I’m sitting in an In-n-Out in Barstow waiting for my food. Posting from the Treo with KABLOG. After food, it’s back out on the road towards Vegas.

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I finally have my digital cable installed (and the guy who installed it used to live in the apartment next to mine. Funny.), so my Tivo is now actually useful. I couldn’t be happier. It really is an amazing little device. I’ve ordered my TurboNet from 9th Tee and will soon start doing cool things with it. For one, I don’t have unlimited local calling (because I never use my landline) so I don’t want to keep the Tivo connected to my phone line. It’s fairly simple to set up to the Tivo to get the listings over the internet instead (still with Tivo service, not circumventing that in any way.) Then, I want to get TivoWeb running and let me, among other things, control my Tivo from my Treo. Couldn’t get any geekier than that. My satellite receiver goes on eBay as soon as I get back from Vegas.

Michael has notified me that trackback pings to me don’t actually work. I’m looking into it. Maybe when they work, I’ll get around to make the trackback pages not be so awful. They really need work.

Oh yeah, before I forget: I bowled a 548 last night (194-176-178). Not bad at all.

Guess that’s it. Goodnight.

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Toilet

I forgot to mention here last time that my toilet was nice enough to go and break on me this weekend. This is what became of the nice plastic flush handle.

So, it was off to Home Depot to pick up a new one, after I decided to stop being lazy about it (and realized krazy glue just wouldn’t hold). I picked up a nice metal one this time, so hopefully it won’t be breaking any time soon. Here’s me screwing it in… damn thing was reverse threaded and I didn’t read the packaging – took me like ten minutes to figure out why I couldn’t do it.

And here’s the completed job. And it actually works. I can flush my toilet again.

Cantenna

I got the pigtail and other miscellaneous parts for my cantenna today, and put it together. I got it working reasonably well, once I figured out that I have to push the pigtail connector all the way into the wireless card. I saw 9 or 10 networks pointing out my window, most of the with no security. I was able to get online easily with three of them, and didn’t try any of the others. I’m pleased.

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Everyone always complains about getting a window of 4 or 6 hours to wait for the cable company. They gave me a nice 2-hour window (8-10am) on a weekend, so I was pretty happy with that. And then they didn’t show up. So I called them, and it turns out they had no record of my appointment whatsoever. This reminds me of the frustration some players face when dealing with offshore gambling sites, even those kasyna akceptujące bitcoin, where issues like non-payment or lack of customer support can occur. I’m annoyed because I woke up much earlier on a weekend than I normally would have, and I have to be at home Thursday between 6pm-8pm now. It’s not really a big deal, because I don’t have the Tivo yet, so I won’t be canceling the satellite service yet, but I’m still really annoyed. At least I’ll (hopefully) end up with a $20 credit on my bill because of it. They say if they’re late for an appointment, you get that… since they didn’t have a record of my appointment, I don’t know. But I’d better get it.

While dealing with the cable company was frustrating, it did give me a chance to multitask during the unexpected downtime. I used those extra hours to initiate a Georgia real estate search, browsing through potential new homes. The convenience of sifting through listings online contrasted sharply with the morning’s earlier disarray. Despite the day’s rocky start, I found myself immersed in virtual tours and neighborhood statistics, making the most of the time that should have been spent waiting for the cable technician. It’s amazing how technology can both complicate and simplify our lives – one moment it’s a missing appointment, the next, it’s the gateway to finding a dream home in Georgia.

Not much else interesting since I last posted here. I had two baseball fantasy drafts this weekend, for a total of three fantasy teams I’ll have for this season. Exciting life I live, isn’t it?

I’m going to Vegas this weekend. In preparation for that, I’m going to be building myself a cantenna. The parts are on the way, and should show up this week. I don’t expect it will take longer than 10 or 20 minutes to get the whole thing together. Now I just have to get a can to use with it…

I should probably be getting to sleep, so that’s all I’ll say for now.

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I want to avoid talking about war as much as possible, but felt I should at least let people know that I’m know we’re at war. That’s all I’m going to say on the subject.

Wednesday night, of course, means bowling. Threw a 536 tonight (175-189-172). Not bad, but it should have been much better. I had a total of 6 open frames, 5 of which were a single pin. And they weren’t the ten pin. I picked up 5 or 6 of those, and never missed it. No, I had to miss the four pin, 4 times! That’s just ridiculous. I did managed to get it once on a spare, but only with the 7 pin standing as well. I don’t know why, but I just couldn’t hit it today. The other single pin spare that I missed was a 6 pin. I was happy with my scores, but not really happy with how I got there.

Major League Baseball has cancelled the season openers that were supposed to take place in Japan, for the safety of the players and everyone else involved. As much as it sucks (especially for Japanese fans), I think it was probably the right decsision. So baseball season doesn’t start for a little while longer, but it’s still coming up pretty soon. I can’t wait. The NL East looks to be a competitive division this year, and the Braves are (finally) looking vulnerable.

