Chris Easton

I am fortunate in my area that I have multiple high-speed internet providers. Verizon laid a bunch of Fiber that they sold to Frontier and GTE laid some cable internet in the 90s, which became Adelphia and finally Spectrum. Due to the needs of wall-street, one of the numbers they look at is subscriber growth, so they have insane promotional pricing to attract new customers and different pricing for established customers. So those of us fortunate to have multiple providers do what I call the ISP shuffle. It boils down to calling your current provider, saying you want to cancel with the hope they’ll reduce your bill to the promotional pricing level, and if not cancelling and switching for 6 months. I haven’t done this, but saving ~ $45/month sounds like it might be worth it. Pinching pennies is fun.

So let’s check the current promotional pricing for Frontier FiOS:

And what I’m currently paying:

So saving $45/month for 2 years is an extra $1080 bucks in my pocket. Time to do the ISP shuffle!

I’ve deleted my Facebook account. I know that they have some of my data and others can provide them with photos, etc. so they’ll still have some record of me on their platform. I’ve deleted it for a couple of reasons, which are:

1. I’m sick of seeing political posts on Facebook. Its too easy to “share” fake stories and I’m tired of seeing the same lies repeated over and over again.
2. I feel bad visiting the site. Its a waste of time and I should be doing something productive with that time. The same goes for other social media, its a time suck with little value given back. I need to cut back in other social media as well.
3. They have too much data. They have your photos, your likes, your dislikes, your shares, what you’ve seen, places you’ve visited on the web and in real life, who you interact with, all of your private conversations in messenger, and probably track your location so they know all the places you frequent in the real world. Its scary and I don’t want to freely give that to them.

I’m going to just one thing though:

1. People’s photos and stories of what they’re doing and where they’ve been. Especially family and friends that have moved away and don’t see anymore. Its a single network to reach out to them since everyone is on it.

I might go back though, and just follow these rules:

1. Only spend a maximum of 30 minutes a week on the site.
2. Use a browser that will delete all of their tracking cookies.
3. Never post photos or stay logged into the site for long.
4. Push people to other platforms to stay in touch, without all the shitty data-gathering and tracking if they become available.

I’ve been looking to refinance my home for the last couple months before rates start to inch forward. I’ve been a big fan of Zillow.com and their mortgage section that lets you model a mortgage by filling in current balance, home value, and your credit score with instant quotes. Seeing an ad and hearing from a friend to try lendingtree.com I decided to give it a shot. Instantly I get about 5 phone calls trying to get my social security number to run my credit and start the process. All the quotes I got without my SSN were higher than Zillow and some refused to model a loan without my Social. I ended up going with a lender through Zillow who has been a pleasure to work with and expect to close soon!

Long story short: Zillow is easy to see what you’re getting, lending tree you’ll get dozens of phone calls asking to pull your credit for higher rates. I recommend Zillow.com for your next purchase or refinance because of its simplicity and honesty with up-front mortgage information.

I just got around to moving this blog to a new server and have enabled SSL. Special thanks to this docker container: https portal for making things simple, it acts as a nginx proxy to the wordpress container and even handles getting and setting up the Let’s Encrypt certificate as well.

Missed 4 sessions of P90X3! But I will make them up! Gotta keep the forward momentum and not give up. Going to make up the days by doing doubles (around Dynamix/Yoga).

Update Today: Did The Challenge + Yoga — down to 3 missed sessions.

I’ve been pretty good this past week with P90x3, I skipped only one day and am looking to make it up tomorrow (agility x+yoga). But I’ve done 8 days so far and its going well. I’ve already noticed some gains with pushups, pull ups, and energy so far and it feels really great to exercise daily. I’ll keep you updated. Down to 217.3 lbs this week.

For reference, I was at 232lbs a couple of years ago and with diet alone got down to 180lbs over the period of 6 months (thank you keto). But I’ve ballooned back up to 217.3 because of not paying attention to diet and not exercising a whole lot. I’m going to try and do 90 days of p90x3 and keep keto as much as possible. And walking 3-4 days a week at least 3 miles with Jack. Let’s see how it goes!