The Brad Hole

So about 2 weeks ago, we called on our AC to have them check out why we weren't getting much airflow through our vents, and why our house was so warm. Essentially, our house won't cool any lower than 80 degrees regardless of the thermostat, and if we keep it around 80, it's on pretty much non-stop. So there's not much mystery behind our $600 electric bill. ;-)

Anyway, we called our home warranty company and they sent out a guy from "Lee Collins Air". He reported that our coils were dirty and needed cleaning, but he only cleaned the part he could easily access, which was roughly the bottom third. He recommended we call again to schedule a full cleaning, and mentioned that it probably wasn't covered under our home warranty.

So the next day I did indeed call Lee Collins Air, and scheduled a cleaning for last Friday - they said they'd call Friday morning to let me know when. Come Friday morning, no phone call so I called them around 9am. Boss was out, no clue when they'd be by, but they'd call me ASAP and let me know. Around 11am I called back - boss was still out, no clue when he'd be in, but they'll give him the message! Around 3:30pm, I called again - boss was in! He told me they had a hell day and that a) they'd stop by on Saturday to take care of it and b) if I called the warranty company on Monday and let them know their previous repair was a bust, they'd just bill the warranty company and I wouldn't have to pay. How could I resist?

Naturally, no one showed up on Saturday.

So I called the warranty company on Monday morning, told them the prior repair was a bust (by this time, we'd returned to our prior almost non-existant air flow), and was informed that in 24 hours, I'd get another call from "Lee Collins Air" to schedule a repair.

Of course, no one called on Tuesday.

So I called "Lee Collins Air" today around 10 am, told them I'd contacted the warranty company, and Ken told me, pretty tersely, that someone would definitely be out today to take care of this. I have a clock with thermometer in my office, and I've noticed lately that it reads fairly consistently between 87 and 90 degrees. I can take the heat, but I can't stand being jerked around.

This afternoon, around 3:30, "Lee Collins Air" had still not paid me a visit, so I called to see what was up. By this time, the boss was out, and the poor lady answering told me that she'd page him and have him get back to me ASAP. By 4:30, I gave up, called the warranty company, told the lady at the warranty company what a bunch of incompetent, incommunicative fuckbags "Lee Collins Air" had turned out to be, and immediately scheduled a repair for tomorrow morning with another company that we'd had out in March when we first moved in.

If this other company comes out tomorrow and takes care of us, you can bet I'll be here on this blog singing their praises. In the meantime, if you are looking to have work done on your AC, I'd avoid "Lee Collins Air" at all costs. An additional point of data: some other guy had bad service with them too. Wish I'd known that before.

Posted by bradman at 05:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

One:

A few weeks back, the city of Phoenix stuck a notice on our door saying we probably had a water leak, to the tune of 1.5 gallons of flow an hour. We did a check around the house and noticed nothing. A few days later, we got a $220 water bill. That's $170 higher than normal, so clearly we had a problem. :) We went around looking and finally found the culprit - the valve for our drip system was stuck open and all of our bushes were getting non-stop water for god-knows how long. It's hot and not so humid here, and the water flow for each drip wasn't enormous, so it was hard to spot initially as there are no streams of water running away from anything.

Two:

May: $149, June: $400, July: $600. Those are our past 3 electric bills. I had chalked the large June bill up to it just being hot and our house being older, but the July bill nearly caused me to have a heart attack. Our AC unit (which sits on top of our roof) is the original from when the house was built, 23 years ago. Apparently it's never had the coils cleaned, and as a result it has grossly restricted airflow and also leaks water onto our roof which then drips down onto our patio. Net result: it runs far more frequently and puts out far less cold air than it should. It's pretty expensive to replace it (to the tune of at least $4000), but we're going to have the coils cleaned tomorrow and, we're told, that should make a considerable difference until we're able to replace the unit outright - hopefully early next spring.

Posted by bradman at 03:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

The Good: I finally ordered a Mac mini this morning. The Apple store has several refurb models available, so I picked up the 1.42 GHz one with Bluetooth and Airport Extreme, and an 80 GB hard drive for $529. Not too shabby! I also picked up a 1GB module from OWC for $112. Kiss my face!

The Bad: Peter Jennings?!? Wow, that one caught me off guard.

The Ugly: DirectShow - formerly known as ActiveMovie and coincidentally (to Apple nuts at least) known as Quartz during development. I spent some time Friday and this weekend writing a DirectShow wrapper that sits on top of QuickTime. RollerCoaster Tycoon 3 uses DirectShow on the PC to, essentially, play WMA files as background music. It's an ugly, horrible API that really captures the worst sides of the COM interface, along with inscrutable names like "FilterGraph", "GraphManager", "Pins" and the like. The amount of code you have to write just to open and play a movie or audio file is staggering. Anyway, we won't support WMA files on the Mac, but RCT3 will support AAC-encoded music files and custom content that you buy from the iTunes music store (along with more traditional music file formats). I think we'll get the better end of the deal. :-)

Posted by bradman at 05:52 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Is this thing on?

Posted by bradman at 08:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (8)