Not much news to report

Not much news to report this past week. The weekend was cold and wet, spent much of it inside playing with Frisket. Did manage to hit Home Depot for a variety of things (most needed: a water pump for the pit under the cellar door which has been collecting water since we moved in). We've gotten the front bedroom and office "back" from the painters. Lisa bought some shelves and a temporary desk for the office. We're going to use the front bedroom as a dumping ground for stuff from my former apartment (which has been in storage since May 2000 in Long Island City).

(ok, something weird happened when

(ok, something weird happened when I tried to correct the URL for this picture from the April 13 post. I now leave you with this picture of Frisket.)

(and no, I don't know

(and no, I don't know why there's a link to c|net at the end of the first post today)

In Defenestration Corner, David Singer

In Defenestration Corner, David Singer writes: Nero Wolfe. We've been watching the Nero Wolfe series on A&E and enjoying it a lot. But I guess we're thieves, because we use TiVo and skip the commercials. Of course, I don't remember signing any kind of contract requiring us to watch the commercials in the first place....maybe the contract is secretly encoded in the vertical blanking interval, along with the closed-captioning. .

IMHO, the media companies are totally out of whack in the crusade against digital media devices. I watch far more TV now with our Tivos (erm, yes, we have two) than I ever did. Until I started Tivoing, I watched at most an hour-90 minutes of TV a day, a little in the morning (CNNfn when Jack Cafferty was on) and usually a Law and Order rerun on A&E. Now we manage to catch NY1 in the morning and typically a couple shows at night. On the weekend we catch up with whatever we missed during the week. Sure, I skip through commercials (much the same as I did with taped shows on my VCR except that Tivo intentionally doesn't have the smarts to skip specifically over commercials like my VCR does). But, given that we pay to receive the signal in the first place (in our case over TWC but we're switching back to DirectTv as soon as we can get an appointment lined up) it's a tad presumptuous for Kellner to call skipping-ads as theft. I mean, there once was a time when Cable-TV meant relatively commercial-free TV. Now you get to pay to receive commercials (ever notice the growth in infomercials on channels which used to have programming 24 hours a day?) with content interspersed in between.

See Top Ten New Copyright

See Top Ten New Copyright Crimes for a relevant post to my screed below.

Ok...I think we need to

Ok...I think we need to look into getting one of those propane space heater things you see in outdoor cafes in the fall and early spring for our deck.

Dozy sunday morning...walked Frisket twice

Dozy sunday morning...walked Frisket twice and watching Looney Tunes (oddly enough, the one showing now is Bowery Bugs which seems to be about Bugs Bunny's runin with Steve Brody and the Brooklyn Bridge).

Sorry Oliver! I still haven't

Sorry Oliver! I still haven't decided on an upgrade for our Tivo , planning to do so today. This morning we took Frisket to puppy play group at Monster Mutt. This afternoon is reserved for dozing, surfing and reading. Tonight Lisa and I plan to catch Enigma (though the theatre it was showing at doesn't appear to be showing it today).

Drat...all of the links I

Drat...all of the links I added to that last post were eaten by the software I use.

Found out the problem with

Found out the problem with yesterday's post...I'd sent it as HTML email from Outlook, Radio Userland pulled off the plain text version instead of the HTML.

Apologies to anyone looking at

Apologies to anyone looking at Frisket's pages right now...I'm doign somem maintenance and accidentally removed all images from her site :-(.

Ok...the updates are done and

Ok...the updates are done and Frisket's site is now moved to a much better location (I was running out of space on my personal site and had this separate site basically sitting around doing nothing). There's new pictures as well of her fourteenth week (mainly from puppy play group and some shots from earlier in the week).

Hey Oliver... I ordered the

Hey Oliver... I ordered the 250 hour Tivo upgrade. Allegedly this will give us ~70 hours of best quality, and 250 hours at basic quality. I think that will be enough for awhile.

...and the tivonet upgrade. Might

...and the tivonet upgrade. Might as well go all-out if I've opened the box up.

The tivo upgrade has shipped!

The tivo upgrade has shipped!

