We recently decided to cancel our cable TV service. At $75/mo for what they consider BASIC service, it just wasn’t a good *value*. We still have internet service through the cable company, and that product has been very good. After waiting for an hour on the phone to complete the cancellation, the high pressure sales guy I got transferred to at the ‘disconnect desk’ asked me what he could do to keep me as a customer. I said I’d like to pick which channels I wanted to pay for – I could rattle them off, but suffice to say there are definitely a few (even after the recent cancellation of the Food channel) that I wish I could tune into once in a while. He laughed and said “nobody offers an ala carte option!”
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The weather was glorious, about 65 degrees F (I prefer days that aren’t so hot), and I got over to CP for a morning ride on Saturday. There weren’t too many folks there when I arrived, maybe 5 or 6 vehicles. Its only the third time I’ve been over there this season, and the second time I went I rode with a friend late after work and we only did 6.5 miles and one Black Diamond. This time I was going to hit them all and try to make it under an hour. The whole trail is about 9 miles when you do all the optional routes, and at the end of last season I was able to complete it in about 50 minutes if I booked. I’m rusty though, as I could tell from my first time marker (3 minutes over), but I wasn’t tiring, so I decided to attempt to do all three of the impossible hills in the back. I never make the first one, but the CLIMB guys had lain down some wood chips and the trails were really dry, and for the first time (ever) I made all three hills! I finished at 1 hr 7 mins, but it was a good ride. The new XTR high-rise dérailleur makes a big difference on the climbs, making it alot easier to get into the right gear on the way up.

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After I came back to work after the holiday, there were several mysterious system failures to investigate. The solutions ranged from the ridiculously simple (it was unplugged) to the arcane (no display, no boot-up, no beep codes). Unfortunately this last was on a fairly important machine used for software development in the engineering department. It took just a few minutes to eliminate most of the possible causes for this problem (tightening cables, unplugging USB devices, reseating memory, etc.) and I soon had the machine booting into Windows but the system process was running at 99% and it was basically unusable. The user claimed that there had been a Windows update on the last day before holiday and I suspected that the machine had been turned off in a rush mid-update (or there was some virus at work). I certainly couldn’t prove either yet, and it didn’t matter. The user notoriously forgets to check in code and it was imperative that I get all data off immediately and over to a working machine so work could continue, plenty of time for post-mortem after the user was back in business.

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Update 12/27/2008: If you have a Sensation mower, you might like to help maintain and expand the Sensation Wikipedia article or join the Sensation Mowers Users Group at Yahoo! for help with your old Sensation mower

It’s been pretty dry around these parts lately, and I haven’t had the mower out in several weeks. The mower, you may recall, is an old Sensation with a 4hp Briggs and Stratton engine. It’s been kept in the shed since 1983, and though pretty dirty most of the time, it was still running well when I last used it. The grass was starting to look like it needed a trim, so I hauled the mower out and filled it up with gas. I was expecting a little trouble since the last time I used it, I had run it out of gas (which I usually try to avoid), as I knew there was some grass and debris in the gas tank. About 10 pulls on the rope later I realized that I had a little more work to do than usual to get her going again. Everything felt normal on the pull, you could hear the normal chugging of the piston, it just wasn’t firing up.

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In 2002 I got what was then the still relatively new m500 Palm Pilot. This is a greyscale version based on the older Palm Vx series form factor, they also had a color one at that time (the m505), but I wasn’t impressed with the screen I saw and I knew the battery wouldn’t last quite as long as on a greyscale model. I used the Palm daily, finding a multitude of free, open source and some paid software to make it more useful. I knew that the battery wouldn’t last forever, but mine seemed to be lasting a whole lot longer than anyone else’s that I knew of. It wasn’t until the middle of last year that the battery finally bit it, and three years of almost daily use came to an end. If I had known it would be so easy to resurrect it, I wouldn’t have procrastinated so long… (read on for links to the great programs I’ve used and how I brought it back to life)
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