A webcam Christmas - 12/25/09 03:30 PM
Technology made this Christmas unique.  My son and his wife were going to be celebrating their anniversary in Bolivia.  My daughter and her husband in Colorado were not going to be home this year.  So my son came up with an idea: why not all meet on Christmas eve via webcams?  So we finally got the time figured out.  (Bolivia is on Eastern Time plus one hour - I never realized it was that far east.  That's the same time as Nova Scotia and New Brunswick.)
So scattered around the world we had our video chat.  How did it go?  Well, … (2 comments)

Winterization might not be all it's cracked up to be - 12/07/09 09:15 PM
We have all seen those orange stickers warning that this home has been winterized.  Be aware that not all winterizations are of equal quality.  There was the home that was winterized twice, once when the home was found vacant and again after the Sheriff Sale.  The buyer did not want to pay to have the home re-winterized, so they just did an air test on the water lines to make sure that there were no problems.  The water lines held, so they bled the air out in several different places.  What came out?  You guessed it: water.  The system was mostly … (3 comments)

Check your cell phone bill - 12/07/09 08:44 PM
There are some very profitable scams out there.  Did you know that a third party service can add charges to your cell phone bill?  A premium texting service was added at 9.99 per month.  We caught it and called Sprint and they removed the charge and blocked the third party service from our account.  But if they add a premium texting service to thousands of accounts and only half of the people notice the first month, then the scammers can make a ton of money.  And it is all collected for them by your cell phone company.  In this case they … (3 comments)