Monthly Archives: January 2004

Who designed this phone?

Well, Ginny and I got new cell phones yesterday.

Ginny wanted to get a picture phone … and I thought it would be kind of cool to have one too (ref: future post about camera envy).

I’ve been less than pleased with the SprintPCS so we decided to get Verizon service. Mitch & Steve both have it and have no complaints.

We picked up the phone yesterday evening … as they were programming the phones, I heard this horrible music playing when they turned the phone on and off. I asked the guy if that could be turned off. He said: Of course … and asked if I wanted to be shown how? I replied that as long as it could be done, I could figure out how.

Got the phone home and tried to figure out the process for turning off the music … I found nothing obvious in the manual or on the phone itself.

Additionally, I wanted to figure out how to change the banner display so it would have my name instead of the words “Verizon Wireless”. Since both phones were identical, I wanted some way to clearly identify Ginny’s phone from mine.

I couldn’t figure out how to change either, so I called Verizon’s tech support.

The guy at Verizon said that there was no way to change the startup & shut down music off short of turning off all sounds and the banner text was built into the phone. Well that’s clearly unacceptable. If you’re in the theater and realize that you forgot to turn off the phone the music plays regardless.

So, we’re off to the Verizon store again to return these phones and find new ones.
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Anyone in jail?

I just received the oddest phone call from my dad … he wanted to make sure everyone was home (both Ginny and myself).

He didn’t necessarily want to talk to us about anything in particular … he just wanted to make sure we were home.

Turns out he had just received two collect calls from Cook County Jail that he had refused … and he wanted to make sure he shouldn’t have accepted them.

In all my years, I don’t think I’ve had an odder phone conversation with my dad.

Statistics?

Recently I’ve noticed that I’m becoming somewhat obsessed with statistics. Web statistics, mail statistics, computer performance statistics, stock performance statistics, etc.

I’m not exactly sure why … maybe it’s because I need proof that something I’m working on is actually doing something.

Do I have style?

Ok, now I understand a little better why Ginny keeps playing with the style sheets on her blog. It’s pretty addictive.

I think I’ve found a style that I like … had to tweak it a bit so that the Google ad doesn’t get overlayed, but no big deal.

‘course, that brings up the biggest gripe I have about CSS …
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Gotta remember to update the blog

Had a panic this morning … browsed to the weblog (you’re reading it now) and found that my main index page was empty!

Problem is: I hadn’t changed anything in the config to cause this.

I did try posting a blog entry through a new blogger interface with Gaim plugin. But that shouldn’t have caused any problems.

I checked the style sheets, templates, configuration, etc, and couldn’t figure out what was going wrong.

Well, it turns out that the MovableType configuration option for the number of days of posts to publish on the index means CALENDAR days (which I misunderstood). This basically means that if you don’t do a blog entry in x number of days, your index page goes blank.

New Cool Tivo feature

Well, it’s not really a Tivo function as such … it’s just the Tivo Home Media Option (HMO) … but I’m running a server application on the linux box called JavaHMO.

This lets me server pieces of dynamic information to the Tivo music and picture displays.

So, in addition to the standard HMO music and pictures, we have some Shoutcast auido streams, the current weather, movie schedules, games (I haven’t figured out to get the tic-tac-toe game to work yet), even screen shots of the PC desktop (although that doesn’t work, because it’s running on the linux system).
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Testing a MT plugin

At Ginny’s request, I’ve started looking into some of the features & enhancements that we can use with this blogging software.

One of those features I’ve found is a amazon.com linker. It automagically creates a link to a book on amazon.com (including the right associate id.

For instance: Right now I’m reading Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban.

Cool, huh?
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More joy

I woke up this morning around 6am and went downstairs to get my normal bowl of cereal (Grape Nuts, if you must know) … and heard a hissing noise.

A little investigation revealed that it was coming from the pipe that had been ‘fixed’ the previous day. There was a very fine spray of water coming out of the joint the plumber had soldered.

Oh joy.

I ran downstairs and shut off the water to the house, but I figured that if any damage was going to happen, it already did.
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