We’ve been getting mail from the phone company for the past year offering an upgrade to FIOS, and the idea of paying for it didn’t seem to make a whole lot of sense until our cable signal went completely digital and everything dropped out except for all of the local channels.
It’s a symbol of just how much things have changed in the last six years—when we moved into the house, local TV was still somewhat watchable. In 2010, however, the floundering networks have programmed infomercial after testimonial after courtroom show, making the local service useless to us. We don’t watch a lot of TV now that Finn is here, and the fact that she has mastered all three remotes in a never-ending quest for MORE MELMO means we will be an ever more vigilant and idiot-box free household.
I was shocked, then, to read just how cheap they were offering the local FIOS “triple play” for: monthly around $30 less for basic TV, high-speed internet, and phone service than we are currently paying for just DSL and phone combined. I’ve read nothing but glowing reviews about FIOS from friends, and the idea that we might get some decent programming to watch again is exciting. The thing that gets me, though, is the price they charge for basic phone service: ±$60 for a number and a bunch of worthless services we don’t use—call waiting, voicemail, etc. As far as I can tell, there’s no way to reduce the service to a simple land line connection, although there was some talk about providing a cheap ±$10 incoming line/outgoing 911 hookup, which would be PERFECT.
So the guy will be here next Monday to rip out the old DSL modem and install a bunch of other shit in the basement. We are still rocking the analog TV set I bought as a bachelor in 1994, so we don’t need to rent their stupid set-top box, but we have to rent some $6 dongle to get the digital service to talk to the TV. At this point, there are several reasons I can’t wait for a new LCD, one of them being a built-in signal converter: the idea that I need to rent another dumb box to stack on top of all the other boxes annoys the hell out of me.
Longtime readers (all four of you) might notice some changes around here, and that’s because the gasping, wheezing hamster that once powered this site has been transplanted by a sleek new robot called WordPress. The content is all the same; some of the permalinks from the old site may not work, and some of the pictures may be wonky in size or format. I’m doing a lot of housecleaning in the backend to make things better, but one of the best new improvements is a world-class comment spam system, which means registration and login and all of that other crap is no longer needed.
The new look of this site is by no means set in stone, so expect some major tinkering around here in the future. What you see before you is a placeholder until I can get some more dedicated time devoted to a sparkly new design; the beauty of WordPress is that it’s a breeze to edit and tweak, as opposed to the 3.3 version of MovableType, which was equal parts black magic, particle physics, detective work, cursing, and blind luck.
The sidebar links archive does still exist (and shows up inline with all the other content, currently) and will be integrated into the site like it was before; I had to do some database reorganization and add it as a new category in order to work within WordPress.
The humorous part about all of this is that I actually had WordPress installed, updated, and running a current import copy of the original Idiotking site back in July of 2009, but I didn’t have the time to fool with it further.
$40, an eBay order from England, and 30 minutes of wrenching time later, I have a functioning screen on my MacBook Pro again. The inverter board, a tiny little slice of silicon hidden inside the clutch cover of my expensive laptop, which controls the backlight on my LCD, had decided to die last fall. I’ve just now been able to get a replacement ordered and installed, and life is good again.
I did a bunch of research this evening on MacBook Pro displays and found that the issue I’m having might not be with the entire LCD itself (an image on which is faintly visible) but with the inverter board, which powers the backlights. In a $40 experiment, I ordered one on eBay from a reseller in England (there was nobody here in the states with the model number I need), and when it comes in I’ll finally crack the case and see if that’s the issue.
I spent a good portion of this morning in a creaky, drafty garage, attempting to make one good laser printer out of three. You never know what you’ll find when answering a Craigslist ad, which is why I always travel with tools, flashlight, cellphone, and the minimum amount of cash possible to hold an item until I’ve taken stock of the situation. These printers were three Phaser 7700 models, big tabloid-sized laser printers bought at a GSA auction and stored for several years behind a surplus hospital gurney covered in books and old Silicon Graphics workstations. Between the three of them there were two full sets of ink cartridges, one set of fusers, and one working hard drive (the other two had been pulled as per government regulations), and after swapping parts around, finagling balky fusers into place and doing delicate transplant surgery on the motherboards, we got one to power up and make it to the “print test page” step before paper jams and my ice-cold feet brought us to a halt. I don’t think these three machines were worth purchasing, but I’m still keeping my eyes open.
Six dropped calls in the last two weeks means your network, while fast, sucks. While talking on the phone with my sister this evening, I got dropped twice. WTF? The church steeple across the street from my house is built out of cellular repeaters. Your responses to customer complaints about the quality and coverage of your network leave much to be desired; in fact, they are the reason I will be dropping your service as soon as your iPhone exclusivity contract expires with Apple. Get bent.