Nothing else to say. Sorry.

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Here.

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I got an e-mail from Cox this morning say the times I wanted for my install appointment were unavailable. They have times available as early as Monday, but I don’t want to have to miss work for it, so it’s waiting until next Saturday. I guess I can deal with that.

I’ve finally finished SMS Chat. It can be found here. Most of you probably don’t care.

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I have made my decision: I’m switching to digital cable. It really won’t be that much effort – just selling my satellite system on eBay. The Cox guy should do the installation this Saturday, and I picked up a Tivo Series 1 with an 80GB hard drive on eBay. Should get that next week. The hard drive in my Dish PVR501 is dying, so I’m getting a replacement receiver. That should also arrive next week. So what I’ll have to sell will be a brand new smart card and like new receiver, along with the used dish. Should get a decent amount for it, and it will at least cover the cost of the Tivo. As soon as I’m all set up with my cable, I’ll be cancelling my Dish Network service. I can’t wait to have a good recorder instead of that glorified VCR that I have now. I want my season pass.

I watched part of one of the free previews of the MLB streaming video baseball games today. I was very impressed. The stream quality was very good. Again, I’ll have to check out the schedule to make sure I’m going to get enough Mets games out of it, and figure out how much use I’d actually get out of it at work. I think I might be better off just getting the audio streams, as those are easier to deal with and much less intrusive at work. We’ll see. Plus, I’ll have the MLB Extra Innings package being recorded on my Tivo at home. I’ll compare the two schedules and then decide what to do. If you’re at all interested, I recommend checking out one of the preview games at mlb.tv.

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I’ve really been slacking off on my blog entries lately, and I apologize. It’s gotten so bad that the home page looks rather empty because I only show the last two weeks of entries. I’ve just been really busy with work and various other projects I’ve been working on. Well, that, and baseball season is approaching, and following spring training takes up a lot of my free time.

I had my first (of three) fantasy league draft this past weekend, and I think it went pretty well. I wrote myself a nice little web ranking system to use for the draft, so I could quickly see who the best (by my rankings, which sucked and will be improved before my next one) player available at each position was each time it was my turn to draft. No crossing out names on piles of paper, and then searching through them for the first name not crossed out – javascript handled it all. Maybe I’ll clean it up and release it so people can set it up for themselves at some point.

I’ve also been working on another Palm program, similar to Quick Chat but with several improvements. I’ve been using it for about a week and a half now as my only IM program on my Treo and it seems to be holding up pretty well. There’s still some work to be done before I actually release it, though. It is currently named “SMS Chat” but I don’t like that too much. If anyone can think of a better name (other than Blood Chat, which I won’t use) please let me know. Maybe post a comment here, or something.

I haven’t been reporting my bowling scores here lately, mostly because they’ve been crappy. That finally changed tonight, and I threw a 191-226-180, for a 597 series. That’s an average of 199 over three games, which I’m plenty happy with. The improvement comes from me slowing down my ball speed, from about 17mph to about 15.5mph, so it actually hooks a bit instead of going basically straight. The bowling alley shows the speed of each shot. It’s cool. Really. That should bring my overall average back up to around a 170, which I don’t really like, but I guess I have to deal with.

I’ve been contemplating lately switching from satellite TV to digital cable, for a few reasons. Well, one reason, mostly. I’m getting sick on my PVR sucking and only recording by time instead of by program name. Tivo just blows the Dish Network PVR501 away. The other reason is Cox Digital Cable offers MLB Extra Innings, and Dish Network doesn’t (but most of the games I’d want to watch would be while I’m at work, anyway). With DirecTV, I couldn’t get any of the major networks, so I won’t get that. No Simpsons = bad. So… with digital cable, I would actually save a few bucks a month if I pay the lifetime Tivo service fee ($300), or it’ll be $5 more per month if I pay it monthly, because of the discount I’d get for getting both cable modem and digital cable. The initial cost of the Tivo hardware would be covered by unloading my satellite system on eBay. If there was zero hassle involved with the whole thing, I’d switch. I’m just not sure if it’s worth the effort. Comments?

One final note: MLB is broadcasting about 1000 games this season over the internet. $80 for the whole season. I’ll have to check out the schedule and some of the sample free spring training games before I decide whether or not to do it. It’s definitely a cool idea. Too bad they’re using RealVideo, though. I wonder if I can even play back the video they’ll be streaming in Linux. Anyway, I’m definitely going to check it out before the season starts.

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Sorry for the lack of posting lately… I’ve been rather busy.

Just a little note today that this page (currently) shows up on the first page if you Google for current terror alert level. Pretty cool.

That is all.

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