Posted by Scott Laird
Wed, 27 Jul 2005 17:36:40 GMT
My driver’s license expired a few days ago and I’ve been meaning to go in and get it renewed, but I was dreading the experience. The last time I had to renew, I had to take time off from work so I could sit for an hour in a hot DMV building full of crabby people. I had no desire to repeat that.
I bit the bullet today and walked over to the downtown Seattle licensing office at 3rd and Union. I was expecting a wait, but the room was almost completely empty, so I was back out the door with a new license in under 5 minutes. The whole process, including the walk from my office and back again took me under 10 minutes.
I’m having a run of good customer service experiences today. First my DSL got a free speed upgrade and now my driver’s license. I don’t really know how to top that.
Posted in Seattle, Personal | Tags dmv, dol, driverslicense, renewal, seattle, unionst | no comments
Posted by Scott Laird
Tue, 26 Jul 2005 21:55:15 GMT
I’ll have to call this a personal first: I had dinner at Chinoise yesterday with a group of people that I’d never actually met in person before, all arranged at the last minute via blog trackbacks.
Besides finally meeting Boris, I got to meet Chris, Lee, Kris, Amanda, and Silas. I’d never been to Chinoise before, but I’ll be back soon–great food, wonderful presented. The conversation was enjoyably geeky; Boris and I double-teamed Lee and Chris on the “you need a Nokia N91” front while the other half of the table discussed photo management software and backup strategies. Here are a couple pictures from Boris’s Nokia 6630, uploaded directly to Flickr during dinner. I really need to get a better phone.
Posted in Seattle, Personal | Tags bryght, chinoise, dinner, seattle, trackback | 4 comments
Posted by Scott Laird
Fri, 22 Jul 2005 14:35:05 GMT
It looks like the US’s daylight savings time rules are going to change again. I’m not convinced that congress is aware of what’s involved in changing the DST rules. At the very least, it’ll require a software upgrade on every computer in the country. It won’t be as bad as Y2K, but there are going to be a lot of computer-controlled clocks that will be wrong during the first few days of the change.
Unfortunately, not all of the computer-driven clocks out there are upgradable. I have two of the nifty radio-driven “atomic clock” clocks at home, and at least one of them has no way to manually control DST. They’ve been great so far–they know the DST rules and flip back and forth on their own. Unfortunately that’s going to break when the rules change. Since no one upgrades firmware on $20 consumer devices, I’m going to be stuck with clocks that are wrong for 4 weeks out of the year. I’ll probably be able to work around it by manually changing the timezone on the clock 4 times per year, but I’m going to be thinking about the wonderful congresspeople who did this to me every time I climb the ladder to fix the wall clock hanging above my kitchen.
CNN isn’t saying when the change is supposed to take effect; I’d heard rumors that it was going to be this fall, but that seems unlikely.
Posted in Personal | no comments
Posted by Scott Laird
Tue, 05 Jul 2005 20:16:35 GMT
I think the neighborhood fireworks fest went just a wee bit too far last night. We spent most of the day with friends, and didn’t get home until almost 11:00. After we put the kids to bed, we went downstairs, opened up the french doors to the patio so we could see the fireworks, and tried to finish another level of Katamari Damacy.
In retrospect, we probably should have left the doors closed–a couple minutes after we sat down, a ball of flaming fireworks (roman candle, maybe?) flew in the door, hit my wife in the leg, and then skidded around, melting a half-dozen holes in the carpet.
Amazingly enough, my wife was uninjured. We doused the carpet, just to make sure that the carpet pad wasn’t smoldering underneath the charred rug, and called it a night.
Posted in Personal | Tags fireworks, fourthofjuly | no comments
Posted by Scott Laird
Wed, 25 May 2005 18:16:07 GMT
I’m still recovering from this last weekend–we ripped a 60 foot maple tree out of our back yard. One of the tree’s three main trunks was rotting, and it’d been dropping branches onto our yard and fence for years. It had to go. The problem was that the tree was less then 10 feet from our fence, only 20 feet from our garage, our neighbor’s garage, and the road, and 25 feet from our house. The hard part was getting the tree down without destroying anything.
We mostly succeeded–our garage’s gutter has two little dings, and we cracked one panel of our fence, but we managed to reduce the tree down to a 4-5 foot wide stump. We hauled 5 pickup-loads of branches to the city’s yard cleanup station, and hauled 2 dumptruck-loads of logs and firewood to friends and family. We’re left with a small mound of branches and leaves, but we’ll be able to stuff that into our yard waste can over the next few weeks.
