It’s been an odd week for weather in the Philadelphia area. Wednesday was 70 degrees and I was out biking, then Saturday morning found me chiseling snow and ice off my car from an all day hail storm on Friday. The snow was frozen solid enough to walk on, though even after plowing the parking lot was icy enough to need my Yak Trax. The sun came out after a bit, as did the birds who have found a new hangout outside of my window.
Comcast actually redeemed themselves from yesterday’s fiasco today by sending out a technician who was smart enough to immediately grasp the problem. The problem, as suspected, was the free HBO and Starz promo wiping out one of my CableCards and multiple customer service people not grasping that they could simply correct the settings over the phone.
Instead, we hung out while she waited on the phone for someone to fix it. They had written up the work order as “customer needs help installing digital box”, so she said she was expecting a little old lady instead of a young guy with a mountain of electronics. We also talked about the Tivo-Comcast deal; Comcast’s own people seem just as excited as the customers to get some decent DVR software.
The new channels are nice; I think the last time I had premium cable was in the 80’s, when HBO was only one channel. Now it’s almost 10, with several in high definition. The Tivo’s going to be busy 
Here’s a fun one: a WordPress Plugin that makes a Firefox Search Plugin for your blog. This is probably more useful to me in finding old posts to reference, but if you’d like to search this blog directly from Firefox, you’ll find the search plugin to the right under News Feeds.
The WordPress plugin that makes this possible is the Mycroft Search Plugin Generator, though like other WordPress plugins I’ve encountered recently, it required some tweaking to work correctly when WordPress is not installed at the root of a site. (I should really just move my WordPress; life would be much simpler.)
There was also a second issue with the update URL being written as a local filename, and the icon is very particular: the entire URL must match that of the search plugin except for the extension. Here are my modifications for download.
People used to joke that Linux was only free if your time spent setting it up was worth nothing. Newer distributions like Ubuntu seem to have defanged such arguments, which are now more applicable to free offers from your cable company.
Comcast offered me free HBO and Starz for six months, and a few weeks later sent me a digital cable box and instructions to call and set it up. Now I had my doubts about this from the start, since I have a Tivo Series 3 that uses two CableCards instead of a cable box. Both have addresses and can recieve premium channels, though, so I figured I had a shot.
After half an hour on hold on the activation line, I explained this to a woman who only knew how to activate that particular model of box. She directed me to Comcast’s main line, where another 15 minutes on hold got me to someone else who soon grasped they didn’t know how to handle it and transferred me to my local office. Ironically, before outsourcing and call center consolidation, I would’ve started there in the first place.
Even for the local office, it quickly escalated to having to send someone out. It’s impressive that they can offer appointments within a day or two, but it still throws a monkey wrench it my schedule for something that it should be possible to do remotely. Also unimpressive was the fact that they weren’t even willing to try fixing my existing CableCards over the phone, one of which is only getting about 1/4 of the channels it should.
Comcast isn’t winning any points here; their free offer will end up wasting at least three hours of my time, and the other options aren’t much better. Their own DVR pales in comparison to Tivo, and their only competitor, satellite TV, doesn’t work with the Tivo Series 3. Good thing for them they have a monopoly.
As an engineer, I like my numbers raw and sliced only by spreadsheets and Perl scripts of my own design. So I’ve avoided commercial financial software for a long time and built up an increasingly sophisticated spreadsheet of my own to track anything and everything money related. (It’s an OpenDocument spreadsheet from OpenOffice/NeoOffice; if you’re being frugal, why buy Excel?) Manually entering data from multiple accounts and wrangling increasingly complex formulas has lost its luster, though, so I decided to give Quicken (for Mac) a try.
One of its big draws is automatically downloading data, though this only works for about half of my bank accounts. When it does work, you get a full transaction log, though it’s up to you to clean it up, balance it, and categorize the entries. For a few more accounts, there’s the more clunky login, download, and import procedures, and for the rest it’s back to manual entry.
