This looks like it was pretty intense. I wonder what the impact sound and felt like?

Update – apparently this was a fake. Pretty good fake, but I wonder how many times the boy can cry wolf.

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.