Retrophisch

Doomed by the dish

So it’s the biggest college football weekend of the year.

And I’m missing all of it.

I am not doing so willingly.

Friday, we had some thunderstorms in the area. Nothing too bad, though the rain was intense at times, and we had a few lightning strikes here and there. But it’s rained much worse, and we’ve had lightning last longer.

Our DirecTV satellite dish system became inoperable at some point Friday afternoon. Two days later, still nothing. It would seem, after all the troubleshooting I’ve done, that the problem is the dish is out of alignment.

My bride thinks the disalignment began with the severe cold snap we got last month, which brought in some ice, and we lost the satellite signal for about a day. She thinks, and I can’t find any fault in her logic, the weight from whatever ice collected on the dish was enough to begin the process, and wind since has steadily moved it more until it’s just off enough that we’re getting nothing.

Except last night.

At midnight.

When we were turning in, and I just kicked on the satellite receiver for the heck of it.

This morning, nada. Nothing. Reset all three receivers. Zip. Zero. On startup, the receivers never get beyond 0% in receiving the satellite signal. I’ve checked cables on all the receivers. I checked the cables in the OnQ box upstairs. My friend Drew suggested I disconnect one of the satellite lines from the multiplexer in the OnQ box and hook it directly in to one of the receivers, to rule out the multiplexer as the problem.

So I lugged my JVC 13-inch television, and the attached receiver, from the study, upstairs to the OnQ box, and plugged it in directly. Still nothing.

So, having ruled out everything else, it has to be the dish itself.

This is what was determined yesterday afternoon, when, after 24 hours of no signal, I called DirecTV technical support. (Note: If you have to do this, never waste time with the first-line customer service reps. All of the ones I’ve spoken with have been pleasant, but they’ve got limited knowledge, and your best bet is to ask them to connect you to “second-tier tech support”, where more knowledgeable folks reside.) The tech rep I spoke with, after I explained to her everything I had done to that point, said it sounded like everything had been ruled out but the dish itself. So she scheduled a technician to come out to the house to get up on the roof to realign the dish.

Thursday.

Thursday.

Just in case you didn’t catch that, the tech is coming on Thursday.

Thursday, January 4th. After which there is only one bowl game of any significance, the BCS Championship Game.

So if I get to watch any of the big bowl games tomorrow, it will only be due to Brent’s generosity in inviting me over to his place. I’ll get to watch the bowl game I care about the most, LSU vs Notre Dame in the Sugar Bowl, over at Drew’s. (Which isn’t bad, since we all went to LSU, Drew and I were in ROTC together, and it’s always fun to watch the games with fellow alumni.) Still…Thursday?

Apparently the technicians don’t work on Sunday, and I can’t begrudge them a day off during the week. They’re not working on what is likely the second-biggest football day of the year (after Super Bowl Sunday, of course), since it’s New Year’s Day, and I can’t begrudge them having that day off, either. Likewise, no techs are being scheduled on Tuesday the 2d, as that’s the National Day of Mourning for President Ford. I can’t begrudge them that, either. And since Wednesday is the first day available after three straight days of unavailability, it’s booked solid when I called on Saturday afternoon. So I’m left with Thursday.

And while I can’t begrudge the techs the above three days off, I’m still left with the feeling that this all stinks. The timing absolutely sucks. At no point did anyone from DirecTV say, “Gee, you’ve been a customer of ours for nearly a decade. Let’s see how soon we can get someone out there.” Which would of course have made me deliriously happy, but we can’t always get what we want, which is someone out right now to fix the problem.

Because the problem is about twenty feet up, on the roof of our second-story home with a steep, pitched roof, and I have no ladder taller than eight feet. And while I don’t fear heights, the prospect of getting on the steep, pitched roof while it’s as windy as it is today—provided I had a ladder taller than eight feet—isn’t very appealing.

I know what those of you who know me are probably thinking: Why don’t you have Verizon’s FiOS TV, anyway? You have the fiber optic for Internet and phone, why not for television, too?

