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That’s all I’m going to say and actually, just about all I’m allowed to say. Almost 1000kbps!

Ford, ya know, you piss me off sometimes. I’m trying to get all the parts ready to bleed my brakes and the Ford manual doesn’t tell you the proper size wrench you need for the nipple. I tried various sizes on the front passenger brake and determined that 8mm was too small and 10mm was too big, so it had to be 9mm. I go to Home Depot, pick up the wrench, come home and it doesn’t work! I return it, thinking I must need SAE, not metric, and then I find out that it didn’t work because I tested it on the rear! Turns out, you need 9mm for the front and 8mm for the rear. Thanks, Ford!

Wow, it just won’t die down. I have previously mentioned the trials and tribulations of Mark Jen, but he made the “Business 2.0 2005’s 101 Dumbest Moments in Business“:

18. Perhaps they should change the motto to “Don’t be stupid.”
New Google employee Mark Jen adds a post to his blog in which he says he spent his first day in an HR presentation about “nothing in particular.” Apparently, Jen snoozed through the company’s strict disclosure rules. In a subsequent post, he reveals that the company expects unprecedented revenues and profit growth in 2005, projections that Google has yet to share with Wall Street. Jen soon receives another presentation from HR: a pink slip.

Thanks to the wonderful galleryadd perl script, my gallery is back! I’m using a fairly complex theme and haven’t quite ironed out all of the bugs, but all of the images are back online. All of the old image links are broken, but I may try to come up with a rewrite script to redirect people.

Rumors have been running rampant about a new camera to replace the Canon 20D. Canon finally announced the 30D and it’s basically the 20.5D. The sensor and image processing abilities are the same but just about everything else has been refined.

Canon definitely listens to users since a large number of little issues have been addressed (feel free to read all about it here). When the announcement came and was effectively quite disappointing, I was a bit shocked. The more I look into the list of changes, the more I realize this was a fairly comprehensive list of changes and there is much more to a camera than megapixels and image quality. When I upgrade from my 300D, I might give this one a look.

Note to self: Re-rip your copy of Bad Religion 80-85. Not only is the copy on your computer missing a couple of tracks, this is now out of print, replaced by a remastered copy of How Could Hell Be Any Worse?

I do have a copy (no, not an original) of Into the Unknown that I break out from time to time for shits and giggles. Nothing like a little synth-rock from my favorite punkers to get the day started.

Ok, most of my Media Center issues are now resolved. Based on all the sites complaining about “Media Center Receiver Service” issues from Media Center Rollup 2, I figured I had the same issue. I wasn’t getting anywhere with uninstalling and reinstalling the updates and .NET frameworks, so I knew the issue had to be something else. I decided to look in the Event Viewer and I saw the error was always reported at “fault address 0x00000254”. Looking this up separately brought in a few more suggestions. One was simply “check your codecs”. I had installed an all-in-one codec pack as soon as I built the machine since this was going to be media-centric. Uninstal l that a BOOM, everything works.

For some reason, the .ax files registered by the codec pack conflict with the receiver service. Now my only issue is that my new router doesn’t seem to like 802.11a traffic. I get barely 802.11b speeds. The router also supports 802.11g, but my laptop is 802.11b, which throttles the whole connection. For now, I can either use my laptop or the 360 as an extender, but not both at the same time.

My TV card came in and I’m all excited about descending into DVR hell, but I’m getting hit with the “media center receiver service” issue. I’ve spent roughly 2.5 hours on this issue so far and none of the workarounds I’ve found are helping. It seems related to .NET 1.1, which isn’t terribly surprising since I had a bitch of a time getting .NET 1.1 set up properly for MCE.

Things are starting to look up, a bit:

  • The 360 and Media Center are now talking to each other. I figured out that just because I’ve added new media to the MCE doesn’t mean that I’ve added new media to the extender (360). I didn’t think they would use different access lists, but oh well.
  • I have at least recovered the directory structure for my photo gallery. The thumbnails are all there, the heirarchy is all there…. just the actual photos are not. Slight problem, eh? I think I can muck around with the DB enough to fix it, if only I can remember more mysql commands than “show”, “explain”, “select” and “update”.

Keeping the shitstream going:

  • Arrived at my doctor’s appointment 20 minutes early, didn’t get to see the doc until 50 minutes later AND he gave me less than two minutes of face-to-face time.
  • Since the appointment ran so late, I get to work at that purgatory period: after the bulk of employees have arrived but before lunch. The parking lots at work are double and triple parked by 10 AM so arriving at 11 AM is a lesson in frustration, futility and lots of gear changes. I can’t find a spot at the local lot so I got to park a couple of blocks away. No big deal, unless it rains. This is Seattle. This conclusion left up to the reader.
  • My favorite internet station, WOXY, the station I listen to every minute I’m at work, is moving to a pay model. $5/month, I’d think about it, $10/month, I’m not so sure.