InfiniteTides

My friend (jeez, did I just call her a friend?  I must not be awake yet.  I mean “co-worker”) Stacy gave me her notebook yesterday at work.  She’s been getting the BSoD (blue screen of death) out of the blue (pun intended), and wants me to take a crack at fixing it.  On my dinner break I booted up and found that she had not properly installed the video card drivers, so I did that.

Optimistically, I called her at home and told her that I thought that might have fixed the problem as I hadn’t seen the BSoD.  She was happy to hear it and asked if I would still take it home and install Linux for her.  This morning, however, the BSoD struck again while downloading an anti-virus program.  The video card drivers hadn’t fixed the problem.  Right now, I’m running CHKDSK.  It has found 2 errors (corrupt data) on the hard drive, and seems to be stuck at 66% of file data verification for the last hour.  That’s normally not a good thing.

Stacy won’t be happy to hear it, but I think her hard drive is defective.  There’s no point in trying to install OpenSUSE on it like she wanted.  She’ll need to replace the hard drive if she hopes to sell the notebook and buy a new one.  I suppose I should start pricing hard drives and notebooks for her since that will probably be the next thing she asks me to do.

Did you know that you don’t need an iPod in order to listen to podcasts or watch vidcasts?  Recently, I told someone at work that I listen to podcasts, and they said they didn’t, because they don’t own an iPod.  Little did they know that all they needed in most cases is a web browser like Mozilla Firefox or Internet Explorer.  These days, most podcasts can be listened to via a flash player.  You only need a digital audio player if you want to take your downloaded podcasts with you.

If you want to get all geeky and aggregate your podcasts to listen to later or to put on your player, you need some sweet software such as Juice or iTunes.  Then, all you need to do is copy and past podcast RSS feeds you’ll find on podcast websites into your podcast aggregator.  So check out the great list of podcasts over at Digg to find something you’ll enjoy listening to or watching.

Some of the podcasts I listen to include:

1Up Yours
Cranky Geeks
Systm
The 1Up Show
The Skeptics’ Guide To the Universe
Wait Wait…Don’t Tell Me
GFW Radio
This Week In Media

Since I’ve found my new home, the biggest and toughest decision I’ve had to face has been choosing an internet service provider.  This should be a no-brainer.  I should go with cable, because it’s generally faster with less latency.  However, the cable provider in Defiance is the evil Time Warner Cable.

Why is Time Warner evil?  Because they are testing metered billing of internet use.  This has got to be one of the most asinine ideas a company has had since AT&T wanted to charge YouTube for bandwidth.  Metered billing works like this:  the customer pays a rate for maximum amount of bandwidth from the ISP.  Then, on top of this fee (which is apparently only covers the customer’s right to download at a certain speed), the ISP measures the amount of data the customer is downloading/uploading.  If the customer exceeds a predetermined amount of data, they are charged an additional fee.

If the ISP doesn’t reveal this pricing scheme up front, such a thing seems a little fraudulent.  They lure you in with the promise of super fast download speeds, and then when you make use of those speeds over a certain amount, they slap you with a fee that probably was not part of the package when the customer signed the service agreement.  Of course those agreements always contain a clause stating that they ISP may change the terms at any time without notice to the customer who may not cancel the agreement without being charged an early termination fee.

In Texas, where Time Warner is to start bending their customers over testing customer tolerance of metered internet, they will charge $29.95/month for 768 kb/s (crappy-slow) with a 5GB/month cap.  Or $54.90/month for 15 mb/s and a 40 GB/month cap.  It’s pretty obvious that Time Warner is trying to steer their customers toward the higher priced service, hoping that the vast majority of them don’t come anywhere close to hitting the cap.  But if they do, it will cost the customer $1 per GB that they go over.

I was leaning toward cable internet as opposed to DSL until I started reading stories like this one.  I foresee Time Warner (and other cable internet providers) extending metered internet everywhere in the near future unless there is a revolt among their customers.  Therefore, I’ll probably go with Embarq (used to be Sprint) DSL since it’s cheaper, and they probably won’t try to cap my usage.

Last night after work, I fell asleep on the couch watching The Colbert Report.  There’s nothing new about that.  I woke up shortly after 2:00 AM, turned off the TV and stereo, and went to bed.  At about 5:30 AM, I woke up to voices from the living room.  Dull light shown through the gap in my door, and I realized in my sleepy state that it was the TV.  I’m pretty sure I turned it off.  Chances are that I didn’t, but I can’t explain how I didn’t hear it on when I went to bed or why I didn’t see the light coming through the gap in the door.

At first I thought that maybe the station I had been watching before I went to bed had gone black at 2:00 AM or something.  It hadn’t.  Comedy Central shows programming (some of it paid) all through the night.  My next thought was that maybe my stereo has a “wake” feature, but I couldn’t find it in the manual.  There is no button for it on the remote.

Another possible explanation is that a ghost turned on the stereo which fed the DirecTV signal to the TV (which I likely left on).  Tonight, I’ll ask the ghost to keep the volume down.

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