Bill Walsh, who guided the San Francisco 49ers to three Super Bowl championships and six NFC West division titles in his 10 years as head coach, has died at the age of 75. Walsh died early Monday following a long battle with leukemia, according to Stanford University, where he served as coach and athletic director. One of the great coaches and the innovator of the West Coast Offense.
Legendary film-maker Ingmar Bergman, one of the key figures in modern cinema, has died at the age of 89. His 60-year career spanned intense classics like Cries & Whispers, The Seventh Seal and Wild Strawberries. Looks like I’ll have to hijack Robyn’s Netflix account for a short while now to rewatch some of these classincs
So we broke down and bought the TiVo HD but not without our fair share of ups and downs. After it got announced on Tuesday we debated if it was gonna be worth it, Dave and Duane jumped on the bandwagon soon enough. We were still holding off until Wednesday when Robyn said that the Circuit City on South Blvd had them in stock, in the store and we should just get one.
So I drove down there on my lunch break and picked one up, $327 poorer, but richer in my heart. It sat on my desk all afternoon teasing me and once I got home, even though I was pretty drained from a busy day at work, we unpacked it, basked in it’s glassy black finish and got to work unhooking the old TiVo and adding this new one to our little entertainment center. Soon enough we found out our old wireless network adapter wouldn’t work so I had to drive up to the nearest Best Buy in Mooresville (some 13 or so miles away) to buy an overprice TiVo branded network adapter, then came the long drawn out setup process of downloading all the channel info, setting up season passes and wishlists and what not. We also did a channel scan which brought up the 3 HD channels we already get, but as we don’t have that package (or CableCARDs) there was no information for those. We also noticed a strange couple of issues.
We connected the TiVo to our TV via an HDMI cable, and now there was a solid green line going down the side (see picture above) and if we watched anything except actual live TV, the picture would pixelate and jump about. So the next day we got a new HDMI cable, same issues, we called TiVo and they suggested replacing the box, so we called up the Circuit City and they still had one in stock, after racing down to near enough South Carolina, we had a new box (and the pain of setting that up too) which doesn’t pixelate or jump about but still had the green line, I guessed it was our TV and we had no other HDMI outputting devices to test it with. Thanks to the TiVo Community site, we were able to solve this, and it was a dumb error too… A simple task to moving the TV’s screen area to the right…
We also tried an OTA antenna to pick up HDTV but we quickly found out our living room is a blackspot for signals. So we’re biting the bullet and getting CableCARDs from Time Warner, they arrive on Tuesday. This also means we’re getting the basic digital cable package, yet more stuff to watch…
Anyways, those issues aside, I’m loving this new TiVo, when we were getting the HD channels they looked superb, even regular basic cable looks good upscaled to 1080i. It’s still the same old friendly TiVo bleep bloop bloop interface, though it’s been given a little glossy makeover, so setting up our season passes was a breeze. I’ll give a proper review once it’s fully operational, but even right now, for $300 you’re getting a box that blows away the current Series 2 DT version, I love that it only requires one coax cable going into it as opposed to two, and if you have digital cable (never mind HD) you can kiss that cable company box goodbye, and by all accounts, thats a good thing…
Originally uploaded by FLC.
Facebook will cost at least $10 billion, says backer. $10 billion for Facebook? What is the world coming to? Let’s party like it’s 1999 all over again…
With the announcement of a low price “lite” TiVo HD coming any day now, Robyn and I decided to look into the prospect of recording in HD. Right now we have the lowest of low end 40 hour series 2 TiVo, we got it at Christmas time a few years ago, back when, to be honest, we rarely watched TV outside of Lost, Desperate Housewives, Grey’s Anatomy and House. Of course 40 hours isn’t really a lot as thats the lowest recording quality, in high quality it’s more like 20 hours, and even then we never thought we’d record that much…
How very wrong we were…
We recorded everything and anything, game shows, freak shows, dramas, sitcoms… It got so much I turned the PC into a Media Center to record even more, now the TiVo is pretty much dedicated to Robyn’s love of TLC, History Channel and Discovery Channel and the PC is my home of, well, the stuff I watched… A short time after getting TiVo we kicked ourselves at not waiting a little longer for the dual tuner version, you know… To record twice as much at the same time? We were pretty committed to getting the Series 3 when it was first announced, multiple tuners, records HD, what more could you want? Well, the $800 price tag ended that dream. So now the “lite” $300 version is very tempting, but first we needed to find out what we had, what we could get from Time Warner Cable and if it was worth it.
