WeaponsGradeCode

I love old computers and when I saw this E450 at Boeing Surplus for $25 I had to have it.

…of course, I only have a 1700 sq ft house with five people in it and this thing is > 200lbs and as big as an end table. Beyond that, what can you do with it? Store your DVD collection in an Oracle database? Run a really mean PERL script?

No graphics, no games, it’s out of here. Sold it on craigslist for $25 bucks, but I broke that small door off on the way so I gave it to him for $5.

$75,000 retail to $5 on craigslist in seven years. That’s what I call depreciation.

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Hurray for schedulesdirect.org! I signed up the day they opened registration. I hope they publish user ids like they do on slashdot.org so we all know who’s old skool.

So I finally got around to updating the system to use the new service. I always dislike mucking around with the channels in mythtv because the configuration system doesn’t quite have their story straight with the programming data folks. That is, it never works out of the box. In other words, MySQL experience required.

To complicate matters, not only did I cancel my premium cable service, but my cable provider changed the entire programming lineup. This will be a challenge.

To start, I updated my Fedora Core 6, atrpms installation flawlessly to mythtv 20.2, ran the setup, and configured schedules direct. I exited and ran mythfilldatabase with the expectation of it magically sorting everything out and… wait for it… it didn’t. Everything was hosed.

Reading a bunch of posts seemed to indicate the best thing to do was to start over. So I did. I deleted all the programming data providers, created new ones and assigned them to my standard definition and HDTV tuners respectively. I scanned for SD channels and imported my HDTV channels from when I first configured them. I re-ran mythfilldatabase and, well, I had programming data for all the SD channels, the SD channel callsigns were changed to ‘Adding Channel X’ and the HDTV channels had no data and their names wrong…

Running ‘mythfilldatabase –do-channel-updates’ fixed the SD channels. The HDTV channels were harder.

Mythfilldatabase  does some kind of crazy schedulesdirect -> channel table matching to figure out where to put programming data. I can’t remember what fields are important, but updating the channum, freqid, and callsign columns in the channel table did the trick. Basically, channum and freqid were set to the imaginary HD channel number, and callsign to the call sign. Re-running mythfilldatabase populated my channels with the correct programming data.

So mythtv still has some way to go, especially with HDTV configuration (is there a tech organization that doesn’t)  but at least with a bit of database skillz, I was able to make the transition within two evenings.

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Note: These events occurred some time ago…

So the whole family’s on the way to sign refinance papers in two cars so I can go back to work after we’re done. I hop in the BMW and out the garage. About 1/2 a block out, things don’t feel right. Two blocks out I feel something’s very wrong, like I’m missing teeth on the differential or something. I pull over and the passenger rear tire’s out. Bad news. Luckily, the wife, kids, and truck are only around the corner so I call them on the cell and they come back to get me.

This should be interesting as I haven’t changed a tire in a long time. Luckily, BMW makes it easy an painless to recover from these eventualities, you see, BMW’s sport a full size spare (sometimes on a premium wheel, like mine.) The shop lift I have in the garage won’t fit under the low slung 330i sport so I use the funny looking contraption jack that came with the car. It worked much better than I expected and had the tire changed in about seven minutes. Needless to say, the kids were very impressed.

A quick inspection revealed the problem, a huge screw in the middle of the tire. Much like this one:

I took it to the dealer and they couldn’t fix it because I’d damaged the side wall during my two blocks of driving, and the tread was too thin. WHAT! I’ve had these Pirellis for about 25,000 miles, they can’t be bad already!

There’s nothing I can do. The dealer won’t fix them and I need the car in top shape. So I head back to tirerack…

If these sport tires are only going to last 25,000 miles I’m getting something cheap. Good thing ’cause the same Pirelli’s are now $50 more, each, and out of stock.

That’s when I found General Tire. I don’t know anything about them, I don’t care. I just need cheap sport tires. So I picked a couple of these General Tire Exclaim UHPs for the rear of the BMW:

…Tire Rack got them to me a day early for less than $100 each. Good deal. Got them to the dealer and had them swapped out for another $100.

Brand new they they tracked (squirmed) around the road funny, but 4000 miles later they’ve settled down and feel like the Pirellis.

I didn’t change the front’s as they still had good tread on them, probably a total 50,000 miles worth. But when they go, I’ll probably get a couple more Exclaims.

Here’s how they look on the car:

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StylishGuide.com is my first custom Wordpress site. Its a fun site listing hidden treasures around the LA area, kind of like losangeles.sidewalk.com before Microsoft bought, destroyed, and sold it to CitySearch.

The fun part of the project was building the custom theme for Wordpress. The theme was somewhat generic and had to be dissected and re-assembled to work with the application. Luckily, Wordpress’s templating engine made that easy.

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Holy Toledo this software’s great. Granted, the premise of the tool is pretty straight forward: Accept text and post it in order. No big deal, but the Wordpress folks have really done a good job of highly polishing the tool into something that’s a pleasure to work with. I’ve built a couple sites with it, including this one, and will be building a couple more shortly.

Generally, it takes about ten minutes to install the software, configure a fun theme, configure the settings and plugins, and create a database at the ISP. Another twenty configuring AdSense and you’ve got a compelling, money earning blog built. That’s time well spent.

BTW: To migrate from Expression Engine to Wordpress, follow the links below:

http://expressionengine.com/wiki/Export_Entries/
http://www.coderemedy.com/2007/05/10/migrating-from-expression-engine-to-wordpress-step-by-step/

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The tires on the BMW wore out so I headed up to tirerack.com to see what the current offerings were.

The requirements were a cool brand, reasonable cost, 40K lifetime and some hope of grip in the snow.

It didn’t take long to land on the Pirelli P Zeros M+S. Ordering a set was painless from tirerack and they arrived on time. The local BMW dealer installed them for me.

What’s fun about owning a performance automobile is that you can instantly detect any change to the suspension. That was definetely true with these new tires. The old Yokohamas were stiff, sticky, and tramlined all over the place. I didn’t take long to learn what lanes of various freeways to stay out of. You’d swerve all over the place like a drunk with them The new Pirelli’s were great. They felt like a new pair of comfortable sneakers. There was no tramlining to speak of and were somewhat quieter than the old tires.

I did get some time in the snow with them and on a 330i sport with traction control, they’re worthless. Telecommute when it snows and you own these tires. I couldn’t even get up a modest lift in the road. It was a total disaster…

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