Oddball Update

Life has been a bit of a whirlwind for me as of late. Not that this is necessarily bad; we’ve just come back from a very nice 4-day vacation in Disney World, for example, and I would hardly call that a bad thing. Before that, we spent a week in Lawrence, Kansas, during which I visited my company’s headquarters for the first time. Although there were some unpleasant things about Kansas — the bland food, the seeming lack of things to do, the horrible weather on our last day there — there were lots of good things too, namely the fact that I got to meet all of my colleagues face-to-face for the first time. And driving on the roads of Lawrence was way fun!

Now we’re back at home, but life isn’t quite ready to return to 100% nominal conditions. Since I took a few days off from work this week, I need to make up some of that by working on Saturday and Sunday. It’s not something I relish, but after just coming off a vacation, I feel energized and ready to face it. (It’s next Friday when I’ll be feeling the exhaustion set in!) Tomorrow, I also need to take down the hurricane shutters from my parents’ home. I did ours as soon as we got home on Thursday, in a little under an hour. The weather was breezy and beautiful, which was a bonus.

So tomorrow starts what I sincerely hope is the final de-shuttering of this season. I’ll be removing the shutters as soon as I get up, before I start my work for the day. It should take about 90 minutes, maybe 2 hours if I remember right. My iPhone is updating to the just-released software version 2.1 now, in preparation for its use tomorrow as an iPod while I work on the house. And this time, I’m leaving the doorwall rails in…just one less thing to do in case, God forbid, the shutters have to go on again.

This is shaping up to be a rambling stream-of-consciousness entry, so click on the link below to keep reading.

In technology news, I am one step closer to getting a Slingbox. For those who don’t know, a Slingbox will let us watch our TiVo from Thailand — or anywhere else in the world, so long as we have an Internet connection. This will make our extended trip in Asia that much more comfortable, since we’ll have the full bevy of recorded shows — even live TV — at our disposal. And with Battlestar and 24 set to return while we’re away, this is definitely a good thing!

Until recently, I had actually decided not to get a Slingbox because I learned they don’t have built-in wireless connectivity. Since my TiVo is at the complete opposite end of the house from my router, this seemed like a serious problem. But then, a series of unrelated events fell into place that suddenly opened a new avenue of possibility for me.

Comcast (our ISP) just implemented a 250 GB monthly bandwidth cap. While I don’t think we use anywhere near that much, I was interested in installing custom firmware on my Linksys WRT54G to keep track of just how much we do use. I wanted to use the Tomato firmware, but my WRT54G is a version 2.0, which has a rebooting problem when Tomato is used. The newer WRT54GL, however, supposedly doesn’t suffer from this issue because it uses a newer Broadcom chipset.

So I thought, why not kill two birds with one stone? I’ll get a new WRT54GL, put Tomato on it and set it up as my main router. I’ll then take my old WRT54G (currently running Thibor 15c firmware) and reconfigure it for Wireless Ethernet Bridge mode. Then I can place it near my TiVo, plug in a Slingbox, and have it forward the signal to my main router. Bang! Problem solved!

And so it is done. The two routers are set up and working perfectly. Now all that’s left to do is pick up a Slingbox Solo!

Now that the fall TV season has started, I’m trying to catch up on some TV programming that I’ve had languishing around my TiVo’s hard drive for weeks or even months. While I previously raved about Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, I never finished watching the last three episodes of the previous season. The problem is, once I got to “The Demon Hand,” I noticed with great dismay that our local Fox affiliate forgot to throw the HD switch and I got the whole episode in disgusting SD. I never finished it, nor the two episodes that came after.

A couple weeks ago, though, Fox was re-running all of the Terminator episodes from last season — in HD, for a change! — and I re-recorded “The Demon Hand.” With season two underway as of this week, I’ve got some catching up to do — so I’m starting tonight, as soon as I finish this entry.

Last night, I also checked out the pilot episode of the new J.J. Abrams series called Fringe. It’s about an FBI agent who gets pulled into this top-secret task force that’s investigating “The Pattern,” a series of paranormal occurrences which are happening with increasing frequency, and all appear to be connected in some way. Think of it as “The X-Files” for today’s ADHD afflicted audiences.

Overall, I’d give the Fringe pilot a 3 out of 5. It was good enough to make me come back next week and see more, but there were some things that weren’t so hot. Certain elements were just over-the-top in a very Smallville (read: cheesy) sort of way, like the overdone malevolence of the “Massive Dynamic” corporation. Also, the most unbelievable moment came at us in the first ten minutes: An airliner, aboard which everyone has died a horrible and disgusting death, safely lands itself at Boston’s Logan airport — because, conveniently, the plane and the airport were both equipped with some fancy new autopilot system. Wow, guys — that’s laying it on thick. Maybe you should have written about disgusting deaths aboard a cruise ship instead?

All that said, while I had my gripes, I thought the show sets up an intriguing series. The sci-fi geek in me wants to know more about this “Pattern,” about the weird human experiments and the strange stuff. Knowing that Fringe comes from the same team that brought us Lost, the poster child for “mystery for mystery’s sake,” I recognize that this is dangerous — because we might never have our questions answered. But I’m going to take a chance and see if the writing team can actually summon the balls to care about their audience, and not just string us along to one dark and confusing place after another and then leave us hanging for 16 months between seasons. (Yeah, I’m a cynical old bastard, ain’t I?)

Lastly, I’m also starting to have devious thoughts about redesigning this website — again — but right now that’s all they are, just thoughts. I have some ideas for a somewhat more contemporary look, but haven’t got enough of it ironed out in my head to start putting anything together. Not just yet. But I warn you, it is coming.

Anyway, that’s gonna be it for tonight. I’ll try to start posting here more often — this fine layer of dust on the furnishings is unacceptable.

Tagged as Fringe, Life, Media, Randomness, Terminator, TV + Categorized as Life, Media, Randomness, Media/Television