Yahoo: No police presence in

Yahoo: No police presence in searches tells how Yahoo!, several internet industry groups, and the US Government (I assume the DOJ but it doesn't say) are fighting against a ruling that requires police to be present when search warrants are acted upon. The issue seems to be the burden placed upon the police (or ISPs) in conducting the search, but that seems to be at least part of the point. We don't want it to be easy to conduct such searches, right?

Waiting for the #1

Waiting for the #1

Argh...tried posting to Frisket's weblog

Argh...tried posting to Frisket's weblog via SMS email and couldn't because the email address is one character too long!

The 250 hour Tivo upgrade

The 250 hour Tivo upgrade arrived! I plan to install it this Sunday.

Surfing around, catching up on

Surfing around, catching up on other weblogs, and sampling a pint of Ben & Jerry's Apple Crumble flavor ice cream...have to say I'm not going to be buying it again.

Frisket turned 15 weeks old

Frisket turned 15 weeks old this weekend. She celebrated by going to the vet for her fourth round of shots. Since she'd been feeling ill (see Friday's posts) the vet decided to postpone her shots until later this week.

Today I've been working to upgrade the 14 hours Tivo to a 250 hour unit and installing a Tivonet card. So far it's gone ok, some minor stumbling points (I thought I had the right serial cable connectors after a trip to Radio Shack but still didn't, and of course they're closed now). The unit has booted up and is doing it's initial setup (the upgrade I ordered completely replaces the existing drives and doesn't recommend copying over the "A" drive to the new "A" drive). So...I can't configure the TivoNet card (might just wait until the 3.0 software upgrade comes out to see if the unit magically recognizes it), the good news being no smoke emanating from the unit.

Unfortunately the one thing I have appeared to break this weekend is the Radio Userland 7.0 installation on my laptop which I write this weblog with...I can't post to it from my desktop (and am not even sure this post will go through) so there might be some delays in weblog updates until I figure out how to fix this mess.

Ok...enough with the helicopters. They

Ok...enough with the helicopters. They flew overhead for much of the night making sure the Brooklyn Bridge didn't disappear over night (or to ensure they'd have live coverage of the event in case it did).

Argh...I tried to add something

Argh...I tried to add something to note when I post by email and of course 1) it didn't work and 2) due to the trashed configuration I can't clean it up through the web interface.

So the plan to work

So the plan to work from home for a bit has run into a couple of snags. First, we have the entire air fleet of the NY press corps flying overhead. Second, someone, somewhere, decided today was the day to jackhammer in front of the house. I have managed to muck around with my weblog stuff to add some sort of indication when I post via email (while munging the email addresses to prevent spam harvesting. At least that's the theory). "Ed Costello" e.p.c. via earthlink

The workers are tearing up

The workers are tearing up the street for water main work next door. e.p.c. via sms

Any bets on whether we

Any bets on whether we have water tonight? e.p.c. via sms

I get the most bizarre

I get the most bizarre spam... Today's example was a poorly written blabbering diatribe about some transportation union official in Oregon. Normally I just summarily delete spam (most of the time it goes straight to the trash...I don't even see it). This one was bizarre enough to read for a few laughs. I'd post some of it but have no desire to get into a flame war with the idiot who sent it out. He left enough information in the email that anyone can find out his name and address using Google. " " e.p.c. via email

Going away for the Memorial

Going away for the Memorial Day weekend. Frisket gets to finally meet Boo (Oliver's 125 pound Rottweiler). I'm sure they'll get along fine. e.p.c. via earthlink

On the road to Amagansett.

On the road to Amagansett. e.p.c. via sms

Argh. Apologies for no recent

Argh. Apologies for no recent posts...the network card on my laptop refused to work so I had to reinstall it. My wireless card is also hosed...no time to fix this morning.

Spent the weekend in Amagansett, mostly dozing and chasing after Frisket, Coco, and Buster (aka Boo). This week at work consists of writing up a bunch of documents about our upcoming products and putting some project plans in place. This weekend...well, the plan is to catch the NY Liberty season opener on Sunday, and nothing else on tap (so far).

My brother sent us some Star Wars t-shirts and the new Star Wars Jedi Starfighter game...haven't had a chance to try it on the PS2. " " e.p.c. via earthlink