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So we live out in Middle-of-nowhere, Indiana. When we first moved here, there was an old UHF antenna up on the roof, facing north, with some ladder-wire to a connection in the kitchen. We hooked a TV up to it (this was back in the VHF/UHF NTSC days) and on crystal clear days, everything was still snowy.

So we pretty well wrote off ever getting TV on it, particularly when the digital revolution happened. If we could barely see what was on analog TV, we reasoned that digital would be unwatchable.

We paid for DirecTV for a few years, but lately the ~$80 a month just started to seem like a waste for what we actually watched. We started paying for Netflix streaming, which is handy but doesn’t always have something good. Sometimes you just want to veg out in front of the TV and watch whatever’s on.

So I started reading up about digital and what it’d take to receive it. We’re about 60mi south of Fort Wayne, in the middle of nowhere… so naturally the signal will be a little degraded by the time it gets here. The advantage is that all the channels are within about a degree of each other at this distance – and with the exception of a mild hill of a quarry (which actually sits below us) there’s zero obstructions between us and Fort Wayne – it’s almost entirely flat.

The antenna was leaning at an angle, which I learned with TVs can really affect signals – apparently if you orient the antenna horizontally (which would be “vertically” as far as the antenna’s concerned, because TV signals in the USA or horizontally polarized), you will get zero signal. So one could naturally assume if the antenna’s leaning 30 degress, you’ve got 90/30 or 33% signal loss (I think I have that right).

So I climbed the forty foot ladder and used some angle iron and some hose clamps to fix the mast. I took the ladder wire and cut a portion of it off and fed it into Trevor’s bedroom, because he’s the only one with an HD-capable TV. I plugged it in, started the channel search and waited. A few minutes later, it’d picked up 19 channels!

Almost all of them come in flawlessly too – a few of them break up, and to be fair it is a perfectly clear day out, we’ll have to see how it behaves when the weather goes to hell. I sat and watch Dr Phil, some soap operas, ads for lawyers and “omfg supar effective weight loss pills!!one” for a few minutes to see if any of the main channels would break up… they didn’t.

I still have to orient the antenna correctly – as I understand it it needs to be pointed approximately 12 degrees from north, and unless our house is oriented that same way, it’s not – it’s perfectly inline with the side of the house. I could aim it by signal strength, but Trevor’s TV doesn’t have a strength meter.

I’m going to run RG-6 to a splitter, then to the several rooms that the DirecTV was into – because of the cable losses we’ll probably want a masthead amplifier as well, but that can come later. I also need to pick up a few converter boxes – kinda wish we’d done it when they were subsidized by the federal government.

Man, today I’m just not feelin’ it.

Last night’s karate class was one of the worst-feeling experiences I’ve had in a long time – if that sounds bad, I don’t mean it to… I had an absolute blast, but jesus I’m sore.

One of our instructors has been doing some Kali seminars, so he ran us through some real basic Kali training in the last few weeks. It’s not the sort of school where they do an 8 hour training seminar and then come try to teach us, no no… that’s not the purpose here. We’re not actually trying to train in Kali, our interest is in how to defend it. But if no one knows how to swing a stick, our practice is going to be pretty unrealistic and uninteresting.

So last night it was decided that the kids weren’t putting enough into it, they weren’t taking it serious enough. So we did a little bit of light sparring with foam covered escrima… let me tell you, the foam doesn’t do a whole lot when you get a couple of adults who should know better acting like kids (Tyler and I). I’ve a couple of nasty bruises on my body that hasn’t really seen these kind of welts since I quit playing paintball on a regular basis.

I took a couple of shots to the wrists as well, courtesy of Tyler’s training. After that we moved onto disarms and takedowns, which basically involved rolling into wristlocks at it’s core… more stress on the wrists.

It was a total blast though, I learned a lot and got some real good practice in… I’m just sore as shit.

Today I was supposed to split some more wood, but I knew as soon as I woke up it just wasn’t going to happen. I experimented with our new Nagios system, despite the fact it’ll probably be tore up when the box it’s on moves to it’s new host. We’ll probably be ditching Pingdom – which sucks, because I kind of like it, but it’s just cheaper and more effective to rent a decent VPS and run Nagios from it than paying to monitor all our services from Pingdom.

I went through and moderated some comments on this blog and on the Moodoo forums – same spammy crap really, water filters, diet pills, accutane reviews, but strangely no porn. I suppose I wouldn’t really mind unsolicited email and links if they were remotely relevant to my interests, but they never seem to be.

