Take the Pam's House Blend survey...and miscellany

Take the survey here (or click the icon). It's been a very long time since I've asked people in the coffeehouse about your experience here, and what you might like to see 1) more or less of; 2) why you come over here, and 3) what makes you keep coming back.

As head barista, it's been a long road since launching the blog in 2004, a labor of love - certainly not for money -- and I've been thinking about the blog's direction for some time, and with my waning health and 2012 coming up (esp with a marriage amendment in my state on the menu), I'm trying to hone in on what's important to do to simplify things and keep the blog going. For instance, I've been mulling what to do with the blog's format - redesign, platform change (to WordPress, Posterous, etc.), I don't have time to mess with coding and design...and write, so I've tended to just do nothing.  Burning the candle at both ends has resulted in a bit of a crisis point - there's even a question in the survey asking what might be the impact of shutting down the blog.  So your help and input are greatly appreciated.

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Miscellany...

Which carrier is your daddy now? So we're getting pretty close to having Ma Bell reunion: AT&T and T-Mobile merger to create largest mobile provider in US.

In what would be one of the biggest deals since the financial crisis broke, the US telecoms giant AT&T has agreed to buy T-Mobile USA from Deutsche Telekom for $39bn (?24bn), creating the biggest mobile operator in the US.

The deal would bring together the second and third largest mobile groups in the US and will thus face intense regulatory scrutiny. If approved, the merger would shrink the number of major national wireless operators in the US to three from four.

Together, AT&T and T-Mobile would have nearly 130m customers, about a third more than current market leader Verizon Wireless, a joint venture between the UK's Vodafone and Verizon. The combined firm would be more than twice the size of the third largest carrier, Sprint Nextel.

T-Mobile's service in our area sux, according to a few people I know who took a chance on it. AT&T when I had it here several years ago, wasn't too bad (I wasn't even charged for roaming in Canada), but its prices started to rise. Verizon is solid almost everywhere I've been in NC, but holy crap, they charge way too much.

Our local Verizon service (landline), was taken over by Frontier recently, and the amount of phone spam calls we've experienced in the last month has us both ready to ditch the landline service. Kate took one of the spam calls one evening and told them to stop calling and the asshat on the line tried to trick her into agreeing to stay on the call list! I know people who earn a living telemarketing need to bring home the bacon, but it makes you wonder how many elderly or people not paying attention get ripped off and exploited by these tactics? How to they sleep at night?

Let's just say that the calls stopped cold after Kate spoke with Frontier.

Health hell. It's been a helluva week health wise; I couldn't work for most of the week because of a fibromyalgia flare paired with diabetic neuropathy in my feet that rendered me nearly bedridden all day in pain, feet on fire, joints hurting, blah, blah, blah; the thought of going up/down stairs or driving a car was unimaginable. All shoes felt like knives on my feet. And I have a pretty high pain tolerance (I have driven myself to the ER during a kidney stone attack -- 2X), but this pain had me in tears. No pain killers work; and meds that help with the neuropathy usually make you feel dizzy or sleepy. I had to take one of the pain killers from my surgery that went unused just to sleep.

Since a bad fibro flare results in a phenomenon called "fibro fog" that meant my short term memory is also toast, and word confusion (aphasia) occurs. It passes when the flare up goes away, but since I was so out of it I rarely checked or answered mail, let alone wrote many posts last week. Thankfully the other baristas were serving up a lot of fresh Blend. What a f*cking mess.

The downward spiral began after the trip to Miami for the Outgiving conference, since plane travel usually kicks off a flare, but stress always makes things worse. There's a lot of stressful sh*te going on these days that I wish I could share, but alas I can't; if I didn't have my lovely wife to pick up the pieces, I'd be completely MIA right now. Anyway, I'm still upright (at least part of the time). I'll limp my *ss into work this week, since I have to, given I have no sick time left. But I have to keep reminding myself that at least I have a job (or rather 3 jobs - the day job, the blog, and now a monthly class I'm teaching on social networking).

Got my Raleigh Journey tix: The concert is August 20 at Walnut Creek Amphitheatre. Even though I had early access to buy via the fan club, I only managed to get row Q in Section 1 on the first day they went on sale.

By the time the tix went on sale to the public (Saturday), all the good seats were already gone; not only that, there were already tix for re-sale on Stubhub, including first row seats going for $1799!

Um, I'd love to be in the first row, but I'm in no financial position to drop that kind of money for one seat, let alone two since Kate's going to this concert with me. Sigh.

The sad truth is my first thought when I got the tix was whether I'd be healthy enough to hoof it from parking lot out in the boonies to the seats at the amphitheatre. </ End of the pity party.>