Went out for a evening snack and beer the other night at one of my favorite places in Park Slope – Stone Park Cafe. I got the burger and a half order of fries and half order of salad. I have to say – this was one of the best burgers that I have eaten in New York City. I am curious as to why I haven’t seen this burger turn up on any of the best burger lists. The fries were also quite good as well as being very fresh.
As good as the food was, I do have one minor complaint about Stone Park Cafe that really is just minor. They have a great beer selection as far as ale’s go on tap, but the lager selection is a bit limited. That said, I should say that the whiskey selection is quite good.  They even have Suntory Yamazaki.  Best thing about the Yamazaki is that its not in their system, so they dont really know the cost….

I bought a Tivo HD not so long ago.  The unit was working great and I was generally pleased with it for about a month or so.  After this initial good experience, I noticed the unit was crashing from time to time with a green screen and a loud siren noise.  I didnt think much of this, as I deal with modern electronics and I understnad that everything is junk now and we as consumers are just beta testers.  However, the problem started getting worse and worse.

The crashes started happening almost every day.  Sometimes one after another (immediately after rebooting).  This seemed odd to me, and prompted me to do a google search on the subject.  I found these two forum threads:

http://www.tivocommunity.com/tivo-vb/showthread.php?t=418924

AND

http://forums.tivo.com/pe/action/forums/displaythread?rootPostID=10426617

It seemed that I was definitely not the only person suffering from this problem, and it was much bigger.  I posted a few things and got some feedback from other users.  A tivo tech got intouch with me and enabled logging on my tivo to investigate the crashing.  Nothing changed for about 2 weeks.  Crashed continued like clockwork.  There were some interesting things however:

1. I noticed it was almost always a HD channel that caused the crash to occur.
2. Often it was HGTVHD or FOODHD which were the culprits.
3. Parking both tuners on SD channels a couple times per day initially limited the crashing, but eventually this didn’t help either.
4. Time Warner doesn’t acknowledge there is a problem (to be expected)
5. Changing the cable cards didtn help (I did this twice)
6. Changing the cable type didn’t help (I tried HDMI, Component, and Composite connections)

I gave up on this for a while and reverted to not watching TV at all for about 2 weeks.  After finishing my grants up and deciding that I wanted to have something tasty for dinner, I put on FOODHD.  There was no crash.  Nor has there been for 2 weeks as of today (07/01/09).  I hope this issue has been fixed, but I am not holding my breath.

There are a few things I learned from this.  Time Warner Cable has decent internet service, but their cable TV service is absolutely terrible and should be avoided if at all possible.  There are other reasons I say this and I will post on them in the future as this post is getting long.  Secondly, I hear and see a continuous barrage of podcasts, and reviews of how good the tivo hardware and software is when compared to the cable company DVRs.  This simply is not true.  During this time where my tivo was crashing, my Scientific Atlanta 8300HDC box only crashed one time and has been fairly reliable as of late.  I can not say so much for the Tvio…..

The nvidia geforce 8400 chip in my Dell XPS M1330 recently died.  It was under warrenty, and Dell promptly sent over a technician to replace the entire motherboard.  The tech did a fine job, and the computer is generally working well since this time.  In this computer, I have an internal cellular modem.  When the tech was reconnecting all the parts back together, there was one issue.  The cellular modem was not functional.  The error was that there was “No Sim”.  We promptly opened up the modem/wireless access panel, and checked the connections.  After, a restart, the modem was working again.  All seemed well.  I even used the cellular connection a few times over the next couple of days.

Then on March 17, 2009, the connection died.  I am not sure what is going on here.  The behavior is very different that the No Sim error.  This time, the computer can not find any connection, but it knows all is working.  The card is detected, and the Sim is indeed read, and has all the correct information.

I called AT&T to ask them if there as some somethign going on.  I was told that there is indeed an outage of sorts in my local area (NEW YORK CITY).  I asked the agent (who was very nice) if she could relay me the details of the problem and she basically dodged the question and said that it would be fixed by 5 PM.    Its now 9:30 and the problem is not resolved. I am completely clueless where this problem is coming from.

I think the main problem I am having here is that AT&T didnt tell me the source of the problem.  I should also say that this service costs $2 per day and its been out for 2 days now.  I don’t know what to do at this point, but I am making this post in the hopes that someone else is having the same problem and will find this message.

So, I had the chance to play with the new “Google Phone” today. I have to say that I like it.  I found no differences in functionality between it and an iphone.  The one thing that I could not get to work in under 10 minutes of playing was to get my A2DP headset to play music.  It did however, work fine for making and taking phone calls. 

The phone feels very solid, unlike the iphone which feels very cheap to me. I think if I dropped this phone, it would be fine, but who knows — maybe it just feels that way.  The keyboard is extremely nice.  It is tactile and responsive. You can see from the video below that I do not have little fingers. So you can imagine the touch screen keyboard on the iphone becomes the bain of my existance when I am forced to type on it. The touchscreen on the phone is quite nice. It is also responsive and fast. I had no complaints there. The inclusion of the track-ball-mouse is something I really liked as well. I really do not like touch screens for a number of reasons — I cant see what I am clicking on half the time when its small. The mouse is more accurate.

The music player that is built in is functional and works well. It shows album art and has basic playback functionality we expect on a portable music player. The phone supports miniSD cards. I think a 1 gig card was included with this phone, but i may be wrong there. Regardless, the infinite expandability is very nice. miniSD is cheap too. The GPS feature seems to work great (at least in New York City). It provided me nice directions based on my location for free. This is a biggy. I installed a weather app which worked well and some simple games. All worked well also.

