I hx0r3d my DVR

The DVR first entered my house on December 28, 2002 when I purchased a ReplayTV 5040. I think I've watched less than 15 commercials in the past five years.

I have DirecTV, but the ReplayTV doesn't know how to change the channels on the new D10 receivers they use. In April 2006, when I had a PC in the house, I followed the 87-step process the Internet(s) outline to load new IR codes to change channels on the D10.

My parents purchased their own ReplayTV in 2004, but abandoned it after some problems it in favor of a DVR from their cable company. I took their unit home last September, and after replacing the hard drive it was as good as new EXCEPT it did not have the update to change the channels.

Finally fed up, I decided two days ago to find the magic process on the Internet(s) to update the ReplayTV in my bedroom so it can change the channels on the box (otherwise, it can't record anything unless I've changed the channel on the box beforehand).

Without boring you (further) with the details, it was unbelievably complex. The only PC I have in the house that I could put a hard drive into is my server. My laptop is a Mac, but all the fucking software to do the updates is PC-based.

Solution?

You guessed it fool: mother fucking Virtual PC:



!!!

Fucking ridiculous.

Nerdier than when When I hx0r3d my cell phone to enable bluetooth.

Fuck-ruckers

The dining establishment formerly known as Fuddruckers is the latest recipient of a nasty email:

I visit this Fuddruckers location, on average, at least twice a week (a staff member recognized me and said hello tonight). On almost every visit, I order a Market Toss Salad and get a drink to go, which rings in at almost $11.00

Tonight was the first time I've seen Pradeep, who seemed to be bossing around the man I'd always assumed was the manager. Admittedly it was busy in there. I walked in and there was no line, Pradeep was the only person behind the register. He seemed disinterested to wait on me. I ordered my meal to go, which he rang up as eat in (I noticed because he handed me a regular drink cup). I reminded him it was to go, and did I need to tell the kitchen? He said he would do it and walked back there.

He did not tell the kitchen. When I was buzzed, he was standing around in the kitchen, my salad was served for eat-in and had no garlic bread. I told someone else it was to go. Pradeep came over, and up-ended my salad into a styrofoam to-go container. I asked someone twice for bread (which ended up being stale), utensils, and a bag.

Since a picture is worth a thousand words, please feast your eyes on my not-so-tasty Fuddrucker's Salad:

Disgusting! I have no problem waiting when a restaurant is busy, but serving something like this is totally unacceptable.

If there is a question about the details of my experience, I've included my number below. Please don't call me just to apologize.

It's lettuce and a chicken breast...HOW DO YOU FUCK THAT UP?

Chivalry?

Unless the rules of English changed, that is not the correct sort-order.

Is There a Nobel Prize for Food?

I had a very late dinner/very early breakfast at IHOP with Corey. I could not decide what I wanted to eat, and struggled with the menu for a good 15 minutes. I finally ordered pancakes and eggs, and long after the waiter had put in our order, I spyed table tents across the way.

...?...

We didn't have a table tent.

What was on it, you ask? Pumpkin pancakes.

!!! xoxo !!!

I sulked the entire time we waited for our food, and kept sulking after I'd eaten every bite. I finally asked the waiter for a short stack of pumpkin pancakes, and they were delicious!

My only suggestion (and I emailed this to IHOP.com), is to either (1) whip some cream cheese up with whipped cream to make a cream cheese spread, or (2) just use the cream cheese filling from the crepes. Either way, a light, sweet, cream cheese frosting on their pumpkin pancakes would easily win an entire season of Top Chef.

The Third Coming of Buzz trumps the Second Coming of Christ

Gentiles and Jews alike, Buzz is back:

On Friday, September 21, 2007, Buzzlife Productions and Fur Nightclub will join forces to create a new home for BUZZ, Washington DC’s legendary Friday night event.

We cordially invite you to be a part of history in the making as we enter an exciting new era of Capitol Intensive Clubbing. Our goal is to continue to raise the bar and to set the standard in nightlife experiences. We will be booking the hottest, freshest and most forward-thinking electronic dance music artists. Our belief is that music is only one piece of the puzzle, creating an intense visual experience is nearly as important. We will host nationally acclaimed video-animators, decor installation experts, hand picked dancers and performance artists to create an atmosphere that must be experienced first-hand.

