March 31, 2004
Upgrading Presently

Got my replacement drive today. Trevor was home sick, so I didn't have any time to work on it until about 2 hours ago. Had a few problems buring the CD (bad batch of disks, or my drive isn't working), and finally went witht he floppy. Things worked fine after that.

The copy started off scary. With a ton of bad sectors. But it got past those, and is copying 76Gb over to the new drive. Using the rather complete Hinsdale instructions, From Any Single Drive Tivo to New Single Larger A Drive.

The old (bad) drive is still under warranty, so when I'm done copying data to the new drive, I just need to grab an error code,and get an RMA to get a new 80G drive. And no real idea what to do with it.

Posted by danisaacs at 10:05 PM
March 30, 2004
Feh. I thought he was Dead.

I saw Paul Tagliabu's press conference yesterday while I was waiting to get my hairs cut. Didn't see the whole thing, but I swore he was giving a eulogy for Art Modell. And I was happy. Ready to find out where he was being buried, so I could go dance on his grave.

But alas, I mistook the Commish's words. Art is stepping down from his leadership position with the Cle...Baltimore Ravens. Not dead.

Too bad.

Posted by danisaacs at 11:23 AM
Time Warner DVR

As I noted in my previous entry, my Tivo is down while I get the drive replaced. Shipped out yesterday, 2nd day. Should be here on Wednesday, and Tivo should be up that night, if I have time to work on it.

But to tide me over until then, I took my digital cable box into the TW office in Cary yesterday afternoon, and got another DVR. Just plan on using it untilt he Tivo is ready. Maybe a week, worst case. We already have one that we keep in the MBR. Kristi uses it for her crappy shows, and to resolve some of the time conflicts. Like Cold Case/Simpsons, and a few others that involve her shows. It's only about $7 more a month over the cost of having a regular digital outlet in there.

But since Kristi uses it to keep her shows, and some others that we watch together, I haven't really used it much myself (aside from just watching something). So the past 24 hours or so is the most time I've spent using it. And with one exception, God, do I miss my Tivo.

The exception is, of course, the dual tuner. Recording two shows at once. It was nice to grab Jay Mohr's special on CC last night @ 10 while also catching the Sopranos @ 10 on HBO2. Of course, I coulda worked around it by catching the Sopranos on HBO2W @ 1am. But it was nice to not worry about it.

Now, if the interface were even close to be as refined and usuable as Tivo's, I'd consider dropping my Tivo Sub. and selling the unit. But at this rate, Art Modell will be needing a coat in Hell before I do that. The interface sucks. Remember the difference between Mac OS8 and Windows 95? That's the scale. One is obviously a least common denominator of the other. I wish these damn cable companies would just license the OS from Tivo. They'd be making me a lot happier than using their sad attempt to replicate Tivo's main features while completely ignoring the rest has.

Hurry Fed Ex. Hurry.

Posted by danisaacs at 11:14 AM
March 29, 2004
Tivo Drive dying

I've noticed some symptoms for a few months now, but they've been very intermittent, until now. The root cause of the issues are heat. Of that I'm fairly convinced. I had the unit sitting on a shelf about 8" above my receiver, but also had my digital cable box sitting directly a top the Tivo. Of the two, the later contributed more to the poor rate of heat dissipation. I placed spacers in between them after I began seeing problems, but only added about 1/4", which wasn't suficient.

Internal temps were usually in the high 40's, but often in the low 50's (C). I'm goign to move things around on the shelves, but that's a two person job, given the size of my TV and entertainment center. Gotta wait for my brother to come down for Easter to have enough time to move everything.

Ordered the new drive, a 120gb Maxtor unit with 8MB Cache. Should be here on Wednesday. I'll do the replacement on Thusday, probably.

I'm thiking I may stop by Time Warner and pick up a DVR for a few days, just to cover the interim.

Posted by danisaacs at 10:04 AM
March 26, 2004
Cordless Drill

The battery on my cordless drill is dead. It's about 50 bucks to replace it. For 80, I can get a 14.4v drill with two batteris and a flashlight. Guess which one I'm going to do.

Printer ink and proprietary batteries. Two of the best rackets outside college textbooks.

Posted by danisaacs at 03:51 PM
March 17, 2004
TV Dinner Directions

I'm making myself a TV Dinner for lunch. It's a Swanson Hungry Man Turkey and Mashed Taters.

I've been eating these for literally decades. When I first moved down to NC from OH, Kristi had to stay up there to sell the house, and I was living in our apt. here by myself. And I was eating about 4 of these TV dinners a week. They would be a staple of my diet if I were not married.

Well I happened to check the directions, just to make sure I was going to poke holes int he right place, when I noticed the directions had changed. Instead of just poking holes over the taters and cooking for 45 minutes, you just cook it completely covered for 30 minutes remove the cover and mix things up, then cook it for an additional 15 minutes.

Bravo! The problem before was that some of the turkey slices and the stuffing would dry up. By mixing things up and pouring some gravy over the stuffing, this shouldn't happen. Nice to see a stalwart of Americana is still improving itself.

Posted by danisaacs at 12:43 PM
Retirement

I'm in my 3rd week since my employment with Paradigm Genetics ended. Can't really say much about the circumstances, due to confidentiality stuff. So don't ask.

But what I'e really learned in these three weeks, is that I would really, really, love to be retired. Lieisure rocks. I've spent a few hours a day hanging out in the garage using my power tools. Watched a few movies I'd Tivo'd. Played some video games.

It took probably two weeks for me to stop thinking about Paradigm's network. 3 years of spending every day thinking about something takes some time to quit thinking about. But I'm not wakign up at 4 am and thinking "I should log on and check on things" anymore. I was as recently as last week. It takes time to stop caring about things you cared so much about.

Anyway, I'm certainly much more focused on retirement planning now. Let's just hope this/these kid/s decide to go to a public University.

Posted by danisaacs at 12:32 PM