Arlene offered to buy me a gadget for my birthday (which isn’t actually until November). No fool I, I immediately took her up on it. On Tuesday, the Dish installer should arrive with a new Dish 6000u receiver that can receive over-the-air and satellite HDTV broadcasts. Dish has a promo: if you sign up for 12 months of their HD package ($9.99 for ESPN-HD, HDNet, HDNet Movies, and Discovery HD, plus HBO and Showtime HD if you get the SD versions), you can get the 6000u for $199. That’s less than half of what a new DirecTV receiver would cost– the best price I’ve seen is around $370 from one of the Google ads appearing on this very page 🙂 Best Buy had an open-box Samsung TS160 that was tempting me until I found out that a) it was $460 with no install and b) I’d lose the “superstation” package that Dish has.
So, by Tuesday night I should be all set to watch Alias, 24, et al in glorious HD.
The installer cometh
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Filed under HDTV and Home Theater
Rotary business
Yesterday I had the pleasure of addressing the Perrysburg Rotary. The topic, you ask? Computer security, of course. Just like usual, I ran about 15 minutes long (people who have been to my sessions at TechEd or the MEC can attest that I’ve gone longer), but it seemed to be well-received. The presentation itself is here.
I also got three raffle tickets for our annual auction. 250 tickets, at $50 each, makes a nice chunk of change for the Rotary Foundation’s local projects, including the new park near Ft. Meigs Elementary. The winning ticket nets some lucky person their choice of a Caribbean cruise to Cancun for 2, a ski trip to Colorado for 2, or some cash. Winner need not be present. If you want a ticket, let me know. (I know I have one or two Toledo-area readers… think of how nice a February cruise would be!)
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Filed under Friends & Family
Speakeasy offers cheap WiFi
This is very cool: from Glenn’s WiFi News:
[Speakeasy’s] newest set of services includes a $49 deal that gets you all the Wi-Fi gear and support you need to get set up at home. For a short time a while back Speakeasy was giving away the gear for new customers, but that was a shortlived promotion. Speakeasy is also offering what it calls personal technology assistant which means you can talk to the same help desk person when you have a problem, instead of explaining your situation over and over to a new person each time you call.
This is especially cool because it covers new and existing customers. See, John, if you’d switched to Speakeasy when I told you to last year, you’d have an Xbox and WiFi now.
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Filed under General Tech Stuff
Talk Like a Pirate Day redux
Tomorrow is Talk Like a Pirate Day (yes, again). I am seriously considering making my computer security presentation to the Rotary tomorrow in pirate talk. (btw, accordin’ to yon pirate name quiz, ye should be callin’ this old sea cur Black Sam Flint. Arrrr!)
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Filed under Musings
What’s in the queue
My dear mother is worried that we’re not reading enough. In an effort to reassure her, I thought I’d share the contents of my current reading stack, in no particular order:
- Bayou Farewell: Mike Tidwell’s account of the ecological destruction of the Louisiana marshlands and the way of life surrounding them
- When the King Took Flight: overly earnest but still fascinating history of Louis XVI’s flight, capture, and execution during the French Revolution. (I’m about halfway through this now)
- Empires of Light: fascinating account of the three-cornered battle between Edison, Westinghouse, and Tesla for economic and technological supremacy in the early electric industry. Jill Johnnes is a terrific storyteller. (Halfway through this one too).
- Fistful of Rain: I’ll read anything by Greg Rucka.
- Positively Fifth Street: journalist goes to Vegas to write about the World Series of Poker and ends up placing fifth. Absorbing. (I still count this as in the queue even though it’s returned ’cause I owe an overdue fine on it).
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Filed under Friends & Family
I’ll have the silver one
Continuing Car Week here at el rancho, I just had to reserve a car for an upcoming trip to Seattle. Hertz sent me an invitation to enroll in their special business discount program, so I did. That netted me a daily rate of $57 for a Taurus, or exactly $1 less than the normal non-discount rate. Interestingly, though, it also quoted me $58.99 for a much nicer car, so I’m happily paying the $2 extra. I love transparent pricing.
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Filed under Musings
Can this marriage be saved?
The station wagon is getting a little too small for the herd as they grow. That’s sparked a discussion of what we might replace it with.
What Arlene wants. Pro: available, capacious, familiar, ergonomic. Cons: booooring, slow.
What I want. Pro: supercharged 430-hp engine, wicked cool styling, 20″ wheels, nifty gun-slit windows. Cons: not available until spring 2004, likely to attract police attention, requires purchase of zoot suit.
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Filed under Musings
HDTV hiatus
Buckeye is coming to get their cable box tomorrow. Why? Well, the test period’s finally up, so I either have to pay for the box and subscribe or give it back. I’m giving it back, which means I’ll be HD-less for a while. I have a confusing set of options at this point.