Next up, I need to rent a stump grinder and get rid of the stump. That’ll probably take a few hours–it’s a lot of stump. Once that’s done, we’ll be ready to level things out, add a bit more topsoil, and then re-plant our back yard. It’s been ailing for years–the combination of the tree’s shade, damage from my sister-in-law’s dogs, and neglect have reduced it to a sea of moss and dandelions.
I keep forgetting how much I enjoy large-scale yard work. It’s a nice counterpoint to the week’s computer work, plus it gives me an excuse to play around with heavy equipment every now and then. How can you argue with that?
Posted in Personal | Tags home, tree, yardwork | no comments
Posted by Scott Laird
Wed, 27 Apr 2005 17:25:49 GMT
I watched the first two seasons of 24 weekly, but I just couldn’t cope with the third season–it was too slow and too irritating. Halfway through the season, we had a power outage and my TiVo missed an episode. I stopped watching it after that–I just didn’t care anymore. The general consensus is that I didn’t miss much.
I couldn’t completely give up on the series, though, so I started stockpiling the episodes for the current season when they started. I figured that I’d give it a few months and then get feedback from friends. If it was good, then I’d catch up and watch it, if it was as bad as season 3, then I’d delete them all and forget about the show.
The season’s almost done now, and everyone seems to be happy with it, so I started watching it last week. I think I screwed up–the show’s too addictive, and I’ve been burning through episodes too fast. I’ve managed to watch 17 of the 19 episodes that have aired so far; I’m going to be stuck waiting through each week’s cliffhanger for the last 4 episodes. Darn them.
On the other hand, it did give me something to do yesterday when I was home sick in bed.
In general, the show’s deeply addictive, but I’m kind of amazed by how willing the “good guys” have been to resort to torture this season. I remember it happening a couple times during the first two seasons, but it was always a shock. Now it seems to be their standard method of interrogation. I’m not sure if this is supposed to say something about our society, or if it’s just a ratings vehicle.
Posted in Personal | Tags 24, entertainment, tv | no comments
Posted by Scott Laird
Wed, 26 Jan 2005 17:19:48 GMT
In a (vain) attempt to prove that I’m not that nerdy, I went against my better judgement and took one of the online “how nerdy are you” quizzes. I figured it’d say something like “you aren’t as nerdy as you think you are.”
People who know me probably aren’t surprised.
Posted in Personal | Tags nerdy, quiz | 4 comments
Posted by Scott Laird
Sat, 22 Jan 2005 16:03:58 GMT
Yesterday morning, when I arrived at work, I noticed that my laptop couldn’t connect to my home email server for some reason. Attempts to ping my home web server showed 90% packet loss. That’s kind of an unusual situation for a home network–I’ve had DSL go out quite a few times over the past 5 years, and I’ve had routers crash, but this is the first time that I’ve seen crippling packet loss. My best guess was that something strange had happened with a VPN that I’d set up between home and work, and that something was flinging non-rate-limited UDP or ESP packets at an insane rate.
Since 90% packet loss effects our home VoIP service as well, I had my wife hit reset on our home router/firewall PC. That fixed the unusual 90% packet loss, replacing it with 100% packet loss. When I got home last night, I found that the system had dropped into the BIOS setup screen with a “the previous boot didn’t complete right, so you probably want to change some BIOS settings” error. Grr. I changed the boot time error settings to tell it to ignore all errors, but this will probably happen the next time I need to do an emergency reboot.
Of course, it goes without saying that yesterday was the slowest day of the month, in terms of traffic to my blog. Traffic is way up this month–my average number of visits so far this month is only slightly behind the single best day from last year. My previous high was 595 hits, followed by 524 hits in second place. This month, I’m averaging around 540 hits per day, with a high of almost 800. Yeah, except for yesterday, which was barely 350.
Posted in Personal | Tags broken, dsl, outage, webstats | no comments
Posted by Scott Laird
Tue, 18 Jan 2005 01:22:03 GMT
So, I’ve been thinking about the new Mac mini. I could definitely use a couple new computers at home, and I’d be happiest with new Macs. They’d fit in well with my Powerbook and our dying old iMac. The Mac mini is certainly cheaper then older models, but the pricing is kind of deceptive. Yeah, you can get a model for $499, but by the time you bump the hard drive up to 80 MB, add a DVD burner, and add a reasonable amount of (third-party) memory, it’s pushing $1,000 all of a sudden. More specifically:
- Mac mini, 1.43 GHz/80 GB model: $599
- upgrade to Superdrive: $100
- add keyboard: $29 (Apple total: $728)
- 1 GB of Mac mini RAM from Crucial: $226.99
I’m sure I could get the memory for a few bucks less elsewhere, but I’ve had good luck with Crucial in the past, and I’d rather not monkey around with the RAM if I can avoid it. The initial rumors were that the Mac mini’s RAM wasn’t user-upgradeable; now it looks like it’s just sort of not recommended. It doesn’t require any special tools at the very least.
