Back online

So just as I was about to get really frustrated with Qwest, UPS showed up with their “welcome letter” and login details about 5 PM Tuesday. It was easy enough to set up the DSL modem; they’ve actually streamlined their install process quite a bit in the last couple of years. Good deal.

Then I went to hook up my existing wireless router to it. No luck. Hooked it back up hardware, did some Googling, and found out that yeah, it’s potentially possible, but not simple, to get my D-Link router to work with their ActionTec DSL modem. :-( Rather than fight with it for hours that I don’t have, I went back to Best Buy, returned the DSL modem, and bought the DSL modem that is wireless-equipped. So, I’m out $50, but I can probably sell the D-Link to recoup part of that cost.

Back home with the right piece of hardware, it took mere minutes to have my wireless network back up and running. I’ll have to relocate the DSL modem this weekend; I really want it in the basement by the PC down there, but I can’t find the phone line. I stowed it up somewhere during the cleanup effort after the Great New Year’s Eve Flood of Aught-Six, and now it doesn’t want to be found. Still, it’s good to be back online. I’m also happy with the DSL speed - cable sure wasn’t supporting 100 Kbps uploads!

iPod Replacement: A for Effort, D for Results

My refurbished iPod showed up via UPS late yesterday afternoon. I have to give Best Buy full marks for sending a quick replacement; they said 3 - 5 business days, and it ended up being only two. They sent an iPod identical to the one I had before (20 GB 4G, white), though they had obviously cleaned this one up, buffed out the scratches, etc. It looked good.

So last night I hooked it up to the laptop to reload the 4100 songs that belong on my iPod. The first time I tried a sync I got a weird Windows delayed write error. Strange, I thought; maybe I just jiggled the cord at the wrong time or something. So I tried again. The second time, it managed to sync about 2 GB worth of music, then stopped syncing. When I disconnected it and tried to play the music from the iPod, uh oh. The iPod didn’t show any music on it at all. When I reconnected it to the PC, it gave me a nasty error and told me that I would need to re-download the iPod firmware and reset it.

At least running iPod firmware updates isn’t so tough these days; it did make me dig up my wall power charger, but I found that and completed the reset. Then I set it up to sync again. As I watched it gallantly attempt to copy the music, I started listning to the iPod - not to the music, but to the device itself, and discovered that the hard drive in it sounds sick. It’s clicking too much, spinning up and then quickly spinning down; I think I found the source of the problem. Again the sync died after 2 GB of transfer; this time it shows that the songs are there, but it locks up if I actually try to play any of them.

So after work this afternoon I will be heading back to BestBuy with my refurbished iPod (still in box) and my service plan paperwork (still conveniently accessible - hadn’t refiled it yet). I am sure they will have me send it in and get yet another refurbished one. I can only hope it goes better than this one did. I think I have to have three replacements die before they’ll actually just give me store credit. :-( I’d be happy enough just to have one that works.

Taking the Plunge to Dish

It’s been a couple of months since I did the math and realized that Mediacom was no longer a good deal for our household. Let’s review. Mediacom provides us digital cable and high-speed internet. They have repeatedly raised prices over the last two years (including a $10/month upper over the past 3 months). They had a real pain-in-the-backside dispute with Sinclair that caused us to lose one of our local channels for a month. We chose to go to Mediacom two years ago now when we dropped our home landline and went to cell phones-only; at that point, Qwest didn’t have the option of getting DSL without having a land line, which priced their service out of our range.

Fast forward to today. Qwest now has the option of getting DSL even if you don’t have regular phone service. Dish Network has an option that will give me pretty much all the same channels I have now. I’ll get a few added benefits from Dish like a dual-DVR system. (The one downer about Dish? I don’t get Versus in the top-200 channel pack, which means I won’t get to see much NHL next year. But heck, for what I’m saving per month, I could order NHL Center Ice next season and still save money.) When all is said and done, we’ll save $35/month for the first year, then when the Dish discount expires, we’ll be saving $25/month. That is, as Bullwinkle J. Moose says, antihistimine money. (“Antihistimine money?” “Not to be sneezed at.”)

So for Qwest DSL, you can either buy the DSL modem for $50, or you can lease it for $5/month ad infinitum, or you can get one from Best Buy. Normally I’d assume Best Buy would be the worst deal of them all. But Best Buy has this deal where if you sign up for Qwest DSL while you’re at the store, you get the DSL modem for free. That’s right, free. No mail-in rebate; they just walk you through the online signup, then they take the modem, throw it in a bag, and hand it to you. I was amazed. The signup went smoothly, appears to have made it to Qwest OK (I got a confirmation email last night), and it’s definitely the same DSL package I would’ve signed up for if I signed up directly from Qwest. So good on you, Best Buy. Now if I get my refurbished iPod yet this week and it’s satisfactory, Best Buy will be on my “very good” list for the week.

