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.
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.
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.
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.
I was finally able to do it again, this time with the date and time set on the machine so it saved it.
From misterrogers.org:
We are very sorry to deliver the sad news that Fred Rogers died on February 27, 2003 after a brief battle with stomach cancer. We are grateful for the many people, young and old, who have cared about his work over the years and who continue to appreciate Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood on PBS. We hope that you’ll join us in celebrating his life by reflecting on his messages and taking them into your everyday lives.
I’m testing KABLOG, a program for the Palm that should allow for easy posting of blog entries from my Treo using MovableType’s XML-RPC interface. If you’re reading this, it means it worked. Cool.
Update from a computer: Well, it worked, but it didn’t enable comments on this entry, and I don’t think there’s a way to do it at the moment. I’ve enabled them manually.
Roughy of UE has set up a cool new website: blinktag. It may look a bit familiar to some of you, but hopefully it’ll turn out to be a friendlier place to hang out online. That’s the plan, anyway. I helped him out setting it up, mainly in the form of testing things as they were coming along.
So you should all (I think there might actually be 5 or 6 of you, now) go check it out.
Saturday, I went to LA to meet up with a bunch of soapboxers. Lon of Tornado Films had a screening of his movie Deserving Selfish at a film festival earlier in the week, and the whole group got together because he (and another ‘boxer, Michelle, for unrelated reasons) were in southern California. We met at a bowling alley, and of course, bowled. There were somewhere around twenty of us there, and it was very cool. I didn’t bowl particularly well (164, 162), but it was fun.
After bowling, we went to eat at Roscoe’s Chicken and Waffles. Well, we went there to put our name down to wait for a table, first. Then we walked around LA a bit, saw some war protestors, and went to Amoeba. On the way there, I saw the Hollywood sign for the first time since moving to California. I almost bought a (used, of course) CD there, but didn’t feel like waiting in line. I’m in no rush to get any more music right now, though, so I don’t really care all that much. We walked back to Roscoe’s to find out that they had called our names about 10 minutes earlier, and missed our table. Turns out it wouldn’t have mattered, because they thought we wanted a table for 5 not a table for 15. We waited a few more minutes, and they were able to put the remaning 10 of us (5 people had to leave) at two different tables. The food was good. Waffles and chicken is an interesting combination. I got far too much food, and took some home with me.
After dinner, some of us (the group I was with continually got smaller) headed to Miriam’s to watch Lon’s movie. We ended up watching a bunch of his older movies as well. I liked a few of them quite a bit. I can’t wait for his next one. When we were done there, five of us went to Andrew’s to just hang out for a while. We started watching the Stargate director’s cut, but I left before it was over because I had to drive back to Santa Barbara. So I did.
Sunday night I saw Daredevil. It was alright, not great. The CG annoyed me a bit, because it was rather obvious. I’m still glad I saw it. Tonight I went bowling, and bowled badly. Consistent, though. 158-158-152. My average dropped to an even 170. That’s about it, for now, I guess. More when theres more to say.
Don over at Radioactive Toy has syndicated my site using my XML feed. It’s on the right side of the page scrolled part of the way down.
Cool. I think I’m going to look into setting up some feeds here instead of just links maybe. When I have some time, maybe (read: not soon).
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