Option 1: I could pay Buckeye $385 for the box plus monthly charges of $6.95 (for the local broadcast channels; they still don’t have ABC, NBC, or PBS in HD even though they’re broadcast locally), plus another $10.95 (for DiscoveryHD, ESPN-HD, HDNet, and HDNet Movies). This is on top of my existing cable bill, and I really, really don’t like the idea of having to buy the box. I’m not sure why, since buying a satellite receiver doesn’t seem like a bad idea. I probably dislike it because there are newer, nicer boxes (like this one) that cost the same, but that Buckeye won’t let me use.
Option 2: I could subscribe to Dish Network’s HD package and buy a new receiver. This would require a new dish, too, which Dish will pay for if I commit to a year’s HD programming. However, Dish’s PVRs are widely denounced for being buggy, so I’d probably end up buying the 811 receiver, which doesn’t ship until November at the earliest. On the other hand, Dish is charging $9.99/mo for the same content as Buckeye’s $10.95 package, but their receivers can pick up over-the-air broadcasts, so I’d get local channels for free. Cost-wise this works out to be about the same as Buckeye, with the bonus that I get lots of channels (Speedvision and BYU-TV, anyone?) that Buckeye won’t ever carry.
Option 3: Wait for the HD-Tivo unit from DirecTV and switch to them. It’s not clear when this unit will actually ship, nor how much it’ll cost, so this is a risky alternative. However, it seems clear that this would give me the most of what I want: HD programming that I can TiVo– I just can’t have it now, or even by the end of the year (and possibly not until this time next year).
Option 4: Buy a cheap over-the-air receiver (like Costco’s $215 Samsung SIR-T151) now. That would give me Alias, Monday Night Football, college ball on Saturdays, 24, Smallville, and PBS in HD, covering the majority of my viewing needs. I’d miss Discovery and ESPN in HD, but I’d be able to resell the receiver later and recoup some of my investment. This looks like the best overall deal, so it’s probably what I’ll do.
Update: According to some knowledgeable (-seeming) folks on AVSForum, the FCC says that cable companies must put OTA HD channels in the basic tier, and they may not encrypt them. If true, that solves part of my problem, so I’ve asked Buckeye whether they think it’s true. If I don’t like their answer, then it’s on to the FCC.
Filed under HDTV and Home Theater
Stop whining
I am fuming after reading this article in the New York Times. Titled “For Citizen Soldiers, an Unexpected Burden”, it’s the story of some folks from an MP company in the California National Guard. They got deployed to Iraq, and their tour has now been extended. This is another in a long series of reports featuring people who signed up and took the king’s shiling taxpayer’s money and now claim they didn’t know they might actually have to do their jobs!
I vividly remember sitting in a college English class in 1990, a week or so after Iraq invaded Kuwait. Thanks to my nifty haircut, my classmates knew I was in the military, and on this particular day they peppered me with questions. “Will you have to go?” “Are you worried that you might get deployed?” “Did you know this might happen when you enlisted?”
Of course I knew it might happen. Anyone who says “gee, I never thought I’d be activated” is either fooling themselves or you. For example, take this fellow:
Specialist Jory Preston, 30, of Pleasant Hill, Calif., signed on with the National Guard in January and was assigned to the 870th. He was working at a small telecommunications company and, having served in the Army in the 1990’s, saw the National Guard as a way to earn extra money. He was married in February, and his wife was already pregnant by then. The next month, he was on his way to Iraq.
Here we have a 30-year-old with prior Army service. Undoubtedly he knew that, in the Army, people get sent overseas, away from their families. He enlisted in January, after it was already crystal clear that US forces were heading to Iraq. Then he acts surprised when he gets deployed.
I don’t want to minimize the difficulty of being separated from loved ones, or the financial impact of going from a good civilian job to crappy military pay. But don’t act surprised, people. It’s not like you were drafted; you knew, or should have known, what you were getting into.
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Filed under Smackdown!
Randy Travis / Rachel Proctor, Detroit, 9/12/03
Great show. We had good seats, in row U on the right-hand section, no more than 100′ from the stage. The lawn section was packed; given the amount of beer, the number of teenage couples, and the presence of country music, I suspect a mini-baby boom in 9 months.
Rachel Proctor opened; I’m normally willing to skip opening bands that I’ve never heard of, but she put on an enjoyable show, playing most of the songs off her only album. Her set was pretty quick– call it maybe 35 minutes. After that, we got an extended Merle Haggard set (with “From Graceland to the Promised Land” repeated probably 15 times, thanks to an inattentive sound guy) before Randy came on stage. He brought his whole band– all 8 of them– and they put on a terrific show. I didn’t keep a detailed set list, but he played most of his #1 hits (including “Three Wooden Crosses”, “Digging Up Bones”, “I’m Gonna Love You Forever”, “I Told You So”, and “Deeper than the Holler”.) I don’t remember the first encore; the second was “America Will Always Stand“, which I hadn’t heard before (see, I told you I don’t listen to country music much).
