Cruftbox: My Box of Cruft

Busy day. Several different meetings in several parts of town. Breakfast, lunch, and dinner all in nice places around town.
New York is one expensive town.
OK, time to go out and smoke cigars.

WiFi access at the Starbucks at Central Park West is good. I’m sitting here with a coffee and obviously typing away. There isn’t much for me to do today, so I am going to wander around NY a bit.
Michele asked me to pick up some fabric for her down in the Village, but the store isn’t open yet. Perhaps they are closed on Sunday. So until I figure out what to do, I’ll just sit, surf, and drink my coffee.
My location and how to reference it in NYC is a bit of mystery to me. Supposedly this area is called ‘midtown’. I don’t know the zip code. Are zip codes important in NY? How will I find a movie?
There are three young Italian women sitting nearby. One of them has been ranting nonstop about something for 15 minutes. Every couple of minutes she pauses and says, ‘eh?’ waiting for the others to acknowledge here. They murmur something and then the rant continues. I wish I spoke Italian so at least I knew what her problem was. It’s really bugging her.

Currently I’m at 41,000 feet in a private jet. It’s 12:50PM PDT.
As I mentioned earlier, I’m flying to New York today. Yesterday I got a phone call from the company travel group and they asked if I wanted to fly out on the company’s private jet instead of on United. What else could I say but “Yes!”
This is one of the kick ass perks of being inside on the evil trans-national corporation.
I think the plane is a Gulfstream something. There’s about 10 seats and a galley. The chairs are more like Lazy-Boy recliners than aircraft seats. Each seat has a personal monitor jack for watching DVDs, music channels and even 110 AC power outlets. Everything is made of wood and leather. There are only 5 passengers, 4 adults and 1 child. It is quite a luxurious way to travel.
America is scrolling by beneath me, a patchwork of farms, desert, highways, rivers and mountains. This flight is not making me want to take more flights, it’s making me want to drive across the country and see all the things I’m flying over.

I’m leaving an hour for New York. I’ve got a business trip and I’ll be in NYC for a few days.
Hopefully the hotels and local hot spots will allow me to blog from Manhattan.
I hope my liver can take four days in The City That Doesn’t Sleep.

Wandering the net I stumbled onto a story about raising the Tricolor from the English Channel on Critical Section The Tricolor was a huge car carrier ship that sunk last December loaded with expensive European cars.
The way they are solving it is pretty damn cool.
Be sure to check out the whole Critical Section site. It’s a pretty cool weblog.

I finished my most recent book a few days ago and am ready to start a new one. On my nightstand is Illium, the new book by Dan Simmons. It’s a big book around 600 pages that will take me a while to read. I’m not sure I feel like a reading another long novel right now.
I am looking forward to the Tivo Hacks book, but it’s not out yet. I’ve looked over the table of contents and it appears to be chock full of cool stuff for me to play with. There’s another two books coming out, Hacking the Tivo and Hacking Tivo, but neither of them are out yet either.
I guess I could pick up the Google Hacks book, it’s out. But the Windows XP Hacks book, is you guessed it, not out yet.
Maybe it’s time to go off the normal path and finally read Guns, Germs, and Steel, supposedly a great book on history.
What to do, what to do? Perhaps a trip to the library is in order.
Any suggestions?

I stumbled onto this at BBSpot. It’s amazingly funny.
That’s all for now. Back to surfing the web aimlessly for you.

I finished one of my birthday books today.
Altered Carbon – Richard Morgan
This novel is mix of old style detective novels and cyberpunk. In the future the technology exists to move a person’s consciousness from body to body. Death is avoidable for a price and bodies are regularly sold as ‘sleeves’.
Takeshi Kovacs is a specially trained warrior/diplomat known as an Envoy that is pulled out of storage work on a case for a weathly man from Earth. The story launches into a firestorm of action and plot twists.
The author doesn’t let the technology get in the way of what is really a detective novel. Piece after piece is laid as you discover what is going on along with the protaganist from his point of view rather than seeing everything from the omniscient POV that is common in many Sci-Fi novels.
If you like crime and detective novels, this book is for you. It’s a quick read, and the pace is good for reading a chapter at a time.
Tivo
Over at PVR Blog, Matt was talking about video extraction. He mainly talks about the difficuly of doing it on the Series 2 boxes. I decided to make up a page about how you do the extraction on a Series 1.
You can read it here: Video Extraction from a Tivo
As usually, I put in some highly detailed graphics….

Friday I took the new Gold Line to work. I got on at the Mission station and rode it to Union Station, where I switched to the Red Line. From the Red Line station at Universal City I took bus 96 to the office. $3 for the fares. I had plenty of time to read my book and I didn’t have to worry about anything.
I was quite pleased. I only wish LA had an even more extensive rail system.
That night I took the train back to Hollywood & Vine to meet up with Michele to have dinner and see a movie. The girls were with our great, new babysitter. After dinner we saw the movie Buffalo Soldiers. The story takes place in Germany just before the fall of the Berlin Wall. A few people are worked up that the story shows the US soliders in a bad light surrounded by drugs and crime. Unfortunately, there is much truth in the portrayal of that era. I had several friends that joined the Army after college and were stationed in Germany. They told me stories about the rampant drug use and the low morale.
The actors in the film did a good job, but the director couldn’t seem to make up his mind about what the story was. A romance? a crime story? the fall of an anti-hero/ You don’t really feel for any of the characters and don’t care a tremendous amount about what happens. The action switches direction in someplaces for no reason, and there is no follow-up the what happens to several of the characters.
It’s worth a DVD rental, but it wasn’t worth a a pair of $14 Arclight tickets.
On Saturday I took the train up to Arcadia and did some shopping. I actually got to the shopping place faster on the train than if I would have taken the car. I’m getting hooked on the train.
Today I went down to my parent’s house with the girls. I introduced them to Model Rocketry. Last week I picked up a set of Micro Maxx mini rockets. The only pack 200 milli-newton/seconds of thrust so they only go up 50-75 feet. The quiet street my parent’s live was perfect.
The girls loved the rockets and wanted more. I only had three mortors, so I have to order more. Good times.

Yesterday I was confronted with a weird technical problem. I’m going to talk about it here so that any other poor bastard faced with the same thing might find it in google.
Martin was having trouble connecting his laptop via wireless to our hub. He has an HP Ze4430 with the W450 54g 802.11g wireless chip built in to the computer. The computer could see the access point and attach, but no traffic would flow.
I tried all kinds of things to get it to work to no avail. I remembered that the day before I had flashed the firmware of the access point and changed the SSID and the channel. Other laptops had no problem connecting afterwards, and with an external card, Martin’s laptop connected fine.
I switched the channel back from 11 to 7 and amzingly, the connection worked fine. The 802.11g chip doesn’t like channel 11 for some reason. It doesn’t make sense, but it’s the solution. 802.11g just ain’t ready for primetime.
Daredevil
I watched Daredevil tonight on DVD. The movie was good, but lacked that connection that made you feel for the characters. The relationships weren’t that believable. As many can attest, I don’t demand alot from a movie and are generally forgiving, but Daredevil didn’t give me a lot of great things to help overlook the bad things.