Rants

Sneaky A** Atlantic Broadband

A little background first (in case you haven’t been following this site religiously), from our local cable company, Atlantic Broadband, we get the fastest internet they offer because that is what is really important. We also get what they call the Limited TV Service so we can get the local big 4 networks and the PBS stations. Because we get just the limited channels we don’t have the cable box that they usually rent you for a mere eight to ten dollars a month, the coaxial cable gets plugged right into the back of the Samsung.

In early September, we received a letter from Atlantic Broadband with the exciting news that starting October 10th all the Limited TV channels would be broadcast in digital format. To view these dramatically enhanced picture and sound quality channels you would need a digital adapter. The letter states that we were eligible to receive two digital adapters at no cost for use on TV sets that are connected directly to cable and if we needed more than 2, they would be $2.99 a month. One adapter would be mailed directly to our home.

Sure enough, two weeks ago, a box came in the mail and inside was an adapter and its associated remote. I placed it aside waiting for the 10th of October to see if I’m really going to need it or not. Right now, if I let the TV scan for available channels it finds over 40 stations which includes several standard definition versions of the local networks along with an HDTV version. So instead of watching the NBC affiliate in 4:3 low definition on channel 2, I watch the 16:9 high def one on channel 82-14, etc. I’m hoping that this will still be the case once they go digital. But not optimistic.

On Monday, we got an email that our cable bill for October was available for viewing and paying online. Hmmm, that total looks higher than it did last month., so I look at page 2 where the details are and looky here. Under Monthly Charges, along with the cost of our monthly cable service there is a line for a Limited Digital Adapter at a cost of $2.99 for the month. WTF? It is supposed to be free!

And it gets even better. Underneath the Monthly Charges section is one entitled Prorates where there is a line for Limited Digital Adapter at a cost of 89 cents. They started charging me for using the adapter (which wasn’t connected to the cable yet and supposed to not be needed until the 10th of October.) on the 22nd of September. Had they looked at the tracking number of the package and started charging on the day of delivery to my house?

Update: 55 minutes total on hold, 2 customer service representatives and the $4.49 “mistake” was removed from our bill.

USB Powered Auto GPS

Even though I now have a smarty pants phone with all the latest travel geegaws, we still use a Garmin Nuvi GPS in the car to navigate when traveling. In the Sonata, it is not an issue, but in the Miata the combination of the location of the cigarette lighter socket and the big stock GPS power plug make shifting into 3rd & 5th gear an adventure in knuckle banging.

Tiring of having to remember to shift into those gears with the flat of my hand in the Emperor I bought an accessory cigarette lighter plug and mounted it on the side of the console out of the way. This eliminated the shifting problem but the large GPS power plug was now an issue for the passenger because it stuck out into their already cramped foot well space. The perfect solution would to have a USB cable that powered the GPS, but…

Even though the Garmin GPS comes with a USB cable it could only be used to charge the unit or load new software or maps. The only way to get to use it for directions was to use the bulky 12V power plug. When I first starting looking for a USB cable that would actually charge the Garmin and allow you to navigate with it, they didn’t exist. I found a tutorial on how to modify a regular cable to make it work, but it involved cutting the cable apart, digging into one of the connector and soldering a jumper wire between two pins of the mini Type-B end. It was delicate operation that me, along with my dull x-acto knife & 40-year old soldering iron would not be able to do, so I gave up.

Fast forward to a week ago and I tried again to see if someone made a cable that would work off the self. This time my googlefu led me to 3BR Powersports, a small business that specializes in cables for the motorcyclist’s power needs, and had just the right product – Red Band GPS POWER CABLES.

Smooth Trip, Rough Return

We have found coach seat nirvana for our flights of 4-1/2 to 5-1/2 hours over to Seattle, a Boeing 767-300. Its two – three – two seating gives us ample opportunity to not have to climb over anybody to get up and stretch or take a nature break1. Plus no possibility of a drunk napping on my shoulder during the flight. Both our flights out and back went un-bumpily smooth and 10 – 20 minutes quicker than advertised. No unruly kids ahead or behind and no crying babies anywhere.