Buzzlife's philosophy is that YOU are the most important part of the party. You are strongly encouraged to express your individuality through fashion, costume and attitude; creatively adding to the visual excitement of what we call "BUZZ."

The lineup includes:

• Moby


• Sander Van Doorn


• Scott Henry

wh00t! Bring on the fizzle and glow sticks, fool!

When Life Gives You a Bag of Burning Dog-shit...

I suppose you can make Dog-shit-ade?

In addition to the two still-born projects I have, I received a third on Wednesday. It's at the two year mark, and in my opinion they've done two weeks worth of work.

I'm incredibly tired. I think I could sleep for a week.

Does Chris Hansen know about this?

Tonight, in the coffee shop on campus, I saw an older lady who appeared to be a cougar. She was working on a black MacBook, and from behind I saw that she was playing Second Life.

...

Is Dateline putting the finishing touches on: To Catch a Second Life Cougar?

Who Dat?

Joey posted this pic of Kimmy and I to her Facebook page, I thought I'd share it with everyone. I have no idea when it was taken (Kim's birthday maybe?), or what we drank that we both ended up with limes.

Been a hectic but interesting few days: I went out to Five on Friday night and saw Peter Bailey, but I'm definitely not up for dancing yet. The doctor took 80ccs of fluid out of my abdomen Friday and another 95ccs on Monday.

Fuck you, iPhone; I know this is your fault!

It appears that Apple changed the sort order in iTunes for version 7.3 and above:

iTunes 7.3: Changes in music sort order

Starting with iTunes version 7.3, the following sort order is implemented:
General ordering

* Letters & Unicode characters (except for digits)
* Digits
* Other

Ignore leading definite and indefinite articles

* "The Beatles" sorts as "Beatles"
* "A Night in Tunisia" sorts as "Night in Tunisia"

Note: In English these are "A ", "An ", and "The " and includes the localized or international equivalents.
Ignore leading symbols and punctuation

* "#41"sorts as "41"
* " ' Til I Collapse " sorts as "Til I Collapse"

Sort digits numerically

The songs "1 foo", "2 foo", "10 foo" will sort as
"1 foo", "2 foo", "10 foo" and not as
"1 foo", "10 foo", "2 foo"
Ignore leading white space when sorting

Any spaces entered at the beginning of the title will be ignored when sorting.
Sort ignoring case

For example with iTunes 7.2 and older versions, the song playlist sorts in the following order:

* .38 Special
* 'Til Tuesday
* "Weird Al" Yankovic
* 4 Non Blondes
* The 5th Dimension
* 311
* Oingo Boingo
* ZZ Top
* つしまみれ

With iTunes 7.3 and newer versions, the song playlist sorts in the following order:

* Oingo Boingo
* 'Til Tuesday
* "Weird Al" Yankovic
* ZZ Top
* 4 Non Blondes
* The 5th Dimension
* .38 Special
* 311
* つしまみれ

Note: If you sort a playlist and sync it to an iPod, the sort order from iTunes will be retained.

If you want to override the default sort rules for a given artist or song, follow these steps:

1. Get Info on a song and click the Sorting tab.
2. Enter the text in the appropriate sorting field. If you want "The Beatles" to sort by "The Beatles" instead of "Beatles" you would enter "The Beatles" in the Sort Artist Field.
3. Click OK.
4. To apply that change to all of the songs by "The Beatles", right-click (or Control-click) the song that you just changed and choose Apply Sort Field > [relevant field] (using the example above, Same Artist).

I'm glad somebody asked me if I wanted to change the fucking sort order. I've only been using iTunes since 2003 -- it's not like I'm used to a certain behavior.

Fucking savages.

My Programz are _The Popular_

I'm taking this "E-Commerce/eBidness/iWasteTime" class, since it's the only 400-level MIS class being offered this Fall. The class is taught using ASP.NET 2.0: I've never programmed in it before, but I've done web programming in PHP, Perl, and ColdFusion, and I've done development in Visual Basic (ASP.NET lets you write the actual code in either VB or C#).

Same difference.

Mason is not all that Microsoft technology friendly, so our professor made us get ASP.NET hosting accounts to publish our homework to. He recommended this site called Somee, which is free.