A good question, certainly, and the answer is this: because earlier this year, midway through January and before FiOS TV was available, my bride placed an order with DirecTV for two of their new satellite receiver/DVR units, and this locked us in to a new, two-year contract with DirecTV. Even though we were long out of our original contract. That’s why we don’t have FiOS TV. (And please don’t think I blame my wife in any way. The receivers these new ones replaced were old, and sucked, and we wanted DVR capability in the study and bedroom.)

I’m seriously considering looking into what it would cost us to break that last year with DirecTV. I’ve been looking at TiVo units direct from TiVo, because, despite the company’s problems, their product is still the best DVR available, and all others pale in comparison. There may be a hefty cost for a switch now, but I’m wondering if it would be worth it to never again have to worry about being doomed by a unaligned dish.

A buggy musical

If you’ve ever wondered what Panic co-founder Cabel Sasser sounds like when he’s singing, you can find out from viewing the hilarious Buggy Saints Row: The Musical. (Caution: Some adult language in the songs.)

[Wave of the phin to John.]

O Holy Night

A little while ago, I finished watching “The Christmas Show” episode of Studio 60. The show closes with an awesome performance by New Orleans musicians who are supported by the Tipitina’s Foundation. The group performs one of my favorite Christmas songs, “O Holy Night”, and you can still snag a MP3 from Studio 60’s music page.

links for 2006-12-27

• New tattoo ink means “4ever” needn’t be permanent - Engadget
  for future reference
  (tags: fun)

My favorite Christmas moment

Yesterday, my wife awoke to find our son still in his bed. Granted, he was awake, but he’s only three and still hasn’t quite figured out the whole Christmas morning, Santa has left presents, thing. So she went to get him up, and moments later he came in to our room.

“Hi, Daddy.”

“Merry Christmas, buddy!” I tell him as Mom helps him up on the bed.

“Merry Christmas, Daddy,” he replies, giving me as big a bear hug as his little arms can muster.

He then proceeds to plop down next to me, still hugging me, and we stay like that for about forty-five seconds before he pops up and says, “Come on, Daddy. Let’s go get presents.”

If nothing else, those sixty seconds made this the best Christmas ever.

Visited States

So while browsing on Flickr, I came across a link to Douwe Osinga’s Visited States. It’s pretty simple: you click on the name of the state you’ve visited, and the state gets marked in red on the map. I’ve visited half the states in the Union:

create your own visited states map or check out these Google Hacks.

I have some personal criteria for what constitutes a “visit”. For instance, I didn’t count the layover in Salt Lake City as a visit to Utah. I don’t think you can really call it a visit when you never leave the airport. Likewise, I didn’t count the short time I spent in Newark, leaving from the airport to go in to Manhattan, as a visit to Jersey. I don’t count the approximately two hours I spent at a friend’s father-in-law’s place in Oklahoma as a visit; we were there to pick up dad-in-law’s old big-screen television, and it was right back across the border in to Texas.

However, though we didn’t spend a night in Maine, or Vermont, I count those as states visited, since we were there to see certain sites unique to the state, i.e., playing tourist. So you may feel otherwise as to what makes a “visit”, but that’s some of what I thought about when marking states.

So how many have you visited?

links for 2006-12-20

• PhishTank | Join the fight against phishing
  Verify a link isn’t from a phisher, or submit a phishing link for inclusion in the database (aka, the tank). Please note the lack of a c in this spelling of phish; these are scum of cyberspace which give a bad name to other, more friendly phisch.
  (tags: community email Internet privacy reference search tools)

MacSanta

How would you like 20% off the best spam-killing app for the Mac? Or maybe 20% off the easiest disk image creator? Perhaps 20% off a professional text editor is more to your liking.

Now that you’ve done all of your gift shopping for everyone else, treat yourself to discount savings on numerous Mac applications from top-notch developers with MacSanta.

links for 2006-12-16

• Linotype Libraries - Generis
  A “generic” font available in different styles.
  (tags: font typography)

Derek Webb

On September 25th this year, our church hosted a concert by Derek Webb, of Caedmon’s Call fame, along with his wife, Sandra McCracken.