So, for $1,000, I can have a Mac with around 3x the CPU power of my aging PowerBook, enough RAM to do a bit of photo editing now and then, and a bit of disk space. I’d reuse the 22” CRT sitting on my desk at home and a Logitech optical mouse that I already own.
The problem is that I can’t afford a new Mac and a new Treo 650. Fortunately, no one seems eager to sell me a GSM Treo 650 any time soon, but sooner or later, Cingular is going to announce pricing, and I’m going to have to decide what I’m going to do about it. If they’d been shipping it 3 months ago, I probably would have ordered right off the bat, but its lack of memory and WiFi makes it look less enticing every month.
Oh, well–I should really wait until taxes are done this year before ordering any new hardware anyway.
Posted in Mac stuff, Handheld and PDA, Personal | Tags apple, hardware, home, macmini | no comments
Posted by Scott Laird
Thu, 06 Jan 2005 19:49:46 GMT
As mentioned earlier, I spent part of the long weekend cleaning up home theater stuff. Part of this involved migrating files onto my home file server, which is an old Athlon 700 with an 8-channel 3ware RAID card and 4 160 GB drives in a 450 GB RAID 5 array.
So what happens as soon as I finish copying stuff onto the array? A drive starts failing on the RAID array, and I discover that it was already running in degraded mode. Now I’m in danger of losing all 200 GB on the array. Most likely, it won’t come to that, but it’s still fantastically irritating. Of the 4 160 GB drives that I bought last year, 2 of them have now failed.
To make sure that this doesn’t happen again, I just ordered 2 more 160 GB drives from NewEgg (only $76 each), along with a 3-in-2 style drive cooler. Assuming that it all arrives tomorrow, I should be able to rebuild the array, including a spare drive this time, and hopefully I won’t have to worry about it failing again.
Posted in Computer System Administration, Toys, Personal | Tags 3ware, broken, drive, failure, ide, raid | no comments
Posted by Scott Laird
Wed, 05 Jan 2005 03:33:02 GMT
As part of the 4-day weekend that work gave us for New Year’s weekend, I spent some time cleaning and rationalizing the A/V system in our bedroom. Since we bought the projector a couple months ago, we’ve had 30-foot long audio and video cables snaking between the ceiling-mounted projector and the receiver and TiVo that were sitting on the floor right below the projector image. There had been a cabinet there that held them, but it got in the way of the projected image, and we couldn’t move them very far without running into the limits of our satellite cable.
The receiver wiring itself was a total rat’s nest, with TiVo, satellite receiver, and DVD player cables all tied together in a knot with a bunch of unused speaker wire. Since we cancelled the satellite and extracted all of the video from the TiVo, they could both be removed from the pile. Similarly, there was an old RCA DVD player–since we’re using MythTV for DVDs, we could remove it, too. Once we were done removing hardware, we were left with nothing but the receiver and the PC that runs MythTV. Since we weren’t tied to the cable jack in the wall any more, I moved the receiver closer to the projector, shortened the audio and video cables, and then re-ran longer speaker wires. Finally, I wired up rear speakers–the first time since 1997 that I’ve had rear speakers connected to any receiver I own. I also took the time to cable-tie the projector wires and discreetly stick them to the wall. That keep the projector from swiveling slightly ever time something bumps the cables, which makes for a more stable image.
Finally, I dragged the Xbox upstairs and wired it into the projector. Amazingly enough, in the whole time we’ve owned the projector, we hadn’t used it with the Xbox once. It works okay, but the interlacing is kind of nasty and the Xbox’s output looks fuzzy when it’s that big; I’m probably going to buy the Xbox component video kit, a component video to VGA cable for the projector, and a cheap 2-port KVM switch for switching the video input on the projector. That should give me a better image, plus the ability to use 720p on the handful of Xbox games that support it.
My one remaining job is to find a cheap IR transmitter for the PC and then program it to turn the projector off and on. Does lirc support any cheap USB IR transmitters? I notice that they have the IR codes for InFocus projectors on their web site. Given the codes and a transmitter, it should only take a couple minutes to get the PC to control the projector’s power.
