Author: Michael

Today started quietly as I made an electric smoker out of a trash can. I gave the smoker a quick test before starting out on the other events of the day. When I get a chance, I’ll write up a page about making the smoker.
We got rolling with a trip to the mall to get the girls some shoes. Success was found early with each girls getting two pairs of sneakers. We celebrated with candy and lunch at the mall.
Zoe had her soccer game at 2 PM and then went to go play at a friends house. That left me with time to mix up a dry rub and get a pair of top sirloin steaks smoking. I know that tri-tip is the preferred item to smoke, but the market was out and the butchers recommended this.
I got the meat into the smoker and sat down with a beer to wait it out. While I was sitting outside, supervising the smoke, I finished the Cory Doctorow book, A Place So Foreign.
The book was a good set of short stories. I had already read two of them in other publications, A Place So Foreign in the now defunct SciFi Age magazine, and Ownz0red at Salon.com. The other stories were good, but tantalizingly short. After tasting a full novel of a fully concieved world in Down & Out in the Magic Kingdom, all of the stories left me wanting more.
You can check out more about the book at Cory’s site, where you can even download the book for free.
Around 8:30 or so, the meat was finally done and I pulled it out to rest for a 1/2 hour. It was most tasty as Michele & James can attest.
To wrap up the day I watched Samurai Rebellion. I had Tivo’ed it the day before and enjoyed it immensely. Toshirô Mifune plays the lead character and is fantastic as usual. The only bad thing is that the recording ended before the movie was over. I don’t know what happens in the very end! If you know, please tell me what happens after the battle in the field.
Tomorrow I’ll be looking around to find a place to rent the film.
Time for sleep.

Many loyal Cruft readers had questions about the size of Tivo “hours” storage in relation to hard drive size. I have stolen this paragraph directly from the Weaknees site, a place you can buy upgrades to your Tivo.

How are the number of hours calculated on a TiVo?
TiVo standalone units (i.e., TiVos without a built-in DirecTV receiver) have four levels of recording quality. At the best recording quality, the rule of thumb is that the number of hours is equal to 0.35 times the number of gigabytes. At the lowest recording quality (basic), the number of TiVo recording hours is 1.2 times the number of gigabytes. Because drive sizes vary slightly (an 80 gigabyte drive may be 81.9 gigabytes or 80.0 gigabytes, for example), the exact number of hours in any given TiVo cannot be calculated precisely in advance. DirecTiVo units generally get about 0.875 hours per gigabyte of storage space. The hours reported on a DirecTiVo is a maximum amount; the actual number of hours yielded will vary based on the type of shows you record (eg. sports take up more space on a hard drive than do, say, soap operas, due to the amount of motion).

So, let’s do the math here. We’ll do the simple case first.

If Martin has a DirecTivo with a 40 GB drive, he should expect 35 hours (40 GB * 0.875 hr/GB = 35 hours). If Martin was to upgrade to a 120 GB drive, he should expect 105 hours (120 GB * 0.875 hr/GB = 105 hours)

If I have a standalone Tivo with a 30 GB drive that I use in High Quality mode, with a 30 GB hard drive there should be about 18 hours (30 GB * 0.6 hr/GB = 18 hr). If I upgraded to a 120 GB drive I roughly have 72 hours (120 GB * 0.6 hr/GB = 72 hr).

So the rough effect of my upgrade was to take me from 18 hours to 72 hours of recording time.

The actual amount of storage will vary depending on the quality I choose to use for each show. Most of the kids shows record at Medium quality and most of our favorite shows record at Best Quality.

Make sense?

I woke up early and walked into the study to find the drive copy was complete.

I placed the new drive back in the Tivo and carefully reconnected it to the TV system.

Power was applied and happily the Tivo booted up just fine. All my content is intact and everything appears normal. My original Series 1 30GB Tivo now has a 120GB drive in it! The Tivo only thinks it a 30GB drive though.

Tonight I ‘grow’ the drive partition to the full 120 GB size. Hopefully it will go just as smooth.

