Sunday Afternoon blahs..

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Upward evaluation day, so the afternoon is shot, I don’t get to watch any football, the live update on Yahoo! Fantasy Sports has my football team leading, barely, and I need a lead going into tonight Pats-Colts games.  I have Brady, my opponent has Peyton.  Do the math.  *sigh*  my only consolation is that the Pats D can usually handle Peyton.  Since I’m here at the church, I can’t take my nap, so I’m grumpy… My laptop is low on battery, which means.. well better hit Publish and get my nablopomo committment taken care of, I hope this had been edifying.

Survivor – Buh Bye Flica

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We are getting down the the merge, and it appears that people finally got tired of the c’est la vie that was Flica.  She certainly couldn’t be trusted in any alliance.

For the remaining 12, the numbers are interesting.  Four of the original asian tribe (only Cao Boi has left), four of the original white tribe (only Flica gone), three of the original black tribe, and only Ozzie is left from the Hispanic tribe.

So who will make the merge, and start playing for individual immunity?  The big four alliance of Yul, Becky, Sundra and Candice will probably make the merge, the two Aitu outsiders are Jonathan and Ozzie.  I think if Aitu goes to tribal, they’ll probably pick Ozzie to go if they council before the merge.  He is too dominant in the challenges to risk survival part the merge.  If he does make the merge, he’ll have to run the table because he is such a big challenge risk.

On the once powerful Raro, they have shifting alliances, since Pavarti looks out for herself, her vote is for sale.  Adam’s challenge acumen is highly over-rated, and I think he just expects to move on based on his physical talents.  Brad, Jenny, Nate and Rebecca may make a good alliance to challenge the Aitu alliance, but as the last reward challenge showed, Rebecca is extremely lacking in the physical challenges.  Add Pavarti to the group and you have in interesting alliance, should they all make the merge.

Will the tribes end up at even strength come the merge, it will make some interesting game play strategy wise.  This season hs shown that they aren’t afraid to mix up the formula to make the game more spontaneous, I wouldn’t be surprised with an early merge with even strength teams, and another two people must leave at the next tribal council.

Yeah… this is just NaBloPoMo fodder. 🙂

Looking over your shoulder…

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Have you ever wondered about God’s angels?  Or guardian angels?  Some type of angelic host that protects us from trouble?

There was a friend at our church that had a really bad bicycle accident, fell 15 feet from the top of a jump.  Landed on his face, and was really torn up.  He will be going through several oral surgeries.  But he will be okay, bruised and banged up, but okay.

The cynic might say, ‘Where was God when that happened?’  Or, ‘Why didn’t God do something to prevent that?’  Maybe even, ‘If an angel were physically present that would never have happened, because it never would have been attempted.’

I’m not equating x-cross biking with sin, but using it as an example.   Would things be better if God physically, manifestly intervened to prevent us from sinning?

Short answer, been there done that, didn’t make a difference.  Longer answer and mindless prattle and preaching after the break. Continue reading →

Frontiers of Flight Museum – Anousheh Ansari

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A while back I posted about Lauren being able to talk live to space astronaut/tourist Anousheh Ansari. Tonight she is in town at the Dallas Frontiers of Flight Museum and has a special hour put aside simply for the kids that were invited to the previous event. It is really cool that they are putting the kids first, and making sure that they can all be seated, while the old fogies get stuck waiting outside. At least they have free internet so I can make this report.

If I’m lucky enough to be able to get a seat inside, I may try to live blog some of the event… if not… well this will be it.

I’m in!

UPDATE:  Here are some pictures of Anousheh Asari signing Lauren’s book and of her and Lauren. (click to embiggen)
ansarisigning.jpgansari-lauren.jpg

Click the Read More button for the rest of my post. Continue reading →

Dusty tadpole

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For the past few months I’ve been a disgruntled laptop owner.  My beloved Dell Inspiron 700m was having the case of the freezes, and was verily unstable.  It was so bad that even booting the machine was hit-or-miss, and letting it stay on, or do some heavy processing was too much for it.  It is out of warranty and I had just changed out the motherboard in the last week or so of the factory warranty, so it should be working better.

I suspected faulty memory module, but the errors never mapped to a memory problem, and memory problems if they are present are usually consistent, and this was hit or miss.  I spent a few hours on the phone with Dell trying to get them to replace my memory module (lifetime warranty on that) but since the problem wasn’t consistent they couldn’t swap out modules.

So I’m stuck with a laptop that can’t go an hour without simply freezing, or if I moved it a bit here or there, it would freeze… I’d read here and there about dust and heat causing this kind of behavior, so I tried to change my processor throttling (easy to do in Linux) and use my fans more to blow the heat out.  Accoring to dkrellem the normal heat was over 50 degrees celcius and if it popped in the upper 60s or over 70, then a freeze would happen.

That worked for a while, but last night the latop (tadpole I call it) really hit the wall, couldn’t get it to boot up normally, to either Ubuntu Edgy Eft, or Windows Vista Beta 2.