We got back to ATL, ate a quick dinner at the terminal, collected our car and were on the road east by 8:00 PM. This, it turns out is the only time I have ever seen the bottom southeast quadrant of the I-285 beltway uncrowded. It was eerily empty. Even the normal 2-mile back up to transition to I-20 was wide open. There was more traffic near Washington Road in Augusta when we got there at 10:30 than around Atlanta…

When we go away for a week or more vacation we lock the thermostat to 77 or 78 so as not waste all that effort cooling the whole house down for the silk plants. When I took off the hold, I could hear the condenser kick on. The temp said it was 79, and I thought to myself, “That’s going to take a while to get down to comfortable.” As we went about our typical unloading of the car, tossing stuff in the laundry hamper, checking mail, staring into our empty refrigerator, we realized there was no cold air coming out from the vents.

Opened the bedroom window and could see/hear compressor running. Shut off thermostat. Reset, even though it wasn’t tripped, the A/C breaker. Turned the thermostat back on, the compressor came on, but still no air.

It was still 79° in the hall and the humidity was at 98.9%, we were in for a long night. We took cold showers, turned on all the ceiling fans to high and went to bed. I did eventually fell asleep, but poor Donna tossed and turned almost all night. At 5:00 I woke, found her in the other bedroom and said, “Hey, lets bike ride to Ridgecrest for breakfast, at least start the day right.”

By 2:00 PM we had cold air coming from the vents for about the cost of one of our round trip tickets to Seattle, but worth every penny of it.

Turning Out The Light On Democracy

When I bought my Kindle Fire last January2 it came with a free six month subscription to the Washington Post. Turned out this was not totally altruistic, the same dude that owns the Kindle company, owns the newspaper too, so he’s hoping I would subscribe once that trial period ran out.

Well, I fell for it. I did, but only because they used the same model as satellite radio did, another 6 months for like the price of the one month. When that ran out I thought I might try a different major paper, the failing New York Times maybe? How about the Boston Globe? But all the biggies were priced 2 to 2-1/2 times the cost of the WaPo’s $3.99 a month. Jeff beat me down, I had become used to reading the Post, so I gave them him my credit card and subscribed.

But the experience has been wearing thin. My big problem was they way it updates. You pick up an actual paper and you get what you get, but electronically with the Post you’ll be reading along article after article, swiping to advance and all of a sudden you’d find yourself 5 articles back. What happened? You’d guess that maybe something new has been added in front and maybe it is newer news. Nope. WTF?

You know when something has been updated on the “paper” because a small semi-transparent balloon appears over whatever you are reading to let you know. The only way to get rid of the balloon is to click on it. And instead of trusting you to remember to go looking, you are taken all the way back to the very first article.

Today I decided that I had enough and decided to just go back to getting my news from my Google News feed. It’s free and I’m a cheapskate at heart. I cancelled subscription.

It wasn’t easy and that is a whole other post…

It’s Been A Week

About time to talk about garage flooring again, don’t you think?

Before I had finalized my design last Friday night, just to be sure I opened up a live chat with someone off the Garage Flooring, Inc webpage. I wanted to be sure, even though they looked like it online from pictures, that my Diamond Grid-Loc tiles would, well, lock, with the Vented Ultra-Loc tiles I wanted under the car.

Chat Transcript
08:08:14 AM [Brian] Diamond Grid-Loc can mate to the Vented Ultra-Loc?
08:08:22 AM [Teanna] Hello Brian Thanks for clicking to chat with me! I’m happy to help!!
08:08:34 AM [Teanna] yes
08:08:54 AM [Teanna] they are able to click together
08:09:25 AM [Brian] That was simple, sort of figured they would, but wanted to make sure.
08:09:33 AM [Brian] Thanks.
08:09:48 AM [Teanna] your very welcome is there anything else I can helpy ou with today?
08:10:50 AM [Brian] No that’s it, I saved an order, but first I’m going to order a sample of each my chosen colors. Thanks again.
08:11:01 AM [Teanna] great idea!

