Waiting for The Cable Guy

The appointment is for 8am-noon today, to install an HD converter. I'm at the computer because I have the TV turned around for easy access. I may get bored here and park myself in the bedroom with the non-HD TV set which I moved up there. I have PS2 hooked up to it with my light gun games (the standard game control is way too complicated for me, so I just do first person shooters, and they don't work on an LCD display). There are college football games to watch, too.

It's been a hectic week at work. My boss announced he is leaving early next month to move back to Toronto and start his own company, consulting in the field we're working in. I wish him luck, he's a good person and continues to be a dedicated manager, but I don't believe he has a deep enough background with only 2 years in the industry and only at one company with only pre-release software.  He'll make a go of something up there, eventually.

Meanwhile my lead engineer is still on partial disability, working mostly from home. He's another good person, and we've got a fine rapport built, thanks to both of us having the same goals and wanting to fully understand this very complex cluster of systems we need to beat up on. He'll be putting the final touches tomorrow on a grueling process we have been going through for the past month, getting a totally whacked testbed cleaned up and re-loaded with 5,000 video on demand movies. Hopefully when I come in on Monday I can start full-scale testing which I originally was scheduled to start August 18.

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Last night after dinner I drove out to Alameda, where theater buddy Jon and his fiancé were holding a going away party at the Elks lodge. It's this huge mansion next door to City Hall, very impressive on the outside, not so much on the inside, where it has been optimized for space rather than style. Large rooms without much decoration. I got there around 9:15, and though the eVite said they would be there till 11:30, the last guests were saying their goodbyes within 10 minutes of my arrival. Must be my cologne.

Jon was in a play I directed at Santa Clara Community Theater a couple of years ago, and he has since done a lot of small stage and indie movie work. That's mostly a hobby for him, he owns an electronic cable company, though I think this party was to celebrate his early retirement, he and his SO are taking a trip around the world for a year, starting Real Soon Now. He's got a web journal set up here which I'll keep an eye on. Especially since he's staying in Thailand for months to get his dive instructor certs.

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After cable guy, I'll of course check out the signal on all those new channels, and then have no idea what else.

Tomorrow will be spent with friend Janice, whose late brother's condo is being open-housed, and she doesn't want to be around (he lived four doors down from her). She had a buyer, but the courts have screwed her over by setting her date for mid-October. He didn't leave a will, and she needs to prove she's his next of kin before she can legally sell anything. So we'll go to a movie, and then generally just hang out. Maybe we can go to the Chinese Moon festival in SJ or the folk music picnic near Los Gatos.

Monday work will be massively busy, after work I'll probably go to the BASFA weekly dinner/meeting again. I think this time I'll buy a pun license.

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It's been a week for bad books. First was Naomi Mitchison's Memoirs of a Spacewoman which is headed for the landfill. Stilted writing, disjointed format, and a half-hearted attempt to combine the concepts of a working woman in space with the time-shift challenges of FTL travel on an independent woman. Great ideas, lousy execution.

Robert Aspirin and  Linda Evans teamed up to do a series of time gate books, and I seem to have picked up the 4th one in the trilogy, Ripping Time. Again, lousy writing and disjointed format have killed what could have been a killer read, about a time tour guide trainee on the way to London to solve the Jack The Ripper case. It is chock full of Ripper research, so maybe I'll ship it to cinchntouch aka leatherapron to see if he gets anything more out of it than I did. Or maybe I'll spare him the pain.

The good news is when I did some research on Mitchison, I discovered she published prolifically, and the Spacewoman book was probably an anomoly, so I ordered her best-selling novel The Corn King and the Spring Queen which I started reading at lunch yesterday. It's better written, and looks to be a good read.

Signifying nothing

Cable guy showed up at 9:30, which was excellent. The set-top box he brought along is bigger than my DVD player, surprised the heck out of me because I do this sort of thing for a living, and all I expected was a little A/D converter box which would plug into the place I'd been plugging in the antenna. Instead it plugs into component video and optical audio and it gives me a channel guide just like Tivo, which means I need to use the cable box's controls instead of the TV's. This bummed me out until the light went on - I prefer to watch TV via the Tivo, I like having a channel guide.

So I look at the HD broadcast part of my May 2004 channel listing, and it says the football game I want to watch is on channel 184. I punch 184 into the cable box remote and it ignores me. I bring up the channel guide, and there is no 184. In fact, the only broadcast channel in the list is KQED. So I go online and chat with Tina, the Comcast rep, and she says try channel 2. No, Tina, I say, that's an analog channel. Oh, then try 702. 702? Yeah, the HD channels are now on 702-714 or something like that. She points me to an online channel guide, but it's buried many layers deep, and is only accessible after I've given my full name address and phone number. Not incredibly user-friendly, that.

So I watched some football on HD, and some Discovery Channel (which has super quality on its HD shows) and generally surfed the dozen or so channels. It feels like the early days of FM radio or CDs, when the quality was a giant leap upward, but there wasn't much content available. ESPN and ESPN2 on HD are hosed right now - serious transmission problems make them stutter and strobe in and out, and it drives my surroundsound receiver bananas because it has to sync up again each time there's a glitch, and there's one every couple of seconds. ABC's re-transmission was fine, and I'll check again Monday before I complain.

Anyhow, the cats got some serious lap time this afternoon. They both seem to be able to see the HD TV, they never paid attention to what was on the analog one.

Went out for a massage, which was just plain excellent, then dinner at a place in SJ called Pomodoro and was served by a waitress who was stunning and perky and will be packed into a crate at closing time and sent back to her dorm room at the California State Home for the Terminally Cute. A pity, I would not mind spending the rest of my life with her. She would, I am sure.

What else? My paycheck was in the mailbox this afternoon, and this means I will be angrily phoning the contract agency on Monday, because they have had my direct deposit paperwork for three months now, and none of my inquiries via my local rep have gone anywhere. Need to also lambaste them for being a month late getting me my dental insurance info.

Got my new bluetooth ear piece charged and working. Works very well when it's connected, but sometimes my phone forgets to stay paired if I don't use it for an hour or two.

Maybe I'll take a vacation from LJ. I'm writing too much.