I’ve been playing a little bit of MAG lately, which is probably what I’m about to go do in a moment. My brother in law bought it on the advice of a friend of his, and then promptly decided he hated it. I was in on the original Beta (one of the few beta invitations I got from Twitter, but not the one I really wanted) and I thought the game was just not fun.

I’m sure I’ll wind up writing a review eventually, but here’s the long and short of it… in an FPS, if you’ve got one or two noobs on your team but otherwise the rest of your team is evenly matched to the rest of everyone on the other team, you’re bound to lose. MAG is like that, except that with 256 players you’re bound to have a lot more noobs. During the Beta, I never played a single game that wasn’t a roll one way or the other, either my team lost by a landslide, or we won by a landslide.

I don’t know what they changed since Beta, but it’s actually a lot more fun. It might just be that at the lowly level of 7 I’m not high enough to play with the good players, because most every game I’ve gone into I’ve kicked ass – and I don’t say this to toot my own horn, because I’m really not that great at FPSes. But it’s definitely a whole lot more fun than it was, and it’s a lot prettier too. It doesn’t have the visual polish of say, Modern Warfare 2 – but fuck, when there’s 256 people in a map, with vehicles and artillery and everything else going on, it’s no surprise there.

If you played it during Beta and like me, wrote it off – I’d urge you to at least rent the game and give it another shot.

I’m having such a great time with my phone since Sabs talked me into buying a memory card for it. I went from having 64MB storage, filled with things like Opera Mobile (v10 beta is great, BTW), Twikini (fantastic Twitter app, though I wish it had some kind of photo/flickr support) and KeePass…

… which left me with about 900K free space. I’d take one photo and my phone would start crying. I picked up the Micro SD card, stuffed it in there, then uninstalled every app before reinstalling it “to the Storage Card.” I don’t know whether Windows Mobile uses “program storage” as a kind of swap or what, perhaps I’m imagining it, but goddamn if my phone doesn’t seem oodles faster to do shit.

When I got home that night, I filled it full of MP3s. I also picked up a set of earphones for it (easier said than done, the hole being 2.5mm and all) and now I can rock out – I hardly listen to the MP3s though, since Spike got me using Pandora.

It’s great, I’ve killed off like three devices that I used to carry around all over. The camera on my phone is awful, but it’s good enough if all you want to do is be like “hurr, look at this funny product” or whatever – so I’m no longer carrying around a hideously-huge-and-expensive, shoulda-paid-forty-dollars-more-and-gotten-an-SLR Sony DSC-H3. The Opera Mobile browser is good enough that I can do most of my work from the phone if I’m out and get a support ticket, and I have an SSH client as well – so I’m not lugging around an outdated, heavy, please-mug-me-youd-be-doing-me-a-favor Sony VAIO laptop.

I got rid of my PSP, trading it for this phone, which is fine because I can stack this thing up with 4GB of MP3s and Video. Considering I can count on one hand the number of times I used my PSP since we moved out here, I don’t regret it at all.

My wife has a soft-shell turtle named “Duck” – you can see photos of him on our Flickr. A while back we switched to sand instead of gravel for his substrate – the result of which has made his little setup hell on filters.

We had the “water-wheel” type of filter, which didn’t last more than about a month before the bushing on the impeller went out… we replaced it, and it lasted about another month. We bought one of the in-tank filters designed for marine aquariums, and it lasted about six months.

We’ve been looking at pool/spa filters, but the pumps to drive them aren’t cheap – so now I’m thinking about trying to homebrew one using a sealed “paint” bucket, a fountain pump and some kind of foam media. I’m thinking if the pump is below the media, and can provide enough suction in the bucket, and I prime the bucket with water, it should work alright as long as it’s serviced often enough.

Anyone happen to be familiar with designing these kinds of setups?

I wrote a while back about our problems with our internet – well yesterday it got much, much worse. We started out having troubles going through auto insurance quotes to begin with, and afterwards it took me about five goes to pick up AT&T’s DSL support phone number.

So I called up AT&T, and waded through the problem. Of course we had the issue that our Cayman 3546 is “unsupported”, so I had the nice lady wait while I hooked up a Speedstream 4100 instead so they wouldn’t have to charge us for help.

After a while they finally figured out that because the problem was intermittent, that there wasn’t anything they could do from their end, and finally after complaining for 2 years about intermittent outages they sent someone out.

It sucked having to get up early, and it was freezing this morning. The tech was great, he ran a few tests, changed out some components on the outside that weren’t in the greatest of shape, and so far everything looks like it’s acting great!

Accidents, mishaps and forces of habit…

… we’ve all done it. You’re used to singing to yourself and you realise, about 60 seconds too late, that you just belted out “Hey there Delilah” in a public restroom.

