So I'm back...

Got back on the 16th. And it's been insanely busy at work. They want my technical workload to decrease and me to start moving more towards managing the team. It'll be nice when we get to that and it looks like we'll be hiring more headcount to help distribute the load more evenly.

In other news, I may be making a trip to India to train our Indian support group (no, they aren't replacing us, just covering their 12 hours of the clock). No firm details, and if one of the other guys steps up to do it, they might end up going. I'm not sure how I feel about flying to Bangalore. It's a 36 hour trip (!!!!!!).

The TiVo got updated on Friday - finally I have TiVoToGo. And I managed to get the .tivo decryption document working so I can watch the files on my Mac. Pretty neat. Now to see what 802.11g adapters work with the TiVo. 802.11b for huge files just ain't cuttin' it.

Hrm, what else is new - worked a 14 hour day on Friday. On purpose. I managed to get a major document done, much to the benefit of the group. Got some testing done, too. It was pretty nice but I got home at the same time Nicole did (around 10).

Watched Dakar and Monte Carlo rallies this weekend, played around with iMovie HD and iDVD 5, and relaxed. Got quite a bit done.

5 days...

The date is fast approaching, and I'm just trying to get all of my ducks in a row before we fly out of here. I spent a good chunk of Sunday figuring out bullet train timetables so we can go to Hiroshima and Kyoto. I haven't even looked at the Tokyo subway system yet. That's going to be a challenge. I've been finalizing my list of stuff that needs to be packed. I'll start packing on Saturday. The flight leaves Sunday at 2:35pm.

I'm pretty nervous and excited right now. I haven't had much time to learn any of the language, but I've been doing a fair bit of reading/documentary watching on the culture. I wouldn't consider myself a "Japanophile" by any stretch of the imagination, but I have an appreciation for the culture now that I wouldn't have had before my "research." Seeing it in person should be quite enlightening.

Good news on the TiVo front - yesterday I got the upgrade hard drive from 9thtee.com (who gets their drives from PTVupgrade.com). The drive installed beautifully, and booted perfectly the first time. It's obvious they're using some fancy customized TiVo image, as they've got their logo added to the startup screen, and they have far more channel logos than the stock TiVo software ever did. Not to mention that their setup for TiVoWeb/telnet/ftpd is incredibly easy. I had TiVoWeb up and running in 5 minutes. I remember spending several hours with the old drive, yanking it out of the TiVo, plugging it into a PC, copying over telnetd and tivoftpd, manually hacking rc.sysinit to get them to start, then praying I didn't screw anything up. Which is funny, because I once accidently forgot to make rc.sysinit executable. Well, there went my fully booting TiVo. And again out comes the drive to be fixed via that PC. Sigh.

Hats off to PTVupgrade.com's NetReady TiVo drives. Super easy installation, good documentation, and quick procedure. And 24 hours after installation, no TiVo freezes. Wooo!

The fixed TiVo's now fulfilling Nicole's TV habit. And now there'll be less Spongebob and Beavis & Butthead on the living room TiVo :-D

11 days...

11 days until Nicole and I fly to Japan. I'm excited, but extremely nervous about going over there. I've been reading up on Japanese culture the last few months. Even still, I know I'm nowhere near being prepared, but it'll be an interesting trip. Pictures and video will be available soon after we return.

The ol' TiVo died, or is in the process of dying. I went out and got a 40-hour Series 2 unit (and USB-ethernet adapter), and ordered a replacement boot drive for the old one. The new TiVo's a lot smaller, a bit quicker, but overall doesn't offer much that the old one did. A trial of TiVo's Home Media Option got activated today on the new unit and so far I'm a bit underwhelmed. The only feature in it that I really want is remote scheduling, but I don't think it's worth $99 just for that feature.

With TiVoWeb on the old Series 1 I had remote scheduling. Ok, so it wasn't easy to setup, but I had it, and it worked, and it was free. The music and photo sharing features of HMO are useful, but the music feature leaves me wishing for more: AAC support (ok, I understand if protected AACs can't be supported, but most of my library is in unprotected AAC format), album art support, and better MP3 playback. I occasionally got a slight skip or stutter on the beginning of some MP3 tracks I played. Most of the time it worked fine.