Derek Webb, accompanied by his wife, Sandra McCracken.

I had a good seat (thanks, Samantha!), and took a few shots of the couple as they performed, plus of the good-sized crowd before the concert, and in between sets.

Beyond his lyrical abilities, one of the things I admire about Derek is his desire to simply get the message of God’s love out there. At one point during his set, he remarked how he was going to freak out all the lawyers and record executives by telling all of us to share his music with whomever we wanted to. Earlier this year, he had even gone so far as to put his latest album, Mockingbird, online as a free download. He says it was a very successful experiment.

More baseball in December

Three days after seeing Michael Young get his 200th hit of the 2006 season, Brent and I were back at the Ballpark in Arlington. This time, we were about 23 rows up behind home plate. I didn’t take a lot of shots, because the net behind the plate gets in the way.

Click the photo to see the entire set.

Baseball in December

Well, baseball photos, any way.

I’ve let myself get way too far behind on processing and uploading photos, so I’m making a concerted effort over the next few days to get caught up.

Back in September, thanks to a generous church member, Brent received four tickets to the Rangers game on the 16th. Four primo tickets, sixth row, first base line, just to the right of first. It was the closest any of us had ever sat at a major league baseball game, and Brent and I were way excited. It was the sort of opportunity that makes me pine for a digital SLR with a telephoto lens or two.

The highlight of the evening—besides the Rangers winning, that is—was seeing Michael Young collect his 200th hit of the season. I’ve uploaded a photo set to my Flickr account.

Michael Young hitting number 200.

OSC gets a dig in on Bill and Ballmer

From Orson Scott Card’s Empire:

“I’m not surprised,” said Cole. “What do you think it takes to build one of those? Two million? Six?”
“Real costs or Pentagon costs?” asked Reuben.
“Microsoft costs.”
“These are not a Microsoft product,” said Reuben.
“Developed in secret, though.”
“Yeah, but they don’t lock up.”

links for 2006-12-08

• Yahoo! News - You Witness
  Yahoo’s experiment in citizen journalism.
  (tags: community news photography social)

There should be a law

I came away from my wife’s company’s Christmas “holiday” party Thursday night with this thought: There should be a law against skinny blonde white women singing “Respect”.

The more I think about it, there should be a law against anyone singing “Respect” except Aretha. Ain’t nothin’ like the real thing, baby.

Never forget

“In the annals of American history, only a few events are so well-known and so deeply rooted in national remembrance that the mere mention of their date suffices to describe them. Of these occurrences, none could have had more significance for our Nation than December 7, 1941. On that Sunday morning… the Imperial Japanese Navy launched an unprovoked, surprise attack upon units of the Armed Forces of the United States stationed at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii.

“This attack claimed the lives of 2,403 Americans, wounded 1,178 more, and damaged our naval capabilities in the Pacific. Such destruction seared the memory of a generation and galvanized the will of the American people in a fight to maintain our right to freedom without fear. Every honor is appropriate for the courageous Americans who made the supreme sacrifice for our Nation at Pearl Harbor and in the many battles that followed in World War II. Their sacrifice was for a cause, not for conquest; for a world that would be safe for future generations. Their devotion must never be forgotten.” —Ronald Reagan

links for 2006-12-05

• outside.in
  Your neighborhood on the Web.
  (tags: community local social reference search)

The latest fortune

Cleaning out my wallet, I discovered the fortune from the last fortune cookie I had:

Alright, alright, keep the laughter to a minimum.

Further proof duct tape can be used for anything

You’ve all heard the adage (wrongly attributed lately, online, to Oprah): “Duct tape is a lot like the Force. It has a light side, a dark side, and it binds the galaxy together.” You may have seen the various offerings of the duct tape wallet.

Now, that amazing greyness has been used to create: The Duct Tape Shopping Bag.

This is pretty much how I feel (or at least, how I should feel)

Walter E. Williams:

[T]he founders of our nation were suspicious, if not contemptuous, of government.