This morning, I started to disassemble the laptop to get to the fan and see if I could make that work better.  A little daunting taking apart a laptop rather than a desktop.  But I got it apart, and the fan… she was DUSTY.  Blew it out with a can of air, and reassembled it… and ended up with the right number of screws…

Did some torture testing and normal temps are now dow in the low 40s, a full video transcode (100% processor for about 25 minutes) brought the processor into the low 60s, then it came back down to the low 40s.  It is mucho stabler, and I can even move it around while working on it.  The true test comes with booting up at home, on the couch.  That will be later tonight.

Jericho – Long Live the Mayor

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Or at least 12 more hours.

No recap, just thoughts.

Hawkins hid a barrel that sounds much like the one the cops were able to discover and disrupt, thus saving New York.  So the question is, why a nuke device in the little town of Jericho

Lots of little bits and peices.  Hawkins was probably in on some vast conspiracy to take down the U.S. government.  Jake was involved in a teft gone wrong that invovled Emily’s father and brother, and they feel like he blew his assignment, thus leading to his death.

Emily’s dad is a bad-guy, but might be a good man to have in a limited resources world.  Especially if things are as rough around other parts like Topeka.

Dale getting out from under the manipulative grocery store lady is a good thing.  Probably go and work for Emily’s dad, which would be a bad thing.

Mayor is gonna die, you heard it hear first, setting up a confrontation between the royal family and the usurper that has returned home.  Hawkins may do good to support the royals.

Mimi and the farmboy will be the love thing, and Jake gets kissed by Joan’s best friend.

Its holding my interest, enough for a pre-Lost show.

Verizon FiOS TV vs. Time Warner Digital Cable.

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I should probably store up all these posts to spatter them about on days I can’t think of anything to write.. but anyways.

I called up Time Warner to cancel my Digital Cable subscription today.  When asked about why I told them that I switched to Verizon Fios, and to the guys credit he didn’t belittle the competition.  He did however try to soft-sell me back into the home court throughout the conversation of settling my last bill.  So I thought I’d post some geekily posts on the winners and losers in this competition.  And to TimeWarner’s credit they don’t seem to be standing still like Comcast (the company they bought) and I relish the idea of real competition in my neighborhood for cable television, it is good for my expenses and good for the consumer at large, regardless of who you get televisoin from.

Expense: Winner – Verizon

This is to be expected, because Verizon is trying to get onto Time Warner’s turf.  But the simple heads up cost, undercuts TimeWarner’s by half.  Something that Time Warner acknowledges, because when I told them I was switching, and part was by cost, the first response was, can we make a deal.  So if you are a TW subscriber, call em up and see what kind of deal they are willing to make.

Signal Quality / Technology: Winner – Verizon

Hands down, no question Verizon has the better picture.  Time Warner is dealing with legacy stuff, and the old Comcast plant is two-cable (A side/B side) stuff that is a mess to work with and install.  Verizon is one strand from the demark to the cable splitter.  Both are going to a full digitial technology that will require a set-top box except for a few channels, so either way expect to pay the rental for a STB regardless of provider.  Both use the same Motorola STB for the DVR, but Verizon’s OS is better, the channel guide is logically arranged, and the DVR settings make it easy to set up recordings and ‘subscribe’ to a series of shows.  The ability to share recordings with other STBs in the house (a premium add-on, but with standard half-price the add-ons are affordable) is also a bonus.  The DVR has a 160GB drive, and can record two HD channels at once.  The TW box I’m returning is a lot smaller and can only handle one HD channel at best.  Also if you start recording a show that you are already watching, the Verizon DVR will add whatever is in the buffer to the recorded show.  TW’s DVR would just dump the buffer and record from the point that the record button  is pressed.
Remotes: Winner -Time Warner

The one thing I can’t do with Verizon is a 30-second advance, and it is largely because the remote they provide isn’t programmable.  The TW remote (the silver one) is programmable, and the TW Motolora (I think it is a Microsoft operating system) had a hook for a 30 second skip, which made flipping through the commercials a snap.  Verizon is limited to a FF and a REW for DVR functions.  A nice semi-feature is that once you stop FFwding it backs up a bit, so you don’t have to worry if you over estimate a bit.  Lack of programming also locks you into whatever the remote code for your other devices are, and you can’t add another button (for me it is my TVs aspect button) to the remote, so I have to keep my legacy remote around.

Hands down, at the moment, Verizon wins.  The only niggling detail is the 30-sec skip, which isn’t even provided stock by TW, and takes some digging and remote control programming to enable.  So TW has some catching up to do in my neighborhood.

Don’t shed too many tears, Verizon’s FIOS footprint is really really small when you compare it to TimeWarner’s footprint.  So a little competition in this neck of the woods, could bring other capabilities to other TW neighborhoods that don’t have Verizon breathing down their neck.
I have to eat a bit of crow to be in Verizon’s camp, since their DSL in my neighborhoor was so horrilbe, and I dumped their POTS service too, and went to AT&T Digital Phone.  I’m now a happy Vonage phone user, so don’t pay for POTS, and Verizon handles my internet and TV wonderfully over fiber.  So this whole competition and market forces work in the telcom industry.