In all, I don't think HMO is worth $99 considering you then have to spend another $25-30 or so for a USB network adapter. I would pay $20 for remote scheduling, though.

Update, 6/9:
Tivo made the Home Media Option a full feature today.

Great songs in commercials

So after reading one of SamTheButcher's journal entries and a comment of his regarding Bill Withers's Lovely Day being used in a Gap ad, I thought a little bit more about some of my favorite songs that have made it into ads in recent years.

Gap -- Busy Child, by The Crystal Method

Mercedes -- Whoever You Are, by Geggy Tah

Honda -- Bossa Per Due, by Nicola Conte

Apple -- Rock Star (Jason Nevins Mix), by N.E.R.D.

Apple -- Hey Mama, by Black Eyed Peas

Mitsubishi -- Days Go By, by Dirty Vegas

Mitsubishi -- Start the Commotion, by The Wiseguys


I don't watch a lot of ads these days thanks to the TiVo, so I might be missing out on more interesting music. Any suggestions?

Once again, TiVos rock.

Woo hoo! Hacking's never been so easy!

CompUSA is running a special on Maxtor-made 7200RPM/8MB cache/80GB drives... $130 up front with a $60 rebate. This, to me, is a sweet deal, considering it's considerably less than Weaknees's 80GB upgrade drive. So, with the drive, and the OS 9 BlessTiVo software, I managed to quickly get the drive blessed and formatted for use in the TiVo.

But, there was the small matter of how I was going to mount the drive in the TiVo. As you can probably already tell, I'm a bit of a cheapskate (Nicole, stop laughing... seriously!). So, using these instructions I managed to fashion a crude mounting bracket out of some old drive brackets I had in a shoebox. I knew they'd come in handy sooner or later...

So, I've done all the hacking on the TiVo that I wanted. It now has 120hrs of capacity (instead of 20), and I can record every show I watch in Best Quality. 33hrs of recording time in Best Quality mode, by the way. This is sweeeeeeeet.

The Qwest is soon to end...

Bye bye landline, how we won't miss you...

Now that the TiVo has been converted over to using broadband for updates, our phone line is going away... on Friday. Woo hoo! The TiVo's been working pretty well since the conversion, and this weekend I managed to enable serial control of my Motorola DCT-2000 cable box. Bye bye, IR blaster, too!

Other than playing around with the TiVo, not a whole lot else has been happening around here. It's been a little boring, to tell the truth. There aren't anymore three-day weekends until Memorial Day. I might need to take a personal day between now and then. Wee...

I just got done reading this interesting story about what the last moments of the Columbia might have been like. Somewhat chilling stuff.

Well, off to go finish working my way thru my NetNewsWire queue.

Currently playing on my iMac:

More Than Words by Extreme

More fun with the TiVo

Today was a productive day. I'm am pleased with what I have accomplished.

I borrowed a PC from work yesterday so that I could take the A drive out of my TiVo and enable telnet and ftp access to it. By following these handy instructions, I managed to get both telnet and ftp access going within an hour. After that, I installed Tivo Web and obtained the ability to see a whole bunch of information from a Webserver running directly on the TiVo.

But, I was not about to stop there. Last week, I saw this and decided I'd figure out how to get programs off of the TiVo. I followed the instructions, and soon was uploading a file off of the TiVo and onto my iMac. And wouldn't ya know it, VideoLAN plays those MPEG-2 files very well. But, in my travels looking for TiVo software, I found an even better program for getting video off of the TiVo. And now, I'm saving myself quite a bit of time.

Even still, I wanted to take that video, and compress it down into something a little bit easier to distribute. No... I'm not going to start distributing South Park again, but I did want to know the general process of how things work on OS X. So, after some more searching, I found that I'll use bbdemux to split the MPEG-2 audio and video streams apart, DiVa to convert the video stream to Quicktime, and Mad to convert the audio stream to AIFF. After that, I use Quicktime Pro to join the audio and video together, and sync-hole to fix any audio sync problems. After that, it's a matter of exporting the final product into a smaller file. I like MPEG-4 so far, because it offers a really decent picture, sound, and framerate. And, it's a format that can be shared across platforms pretty well.

The only TiVo hacking project I'd like to complete is adding another 80GB of hard drive space. Soon.... very soon.

Boo ya, Grandma, boo ya.