Up stepped Robyn first of all, her call to Time Warner was the classic case of BAD customer service. She asked about how we would go about getting a CableCARD to put in our TV (and eventually TiVo HD) and she kept getting the runaround from the person on the phone pressurising her to get a set-top box, even going as far as saying CableCARDs aren’t available as they are in the cable box. Well, we weren’t standing for that kind of bullshit, don’t they know who I am? So I called up tonight, and having worked in a customer service call centre before, I know how to treat these members of the poor, hungry huddled masses, yearning to breathe free…
Turns out it’s not even worth it, oh we can get CableCARDs as we already knew, and adding the HDTV Basic package to our existing package along with the “rental” fee for the cards would be a whopping $16, but unfortunately, as we live in Huntersville and not Charlotte, this area used to be Adelphia, and right now it’s not under Time Warner control outright so we get the shaft all for the sake of, literally, 10 miles, so we only get 3 HD channels (THREE?!?!), CBS, FOX and Discovery HD. We already get these without having to pay so is it worth $315 to record these channels?
The hypothetical questions they should ask at the presidential debates. Candidates, pay attention: An international financier has smuggled an atom bomb into Fort Knox. He loves only gold. Only gold. After an amazing sequence of events, including car chases, sexual conquests, and your defeat of the assassin known as Oddjob, you find yourself staring at the interior of a nuclear device. The final seconds are ticking down. This goes to you, Senator Clinton: Do you cut the blue wire, or do you cut the red wire?
Michael Vick could be urged by the NFL and the Falcons to take a season-long voluntary leave of absence and to focus his energies on his legal challenges. If this happens then don’t expect too much from the Falcons this year with Joey Harrington in line to move up to starting QB. Where’s Matt Schaub when you need him? Might we even see a DJ Shockley appearance?
We’re currently watching Celtic vs MLS All-Stars on ESPN2. and Celtic’s Dutch player Jan Vennegoor of Hesselink comes on screen…
Her: What’s his name? Is it where he comes from? Do All Dutch people do that?
Me (quoting Wikipedia): “His name – the longest in European football – derives from the 17th century, when two farming families in the Enschede area of the Netherlands intermarried. Both the Vennegoor and Hesselink names carried equal social weight, and so – rather than choose between them – they chose to use both. “Of” in Dutch translates to “or” in English, which would mean that a strict translation of his name would read ‘Jan Vennegoor or Hesselink’.” So there…
Her: Oh, so he has a conjunction in his name? I thought it was a preposition.
Just awesome… You can’t make this stuff up. To make it even better, MLS is beating Celtic 2-0 at half time. Shame about the David Beckham over saturation, I wish they would concentrate on the game that’s being played, not some muppet in the stands.
Yeah, I’m late… Too tired/busy/injured to do this earlier, but better late than never huh? Well, the story of our trip to Pennsylvania starts last week, at 4am for me as I went into the office at an ungodly hour so I could get a whole days work in before we left, so we left at 3pm with Robyn’s parents and after a few miles I was pretty much asleep.
When I woke up we were in Virginia… It’s a strange journey, about 90 minutes in North Carolina, 3½ hours in Virginia then about 30 minutes in West Virginia, 10 in Maryland and 2 hours in Pennsylvania… West Virginia and Maryland shoot past really fast. Anyways, We arrived at Robyn’s grandfather’s (hereby known as Pop-Pop) house at 11:30… We were all beat at this point.
Thursday morning I was shown around Allentown, Bethlehem and Easton, and for lunch I had the first of many, many steak sandwiches, I also got to see the Dixie Cup building and I even got to meet Maryann (Robyn’s godmother). That night we spent time with Dee and Tuna, having dinner at Neff’s Hotel then back to their home for a few after dinner drinks, Robyn and I also got a ride on Tunas Harley, they have a cat that looks exactly like Felix, actually, they have five cats (here’s another), and I thought we were bad with three…
The next day we visited Robyn’s great aunt Edna in her home before heading to Dorney Park for the evening, well, only me, Robyn and Ruth went. We had a great time, Robyn and her mom rode the big thrill rides I wouldn’t go on, they also went on a big water ride, ending up totally soaked afterwards. Robyn also went on the biggest ride I’ve ever seen…
On Saturday we celebrated Pop-Pop’s 91st birthday, albeit a little early, with a dinner and some cake afterwards. And then Sunday was the long drive home, another exhausting drive, even though I was the passenger… 8 or 9 hours in a car is very tiring, at least for me.
Lehigh Valley, PA. – July 2007 (set)
Originally uploaded by FLC.
Eminem’s music publisher filed a multimillion-dollar lawsuit against Apple on Monday, alleging the computer giant violated copyrights by allowing unauthorized downloads of the Detroit rapper’s songs onto iPods. They must have short term memory, as didn’t Eminem appear in an advert for Apple advertising his music?