You’re typing something, and you type something else. I used to type “mysql” by habit when I went to type “myself” (I suppose some workaholic realtors might wind up writing “myrtle beach vacation rentals“), or I start typing in what I call “internet degenerate”…a curse bestowed upon me by way too many hours’ worth of MMORPG play. Professional clients don’t really want to be greeted with “hay how u doin dawgeh?”!

Well tonight’s accident was a little more serious. In the context of passing it to me, my brother in law managed to drop his SixAxis PS3 controller in the dog’s water bucket… I dunno if he thought I had a hold of it or what happened, because it all happened so quick.

I have the thing apart and the various pieces sitting in a container filled with rice. I put it together briefly and tested it – it still “works” (as in comes on and associates with the PS3) however I think the analog stick keeps reporting “down” because they won’t work and it keeps spamming down on the XMB.

So I took it apart again and stuck it back in the rice, and I’ll hit it with some 2-26 tomorrow and see if that fixes it.

So Netflix has finally come to the PS3, so we decided to give it a shot. We’ve had Netflix before, but it was a pain in the arse sending the DVDs back so we canceled it.

But their instant-streaming package might work out pretty good, so we signed up for the free trial. It’s far cheaper than re-activating our DirecTV, and we don’t really watch that much in the way of TV anyway.

If you’re looking to burn fat in front of the TV, Netflix is the way to do it. I personally hate exercise DVDs, but my wife digs them – she just gets tired of them really quick and wants something new. Instead of spending $50+ on a DVD, just rent one then when you’re sick of it send it back.

I’m a little disappointed that we have to wait for a “streaming disc” in order to activate the PS3 – I’m hoping it integrates well with the PS3 and isn’t like some half-arsed addon, but we’ll see when the disc gets here.

So we spent yesterday running all over the place doing different things, taking in all that Indiana has to offer. We skipped by “Bosco Coaltrain’s – Guns, Liquor and Equestrian Apparel” and headed straight for ALCO, where my brother in law picked up MW2 – seriously there’s some janky stores out here.

We finally wound up driving out in the opposite direction because my darling, pregnant wife was craving Hardees. I’m still sour on the fact they canceled the philly cheese-steak burger and haven’t brought it back, but I grudgingly obliged.

We then hit up a bunch of other stores around, for example the Walmart has been remodelled so we went to see what they’d changed. Unfortunately it’s not done much for the people, but hey – that’s walmart for you.

I haven’t had the money to buy a decent soldering iron and try to repair the sick motherboard on our Acer Aspire 5920, but I started messing around with it a bit anyway. It’s not perfect, but it’s usable – we can operate it from battery which gets us about two to two and a half hours’ of use before it’s dead.

The moment you plug it in, it will power off and refuse to come back on.

So, the Vista installation had some malware issues, and it’s loaded down with all the garbage Acer crams on their OEM machines… and my desktop won’t run Windows 7 because my graphics card is too crap… so I decided to try Windows 7 on the laptop.

It runs fantastic – ~15 second boot times aren’t outside the norm, apps start up immensely quickly. So far all of the hardware seems perfectly well supported, apart from the touchpad – it functions, but things like the “drag the edge of the pad to scroll”, and the scroller function of the middle mouse button don’t work. I’ll try to find another driver later on and see if I can make it behave properly, because I didn’t realize how much I actually used that stuff.

The graphics card was supported moderately well with the generic driver, and the wireless and wired network devices both were supported which made updating drivers for everything else a breeze.

It’s easy to say that anything looks good after Vista, but I think I can honestly say I like Windows 7 more than I like Windows XP.

Update: I found a driver for the Synaptics TouchPad that’s compatible with Windows 7, which doesn’t support the scroll button or the “tilt”, but the “drag edge of pad to scroll” function does work. Awesome.

Halloween is great.

It always seems like everyone pulls out all the stops for it – it’s not like Christmas where people care about the capitalistic tendencies of the holiday and are on their guard. Everyone except the people fixated on “receive candy, go to hell” really has a blast. I mean, even in this town they have a little fun with it when they’re not trying to move trick-or-treating to a different night.

A bunch of game publishers are doing some neat stuff this year as well – there’s the usual suspects of MMORPG providers pushing out halloween events. But to my knowledge, this is the first year an FPS has had a decent Halloween event.

As usual, everyone’s going trick-or-treating, and I’m sure we’ll all need deep dental discounts and appointments at the dialysis clinic when we’re done gorging – but it’s all in good fun.

Boo!