Ya know that feeling of euphoria and adrenalin you feel in your chest when you complete a task that you were really worried about? I have it right now. I just got done installing a TurboNet adapter in my Philips 20hr. TiVo. It went very very well, and my test call succeeded the first time through. Rad.

By far, the hardest part was getting the cover off the TiVo. It's really seated on there well, but I guess that's just one way to keep people from screwing around with their TiVos. I guess I can understand that. It's a little funky having an Ethernet cable hanging out the back of the TiVo, but hell, it works. I'll give this about a week to burn in, and then I'll start making preparations to get rid of our phone line. There won't be any use for it anymore.

Now that I've opened up the TiVo, I know I'm going to upgrade the hard drive, sooner or later. After seeing this, I'm going to start archiving shows off of the TiVo. Hopefully this week will go well with the TiVo. Too bad I don't have a PC. It's going to be a little tricky to get FTP/Telnet turned without one.

Kill your TV ads.

I'm so proud. I didn't watch the Superbowel this year. (Yes, that was a deliberate misspelling). Instead, I spent the morning catching up shows on the TiVo (Junkyard Wars, in particular). I caught two movies this afternoon - the forgettable cult classic The Wild One, and the somewhat interesting The War Room. I'm glad The War Room was only 96 minutes long. I don't know how much more James Carville I could've taken. I spend a lot of time watching TV, but the difference is that I'm watching TV shows, not TV ads. I've had the TiVo for about 13 months now, and in that time I'll admit that I've lost out on a bit of American pop culture. But, I still stop for the VW ads.

Speaking of TiVo, I'm heavily debating getting a TurboNet adapter. I want to get it so that I can dump my phone line once and for all. That's a cool $30 month that I won't have to spend for something I rarely use. Problem is, I've heard varied reports of success over at the AVS Forums. I'm going to have to keep researching. For those interested, I have a Series 1 Philips HDR212 TiVo, which is still stock.

Another exciting work week starts up tomorrow. Woo! At least I have this to keep me entertained until then. :-)

Phoning above it all...

This weekend wasn't too exciting. Got some housework done with Nicole on Saturday. Managed to watch Heathers on Saturday Night and then watched Conspiracy: Trial of the Chicago 8 Sunday morning. Saturday morning, Nicole and I went and saw the new Jackass movie. It was probably the high point of the weekend.

I do, however, feel like I actually accomplished something this weekend. I volunteered at the Rise Above It All headquarters in Belltown this evening, doing phone banking. In two hours time, I called 100 phone numbers. I ended up leaving more messages than anything, and did get a few freaks in the process, but all in all, I've done a little part to hopefully get monorail passed in this year's election.

I had two calls that got pissed off at me for interrupting the World Series, one woman who admonished me for soliciting on a Sunday (eesh, I'm volunteering for cripes sake!), and one woman who told me her husband was a DOT engineer and thought the monorail proposal was seriously lacking. The one call I got that I could've possibly changed the person's opinion was this guy who said that Seattle/Puget Sound really needed to build some form of rapid transit along the I-5 corridor, and that the monorail didn't do enough. After the call, I was left thinking, "Shit, I could have told him that this initiative is only the beginning of what could be a 58-mile citywide system." And he bitched about how the monorail didn't go to the airport and to the east side and elsewhere, like the transit systems in Chicago (where he used to live).

Well, no, it's not going to go there because it's a Seattle-only system. If you want so-called regional transportation, that's what ST Link is for. Good luck with that. Let me know how that goes, considering it'll only go within a mile of the airport and then you'll have to transfer to a shuttle to get the rest of the way. Sheesh.

So, next Sunday I'm going to volunteer on the phone banks again. It's pretty grueling work, but it's worth it. And although I'll miss the season premiere of the Simpsons, I'll catch it Monday on the TiVo. Oh well, it's worth it to get the word out.

Monorail Yes!

Ship Happens

So, this is the first entry. I'll keep it short and sweet.

Been watching The Ship on the History Channel. Quite the show. It's got its fair share of drama and intrigue, and even though I'm more of a technology lover, it holds my interest. Thank goodness for TiVo. What the hell was THC thinking, putting 3 episodes of it (2 1-hr and 1 2-hr shows) on Tuesday?