[…]

Today’s Americans hold a different vision of government. It’s one that says Congress has the right to do just about anything upon which it can secure a majority vote. Most of what Congress does fits the description of forcing one American to serve the purposes of another American. That description differs only in degree, but not in kind, from slavery.

At least two-thirds of the federal budget represents forcing one American to serve the purposes of another. Younger workers are forced to pay for the prescriptions of older Americans; people who are not farmers are forced to serve those who are; nonpoor people are forced to serve poor people; and the general public is forced to serve corporations, college students and other special interests who have the ear of Congress.

[…]

You say, ‘Williams, don’t you believe in helping your fellow man?’ Yes, I do. I believe that reaching into one’s own pockets to help his fellow man is both laudable and praiseworthy. Reaching into another’s pockets to help his fellow man is despicable and worthy of condemnation.

The bottom line: We love government because it enables us to accomplish things that if done privately would lead to arrest and imprisonment.

Like Mr. Williams, I don’t mind giving money to help others. In fact, my faith compels me to help others, if not with my time and sweat, then at least with my money. I am happy to give. However, I believe I am a better steward of my own money than the government, especially when it comes to charity. Private charities do a better job in their respective areas than similar government agencies. There are charities which receive federal and state funds, which to me means nothing more than the government acting as an unnecessary and fund-stealing middle-man. The government needs to get out of the charity business.

Speaking of charities, a good one to consider this holiday season is Feed the Children. Hunger is still a problem even in the United States, and it’s especially important for children to get proper nourishment so they develop normally. Please consider a donation to Feed the Children as part of your end-of-the-year giving.

XP or Vista?

So I purchased a copy of Parallels Desktop a few months back, when they were offering it at a reduced price while still in beta. I haven’t gotten around to installing it since, mostly because I didn’t have a legit copy of Windows to go with it, and I’m not much interested in dinking around with any Linux variants.

Lately, I’ve been intrigued at the prospect of running Windows from a virtual environment on my Intel iMac, mostly for web browser testing. (My sites don’t look nearly as nice in Internet Explorer as they do in, well, pretty much every other browser.) And long ago I promised I’d help out with some of our church’s web stuff, and they use FrontPage (yes, I know—ick!).

The question then is, do I get the latest version of Windows XP, or do I jump in to the exploratory waters of Windows Vista? Let me know what you think.

Good bowl viewing appears to be on the horizon

There are times when it’s nice to be wrong, and I’m glad I was wrong regarding the poll voters living in yesteryear. They did the right thing, and put Florida in the BCS Championship game opposite Ohio State. That will be a great football game.

It looks like there will be several great football games featured in the upcoming bowl season. My Tigers will face Notre Dame in the Sugar Bowl, and that looks like a great match-up. Michigan is going to face USC in a classic Big 10-vs.-Pac-10 Rose Bowl, and as usual, should be a good game, though I think Michigan is going to roll right over the Trojans. The Wolverines will be looking to prove something after seeing Florida vault over them in the standings, and I’m not sure the USC ego is going to recover from losing to UCLA. I’ll set aside my normal dislike for Michigan to root for them, as my dislike for the Pac-10 in general, and USC in particular, is so much stronger. (My best friend in high school—hi, Matt!—was from Ohio, and a huge OSU fan, so I picked up the Michigan dislike from him.)

Boise State against Oklahoma in the Fiesta Bowl should yield another great game between well matched-up teams. Likewise with Arkansas and Wisconsin in the Capital One, West Virginia versus Georgia Tech in the Gator Bowl, and Tennessee against Penn State in the Outback. I know Brent is probably beside himself in anticipation of potentially seeing in person his beloved Auburn take on Nebraska in the Cotton Bowl. That should be another great game.

The only snoozer I see is the Orange Bowl. Will that many people really tune in to see Louisville take on Wake Forest? Granted, it will be the only college bowl game on that night, so I’m sure they’ll get a lot of viewers that way. (I confess, I’ll probably be one of those.) But I can’t imagine it pulling in the sort of ratings the other BCS bowls will. Louisville’s going to crush Wake Forest. I still believe the BCS needs to seriously consider the automatic bid for the Big East, and to a lesser extent, the ACC.

