Phil and his team did an awesome job moving a spinet piano into our home. It was a simple move from one side of town to another, which was done is less than an hour! They were on time, professional, had the right equipment, and very friendly as well.

Turns out Phil is also a pastor of a local Baptist church, which I didn't know until I finally read his business card after he left. It was nice to get great service from someone who didn't advertise being a Christian, and yet lived it out in his business. » read more »

Anybody remember the series of storms we had back in March? There were a couple of tornado warnings in the northern Atlanta suburbs. At my house, we had an intense, thrilling hail storm, the likes of which I have never seen.

Well, I didn't realize it at first, but it turns out that the hail did some damage to our roof and other parts of the house. A couple of weeks ago, I called our homeowner's insurance company, which is USAA, to file a claim. Last week, they sent an adjuster out to inspect the damage. Yesterday, we got a check in the mail. » read more »

Georgia Power is by far the worst electric company with which I've ever been forced to do business. We never have a week go by without an outage. This week, we've had two hours-long outages. The voltage bounces all over the place. We've had to pay hundreds of dollars on numerous UPSes in order to protect several appliances and computer equipment, else they may be destroyed by GA Power's incompetence. We also believe their bad power--when it's up at all--is responsible for the poor lifetimes we've had on incandescent bulbs of late. » read more »

TuneBelt.com has been a bad business to deal with. Their prices are almost twice the price everybody else charges for the same products. While their website says they use USPS Express Mail, they actually only use First Class. When requested to rush the order, they sat on it doing nothing for five days--without notice. Communication with the customer is nonexistent. An order number was presented on the website, but no emails were ever delivered with an order confirmation, invoice/receipt, shipping notification, or ETA. And they don't take Amex. » read more »

TuscanyCircle is back again. We went offline for registered users (anything that used SSL for access) for over an hour due to a mistake by my hosting service. All should be well now. Let me know if you see anything not working fully, though.

TuscanyCircle has undergone some minor changes recently. First, you'll notice the link colors have changed. Next, you should notice that the URL for its "All nodes" feed has changed from http://tuscanycircle.net/node/... to http://tuscanycircle.net/view/.... The former is now named "Front Page" and does not contain all new content but only that which has been promoted to the front pages. » read more »

Maybe just a sign of the times, but the mindless service provided by Marta (Atlanta's excuse for "public" transportation) is even worse than one would expect from a government monopoly. The average Marta employee has an IQ approaching single digits, or so their ignorant, English-challenged behavior seems to suggest. They all (all we've ever encountered) have unwarranted chips on their shoulders, and they're itching to start some kind of trouble with otherwise peaceful customers. Being government employees--performing at the same level as any other welfare recipient--they are mad with power far beyond their ability to responsibly wield, leaving frustrated riders with no alternatives should they be cheated. » read more »

If you'd like to stay current with new content added to TuscanyCircle (blogs, forum posts, comments, shouts), there are three RSS feeds to which you should subscribe:

• "all nodes"
• "all comments"
• "shoutbox"

There are listed as feeds on every page (under Firefox' feed icon, for example) as well as under the "rss" menu item for your convenience. The "Front Page" feed only catches those nodes promoted to the front page.

If you're new to RSS, try this brief tutorial. » read more »

We recently had all new siding installed on our home, soffets and gutters included, by Remodel America. Yes, those guys who have minutes-long commercials during weekend TBS movies. The process was quite painless and very quick. Start-to-finish, it took about a week, and this included the original in-home consultation. » read more »

If you find any links on TuscanyCircle that appear to be broken, let me know. So far, they've all been caused by news articles and such that were removed by the linked site. You gotta wonder why they might do that! Sometimes I can find copies of the missing articles online and restore them locally. The major media obviously fails in its job of holding our rulers accountable, so it's up to the blogosphere to perform this duty--except that we have to hold the media itself accountable, too.