Having everything in one place does have advantages; you can easily look at your budget across categories for different time periods or review stock holdings and tax implications from multiple brokerage accounts. At it’s heart, Quicken is still an accounting package and isn’t all that intuitive or user-friendly, though they provide wizards for common tasks. Also, while some common data mining and summaries are easy to generate, I’ve yet to find hooks for adding your own like keeping a running tally of money earmarked for taxes or estimating what kind of home I could afford in two years.
So far, it appears this may be a case of multiple tools being needed to cover all the aspects of a job.
Tivo
With Amazon Unbox on TiVo, you’ll be able to purchase or rent movies and TV shows to be delivered through broadband directly to your TiVo Now Playing List, so you can watch them on your big-screen TV. (C’mon people, it’s 2007: Renting movies through the mail is so pass�!)
Renting movies through the mail may be passe, but at one point, Netflix was moving more data per day than the Internet, and certainly more movies than all the online offerings combined. So why aren’t we just downloading our movies in the modern world?
When Amazon and Tivo conquer those two problems, then maybe I’ll consider giving up my Netflix subscription. Though maybe not; Netflix CEO Reed Hastings has long hinted at downloadable movies, noting the company is called Netflix, not Mailflix.
One thing leads to another in interesting ways sometimes:
As part of our agile software development process at work, we estimate how big the tasks are for the next couple of weeks so that we don’t bite off more than we can chew. This week, we threw down poker cards with our estimated feature points, which happened to be in a Fibonacci sequence.
That prompted me to share this set of Fibonacci single speed spacers, since a few other guys ride. A few of the non-riders even took an interest, giving me the opportunity to explain the simple and lightweight appeal of a bike with only one gear.
Today, this thought caught back up with me and I finally weighed my bikes:
That’s for a Trek Fuel 90 cross-county full-suspension and a Trek 7000 hardtail, so it’s a fair comparison. Both have aluminum frames and mid-quality components; the single speed gets a slight extra advantage from having v-brakes instead of full hydraulic discs.
Anne and I went to the Philadelphia Flower Show, where there was no shortage of flowers or photo opportunities. This year’s theme was Ireland, so many displays hinted at the beauty of its countryside. The outdoor displays were a mix; only a few managed to convey a true sense of the natural outdoors without looking overly staged. The contest entries were more appealing; there were some real works of art in constrained spaces.
Photography was pretty tricky; the convention center lighting was dim with powerful spots emphasizing parts of the displays. Tripods were banned due to the foot traffic, and I don’t use one anyway, but you’d need one to get good photos. It was also one of the few occasions when I would’ve liked DSLR for the better low light performance and external flash control.
Instead, I made do taking multiple photos with various flash settings and got a decent number properly exposed. A bit of tweaking in Picasa helped out a few more, though what I really wanted was an inverse gradient filter to counter the flash washing out the foreground. (Picasa only offers one geared towards dimming the sky, and my manual experiments in GIMP were unsatisfactory.) I’m also finding a square aspect ratio to be fun for some cropping, and threw one off-color shot into black and white.
WordPress is quite customizable with plugins, so I thought it would be easy to hide some of the things on the Write Post page that I don’t use. Write a plugin that hooks into one of the page’s actions and spits out some CSS to hide those elements by id would’ve done it in ten minutes. Instead, the page has some later dynamic rendering that hardcodes styles onto the elements, making them impossible to override. (Firebug was quite useful in figuring that out.)
The much messier solution was to use HTML comments to hide most of the unwanted elements and the above described plugins to tweak the few with proper semantics. Furthermore, you can’t just hide all the form inputs, because then WordPress will default to closing off comments and pings. These two therefore got copied into a div hidden with CSS.
There’s also some funky rendering going on, so that some of the remaining elements spill out of the box that would seem to contain them. For now, though, it meets my needs; if you’d like to do something similar, you can download my changes as a starting point.
I’ve done some speed dating, ranted about its profiteering, and even pondered wearing an offensive t-shirt to make sure I was remembered. One thing I never pondered, though, was a speed dating event where the entrance criteria was being either a rich dude or a hot chick. Some promoter of course did stoop to this, and had no trouble filling the room. Thankfully and inevitably, someone also crashed the party and mocked it quite deservingly in Get Rich or Try Lying.
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