ErkkilaDotOrg

I love that Time Warner was able to get my billing straightened out within a few hours, so we could get a DVR (had to break out cable TV services as residential since they don’t allow DVR for commercial sites, and we have Homebusiness Roadrunner out of our house for telecommuting purposes).

I love that I was able to pick up an HD DVR the same day from their East Rochester office, so that I could finish out the Olympics in HD.

I love that I can view and record HDTV, and that the DVR has more than one tuner (although, the HD lineup is still stinky, especially if you don’t want to pay them the extra $5 for HDNet/ESPN, and probably soon Universal).
That being said, Scientific Atlanta’s 8300HD is the worst piece of crap DVR UI I’ve ever used, with the possible exception of the Dishplayer (whom I forgive for being a *very* early DVR).

How, with the far superior Tivo and Replay UIs having been out for years, could Sci-At come up with such a steaming turd? See my continuing comparison.

OK, so I’ve been waiting for the technology to mature before getting an HD DVR.

Waiting for them to work out the copyright issues so they could allow video extraction, without my having to go through an additional analog-to-digital conversion on another box (yes, I’ve been spoiled by ReplayTV and DVArchive) to edit the video and burn a DVD (yes, this is still legal. It’s called fair use, if we’re only making a copy for ourselves).

Waiting for CableCard so that I don’t have to connect the analog output of a cable box to an external DVR that *does* allow video extraction.

Tivo version 3 may be that box. But I don’t feel like waiting months.

Time Warner has the Scientific Atlanta 8300HD. So far, I’m finding it has an extremely crappy user interface compared to either ReplayTV or Tivo. But at least it’s HD, I didn’t have to pay for the box, and when I get sick of it I can just take it back to them and cancel whenever. Like when the Tivo V3’s come out.

A work in progress.
Note the new wiki (in link) icon. Pee insisted either I make a new icon that didn’t cut off Icky’s head, or forgo an icon entirely.

My favorite sandwich…

• crusty french bread
• spicy mustard
• american cheese
• turkey
• bread and butter pickle slices
• crunchy crack

Put on plate, smoosh till it stops making noise, eat !

A net.friend of mine is having a rough time with his step dog. Apparently he found out yesterday that the dog has bone cancer and won’t be around for the infinity that we’d prefer our furry counterparts would stay around for. I’m still sad when I think about personalities that I will no longer get to interact with lupi and peanut .

I’m not really the type to believe in mystical powers, even if hindsight and tricks of the cranium try to make unrelated events seem like they might be tied together. I have no hidden hopes that anything I can do can prevent the inevitable. I don’t remember clapping during peter pan, but it’s possible I went along with the lemming flow and blocked it out.
Having put that out there, I hope the time Goliath has left is good time. My feelings and thoughts are with him and his pack of monkeys.

Happy birthday Icky !
A round of butt sniffing should make it a perfect day :)

A lot of people probably have good memories of their childhood when they watch TV shows or movies from the era in which they grew up. I think this is even more true if you happened to grow up near places that were filmed a lot. For instance, at least one episode of Dukes of Hazzard involving a racetrack was filmed at the Saugus Speedway–which, of course, reminds me of the weekend swapmeets held there, which we used to attend occasionally. Lots of the back road driving on that show reminds me vaguely of the Santa Clarita valley in the mid 80’s, as well (and not at all of the year we lived in the southeast, oddly enough). Always makes me think of how neat it was in the SCV and the surrounding area then–still relatively empty, lots of hills, scrub, onion fields, and not so developed. Very different from how it seemed last time I visited in ‘99, and I’m sure even moreso from how it looks now.

ET, while not specifically shot anywhere I knew, took place in a neighborhood that looked very much like the ones I grew up in. Don’t know where that corn field and pine forest came from, though; certainly not behind my house nor within biking distance.
Then, there is the mother lode of things shot near Vasquez Rocks…old Star Treks, old Battlestar Galacticas, commercials…just reminds me of all the hours I used to spend with my mom in nearby dry streambeds cracking open rocks looking for agate. Also it reminds me of the time my dad worked a night shoot for the TV show Benson and took me along to watch them tape. Very long night, while they sat near a “downed” helicopter and had to stop shooting every time a plane flew over. I remember arriving home cold (got pretty chilly overnight) and falling into bed exhausted.

Since my dad worked in TV (video engineer), a lot of TV shows trigger memories of where we were living at those times…Too Close for Comfort, It’s a Living, Golden Girls…got to go to the set for that last once. The movie The Color Purple reminds me of the time my dad worked on a short video shoot involving Whoopi Goldberg, whom I got to meet (she signed my VHS copy of the movie). Blah blah blah namedropping blah. Reruns of Night Court, along with a signed script (from one of the Hurricane episodes with Brent Spiner as a hick), remind me of my parents’ friend Jeff who had a few different jobs on the show, from what I recall.

Pump up the Volume, while done a couple of years after I left, was shot at my high school.
I’m not sure where this post came from. I fairly often get nostalgic about stuff, but I really wouldn’t want to be living out there now. For one, I’m glad we’ll be paying off our house within my lifetime, and I prefer the near-solitude here to the postage stamp yards I remember from those years. For another, I never got through a winter there without wishing it had snowed (I’m just about feeling that way this year here!) But it’s pretty nice remembering how it was then.