The samples came in the mail today. The pieces are only about 4″ square, but all three did in fact show at least one of the connections. The Graphite Diamond Grid-Loc had a male end and the Gunmetal Diamond Grid-Loc had a female end and no surprise, clicked right in. The Vented Ultra-Loc not a chance.

And when think about it, why would they? Grid-Loc. Ultra-Loc. They don’t even sound the same. The Grid-Loc tiles have 4 connections a side while the Ultra-Loc tiles have twice as many. Maybe why the superlative sounding Ultra was used? What I really meant to ask was do the Diamond Grid-Loc tiles mate to the Vented Grid-Loc tiles. So we had a customer who knew what he wanted to ask, asked it wrong and a CSR confirm that his incorrect request would work in a situation where it clearly wouldn’t. Or maybe I really do have Jedi Mind Powers!

This sample order was helpful on a couple fronts. Turns out I didn’t like the Diamond texture, so I’ll go with the Coin pattern instead. Plus the Grid-Loc vented tiles are 40¢ each cheaper than the Ultra-Locs.

I played around with a couple different designs. Instead of a 1′ square checkerboard pattern, doing a 4′ checkerboard, and looked OK on the web page, but would be too large for the small garage. Then I tried a diagonal stripe pattern, which I thought looked OK on the web too, but not enough to commit to really using it. I really thought this snake skin look would be just too cool park on! But we still have bipartisan support for last Friday’s small checkerboard surrounding a black vented middle.

aLL hAIL sHIFT f-3

Almost all of the work I do during the day is in AutoCAD and everything is in capital letters. So the CAPS LOCK key is my friend. It can also be my sworn enemy as you might imagine. I do work in other programs, email, Word, Excel occasionally and when I start typing invariably the first letter is a small one and the rest of the sentence is big shiny capital ones.

When in Word it is not a real problem because a couple of menu clicks and you get a dialog box with a four options to suit the issue at hand. If I forget and leave the CAPS LOCK off in AutoCAD it too has a little menu option for selecting the correct capitalization for text. When in Excel though, I have to highlight, copy, open Word, paste, key press, key press, highlight, copy, close Word, back to Excel, paste or just delete and retype. Guess which one I use?

The email thing is the most frustrating. It’s Outlook. Its Microsoft Word pretty much with the same ribbon and almost all the same text formatting options, but no sentence case swapper thing. Really? So I have to revert to the Excel procedure and depending how far I’ve gotten in the email I have even done the 20-step copy-paste dance.

It is a pain and usually I muddle through mumbling to myself. But today it got to me (steroids, ya think?). I started crawling the web looking for a macro or something that would automatically take the CAPS LOCK key off anytime I started typing into an Outlook text area. Couldn’t find anything like that or didn’t use the right search term, but I did stumble on an older page on Online Tech Tips that was designed for Word, but actually still works in Office 365 Outlook.

aLL hAIL sHIFT f-3 → press 2 keys together
ALL HAIL SHIFT F-3 → press 2 keys together
all hail shift f-3 → press 2 keys together
All Hail Shift F-3 → It’s a June miracle.

Jedi Mind Trick

This morning Donna went along for a ride in the Miata, which she misses, to the local Dunkin Donuts for a quick breakfast. She wanted to go this particular morning for two reasons, 1) the a fore mentioned Miata ride and 2) because the local DD has free copies of the Aiken Standard for customers and Wednesday is the day there are grocery coupons in the paper.

We are getting away cheap because we bring our own drinks and all we buy are a muffin for me and some doughnut holes for her. When the girl waiting on us asked what we wanted I said, “I’ll have a Coffee Cake Muffin and my wife will get 4 Munchkins.” As I was about to say, ‘Two glazed and 2 chocolate glazed’, as that is her go to order for the doughnut hole variety when Donna said, “I want 4 chocolate glazed.” I repeated to the server, “Four chocolate glazed Munchkins”, all the while thinking, ‘She usually gets 2 glazed and 2 chocolate glazed.’

We sat down and when Donna opened her little bag and showed me – 2 glazed and 2 chocolate glazed.

*The force is strong with this one.*