Tonight I’ll stop by the satellite TV place on the way home and put in my order for Dish. When I checked with them a few weeks back, the lead time on installs was only a couple of days. I’m guessing I’ll get an install Friday afternoon or Saturday. I’m keeping my fingers crossed that it all goes smoothly.

iPod: the continuing saga

Took my iPod with the bad battery and service plan back to Best Buy today.  They have to send it in for service, and gave me the option of either having my iPod serviced in about 2 weeks, or in the quick replacement plan where they send me a similar iPod, refurbished, right away - i.e. 3 - 5 business days.  I opted for the latter option - the quicker the better, and I’m not tied to my particular piece of hardware - I just want something that works.

I’m hoping it ends up being more like 3 business days instead of 5, but then, I’m just awfully impatient sometimes.  We’ll see how it goes.

iPod Blues

I’ve had my 3G 20GB iPod for two and a half years now, so it’s no surprise that the battery was about due to go.  Well, it pretty well happened last week; I could charge it overnight and still not get more than about 30 minutes worth of play out of it.  :-(

When I bought the iPod, I shelled out an extra $50 for the 3-year service plan, since the Best Buy associate assured me that it would cover replacing the battery, and I knew that batteries were the iPod’s weakness.  So when I get a chance this weekend I will be heading to Best Buy to see what they’ll offer me for service options.  I think it’s unlikely that they’d just offer me a replacement, though if they wanted to offer me $300 towards a new iPod I certainly wouldn’t complain.  More likely they’ll tell me I have to send it in for service and be without it for a month.  Ugh.  I guess I’ll see.  A month would be a long time to go without my iPod.

How quickly we get attached to these electronic gizmos.

A much-needed improvement...

I’ve been using Google Reader for some time now as my feed reader, and one of the more frustrating things has been its really bad email feature. When you find a blog post that you want to share with a friend, the email feature should make it easy, right? Unfortunately, Google Reader ended up dumping a bunch (but not all) of the text from the post in a horribly-formatted email. If I were Google I would’ve been embarrassed that it was even an option. It was that bad.

Today, though, I find that they’ve updated the email feature. Now when you click it, it just opens a little panel right in the blog post, lets you type in an email address (which it will auto-fill from your gmail address book if possible), and add a personal message. The email that it sends out then looks good; it includes all the original formatting, pictures, and a link back to Google Reader. Very nice.

Yet another reason to consider moving to Google Reader if you need a feed reader.

Random Thought #2

I’m sitting on my PC waiting for the Microsoft Visual C++ .NET development suite to install. And on one of the little information boxes that it brings up while I’m waiting, it highlights one of the benefits of MSVC++.NET:

MSVC install note

A “mature and intelligent” developer community? Intelligent, perhaps, but when I think about most of the coders I know, mature?!? :-) To quote Groucho Marx, “I’d never join a club that would have someone like me for a member.”

New toy coming...

Thanks to some unexpected cash influx, I was able to purchase this earlier this week:

It’s a Nikon D70s, a quite nice Digital SLR camera. Only 6 megapixels, but that should be plenty for me.

Fedex promises it’ll be delivered tomorrow… can’t wait. Looking forward to posting more pictures here… you can be bet I’ll be taking a lot of pictures. :-)

Google Reader adds "sort by oldest"

Finally! This was my biggest gripe with Google Reader up until now; the only chronological sort option was newest-to-oldest. But I don’t want to read that way; especially on the conversational blogs that I’m subscribed to, I want to read the conversation in order the way it happened - oldest-to-newest.

So I rejoiced this morning when I saw on the official Google Reader blog that they have now added an oldest-to-newest sort option. Woohoo!

Goodbye FeedLounge, Hello, Google Reader!

I’ve been using FeedLounge for several months now (ever since they came out of beta!) as my online feed reader. It has, without a doubt, the nicest UI (user interface, for my non-geek readers) of any feed reader, online or off, that I’ve ever come across. At the time I signed up, none of the other online feed readers were much good; Bloglines was the best of the bunch, but still not great. So I ponied up my $5/month and felt like it was an OK deal.

The convergence fo a few events have caused my thinking to change in the past week. First, I ran across the new and improved Google Reader. And boy, is it improved. There are still a few little things I wish it had (like choosing your sort order - I like to read from oldest to newest), but for the most part, it does everything I want a feed reader to do. Second, FeedLounge has been through a couple of frustrating hiccups this week, two separate issues causing multi-hour downtimes. Third, I’d like to save the $5/month. So, I dumped my OPML file from FeedLounge, imported it into Google Reader, and I’m good to go. I cancelled my FeedLounge subscription this morning.

Now I know Geof will have some comment to post here; he’s been using FeedLounge since the very beginning, maybe even before that; heck, he even had a version of it named in his honor! And I can’t fault him for sticking with it; it’s a great product. But market forces really do work; given the choice of a lower-priced, similar-and-acceptable functionality product, I’ll make the switch.