Is Cable TV on Life Support?

August 17th, 2010 § 3 comments § permalink

heartmeter

I am sure they know it’s coming. I doubt customers are dropping like flies yet, because they are already paying for internet access and it’s not at the tipping point yet.

Thing is, I am quite sure, I am not the only customer that has woken up and realized how little I actually need cable TV.

Of course there are the sticky issues of sports, news and Dexter of course (literally the only reason we paid for Showtime) but that list is going to continue to shrink and you can bet that Comcast, Time Warner and the rest of those clowns don’t want to end up being a low-rent Internet Service Provider. So what to do?

Personally, we just bought a new house and I only wired two rooms for Cable TV. The rest of the house has TVs with Xbox 360s connected via Ethernet. Between Zune, Netflix and our Home Server (and soon Hulu plus) there is no logical reason to be paying for a cable box for those TVs. I am sure the other two will drop soon enough and I’ll be buying a couple more Xboxes.

So where are you? Do you find your use of cable diminishing? Do you already watch Internet based video on your Television? Do you still watch most of it on a laptop or desktop computer? I am curious what everyone’s usage patterns are.

Cable is going to pasture for me pretty soon.

Yes I Still Blog!

August 6th, 2010 § 1 comment § permalink

I have been incredibly negligent to my blog lately and I apologize. With Office planning at it’s peak and moving into a new house, I have been a little busy! That being said there has been so much going that I want to talk about, I’ll get some new posts and videos up this weekend to show you all what I have been up to. Stay tuned.

image

This is a photo of my new home office, and the studio is being built, hope you love it as much as I do.

Sorting Out Multiple Monitors, Color Profiles and the like

June 6th, 2010 § 0 comments § permalink

Back in the day being into photography, graphic design or video was easy, you just did the best you can when it comes to color. As soon as computers got good at handling color, a new crop of monitor calibrators came out.

Now in a world with one monitor, calibrating your monitor is pretty easy. In a world where we have two, three or more, it becomes less clear. Another wrinkle is that consumer calibrators, like mine, only support a single monitor. That makes calibrating multiple monitors nearly impossible.

IMG_0455

Fear not dear readers, I am going to show you a hack to get past that pesky single monitor limitation, as well as a physical hack to keep yourself square and re-square if you have to disconnect and reconnect your setup.

Tip #1: Know Who You Are Deal With

IMG_0460 I mean monitors! I use the Pac-Man Principle. The way I keep my monitors and profiles straight is by naming my monitors something other than Samsung 204b, and physically naming my color profiles to match. I have three monitors, and left to right I have named them Clyde, Inky and Blinky. On each monitor I have affixed a label (I am a label Nazi) that says “L Clyde,” “M Inky,” and “R Blinky.” When I set up my desk, it’s never a question of which monitor goes where.

IMG_0463 The next thing is making sure that the monitors are always plugged in the right place. In addition to wrapping all three monitors together with zip ties, I have labeled the monitor end in L, M and R for Left Middle and Right obviously, and I have labeled the other end to make sure they always make it into the same ports like pictured.

This way again, if I have to move my setup, I am never concerned about what gets plugged where. As you will find, there are two significant factors that effect the color on the display, the monitor itself, and the video card you are connecting to it. I have two cards, so it’s super important that they are labeled appropriately. I believe in zero room for error!

Tip #2: Tell Your Computer What’s What

Since we have gone through the trouble to identify each monitor clearly and label them, it’s great practice to carry that through. When you calibrate your monitor, especially with one that has a single monitor limitation, you are going to come up with some ugly profiles. I solve that by using a handy little Mac utility called ColorSync Utility, it’s built into the OS and will allow you to both rename the files AND the friendly name that shows up in the OS Color Profile selector.

Tip #3: Trick The Limit

This last one is easy. Profilers like my Spider 2 Express, always calibrate the main monitor. Simply go into your display settings and change the main monitor before you calibrate.

The process is simple, set your main monitor, calibrate it, use the ColorSync utility to rename the profile to match your friendly monitor name, rinse and repeat.

Wrap Up

So those are some simple tips. Another thing to keep in mind, if you are lazy you can only calibrate the monitor you use to edit color.

