My Place Flooded

Lately, I have been really bad about posting on this blog. I feel you may forgive me, however, when I tell you that my apartment flooded from a strong storm. So, Sunday night I went to bed a 1 AM and awoke about an hour later to my computer making funny sounds. You know the sound Windows makes when you put in and pull out a USB drive? My computer kept making that sound. So I got out of bed to go check it out. When my feet hit the floor, I hit water. I flipped on the light and walked out to my living room and found about an inch of water, with more running in under the door. After calling for backup, Michelle, my neighbors and I used one gallon ice cream buckets to bail the water back out the front door. The rain started to slow down after about a half hour, and the sump pumps (there are three of them) were keeping the water down, so no more was flowing into my apartment. We were able to push a large amount of water from the carpets out the door with flat cookie sheets. The apartment's maintenance showed up and gave us (me and my neighbors) a water vacuum. We sucked up gallons of water. At about 5 AM, a 24 hour clean up crew showed up and swept up a lot of the water we hadn't gotten to yet. I got to bed about 6 o'clock in the morning and slept until noon. If anyone was wondering, I didn't miss any class or assignments do to the flood. It has taken several days to get the apartment back to normal (AKA not reeking), but it's finally dried out, for the most part.

So that's my story. I'm back on track now, so stay posted for more about gadgets!

Netflix

Netflix is neither a gadget, nor an application for a gadget (kinda).  For those people that live under rocks, here is a quick explanation. Netflix has two business units. The first is what they started doing when they were founded, which was renting DVDs via mail. Customers sign up online and make a list of movies that are then mailed to the customer.  The second part of their business  is streaming movies and TV shows to computers, TVs, and now, mobile devices.  In most cases, the wireless network carriers (AT&T, Verizon, Sprint) do not have the speed needed to stream video over their network.  But if you have an iPhone, or Windows phone, you can stream Netflix over WiFi.  Netflix is hard at work to increase the number of shows and movies on their streaming service. My family has an account with Netflix and I would recommend the service to anybody with a broadband connection. The movie and show selection has greatly improved since we became customers (back in '08), and hopefully will continue to improve.