Irritatingly out of line with what their commercials say, in my area Comcast, under the covers of the national
broadcast digital switch, is sneaking in their own switch to digital, moving channels above 30 to their own digital format. Previously, I had Windows 7 Media Center running on a PC with a Hauppauge PVR500 which can decode two television signals at once setup to record shows I like. The XBox 360 works
great as a Media Center client letting me easily watch the recorded shows over my home network on my normal TV.
Unfortunately with Comcast's change, now one needs a cable box or a Comcast digital to analog converter in order to view their signal, but Comcast is offering up to two free converters for those who'd like them. The second of my two free converters I hooked up to the Media Center PC and I got the IR Blaster that came with my Hauppauge out of the garage. I plugged in the USB IR Blaster to my PC, connected one of the IR transmitters to the 1st port on the IR Blaster, and sat the IR transmitter next to the converter's IR receiver. I went through the Media Center TV setup again and happily it was able to figure out how to correctly change the channel on the converter. So I can record now, however:
sequelguy posted a photo:
Bear Flag wine has a cool label and has the barcode wrapped around the neck of the bottle.
sequelguy posted a photo:
Wtf? For more see the 'Most Condescending Game Ever' thread on www.boardgamegeek.com/thread/33357
sequelguy posted a photo:
Cookies and cupcakes mysteriously appeared in my office. (Actually not mysterious -- thanks Eric!)
sequelguy posted a photo:
Saw this at the Fremont Market. The tag read along the lines of Veterinary related tool -- three guesses.
sequelguy posted a photo:
James Bond's jetpack found at the Three Lions pub in Redmond, WA
Inspired by one of Penn's (of Penn & Teller) articles in which he mentions he has his computer tell him what he wrote in his journal that day the previous year, I've wanted to implement a similar thing with my blog. Now that, as I mentioned previously, I've updated my blog such that its much easier to implement search and such, I've added date range filtering to my site's search. So now I can easily see what on Delicious and my blog I was doing last year.
I've also otherwise updated search on this site. You can now quote terms to match an entire string, stick 'tag:' in front of a term to only match that term against tags as opposed to the title and body of the entry as well, and you can stick '-' in front of a term to indicate that it must not be found in the entry.
I've redone my blog's layout to remind myself how terrible CSS is -- err I mean to play
with the more advanced features of CSS 2.1 which are all now available in IE8. As part of the new layout I've included my Delicious links by default but at a smaller size and I've replaced the
navigation list options with Technical, Personal and Everything as I've heard from folks that that would actually be useful. Besides the layout I've also updated the back-end, switching from my
handmade PHP+XSLT+RSS/Atom monster to a slightly less horrible PHP+DB solution. As a result everything should be much much faster including search which, incidentally, is so much easier to
implement outside of XSLT.
On Friday Sarah and I went to the
Mariners vs Rangers game at Safeco Field with Eric and Jane. The Mariners lost but then before the game the announcement made outside the stadium guaranteed the best service and a good time, not a
winning game -- and they were right about the good time.
The night before, we saw The Hangover which was very funny and included Zach Galifianakis who was great. Incidentally, take a look at some of Zach's Between Two Ferns.
Last weekend Sarah and I mounted the TV to the wall which was exciting and we saw a mouse in the house!
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