Category: Geekery

It’s resume time again

It’s coming up to the end of my contract. My boss’s boss’s boss asked all the contractors for copies of our resumes to help him get approval to renew the contracts, as we’ve all been here far longer than is allowed by company policy, and so he has to do whatever crafty tricks he does in order to keep us. But I figured a good resume isn’t a bad thing to have if his tricks stop working, so I spent some time on it and asked some friends to review it.

My old resume was, in the words of one person who looked at it, a “bit last millenium”. He suggested that I find a nice template somewhere and redo it. The problem is that I like having the resume there on the web both for portability and accessibilty, and most of the templates you find are Microsoft Word. But in googling around, I stumbled across a pretty nice looking resume that was implemented as an XML file with an XSL file to translate it into html. Now that is 21st century! Unfortunately, I lost the link and the guy’s name in my rush to stealadopt his technology. The XML has optional “hide=’true'” attributes so you can leave out different bits for different applications, although I haven’t made use of that.

The new resume looks pretty good. Have a look. Offer me a fulfilling job with lots of money.

Paul & Vicki get HD – A Comedy of Errors, Vol II

So after the first day’s comedy of errors, we decided to go the CableCard+TiVoHD route. We ordered the CableCard installation, which was scheduled for a few days later. I figured I’d set up several TiVos in my day so that shouldn’t be any problem, so I left if for the night before the installer appointment. That was my first mistake.
Continue reading “Paul & Vicki get HD – A Comedy of Errors, Vol II”

Paul & Vicki get HD – A Comedy of Errors, Vol I

Last Friday Vicki and I were looking at the horrible picture on our downstairs TV, and at the check I just got back from Google, and said “It’s time to replace this piece of shit and buy a TV made in this century”.

Some friends had raved about the Sharp Aequos(?), and we had a look at it in the store and on the web. It was just barely within our price range. But we said “hey, we don’t watch a lot of DVDs, and we don’t have any plans to buy a new HD or BluRay DVD player anyway, so why do we need 1080p?”. We decided that the Sony Bravia looked just as good to us, and cost enough less that we could also afford a new TiVo HD. Hey, bonus! Of course, the salesman tried to talk us into the Monster Cable HDMI cable (which came in two versions, one costing $100 and one costing even more). There is only one thing I know about video cables, and that’s that Monster Cables are horribly overpriced, so we “settled” for the non-Monster one that “only” costs $50.

It was when we got everything home that I discovered that the new TiVo HD doesn’t have a way to control a cable box. I thought I’d just have to take the old cable box in and swap it with an HD one, and I’d be away to the races. But no, this one takes one or two CableCards. Fine, I thought, I wouldn’t miss the cable box. But then I looked at the Time Fucking Warner (aka TFW) web page for CableCard and discovered three things:

  • You can’t just swap your box for a CableCard, you need to wait for an installer
  • The CableCard doesn’t support some of the HD channels, notably anything they’ve added after January 2006.
  • If we ditch the cable box, we’re going to “lose our package” and pay a-la-carte for the premium channels, which would raise our monthly fees by about $30

Ok, neither of the first two are show stoppers, and we could deal with the third by moving the cable box to the upstairs TV, but I was seriously thinking of ditching the TiVo HD and getting Time Fucking Warner’s own DVR. That was, until I tried to figure out how bad their DVR’s user interface was. I’d heard from some people who had dropped their TiVos in favour of their cable company’s DVRs and had ultimately gone back to TiVo because the UI was so incredibly bad.

And then I discovered the worst Flash web site on the web, and that’s saying something. This site attempts to show you how to use a DVR, but all it does it tell you “press this button, now press this button, now press this one”, without telling you *why* you’re pressing that button. There is a depiction of the user interface screen in one corner, but it’s so small you can’t see what you’re doing, so while it’s telling you to press the up arrow, you can’t tell why you’re pressing up – are you selecting a menu, or scrolling through a list, or what? Maybe if they used some of the real estate taken up by the dancing doofus they’d have room for a readable screen depiction?

Anyway, after enduring that horrible demo, I decided not to go for the TFW DVR.

My TV set runs Linux!

I bought a new Sony Bravia HD TV today. When I unpacked it, I got a big surprise. The first paper I saw was a copy of the GPL License that included the notification that it includes the Linux kernel, busybox, insmod, and a bunch of libraries.

Because I don’t have a CableCard yet, I’m leaving the old Tivo hooked up. If I had any hair, I would have been tearing it out while trying to get things set up because I confused Composite video with Component Video. I hooked it up using Composite, and couldn’t understand why I wasn’t getting any picture when I selected Component input. Duh. I eventually noticed that the Composite plugs on the back where labelled “1” and “3”, and the video input settings in the menu were labelled “Video 1” and “Video 3” and “Component 1” and “Component 2”. And that was in spite of the fancy little icons showing the cable configurations beside each setting – I hadn’t realized that both pictures where only showing the video, not the audio, inputs so “Video” (ie Composite) only showed one input and “Component” showed three inputs. I felt like such a tool when I realized what I was doing wrong.

But even with just SD input, it sure looks nice.