Posted in MythTV, Personal | Tags cleanup, home, mythtv | 2 comments
Posted by Scott Laird
Thu, 30 Dec 2004 01:44:42 GMT
I finally called today to disconnect our Dish Network service. It only took 15 minutes on hold to get through to them, which wasn’t quite as bad as I’d feared. Still, the process raised the age-old question again: does hiding the “cancel my service” option really keep people from canceling?
This seems to be a phase that everyone with small kids goes through–“we’re going to stop watching so much TV and just turn the darned thing off.” My parents tried it once or twice, as have friends, siblings, and in-laws. Inevitably, people seem to turn it back on after a year or so, but they never seem to really regret it.
Watching less random TV is good, but mostly we’re trying to avoid paying $50/month when all we really watch are movies and things that are available on broadcast TV. So, the plan is to pick up a PCI HDTV tuner and use it to grab just the handful of shows that we care to see. I already have MythTV running at home, so adding a HD card to the existing setup shouldn’t be that hard (heh–everything with MythTV is harder then you’d expect), and I expect that watching HD resized to fit an 800x600 projector will look vastly better then the SD Satellite→Analog→TiVo→Analog→Projector video that we’re used to now.
Anyway, we’ll see. We’re sitting on at least 2 months worth of DVDs that we’ve never seen, plus a ton of subtitled anime, and I’d like to have more time to read, anyways.
Posted in MythTV, Personal | Tags dishnetwork, entertainment, mythtv, tv | 2 comments
Posted by Scott Laird
Fri, 17 Dec 2004 18:52:52 GMT
I am swimming in spam. Every where I go, every direction I look, every medium I deal with, I am being spammed. Spam in my email box I can handle–my spam filter manages that well enough that I can ignore the problem. It’s all of the other spam that is driving me insane.
Let’s start with blog spam. I run Movable Type, and I have a PageRank of 6 or so, so like everyone else with a good PageRank, I’m being bombarded with blog comment spam. It’s not uncommon to wake up in the morning and find that 100 ads for Viagra or online poker or something less savory have managed to make it through my filters and pollute my blog. From looking at my logs, I’ve been had over 7,000 comments posted on this blog, with only 150 or so being legitimate, and around 6,000 blocked by MT-Blacklist.
Then there’s phone spam–the Do Not Call list has actually worked pretty well for my home phone number, but I’ve been besieged by calls from (905)-482-1663 for the past couple weeks. I assume that they’re a telemarketer, but I’ve never been able to figure out what they want–even when I’ve picked the phone up on the first ring, they just hang up on me. Google suggests that that number has done work for Bank of America and the Kerry campaign and pissed off a number of other people; it’s not just me. After a week of this, I had Asterisk blacklist them, so I don’t have to listen to them hang up on me 2 or 3 times per day. Yesterday, they escalated–they called my cell phone 3 times last night. I sent a Do Not Call list complaint today, but I doubt it’ll take. I’d probably be better off using one of the other laws on the books regarding telemarketing calls to cell phones or percentages of hangups, but it’s probably not worth the hassle.
My work phone isn’t immune, either–I’ve been getting 2 or 3 calls per week from random business magazines, wanting to give me free subscriptions or renewals. Frankly, I receive so many magazines that I can’t keep track of which ones I’m already getting–95% of them go straight into the recycling bin without ever being opened. I really don’t want more–my mailbox is too full as it is. Last week, I got two calls from Information Week and had to hang up on them–they wouldn’t take “no” for an answer. The week before, it was a call, a fax, and two emails from Network World. This morning, it was eWeek.
Thinking about all of these–the blog spam, the telemarketer spam, and the magazine renewal spam–the common thread is that none of them are actually trying to sell me anything. The blog spam is trying to increase their own PageRank. The magazine spam is trying to increase their circulation size and advertising rates. The telemarketer might be trying to sell me something, but since they refuse to actually talk to me, I can’t really tell. Largely, they’re all bothering me because they can sell something that I have (eyeballs, highly ranked blog) to others, and they don’t care that they’re wasting my time and money in the process.
Posted in Blog stuff, Personal | Tags asterisk, blog, google, spam, telemarketer | 165 comments
Posted by Scott Laird
Sun, 05 Dec 2004 16:37:03 GMT
One of this morning’s blog reading discoveries was a post by Kellan on Find Your Spot, a “where in the US you should live” survey. It asks you a ton of questions about weather, cultural activities, transportation, and recreation and then recommends the 24 best places in the US for you to live. Sounds like fun, right?
