Scissors, the fine K6-200 machine with a badass circa 1997 “I Love Unix” SCO sticker, will be on autopilot for the next few days as I’m off in Texas, it’s like a whole nother country down there. If this is anything like previous trips, something will go wrong three hours after I leave Pittsburgh and the server will just stay down. Such is life.
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I knew I shouldn’t have gotten too excited about us winning the broadcast flag fight. Today we lost a much more important fight. The senate voted 100-0 to approve the supplemental funding for Iraq which had a nice rider of the Real ID act which will do nothing to make America a safer place. It just means that now if you’re a suspected terrorist not only will you not be able to fly, but you won’t be able to get a job, enter a federal building, open a bank account, or really do anything.
I set up a MythTV Wiki today. I should be doing work. But I guess this was a nice little distraction. If you’re a WPLUGer who just got a card stop by and help me fill in some details.
I’m aware that there is already a general MythTV wiki but something about that just bothers me. It is of such poor quality, and really MediaWiki is so much nicer than MoinMoin (I’m saying this even as a Python lover).
Ever wondered what a grad student like me would look like as a South Park character? Well, I just designed myself. Feel free to make your own South Park character.
Mad props to the [planet fd.o](http://planet.freedesktop.org/) folk for showing me this.
In addition to all of the pcHDTV cards I bought last week, I also picked up a shiny new Dell 2005 FPW. It’s a beautiful 1600x1050 20.1" widescreen LCD. It’s also successfully replaced both the monitor and TV that we had sitting on our entertainment center in the living room. It took a little bit of Googling to figure out to get my video card to like the monitor, but it turns out my trusty MGA G400 works like a charm.
Ah yes, there’s nothing like coming back from seminar to see that you’ve got 20 pcHDTV tuner cards waiting for you in your office. These were prviously written about here, here, and here. In any case, they’re in and I’ve got a BIG ASS charge on my credit card. Yay.
For giggles, here’s some photographic proof of the cards and me with them. Unfortunately, they come in really non-descript cardboard boxes, which makes me a little sad as it makes the pictures a bit more boring.
I think I flubbed up parts of the order on the last order of pcHDTV cards. Namely, I ordered 1 too few, so I only get one card. That sorta sucks. I’m willing to order more if we can find some other folks to join in. I doubt we’ll get as many, but we’ll see. Anyway, if you’re interested, email me.
Three years ago I purchased a nice copy of Quicken Deluxe 2002 to help manage my finances. By and large, I’ve been fairly happy with it. There were a few features that I never could get running quite properly, namely PNC Bank, NetBank, and allowing it to properly manage my savings bonds. The PNC problem wasn’t a big deal because that was our spending cash, so we didn’t want to track it closely (we each get $100/month in our person accounts there).
A few weeks ago I posted about The Great WPLUG pcHDTV Buy and how I was I hoping to get 10 cards organized in a purchase. Beyond my expectations, we managed to get almost 17 people to purchase cards. This is 17 more people who are standing up and saying that the FCC must stop this lunacy with regulating content and the broadcast flag. This is 17 more people who are exercising their rights to preserve data from the wireless spectrum that by definition belongs to the public.
As part of our move, I’m also going to have to move scissors, the little computer that powers this web page. I’ll try to keep down time to a minimum, but I can’t guarantee anything. So expect the page to die for a few days sometime next week. Yes Kenneth, this means you’ll need to find something else to do at work for a day or three.
I was a little shocked when I called Comcast to inquire about transferring my service.