season. I’m coaching his team again. After ten straight losses in the spring it was nice to win one. Jake had a solid game – the kids all played well.

Josh has been playing basketball as well. He is on a good team although the teams at his age seem to be less team oriented and more "street". Josh’s focus has changed though, from basketball to music. Josh has been playing guitar for almost two years and his hard work is really starting to pay off. He’s getting quite good. Here’s a link to one of his performances with the School of Rock (Jake is on keyboards). He was asked to be in the main band for the local School of Rock.

Jake also has been getting involved with music playing keyboard but also dabbling in bass and trumpet.

Alec is taking it a little bit easier this summer but he’s no slouch. He went to music camp and performed as both a drummer and debuted as a singer. He seems to be a natural performer.

My band played our third gig. Here’s a representative piece filmed by a very fidgety 12 year old (Jake). If you listen closely you can hear him singing along. Here’s Come Together.

Bridget is busy with Bar Mitzvah planning and Jake is working hard learning his material. It should all “come together” very well. Hope to see our family and friends soon.

Trip To Universal

We got in a quick trip to Universal this weekend. Between sports and music and getting ready for school it was tough but we decided to make a quick jaunt to Orlando. We had a great time and got to ride a lot of roller coasters. This is the first time that Jake was willing and Alec, tall enough, to ride all the roller coasters. They all loved the Hulk, Dueling Dragons and the Mummy. The biggest surprise was the new Simpson’s ride which, although not a true roller coaster, may be the most fun of all.

One of my highlights was getting to meet Bullwinkle.

 

More photos can be found on my Picasa site.

Josh’s first gig

Joshua has been taking guitar lessons at Paul Green’s School of Rock. Actually, Jake is taking keyboard lessons and Alec is starting drum lessons next  week. Let’s not talk about money…. In any case, the concept at the School of Rock is that the kids take standard lessons once a week but work in a band setting as well using classic rock as the vocabulary for learning. The goal is that every few months they will perform as sort a kind of recital. Josh has been working on a Beatles repertoire and they performed last Friday evening at a local coffee bar. This particular show had a lot of younger kids but it was a lot of fun and the kids did really well. Its really good for Josh because he’s somewhat shy and this forces him to do something he probably wouldn’t ordinarily do.

Here are some pictures….

 

Contractors in South Florida – follow up

Last year I wrote about some remodeling we were doing in our home. We had new floors put in, refinished our stairway and painted. It was a lot of work which should have taken much less time than it did. In the last year we also, had considerable amount of work done in my mom’s old house in Delray Beach. That house needs to be sold and most of the appliances and fixtures were almost 30 years old.

First the good news, Bob Ziegler is a great general contractor and made the remodeling of my mom’s house pretty painless. His prices were reasonable and he did what he said he was going to do and followed up. You really can’t ask for more.

Regis is a contractor who does finishing and remodeling as well and is a perfectionist and will go the extra mile to make sure that his work is done to his and our satisfaction. Because of some other contractors he needed to refinish our stairway more than once. Every time he paid as much attention to detail as possible.

The stairway was done by Elite Stairways of Florida, Inc. Never, ever use these people! Our relationship started great and they promised the world. As work proceeded, there were problems at each phase, seemingly due to sloppy work on their part. At first, they were willing to correct their errors but when work on the stairway was supposedly completed, we noticed some large bubbles in the wood. It took months to get them back to come back and complete the work. Many phone calls, promises that they would be there, they wouldn’t show up, they wouldn’t return phone calls. It seemed to go on forever. Then, they finally came and re-did the portions on the side of the staircase that had bubbled. They agreed that they would pay for the finisher to re-do his work. However, we again went through an endless cycle of calling, not getting return calls, them telling us that they would approve the finisher, Regis, to do the work and Regis telling us they did not approve it. This went on for months. Finally, we gave up and asked Regis to do the work and we would pay him out of our own pocket. Regis came last week and did the work again. He found while refinishing that when Elite Stairways had come to fix the bubbles in the wood, other bubbles had formed. This was obvious because the person doing the work, Tony, had put little cuts in the wood to relieve the pressure and remove the bubbles that were forming. Rather than get it right, Tony left it. He seems to have a pattern of leaving poor work for others to fix. The bubbles aren’t as bad as the first time so we are going to have live with them.

The last contractor to mention was Floorworx. Their review is mixed. They put the engineered wood flooring in several rooms and on the stairway. Initially, we were pleased and even though there were some issues that arose they were addressed by some excellent customer service people at their factory. Since then, we noticed some problems with the flooring and they sent a product specialist to investigate. They indicated that the flooring may be defective and may need to be replaced – all of it! We are still waiting for them to follow up.

Contracting is never easy. Its difficult finding reliable people. We wanted to share our experiences so that others could benefit. Please contact me if you have questions or would like more information.

Office Furniture the Ikea way

My office has been really out of control lately. Working out of the home plus having all the family’s musical instruments in my home/office has produced a lot of clutter. I was paralyzed in doing any significant reorganization because there was no place to put anything. We decided to look at Ikea and get some inexpensive furniture.

To shop in Ikea you have to accept that all the furniture is simple to the extreme. That’s a negative for some but this was not furniture for my dining room, its for an office and functionality is paramount. One of the main advantages of Ikea is that the furniture is highly configurable. We settled on two bookcases and several CD towers. My goal was to to store the books and CDs that were overflowing and get rid of some of the older furniture I had couldn’t hold all my stuff.

However, I had  one problem in putting together the bookshelf. I thought they had not given me enough screws for one assembly. I went down to Ikea and was ready to start trouble for wasting my time and not giving me the necessary parts. I approached someone on staff and they were very patient, looked for spares and then brought me to the unit I purchased to see how the parts I needed were used. It turned out I was putting it together incorrectly.

The bottom line is that I like Ikea. There is a good deal of work in putting together the furniture but its really not hard, just time consuming. Almost all of the furniture was  assembled over the weekend.

The office is not yet under control but at least has hopes of getting there.