I setup my account a few weeks ago and published my homework there. The first assignment is due tonight, and this afternoon I got this email:

Date: Thu, 13 Sep 2007 12:50:50 -0500
From: Support@somee.com
Subject: Your web site has been deleted!

Your site was deleted by our automated verification system. Reason: CPU overuse.

Somee International
http://somee.com

><

Somehow I doubt that my ASP.NET-based wage calculator was the top item on Digg today.

Tori Amos Improvises her Opinions on Celebrities

During the celebrity DUI binge of 2007, Tori Amos improvised a song at one of her concerts called "I'm Not Stupid":

Just a little chat
I need to have
When I was 21 do you think I had a bag of cocaine
in my car?

If I did - if I did
You’d never know it because it would have been hidden
I’m not stupid.
But why are so many 21-year old millionaires so stupid?
Stupid and cute.
But stupid - I don’t know

Let’s just say
When I was 26 (or seven - or eight)
And I was a billionairess
What would I have done?
Many naughty things
Many, many, many naughty things
But I would have had a DRIVER!

‘Cuz I’m not stupid, no
I’m not stupid, no
Not THAT stupid anyway
‘Cuz if I had been naughty
(I like being naughty)

But I haven’t been caught so far
and I am almost 44
44
And I’ve done many, many, many, many, many bad things

They are hidden inside my *mmm - mmm*
Inside my *mmm - mmm*
So there’s no record or no fingerprints on it

‘Cuz I’m not stupid
‘Cuz I’m not stupid
No, not stupid!

Apparently, Ms. Spears inspired her to improvise another commentary at a concert this past Tuesday in Australia:

Listen Here

Britney, they set you up
But you drank from their cup
Britney, they set you up
Oh, but this is what it looks like, love,
This is what is looks like

When a star falls down
When a star falls down

Well, maybe you’re a mother
But you still need your mother
Yes, I may be a mother
But I still need a mother
To pick me up
Yes, to pick me up

When it all falls down
When it all falls down

Britney, they set you up
Is your contract winding up?
But you drank from the cup
Boy, this is what it looks like
Yes, I said, this is, this is what it looks like, Disney, yes

When a star falls down
When a star falls down

You may be a mother
Baby, you still need a mother
Yes, I may be a mother
But I still need a mother
To pick me up
Yes, to pick me up

When it all falls down
When it all falls down
When it all falls, all falls down
When it all falls down

Yesterday, I began a media blackout on all this Paris/Lindsey/Britney. I've decided that The Three Whores of the Apocolypse are wasting all my time.

Mark Warner decides to run for John Warner's Seat

From WaPo:

RICHMOND, Sept. 12 -- Former Virginia Gov. Mark R. Warner will announce in an e-mail to supporters Thursday morning whether he plans to run next year for the Senate seat being vacated by Republican John W. Warner.

As a Virginian, I'm all for this. Think of how many tax dollars will be saved by only replacing half of every nameplate?!

Come to think of it, if we're going with the $VIRGINIA_SENATOR = TO_CHAR($APOSTLE, 4) + "Warner"; -- this would be a good time to spend the $25.00 to get my name changed to LUKE WARNER.

If your blood has never boiled in your veins...

I suggest you use Microsoft Word for Macintosh, if only for 10 minutes.

There's nothing quite as pointless as adjusting Window position EVERY FUCKING TIME you open Word. And then, the excitement of changing your font and losing your toolbars EVERY GOD DAMNED TIME you open Word.

Do you see how the new document window opens under the floating toolbar? Who thought that was a good idea? Why isn't the Font Name/Size/Style toolbar on top, but in that oozing cyst on the right?

That Normal.DOT bullshit does not work in Macintosh Word the same way it works on Wintel.

Why do I use it? Why do I punish myself? I don't know. Maybe I'm more retarded than the developers who shat this thing out.

Shitty Tuesday

My power went out last night for several hours around midnight. All the UPSes kicked in, but apparently there isn't enough runtime on the big one for kaitain to shutdown anymore.

I woke up this morning, brought kaitain and both dvrs back up, then VPN'ed in to get the call-in number for my 9:00am conference call. It was, as they always are, a crucial waste of time.

My laptop died during the call, because the battery is old, and because Virtual PC does nothing but eat CPU cycles (I could cook an egg on the bottom of the laptop when it's running). After the call was over I got dressed and went into work.