That’s it, calibrate and enjoy!

Ignore People – or making the most of social networks

May 25th, 2010 § 3 comments § permalink

icon_facebookIn the beginning I accepted every request. When a graduation class group started, the invites started pouring in like a flood. I accepted all of them and before long I had over 300 friends on Facebook. These days I have 136, and regularly I go through the list and prune it here and there.

I get invites from people I know, and I ignore them. I don’t ignore all of them of course, but I have built criteria over time.

So, what’s the most valuable real estate on Facebook? My feed is the most valuable to me. That’s how I keep up with what the people I care about are up to, and I make sure that I don’t have to sift through things that are irrelevant to me to see it.

ignoreMaybe if I read my feed non-stop it wouldn’t matter so much, but as I only check it every little bit, having a mountain of friends will mean you miss a whole lot.

Case in point, my family owns a restaurant in North Carolina. I live in Bellevue, Washington over 3,000 miles away. Now logic would say “it’s your family so accept that request!” but I say no. Any events, specials or news they share will be of no use to me. It may be a bit militaristic, but if the individual family members I follow are on Facebook, I will see what is up in their lives, I don’t need to follow their workplace.

The same goes for vague acquaintances from high school, college and past jobs. Sure my close friends stay, but I see every person that I don’t have a close tie to as potentially erasing information from people I do care about by bumping them down the feed.

I refuse to believe that I have even 136 friends that I should be following so closely, but I have settled at that number…for now.

I guess it comes down to what do you use a social network for. If you are of the narcissistic camp and just want everyone you have ever met to see how awesome you are now, collect away. If you are in the community camp, keep your friends to people you actually engage with and you might find it to be a lot more useful, fun and relevant.

iPhone Rant, entitled: and what’s more…

April 19th, 2010 § 2 comments § permalink

iphone_home Today I had a problem with my iPhone again. When I leave the office, I have to go down to an underground parking garage to get my car. Obviously I lose what little signal I actually get at work. One might think that as soon as you get out of the garage, you’d be fine. You would get your beloved signal back and all would be good, right?

No, not right. There are many things in this world I don’t understand, I am just a man. One such thing is the mysteries that must explain the laws of iPhone cellular connectivity. I would think that it’s constantly searching for signal, if it’s present it gets the best it can, if not, it doesn’t. I would of course be wrong, because when I get out of the building, I still have no signal. I might still have signal until I do one of several things (only one of which works) which I’ll describe in a minute.

Today I left the office and decided to wait, wait until I got signal back. I traveled this route:


View Larger Map

That’s right, 2.1 miles and 5 minutes later (not including traffic and lights) I still had zero signal. Now I travel this route and talk on the phone, via headset of course, nearly every week day. I know there is signal here. It seems like the iPhone just sucks at re-acquiring a signal.

And What’s More

Why doesn’t switching the phone into airplane mode reset the radio and prepare it to acquire a fresh signal? I am guessing since the intent is while you are ON an airplane, it expects a different network  and would scan for the best possible network to connect to when you turn it back off.

The problem is that it doesn’t. When you turn airplane mode back off, it’s got the same crappy non-working, call failing signal I had when I got out of the parking garage. We are talking 3G indicator with 4 minimum bars. For some reason I can get email, and text messages, but I can’t make phone calls.

And What’s More

The only way I have found to fix it is to physically reboot the phone. So why the hell does it take so long? Why does my phone take longer to shut down than a 3 year old install of Windows XP? It doesn’t make sense. If it’s really based on Darwin, when it sends a kill, shouldn’t it just KILL? Why do I have to wait literally over a minute for my phone to turn off, and nearly a minute for it to boot again. Two minutes doesn’t seem long, until you are standing there trying to make a damned phone call.

It seems like the one thing my iPhone does very poorly is actually making and receiving phone calls. We have all complained about the call quality and of course the ever present dropped calls, but there seem to be a whole rats nest of problems with the iPhone when it comes to telephony. Sorry to rant, but this one is getting old, it happens nearly every day when I leave work.

« Older Entries

Newer Entries »