I only just got Snow Leopard from Santa over the holidays (thanks, Santa!), so I’m behind the curve as far as what’s new and what it does. One thing I was not aware of was that Apple was removing Appletalk support altogether, which means no more direct printing to either of our printers—something I wasn’t aware of when I upgraded my laptop last week. Thankfully, it’s an easy fix: I set up Shared Printing on our G5 server (which can’t run Snow Leopard anyway) and all was right again.
After some wrangling, several phone calls, and a weekend of frightening media darkness, we’re back online. A Verizon dude came to the house, looked at the outside boxes, mumbled something to Jen about “going back to look at the mainframe”, and left. Hours passed, and then another nice man came out to make sure service had been restored. His efforts to make sure the DSL was working were thwarted by the updates I’d made to our cable routing during the downtime; I set up a honest-to-god punchdown block in the basement and commenced to rerouting and sorting miles of data cable hanging from the rafters like so many burmese pythons. After I got home from work, I made a few quick changes to the patch cables and restored the internet to glorious cinemascope. I still have to tighten up the remainder of the wiring, reroute coax that’s mixed in with the data cabling, and finish cleaning up the punchdown block before I can call it done, but it’s better than before. Oh, yeah, adding a 24-port switch to add into the rack would be nice…but it’s not necessary.
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Over the weekend our neighbors invited us to a “green” meeting (local folks coming together to talk about environmentally friendly methods and practices at the Lutheran church), and while the speaker was relatively good (a semi-nervous woman who sells eco-friendly products), it just so happened there was a used tool sale going on in the back of the room. For $15, we walked away with a 22″ hedge clipper, a full-size shovel, edging tool, and gravel rake, a pipe cutter, two channel locks, several snap-on wrenches, two unused paint scrapers, a sharpening stone, and the big find: a shaft-driven Bolens edging trimmer in unknown condition for the princely sum of $3. If I can get it running and swap out the gas tank (there’s a hole in it), my days of hauling 150′ of electrical cord around the yard will be over for good.
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After some confusion and a misplaced paper were cleared up last week, I finally got a box this afternoon containing ten window balances from Pullman, which will go into use just as soon as I can block the time out to install them.
Well, it’s final: I powered up my MacBook Pro yesterday and was greeted with a dark screen where I could only see the faintest hint of items on the screen. It looks like the backlight on my LCD has finally crapped out, which means one of two things: either the cables to the display have frayed and worn to the point of breaking, or I’ll probably have to replace the LCD/backlight assembly. Only some hours spent cracking the case will tell for sure. Unfortunately, I don’t currently see any replacement cables for sale.
If it’s the cable, we’re talking $30. If it’s the display, then we’re talking $300. In the meantime, I’m using remote desktop to work on my laptop from my work machine, which is like looking through a slightly blurry windowpane at my monitor—but still usable.
Well, it’s official: Saturn is dead. I kind of knew it would happen, even when they claimed that Roger Penske was going to buy it (buy what, exactly? Build what? That whole story never made sense).
I’ve spent a good deal of quality time with OS X Server (Tiger) over the last couple of weeks, and my experience has been very good overall. I had a previous install to learn from, so doing things like setting up users, groups, share points and sharing were a lot easier to do than if I’d tried it out of the box. Opening up ports for HTTP, FTP and VNC went smoothly, and I followed some helpful directions to log into the server using SSH and then share via AFP over a secure connection. I’m curious to get a copy of Snow Leopard Server and look at the differences.
I also bartered some networking help for a used G5 tower, which means our setup here at the house will be current as of 2004. The big thing is to have a machine that will take a SATA drive, which are cheap and plentiful—I’ve been cobbling together servers with ancient hardware for years, so when I can put an enterprise-level terrabyte drive in a five-year-old machine for ~$100, it means I can finally collect all of our photos, music, video, and backups in one place. I started moving files last night, and with the help of a utility called SmartReporter, I’m hoping I can avoid the catastrophic failure of our last music server.
I did not know this before, but the 3rd generation iPod will not charge from a USB connection, which sucks, because Apple decided to drop FireWire 400 ports from the back of new Intel iMacs. Which means I can listen to what’s on my iPod from my work computer, but I can’t charge it unless it’s plugged into the wall.
We are inching closer to that new car, but it’s slow going.
I’m going to have to break down and dip into the home equity fund to buy three more windows for the front porch before the really cold weather hits. It’s chillier at night now, and I’m too used to being able to work out there quietly. Also, having two computers on the dining room table for a second year in a row is unacceptable—especially with all of the cords hanging at Finn-height. Meanwhile, I just ordered ten more Pullman window counterbalances for the rest of the upstairs windows. Ten is about all the budget for this month will allow, and it’ll take me a weekend or two to get them all installed. The next step is to figure out a good way to blow paper insulation into the empty window pocket cavities without getting it all over the house.