As I type this, my Tivo drive is being mirrored to a new 120GB hard drive.

If everything goes successfully, tonight I will have the new drive installed and working back in the Tivo.

*knocks on wood*

If you want to try this yourself, go read the Hinsdale How-To on upgrading Tivos.

Well, I can get the audio and video streams, but it’s way to loud to hear anything.

People like my wifi setup and ask questions about it, but I can’t follow much of what’s going on inside the room 15 feet from me.

My kingdom for a set of pc speakers…

I’m having trouble getting my work email at home, so I thought I’d goof off.
Referrers
Like most webloggers, I peruse my stats and look at what pages are linking to my site. These are commonly know as ‘referrers’. I look at these regularly. OK, I check them daily.
Many of the referrers are search engines. As an example, here are the top keyword searches from this month so far including the number of times someone has gotten to my site from a search engine.
Atari 10-in-1 57
how to make a cup of tea 20
important quotes 19
buildabear 15
crawfish boil 13
history of hdtv 12
baseball cap washer 12
cantenna 12
washing baseball caps 9
Clan MacGregor scotch 7
“Pictures of dead people” 7
burger king tacos 6
Dr. Pepper and the imposters 6
Beyond the keyword, it’s always interesting to see the site that point to me.
Here are a few examples…
An eBay auction is pointing at my cantenna page. If he sells it, I wonder if I get a cut.
Adventures into the Well Known has a link to me somewhere. When I read the About page I saw that he must be part of Matt’s circle of DC bloggers. I then read that he grew up in Lawrence, Kansas. Small world. Guess who else grew up in Lawrence, Kansas? Yeppers, Martin and Jennifer!
There’s a link from g2gk.com. I’m not sure what g2gk.com is about, but they like the site.
That’s just an example of what I see in the referrer links. Now I need to see if I can check my work email.

Wow, 20 blurkers forced into the light. Well done folks.
As promised, here is a picture of Michele in the new car.

It’s a been a light week for weblogging and heavy week for work. The company is trying to get it’s shit together, but it’s not easy to turn the wheel of the ship. A few of us try to sneak into the wheelhouse and spin the wheel until someone tells us to stop.
The good thing about work today was that I got to play with the HDTV Tivo. It is quite sweet. The picture loks great adn they are recording the full ATSC data stream, and aren’t compressing it at all. It’s probably a year away from being in stores, but I lust after it already. The picture is quite tasty.
I also had a chance to play with the Series 2 Tivos with the new features. We don’t watch enough TV to justify to have two, but the access from the internet is enticing.
Lastly, I got the door prize at the meeting. It was a Wristlinx wrist FRS/GMRS radio. I tried it out with Zoe a bit but everything was distorted. I think that they could have been too close. I’ll try it again tomorrow outside.
Linkage:
We had the Superbowl party on Sunday and Brad wrote up the story of the broken window.
My wife, Michele appears to have her weblog groove on.
Via Rebecca Blood, here is the crayon stain removal page.

I moved the beer from the primary fermenter to the secondary fermenter. I measured the specific gravity and the rough calculation is 4% beer. Not bad. A few more days to eek out the last bit of fermentation and I’ll bottle it.
Tivo News:
Tivo announced several new options today at CES. They are all great. I don’t knwo which one to get…
You can get a Tivo with a DVD player built-in.
You can get a Tivo with broadand access that you can access from the internet and move clips to other Tivos in your house.
You can get a Tivo that records and plays HDTV.
Health Update:
Will all you stop worrying about me? Sheesh it’s not like I’m gunna keel over.

