::::: : the wood : davidrobins.net

On the 'net again; new laptop drive, new guide data

News ·Tuesday September 18, 2007 @ 20:41 EDT (link)

2007 Twit of the Year
Will the driver of a silver Chevy Tinycrapmobile with plate WA 393 THB please step forward to claim your prize? At around 1800 on September 11, tried to pass me on the right going east on Novelty Hill, where it splits into two lanes. Honestly, kids, when it's that busy it's just queue-jumping, so wait your turn; doing otherwise makes you an ass. I didn't want to play chicken with him when he tried to merge in front of me, so I had to pass him in the empty oncoming traffic lane, yikes. Unfortunately he passed me in the right turn lane immediately before the steep hill leading to West Snoqualmie Valley Road NE; I figured he might try that, and could have stopped him by going into that lane myself, but I refused to become an ass just because of what someone else might have done.

Finished books: Guy Gavriel Kay's A Song for Arbonne and The Lions of Al-Rassan. Weis and Hickman's Legends trilogy (on the Majere twins); started the Meetings sextet (couldn't find those at the library, so we got them at a used bookstore). We also found Eddings' The Tamuli at Duvall Books down the road, $5/each, hardcover.

20070903: Got a new naturalization interview date from USCIS; we had to request a postponement because the previous date was while we were in Canada (Alaina's wedding etc.). It's a bit dicey because they make you return the original letter to request a new appointment, and who knew how far they would move the date? So it's a relief to get the new appointment. This is the beginning of the end of a long process that began with applying for my LPR (Lawful Permanent Resident) card ("green card") in late 2003.

20070903: Theo and Rebecca Penner move to Thunder Bay, Ontario, for school (small airplanes/teaching certificate respectively).

20070904: Played and finished Space Quest IV (from the I-VI CD pack).

Got our Internet and cable back; MDM finally got someone out, Anthony, very friendly and very competent. When we got back from Canada we found our TV was out too; when we left it was just our Internet. Anthony discovered that the technician that had been there while we were gone had disconnected the cable completely; he also removed some filters and gave us a new, better splitter. We split the cable 4 ways: 2 to the MythTV box for 2 TV cards (the one disadvantage of 2 x Hauppauge PVR-150s over the single 350 is that the 150s of course each need a cable input, however when we were setting up I couldn’t find a 350 that worked; some of them had bad tuners); 1 to the TV (not strictly necessary, we usually record shows, and can watch TV using the MythTV box), and the last to the cable modem for Internet connectivity.

Since Zap2it is discontinuing their free program guide data for MythTV users, due to rampant abuse by commercial bundlers, we subscribed to a new alternative, schedulesdirect.org: $15 for 3 months, first week free, price to come down with user volume (since this is being entered later, I can tell you that the first price drop has occurred, and has been made retroactive; for our $15 we now get 6 months, plus the free week, plus a day for every day of paid membership; expiration was 2007-12-11, is now 2008-03-19.) Update: now it's sometime in June 2008.

20070908: Took the Myth box to Hard Drives Northwest, where we bought it, but when they tested the DVD writer, which had been giving read errors playing back some AVI movies (Sliders, with quality unfortunately falling off in the last two (of five) seasons), but the DVD played fine in the second drive. Left the laptop for investigation.

20070911: "[Darn], is Raistlin coughing up a lung or what?"—Honey, reading Dragons of Autumn Twilight (Chronicles I, Weis and Hickman; revisiting old pastures).

Updated the MythTV Gentoo package on cirith-ungol, ran mythtv-setup and updated the lineup, and ran mythfilldatabase; no issues.

20070913: Receipts! A huge stack; we're several months behind and aiming to fix that today. Picked up the laptop from HDNW; bought a new DVD drive (removable, so no installation fee; if they'd wanted to charge one I'd've done it myself anyway), came to about $140 with tax; not terrible if it makes the laptop useful for viewing movies in airports and airplanes again.

20070914: So not too long ago the idiots in the City of Duvall council set up a 20 mph speed limit on NE Stephens/152nd Streets, near our turnoff, because there's a small park nearby. It's already 25! It's ridiculous. If kids play in the street and get run over, think of it as evolution in action. Still reading Moby-Dick (sigh); also reading the Dragonlance Chronicles again, with Honey; it's been a long time.

20070915: Wrote verify.pl, a perl script to automatically match up receipts in our database to our bank's online records. The file from the bank is in Quicken QFX format; like OFX, but has the MEMO field with possible check numbers; it's basically SGML, but my script doesn't bother to parse it, it just goes line by line and makes assumptions about layout.