Fire up the (new) grill!

We got our very first gas grill as a wedding shower gift over 12 years ago and it served us extremely well. As part of our backyard renovation project that we started last fall (and is almost done!) we decided to finally get a new one.

After shopping around and doing some research, I chose the Charbroil Infrared Commercial Quantum series. The model I got has four burners (40,000 BTUs), a side burner (13,000 BTUs), and 580 square inches of cooking space.

The manual estimated the assembly time at a mere 30-45 minutes, which turned out to be extremely optimistic. It took me about 4 hours to get the entire thing put together (including unpacking and cleanup time), but I also did it all by myself. You can see assembly pictures here.

After assembly, I fired it up at full power for about 20 minutes to burn it in, so to speak. 🙂 It can put out some serious heat! The metal grates shield the flames from the food, converting the convection produced by the gas flames into infrared (or radiant heat). I had all four burners up past 700 degrees in just a few minutes. The side burner also came with a griddle (pancakes, anyone?).

Tomorrow I’ll give it a shot with actual food and see how it comes out.

The DTV switchover in hurricane country

So the original February 17th deadline for the digital TV switchover has come and gone but only a handful of stations have shut off their analog signals thanks to the DTV Delay Act. Is everyone confused yet?

One thing I don’t think a lot of people here in hurricane country have thought of (even myself, until recently) is those battery powered TVs in their hurricane kits. I have a little 5″ B&W television in our supply kit that runs on 6 D-cell batteries … and it won’t work after the digital switchover in June without a converter box. The problem is: how do you power a converter box when you don’t have power?

One solution is a battery-powered converter box like the Winegard RCDT09A (which is also coupon eligible). Another possibility (and I have to give my local Fox news team credit for this one … can’t believe I didn’t think of it myself) is a USB TV tuner for your laptop.

I just happened to have the Happauge WinTV-HVR-950Q sitting in my computer parts box, unused. Since I have a bunch of TiVos in the house, I didn’t really need a TV tuner for my PC so I threw it in there several months ago and forgot about it. It makes sense, though, to put this little device in our hurricane kit.

I first tried to get the device working with my Eee PC. Ubuntu recognized the hardware right away (and it showed up in Totem, the media player), but I could not get w_scan to find any channels with neither the included antenna nor with the tuner directly connected to cable. I tried all sorts of other packages (xawtv, mythtv, dvb-utils, etc.) and just could not get it to work at all.

So I moved on to Windows Media Center on our Vista laptop and it worked perfectly. While the signal strength is poor in my area (we’re about 33 miles away from all the main antennas according to antennaweb.org), I can at least pick up the local ABC and (barely) CBS affiliates which is all we really need during a storm.

WIJFR: Martin the Warrior

Badrang the Stoat has his evil eyes set on ruling over his own empire, and will do anything to make sure that his ultimate fantasy is fulfilled. But little does he realize that the quiet, nameless mouse he is holding captive will one day turn out to be the heroic and fearless Martin the Warrior.

“Martin the Warrior” is the sixth book of Brian Jacques’ Redwall series. The opening sequence takes place shortly after “Mariel of Redwall” but the actual story of Martin is the earliest so far in the series, placing it sequentially before “Mossflower.” The book also takes place in the far north lands, a new area of Jacques’ world.

Badrang the Tyrant, the ruler of Fort Marshank on the shores of the Eastern Sea, has captured a young mouse named Martin. Martin eventually escapes with Brome (another mouse) and Felldoh (a squirrel) from the fort and meets up with Brome’s sister Rose and her companion Grumm (a mole) who have come from Noonvale.

Separated during their escape, the remainder of the book follows the two parties in their respective quests: Martin, Rose, and Grumm attempt to return to Noonvale and raise an army to attack Marshank; Brome and Felldoh meet up with a travelling troupe of entertainers known as the Rosehip Players (which include a Badger named Rowanoak and a hare called Ballaw) and plan a series of missions to free the remaining Marshank slaves. Meanwhile, Badrang has to deal with both the outside attacks and inside subterfuge caused by an old “friend” (Tramun Clogg, a sea-faring stoat pirate) paying an unexpected visit.

As usual, the characters are varied, colorful, and entertaining and the story is easy to read. This volume, however, has the most sad and tragic turn of events in any of the books so far in the series. Suffice it to say that the ending plays an important role for the Martin we see at the beginning of “Mossflower” and explains his actions that carry on in the later Redwall novels.

The age of the personal “home” page …

… has long passed, I know. These days a person’s presence on the ‘net is usually defined by a social networking profile (like Facebook, MySpace, or LinkedIn), maybe a personal blog (like this one), or a Twitter feed. Gone are the days when people crafted their own home pages, hosted by their ISPs (or places like GeoCities).