Other than the above, I found the marketplace to be a bit barren, but I suppose that is to be expected on day one of a new product.  There were some nice apps, including the stated weather apps, some multimedia players and games.  I like the ability to have background apps running and copy/paste is a nice option too.  In general, the operating system feels solid. For a launch product, I must say – I am impressed.  If this is what a “beta” is like, I am very anxious to see what is in-store for the future.  I will likely get one of these when they become available on AT&T as I do not feel like switching providers at this point.

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So Governor Palin thinks that reading books is enough to learn about different countries and their cultures. Hmm. Her wikipedia page seems to indicate that she was not so dedicated of a student.

She also thinks that you can not work and travel and that somehow these things do not go together. Who is she trying to kid? I went to school full time. I received an Bachelor’s and a Master’s degree in Biology in 6 years. During this time, I worked close to 40 hours a week by taking shifts Friday nights and Saturdays and Sundays all day. I did not make tons of money at these jobs, BUT, I was able to travel to Japan THREE times as a student on this money AND make the Dean’s list every semester. This is something that I wanted to do on my own. I did not get a backpack from my parents either.

Who is she trying to kid. with these statements? Why doesn’t she save face at this point and just admit that she is grossly under qualified for the position of Vice President of the United States. She should just say that she doesn’t know what she is doing and was overly ambitious when she accepted the nomination.  She could also say that she is willing to work hard to make up for her deficiencies. This would still not qualify her for the position in my eyes, but at least she would come off as a little bit less of a liar and a cheat.

So when is a pig with lipstick on it a sexist remark?  Apparently whenever John McCain says it is.  Why is it OK to use this old phrase one day, then the next you attack your opponent with accusations?  This is not acceptable behavior from the President of the United States of America.  The President is supposed to be wise and intelligent, not a low life who twists things to his own benefit.  This is UNACCEPTABLE.
If you are reading this post, PLEASE think about this mentality — and wisely cast your vote this year.  Do we really want this person running a country?  I think not.

Over the last few weeks I have had 2 major problems with standing in line.  One in New York City and one in Huntington, WV.  The funny thing, is that it was exactly the same problem.  The issue is the new self check-out kiosks.

As of Sunday the 17th of August, Mozilla Weave seems to be back up and working.  I haven’t been able to use the service for at least 2 weeks, but I can confirm that I can login, and sync all my Firefox 3 settings.

The sync process is still slightly slow, but it is working again.  I use no fewer than 4 computers on a daily basis, and I have found it is hard to function properly without such a browser sync feature at this point.

This is something that Microsoft really should think about integrating into Internet Explorer 8.  We could set this up to use our hotmail/live/msn email logins as the sync username.  I can see the process being really smooth.  I can’t guarantee that I would use IE again, but this might get me at least slightly intereseted.

I have a number of email accounts I check on a daily basis.  I run different tools to help filter spam on most of them.  Web based accounts like gmail, hotmail, and yahoo mail have typically been plagued the worst by spam, but by far none is worse than my Marshall University email account.

In recent weeks, I have noticed a large dropoff in the amount of spam i am receiving to my web-based accounts.  This is a good thing.  I have a number of University emails too.  Some of these accounts receive very little spam, but as stated above the Marshall University account (which I have had for many, many years) is the worst.  Even this account is not receiving as much spam lately.  In fact, it seems to be receiving less than 10 spam messages per day.  These mostly come from Russia (based on the character set in the subject of the message).

I don’t know whats going on lately, but I hope it is a trend.  Any reduction in the amount of spam I receive daily is a good thing.  Hopefully, this is not just an unfortunate coincidence.

I recently sold some older drives on ebay.  I made a mistake in my listing in saying specifically that I do NOT ship to Europe, rather just the continental US and to Canada.  I generally change 10-15 USD for shipping via USPS priority mail to USA and $25 to Canada.  This price includes the box, packing material, insurance and tracking.  I think it is a fair price, and I do not make more than a few extra cents by estimating the cost.  In fact, often the shipping to Canada, I lose money.  This few cents is what I earn for my time spent waiting in line at the post office just to ask for a customs form — which in NYC can take upwards of 1 hour!!  No, they are not freely available here due to the fact that people steal them….

Here is where my mistake lets me know a bit about how Europeans think.  In the listing, I had $25 for international.  It should have read International to Canada (which it DID in the item description), but since ebay made some changes recently in their selling system, I made a mistake.  I admitted to the mistake, and asked if it would be possible to charge the extra $10 for shipping to Europe to the 4 people who won the auctions from Europe.

Each one of them accused me of fraud.  They said it doesnt cost that much to ship to Europe.  Well, guess what Europeans.  IT DOES COST THAT MUCH TO SHIP A HARD DRIVE TO EUROPE VIA USPS INTERNATIONAL PRIOROTY MAIL.  I am NOT using first class mail, which is closer to $25.  It costs about $38 USD to ship a 2.5 pound package to Western Europe.  I am shocked by this as much as you are, but I assure you it is not fraud on my part.  You can even goto USPS.com and check it.  It tells you how much it costs.

So, in the future, please think before you speak.  Use the internet, use google, and most of all check USPS.com for the price of a 2.5 pound package shipped via USPS International Priority Mail to your country before you cry, complain, and accuse.  It really makes you look bad in my eyes.