Between songs, he was relaxed and talkative, and he seemed genuinely surprised at the volume and level of crowd reaction. He spent a good ten minutes accepting roses (mostly from women of a certain age) and signing autographs during the two encores, which I thought was a classy touch. (personal to Betty: he’s going to be in Gulfport at the casino on 10/24– you should go!)
This was a country concert; according to the master tour dates list, he also playes “inspirational concerts”, mostly at Baptist megachurches. I might have to dust off my missionary nametag and go to one of ’em.
Getting to and from the venue was a hassle, thanks to construction on I-75 in both directions and a complete lack of parking control at the amphitheater– once the show was over, the parking lot became a huge free-for-all. There were staff on hand to direct traffic, but none of them did. It took us about 2 hrs up and almost 3 coming back, all for a distance of about 100mi each way. Overall, it was quite an enjoyable experience, and well worth even Ticketmaster’s bloated prices ($31 for the ticket, plus another $9/ticket of fees).
Julie wanted to know which Muppet most closely resembles Randy. Judge for yourself…
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Filed under Reviews
Randy Travis
I don’t even remember the last concert I went to. No, wait, that’s not what I meant… oh, never mind. Arlene and I are about to head up to the DTE amphitheater to see Randy Travis, the only country music performer I’d pay actual money to go see. I’ve been trying to convince her to go see him in concert at a casino, where the performance areas are typically much smaller, but he hasn’t performed near here. I’m excited. Maybe this will signal a renaissance of my concert attendance, now that I live someplace near actual concert venues. Huntsville, sadly, never drew big acts (Metallica and ZZ Top both came to town in ’92, but it was all downhill after that).
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Filed under Musings
Skype peer-to-peer telephony app
According to this story, Skype has launched their peer-to-peer Internet telephony application. It supposedly combines excellent call quality with seamless configuration and an IM-like interface. Lots of folks are raving about it (try doing a search for “skype” here), but I haven’t been able to register yet. As atog says, be sure to read the EULA.
Update: John and I had our first Skype conversation a short while ago. Once I plugged my T40 directly into the DSL modem (bypassing ISA), it worked great– no setup or configuration required. Audio quality was good, although I had better reports from John when I moved across the room and continued speaking. I also talked to the world-famous and internationally known Martin Tuip, and everything worked just as well. I’ve queried the boffins to see if they know why ISA’s blocking Skype traffic, but once I get that fixed I expect to be using it quite a bit.
Update: Skype should work with the way I have ISA configured, but it doesn’t. Mailing Skype support, unsurprisingly, has gotten me nowhere. For a free app with 240,000+ users, I wouldn’t expect a large support budget. So, plan B is to break out my old Linksys box and use it to front-end my laptop instead of ISA.
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Filed under General Tech Stuff
iTunes radio!
I had the Rhapsody client installed on my laptop, and I liked it fairly well; it had lots of channels, and the client had a good interface that presented a great deal of artist and album information. However, it wasn’t very useful when I wasn’t using my laptop, so I decided to fire up iTunes instead. Shazam! None of the built-in radio stations work, but a quick trip over to Shoutcast brought me more stations than I could listen to in a very, very long time. Now I can give my existing playlists a bit of a rest.
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Filed under General Tech Stuff
InstantSSL for certs
I recently needed a new SSL server certificate, and I didn’t want to pay the monopolists (wipe that smile off your face, I’m talking about these guys) an exorbitant fee. Instead, I found InstantSSL, where for a paltry $199 I got a three-year 128-bit certificate. Their administration site and ordering process are well-tuned, and I was able to get quick technical support immediately when I ran into a minor snag. If you need a cert (and you will, if you’re enabling RPC-over-HTTP or Outlook Mobile Access), give these folks a try.
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Filed under General Stuff, Musings
Litchfield does it again
From the sewer of misinformation and hype that is ntbugtraq, a rare factual and informative nugget:
For those interested, NGSS [David Litchfield’s outfit — PR] has just published a paper describing how to defeat the mechanism built into Windows 2003 Server to prevent exploitation of stack based buffer overflow vulnerabilities. Previous work done in this area presented methods that only worked in highly specific scenarios – the new methods presented in this paper are generic. The paper can be downloaded from http://www.nextgenss.com/papers/defeating-w2k3-stack-protection.pdf.
This is an interesting paper that will no doubt generate a lot of wailing, moaning, and gnashing of teeth. However, the fact remains that MS at least implemented a mechanism, and no doubt they will improve it as people (inside and outside of MS) learn how to defeat it. It’s just another small corner in the Great Security Arms Race™. I must say, though, that I’m not thrilled about Litchfield’s decision to post exploit code in the paper, but maybe I’m just an old fogey.
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Filed under General Stuff
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