I was reminded of this a few days ago when I received an e-mail from RoadRunner informing me that they will be shutting down their current user home page site (home.tampabay.rr.com) on March 17. If I wanted to keep my home page I would need to migrate to the new home.roadrunner.com site (with, wow, 25mb free storage). It occurred to me that most of the stuff on my RoadRunner home pages was old … really old. Once I started this blog last year I never really touched that content. So, after over a decade of having a hosted home page of some sort on the ‘net, I decided to take them down.

Ok, so they’re not really gone … I moved them all to my own server to be preserved for (arguably questionable) “historical” purposes. Nothing ever disappears from the internet after all …

PalmOS is dead … long live PalmOS!

I bought my very first PalmOS device (the Pilot 1000 by USRobotics) back in 1996 from an Elek-Tek in Castleton, Indiana … a total impulse buy. It only took me a few weeks to master Graffiti (I remember I actually started using Graffiti characters in my normal handwriting). I took a few shots at writing small applications, but mostly ended up contributing random text files to the community (some of which are still up on memoware.com). PalmOS wasn’t a multi-tasking operating system, but it was simple, elegant, and fast … and there were a ton of third-party developers writing apps for it.

While Palm did make minor changes to the OS as the years passed (support for higher resolution screens, color, more storage, etc.) the basic software stayed the same. It was a winning solution, though: compared to Windows Mobile devices (like the iPAQs or Jornadas) the Palms were easier to use, almost always faster, and had a slew of cool (usually free) applications. And of course there was HotSync, which kept the device backed up and in-sync with the Palm Desktop software on your PC. (Side note: try asking a Windows Mobile user if they can factory reset their device, then connect it to their PC and have ActiveSync put it back exactly the way it was before they did the reset. HotSync has been able to do that since 1996 … ActiveSync still can’t). These points all held true as the clunky but loveable PDA turned into the original clunky phone known as the Handspring Treo 180 (that I believe started the smartphone revolution) and eventually led to the vast array of Treo models we’ve seen over the past few years. I still love my Treo 680 because, while it may not be 3G or have a motion sensor in it, or multi-touch, it’s fast and it works.

Unfortunately, in a move I guess we all knew was coming once the Pre was unveiled at CES, Palm today announced that the current Centro will be the last PalmOS device produced by the company. webOS is still an unknown quantity, but I hope it can take PalmOS’s place in the hearts and minds of Palm lovers everywhere as a worthy successor.

I guess my next Treo might have to be the Treo Pro, unless a GSM Pre that runs GoodLink is released in the near future.

GPS map “update”

So I broke down last night and purchased the latest map update for my Garmin StreetPilot c340. After downloading the 2gb file and running into a few setup issues, I finally got it installed on the GPS.

This morning, I fired the unit up on my way to work, as I am wont to do (mainly to see my estimated arrival time). Imagine my surprise when, as I was driving on I-275 North over the Howard Frankland Bridge (which goes over the bay), the GPS display looked like I was driving over land instead of water:


Yes, this is a minor thing since it’s just a display issue (the routing and navigation is working fine), but it’s really annoying since this was an “update” (that cost me $60) which clearly has some sort of corruption in it. If I zoom out far enough, eventually the correct map is displayed:

But I shouldn’t have to deal with that. And who knows what else is messed up?

I tried re-installing the map update from scratch, resetting the GPS, changing map views (3D vs. overhead) and detail levels, etc. without any luck. I’ve opened a support ticket with Garmin and am waiting to see what they have to say.

Brrrrr!

I woke up this morning and it was 38 degrees outside here in central Florida! It’s not even going to break 50 today. This is one of the coldest winters I remember since we moved down here in 2001.

Yeah, okay, this is nothing compared to what’s going on up north and in the midwest, but don’t you guys care about the upcoming crop of oranges and strawberries?

Luckily we’re going to be back up in the mid-70s for the weekend, which is good because the Florida State Fair starts today.

Server naming conventions

I found this interesting article via Slashdot this morning that explores the topic of naming computers.

I don’t really remember when I started naming my machines, but I’m sure it started once I had a home network with more than one PC. I do remember that my first naming scheme was using characters from Babylon 5 (kosh, londo, vir, etc.). At some point I switched to Farscape and have been using that ever since: rygel, sikozu, moya, talyn, stark, katratsi, zhaan, grayza, etc. (I’m about to run out, actually, unless I start re-using old names from retired machines).

When I was still a consultant many years ago I worked at a company that used the periodic table of the elements for their server names (they even had a Periodic Table of the Servers printed out and hung on a wall … it was huge). That was a bit confusing as I could never remember if argon was a database server, or maybe that was hydrogen, or carbon?

At my current job, the old naming convention was Star Wars characters and locations (I’m responsible for VADER and SIDIOUS, for example) but new servers are given more logical, coded names (like LOC02MAIL03) which are less fun but more functional.