Ready? Here we go.
After a several day posting hiatus, I am back. I’m not quite back in the groove, but I’m back.
Thanksgiving was fun. We enjoyed the traditional roasted turkey and a smoked turkey as well. I brined the turkey and Martin smoked it. It was kind of fun to start smoking the turkey the night before. Martin, Casey, & I drank a few beers and poked at the fire for a while. It was nice for me since I went home and went to sleep. Poor Martin was up tending the smoker all night.
My father loved the smoked turkey, so I expect we’ll be smoking another one next year.
I finished reading Vanishing Act last week. I really enjoyed it. It was a solid read with a good story arc and plenty of surprises that kept me guessing as to what would happen next. Thomas Perry’s writing about the underworld is fantastic. I still think Metzger’s Dog is his best story, but this one ranks up with Butcher’s Boy and Sleeping Dogs.
On the linkage front, go read this Being Daddy. It’s funny ’cause it’s true.
Geocaching front: We went geocaching on Sunday. Here’s the story of the Where the Wild Things Are cache. I did another geocache today, but I haven’t written it up yet.
Children front: As a Hanukah present, we took the girls on a trip to Build-a-Bear. People without children may find this strange.
Technology front: I picked a new toy for Michele. One of the drawbacks of the MSN Companion we have in the kitchen is that it does not play audio. I bought a modded Virgin Webplayer as a replacement. It has a hard drive and Windows 98 installed and is a full computer. After a few minutes of fiddling, I had it playing MP3s and streaming audio. Michele is happy.

I was pondering a few things about weblogs and wrote a couple emails off to Rebecca Blood and Matt Haughey. They are fairly well known experts about weblogs.

After exchanging a few emails, I decided to buy their books on weblogs. Rebecca’s book, The Weblog Handbook, came quickly from Amazon. Matt’s book, We Blog: Publishing Online with Weblogs, comes out this week and has not arrived
I took Thursday off for my aborted geocaching trip, so I was happy when The Weblog Handbook arrived in the mail. I grabbed a soda pop and began to read. The book is only 160 pages so I was able to read it during the day. I’m a fast reader and I was familiar with the material, so it went quickly.

Here’s my book review

Rebecca’s book has some really good information in it. At first, I thought, is there enough info about weblogs to write an entire book about? After reading it, it can definitely say there is.

The book goes over the origins of weblogs and identifies the different types. I’ve been on the web a long time and thought I knew everything there was to know about weblogs. I wrote my first weblog type post back in 1997. The first couple chapters go into good detail about exactly what happened.

I disagree a little about the origins of weblogs though. I’ve been wasting time on the internet since 1991. Back in the day, everything was text based. To learn about someone else on the net, one of the first things you could do was to ‘finger‘ them. When you fingered someone, you’d get a basic set of info they had written to identify themselves. One of the files that could be used was known as the .plan file. The plan file was a relic of the time when the net was primarily an academic place. A .plan would be used to describe the plan of study. As the scope of the net became larger, the plan files became something that people could change a bit more regularly to reflect what was going on. Before there were webcams, you could finger devices on the net, like a coke machine, and the .plan would describe their status.

In my mind, these .plan files were the true origin of weblogs. It’s a bit of a stretch to see it if you have never lived in the pre-browser internet. But trust me, it’s true.

Enough of my navel gazing, back to the book. Rebecca has some sound advice for someone wanting to start a weblog or make their existing weblog better. I thought the chapter on Finding an Audience is great. She is absolutely correct that regular visitors are the currency of weblogs.

Whether people like to admit it or not, what people are craving with weblogs is attention. Everyone checks their referrer logs. If someone doesn’t check their referrer logs, it’s because they don’t know how.  She lists several good and practical methods to get people to visit your site and what to expect when they eventually do come.

The chapter on Weblog Community and Etiquette should be required reading before you can join blogger.com or start any other form of weblog.  I think the idea of having an ethical code for your weblog is a good one.  Since my weblog is kinda fluffy, I don’t really run into these issues much.  But there are many people who write about serious issues and they should at least attempt to have a code that they try to adhere to on an ongoing basis. I have read many sites that post anything without the least attempt to verify it’s truthfulness.

On a more practical note, the book is full of helpful tips and how-tos for someone learning the basics of weblogging and online community.  It’s long enough to be worth the money, but it’s short enough to finish the whole thing in a couple sittings.  The three appendix sections do a good job of explaining the basics of creating a weblog, creating hyperlinks, and using third party weblog software.

I wholeheartedly recommend the book to anyone that finds weblogging interesting.