jautor

They will implode CCA7 / CCA8. There are already crews taking out the windows and internal finishes... You can see the progress from Jones Rd.

Not something I ever thought I'd see...

Jeff

Family over in the Lakewood Forest area just got notice from their water district that the changeover from well water to the City of Houston's surface water will take place in the next two weeks. It came with a warning not to use the water for your Fish as it would kill them and not to drink it if you're on dialysis (as it would kill you too).

FYI - the toxicity to fish (and the effects on dialysis machines) are due to the change from a chlorine to a chloramine water treatment. For ponds and aquariums, both chlorine and chloramines are toxic to fish (burns the gills, probably more). Drinking it is fine, breathing it - not so much...

The difference is that chlorine will break down in a day, while the chloramine sticks around. That's good for municipal water treatment (it's doing its job of disinfecting the water longer). Anyone filling their pond/aquarium should already be using a declorinator chemical when adding tap water. The difference now is that you'll be harming your fish much faster than before if you don't...

The Wikipedia article talks about the dialysis machine issue, and a few other things:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chloramine

Jeff

Hey does anyone know what they are building?

http://www.ymcahouston.org/links/CypressCreekWorkWeek.pdf

12,000 sqr. ft addition with new exercise studios/areas and child care...

I had it a while back, and found the outages from heavy rains to be annoying. You'll be watching DVR recordings of your favorite shows, and right at a critical juncture, it'll go to static snow because there was a rain storm during the recording period. Same with live sports events. Houston gets heavier downpours more frequently than most of the country (although not so much this summer), and it's a problem. I don't think the minor savings is worth the hassle vs. Comcast or AT&T U-verse (which I've heard very good things about, and was rated highly in a Consumer Reports survey).

I've been a DirecTV customer in Houston now for about 10 years. While cost of service is one reason to go with a sat provider, for me it's always been about the content - they have the most HD channels (that you'll actually use), and their equipment is much better than cable - and is at least comparable to the U-verse gear.

In terms of reception, things are probably better now with the somewhat larger HD dishes, which have the side effect of being less prone to rain fade. But mine "goes out" for 10-20 minutes, 3-4 times a year. The difference from that and cable is that with satellite, it comes back on its own - not hours later when some cable guy fixes it... And I agree with the other posters talking about the wind - if you're losing signal when the wind blows, your installation is not correct. That should not happen, period.

The thing to note about U-verse (at least in Houston) is that the bandwidth per home is limited, and (the last time I checked) you can only have one HD stream active per household. They really dance around that fact in the sales pitch. Yes, you can have 4 standard-def streams at once, and you can watch a DVR'ed HD show while recording, but you can't do the very basic watch-one-live-while-recording-another trick that people remember from the VCR days.

DirecTV has also improved their equipment to be more friendly with existing house wiring (although you may need to ask for it and perhaps add some $$$) that makes it much easier to get the full benefits of their HD / DVR devices.

And if you want to sign up, I can refer you and you'll get $100 off...

Jeff