Unfortunately, it seems to be dreadfully wrong. My top 3 results:
- Kent, Washington
- Provo/Orem, Utah
- Tacoma, Washington
I mean, I guess it’s nice that 2 out of the top 3 are within an hour of where I live, but Kent? I mean, I guess it’s close to Ikea, and it’s easy to navigate, with all of the big wide streets full of warehouses, but other then that, it’s the butt of most “Seattle suburbs” jokes. Go watch reruns of Almost Live for edification. Tacoma’s supposed to be better then it was, but it’s not exactly what I’m looking for, either.
I’m going to resist commenting on Provo. I’ve been there a couple times, once driving through as part of a road trip, the other on work, and I have *no* desire to go back, much less live there.
The first batch of questions were on weather–I thought that I said that I don’t like cold streaks, warm is good, moderate weather is best, sun is good, but a bit of snow is nice. I suppose that explains number 5 on the list: Anchorage, Alaska.
Here’s the full list:
- Kent, WA
- Provo-Orem, UT
- Tacoma, WA
- Ann Arbor, MI
- Anchorage, AK
- Fort Collins, CO
- Olympia, WA
- Hampton, VA
- Bellingham, WA (Hey! I’m from there)
- Hickory, NC
- Tulsa, OK
- Manchester, NH
- Bismark, ND
- Spokane, WA
- Sioux Falls, SD
- Chapel Hill, NC
- Chattanooga, TN
- Colorado Springs, CO
- Portland, ME
- Greenville, SC
- Loveland, CO
- Amarillo, TX
- Ogden, UT
- Clarksville, TN
I’ve been in 6 out of the top 10, so I guess the list isn’t completely worthless, but in many ways it reminds me of one of those career placement tests that I took in high school. It told me that I was lousy at organizational skills, would average a ‘D’ in college accounting classes, and should consider a career in accountancy. It also claimed that there was no hope that I’d pass a college zoology class, but the rest of the sciences would be straight ‘A’s for me.
Posted in Personal | Tags broken, personal, quiz | no comments
Posted by Scott Laird
Sun, 21 Nov 2004 17:53:03 GMT
One of the problems with owning a 20 year old house is that it comes full of 20 year old appliances, and most appliances are designed for a 15 year lifespan. When we bought this house almost 5 years ago, our inspector told us not to expect the appliances to last much longer, and to be happy with whatever life we got out of them.
Since then, we’ve lost the dishwasher, hot water heater, garbage disposal (who knew they could die?), and we’ve had to replace a couple faucets, a bunch of toilet parts, one complete toilet, and an outside water faucet.
Sometime tomorrow, we’ll add a new refrigerator to the list. Our current one is an old side-by-side Whirlpool with lots of fun features–the shelves don’t go all the way back, so things are prone to falling off the back of the shelves and ending up wedged behind the drawers at the bottom, where we don’t find them until we pull everything out for a big cleaning. The drawers fall off their rails all the time. The door shelves fall off sometimes. The glass shelves in the fridge pop out of their holders at a whim. The kick-plate the covers the coils doesn’t stay on right anymore; Gabe has a big gash in his foot right now from stepping on it after it fell off. And, on top of that, for the past few weeks, neither the fridge or freezer door closes properly. We’ve pulled everything out, cleaned the seals, checked alignment, and it looks like something’s bent somewhere. Even when everything’s closed as well as possible, the fridge barely makes it to 42˚ F overnight, so food’s been spoiling. Even if the seal problem is causing the lack-of-cold problem, and they’re both fixable, when all is said and done, we’d still be stuck with an old fridge that doesn’t work right.
In short, we need a new fridge. Fortunately, we’ve known this day was coming, and we’ve done way too much research. So, we had a decent idea of what we wanted, what models were available, and what they cost. After an afternoon of fighting pre-pre-Christmas shopping traffic, we’re the proud owners of one of LG’s new ”french door” models. Most of the reviews online seem positive, and we get got a decent price on it. It’s supposed to be delivered on Monday, which is better then I’d expected; when we replaced our dishwasher, it took over a month for it to show up.
Of course, there’s a downside to the story. While I was waiting for them to arrange delivery details, I spotted a pile of open-box InFocus DLP projectors for sale. I’ve been lusting after one for a while, and $735 seems like a decent price. So, I’m the proud owner of not only a new fridge, but a new projector as well. For the moment, it’s sitting in our bedroom, projecting an 8’ TiVo image on the wall, but we’ve been planning on turning our basement into a media room. It’ll be a few months before we’re ready to move it, but this gives us a nice incentive to keep after things.
I’m also trying to set up a MythTV box to go with it, but that’s a whole other story that I’ll get to later.
Posted in MythTV, Personal | Tags broken, dishwasher, home, refrigerator | 1 comment