There look to be some good match-ups in the lesser bowls, too. Our local TCU Hornfrogs are in the bowl season opener, the Poinsettia Bowl in San Diego, on December 19th. And what’s with these two minor bowls, the International Bowl in Toronto, and the GMAC Bowl in Mobile, Alabama, being held after the first of the year? Get back to being scheduled before December 30th, as all minor bowls should be. ESPN has the entire schedule for your TiVo-setting pleasure.

So, go Florida! Go Michigan! Go Arkansas! Go Auburn! Go Tennessee! But most of all, Geaux Tigers!!

This year’s BCMess

Say, worshipers of the University of Spoiled Children: for there to be a dynasty, don’t you need to actually make it to the title game? Pardon me while I congratulate the Bruins of UCLA for an outstanding defensive effort, stifling the Trojans and keeping the overrated Pac-10 from a national championship shot.

So now all of the attention is on the poll voters, who will determine if Michigan or Florida deserves to play Ohio State on January 8th.

My two cents: the SEC is the toughest conference in all of the college football. To emerge undefeated from this conference, as Auburn did in 2004 (and was denied the national title shot) is one of the greatest team accomplishments in all of college football. Florida fell one game short of that goal this year, which is still a heck of an accomplishment, considering this is the SEC.

Michigan has a hell of a football team this year, no doubt about it. But Florida played one more game this year, and the Wolverines failed to win their conference, as that honor went to Ohio State. Frankly, I don’t think you should be allowed to play for the national championship if you fail to win your conference; this caused a lot of angst in 2003, when Oklahoma got to play LSU in the Sugar Bowl, even though the Sooners lost the Big 12 Championship game to Kansas State. In my mind, USC has a legitimate gripe they didn’t get the title shot in 2003, and I would hate to see the same thing happen to Florida this year.

I think the problem Florida will have with the poll voters is that too many of them are living in the glory days of yesteryear when the Big 10 and the Pac-10 did rule college football. Gentlemen, those days are over. The Pac-10 is a dim shadow of its former self, and the Big 12 has risen to national prominence. The SEC, Big 10, and Big 12 conferences are now college football’s elite. Florida and Michigan come from those conferences, but of those two, only Florida emerged as conference champion. My fear is that too many voters will overlook that fact.

Send Michigan to face USC in the Rose Bowl; you’ll get your big Pac-10 vs Big 10 bowl game to remind you of the yesteryear you seem fixated upon. Florida deserves to be in the desert facing the Buckeyes in January.

How the mighty art fallen

We’ve known for quite a while now that the BCS was rife with flaws, but there is something seriously wrong with college football when Wake Forest is going to the Orange Bowl.

ATPM 12.12

The December issue of About This Particular Macintosh is now available for your reading pleasure.

We debut a new column this month, with Lee’s Photoshop for the Curious. As he notes, this is not a “Photoshop for Beginners”-type tutorial, but rather a look at various elements of Photoshop that occasional users would benefit from. If you’re a Photoshop Elements user like myself, you will find that many of the tips translate well.

Mike Chamberlain offers his personal tour of the Macintosh blogosphere in this month’s Mac of All Trades, while Miraz puts SeakMonkey through the web-accessibility wringer. Sylvester continues looking at Activity Monitor, this time using it to plug memory leaks. (Those would be leaks in the Mac’s memory, not Sylvester’s. His memory is just fine. At least it appears that way to the rest of the staff.)

This month’s desktop pictures are brought to us by our Mr. Chamberlain, taken on his European sojourn this past summer. We continue to see the genesis of Cortland’s employment at Wieser Graphics, while dark forces prep their move to the Midwest.

Lee has a double-dose of reviews this month, looking at Rogue Amoeba’s Fission and the media device, iRecord. Matthew pokes around with OpenMenu X, while David notes one of my favorite iTunes utilities, Synergy. Finally, for all you gamers, Andrew rocks on some first-person shooters as he puts the Tankstick through its paces.

As always, this issue of ATPM is available in a variety of reading formats for your enjoyment.