Since today is Tuesday, there was no parking. I found one secret spot in front of the PE building, parked there, and walked through the rain to my office...where people were looking for me. I apparently missed a 9:30am meeting about the same thing the 9:00am meeting was about.

Did I mention how much pain I'm in?

120CCs

The doctor drained 120ccs of fluid from my abdomen today.

How sexy is that?

It's just an ATM

Would someone please tell the Chevy Tahoe in front of me that you cannot h@x05 the Gibson from a Bank of America ATM?

You've had your 15 minutes, brother...give somebody else a chance.

Goods News, Bad News

The good news is that I installed my new, cheap car battery from Costco at lunch yesterday.

The bad news is that I can barely move today. Apparently, four weeks after abdominal surgery is not the best time to be lugging around a 50lb car battery.

I am a dolt.

eCops bust eHookers and ePimps for iFucking

We can thank the New York Times' eminent journalists for this article on Craigslist Prostitutes:

All eight were arrested on prostitution charges here, snared in a new sting operation by the Nassau County police that focuses on Craigslist.org, the ubiquitous Web site best known for its employment and for-sale advertisements but which law enforcement officials say is increasingly also used to trade sex for money.

Nassau County has made more than 70 arrests since it began focusing on Craigslist last year, one of numerous crackdowns by vice squads from Hawaii to New Hampshire that have lately been monitoring the Web site closely, sometimes placing decoy ads to catch would-be customers.

“Craigslist has become the high-tech 42nd Street, where much of the solicitation takes place now,” said Richard McGuire, Nassau’s assistant chief of detectives. “Technology has worked its way into every profession, including the oldest.”

[...]

Law enforcement officials ask why Craigslist even includes Erotic Services among its 191 categories. Mr. Buckmaster, the company president, said the site created that category “at the request of our users” for legitimate massage, escorts and exotic dancers. In an e-mail interview, he said that the police had praised the company’s cooperation, though he did not give examples.

Have I moved to the Netherlands yet? The US has become such a fucking police state.

Bargains, bargains, everywhere

I apologize in advance for the lameness of this post, but after an insane summer schedule followed by surgery and a three week recovery, "the funny" (or "the angry") is going to take a minute to regenerate.

Right after surgery, a letter came addressed to the previous homeowners. It said something about "GE Appliance"-something, so I figured it was something I should open and look at. It turns out, I was right:

Over several years, normal use of liquid rinse aid in some models results in a concentration of rinse aid on the wires inside the dishwasher door. In the affected models, the rinse aid can degrade the insulation on the wiring inside the door, which can cause an electrical short, overheating or fire if the wire comes in contact with the metal door. You should stop using these dishwashers immediately until you obtain more information.

I mean, who wants a flaming dishwasher?

Since Home Depot was having a sale, and GE was going to give me another $150.00 to replace a 6-10 year-old dishwasher, I decided it was probably the right thing to do. The deal broke down like this:



While I wasn't planning on spending any money on a dishwasher, it was likely that I'd have to replace mine sometime before I sold the house. $180.00 delivered and installed to do that is a pretty good deal.

---

You may recall that I turned the WRX in last January, and ended up with my parent's 2002 Honda Accord. I've noticed that if the car sits for a day or two, it has trouble starting (but once I drive it, it charges right back up). I don't think that battery has ever been replaced, so I decided to start looking around for battery deals.

My first stop was Sears, even though they have pissed me off the last several times I've attempted to buy anything there. A Diehard Gold for the Accord is $109.00, which seemed a little high to me. I decided to do some looking around online, and I found this little gem:

Most auto batteries are made by just three manufacturers, Delphi, Exide, and Johnson Controls Industries. Each makes batteries sold under several different brand names. Delphi makes ACDelco and some EverStart (Wal-Mart) models. Exide makes Champion, Exide, Napa, and some EverStart batteries. Johnson Controls makes Diehard (Sears), Duralast (AutoZone), Interstate, Kirkland (Costco), Motorcraft (Ford), and some EverStarts.

So Sears and Costco batteries come from the same manufacturer, huh? How much is the comparable battery at Costco?

$54.49

I had to drive to two different Costco's last night, but I found one. Now I just need to put it in and I'm good to go.

My poor American Express.