Getting Shit Done!

I had an amusing and motivating chat with Todd & Hargrove at work the other day. We were lamenting on how it sucks to pay monthly fees for things you no longer use. Hargrove pointed out that he can’t access his World of Warcraft account because he can’t remember his password. He could have his password sent to him if he can answer the secret question he created when he first set up the account. No problem, he just needs to answer the following:

What is my favorite movie?

While that may seem like a pretty easy one for most, he has all of the following adding to the level of difficulty:
- The answer is case sensitive
- He wrote that question in 2004
- He was likely drunk while writing the question

He pointed out that he would just call customer service and deal with it that way, but their hours of operation are the same as his work hours making that a bit difficult.

Well, after that conversation I decided it was time to stop paying for a couple things that I have been paying for without really using. So, in the past 4 days, here’s a list of my money savings:

- 2 memberships to Las Vegas Athletic Club - $42.50/month (Yes, I know I NEED to go to the gym, but I haven’t been in a year so I may as well stop paying for it until I get motivated…)
- Sirius Satellite radio subscription - $12.95/month (I don’t use the portable unit since my car has it built in and I received a 1 year free subscription)
- Subscription to dotcombuilders.com - $20/month

And, in the next two weeks I’ll be ready to end my hosting agreement with 1and1.com since I sold 95% of my sites and have already moved my remaining sites to my dedicated server at MarquisNet - That’ll be another $20/month savings.

Feels good to finally get this stuff of my plate and off my mind!

Oh, and on a side note, since posting about deleting all my MP3s, I have since ripped over 1400 songs. The library is coming back and I’m a happy little camper.

Well that was dumb!

I’ve only recently (within 6 months) become an iPod user. Before that, I’ve had about 5 or 6 different MP3 players. I used to use software called cdex to rip CDs to my computer to play on my MP3 player. The problem was, I never had a standardized naming convention. So, some of the tracks had track numbers, some had band names, some had just the title and a whole mess of them were never sorted in to sub-directories… this made finding stuff a bit of a bitch.

With the new iPod came iTunes. It has it’s own nice little MP3 ripping software built in that lets you rip the CD and import it to your iTunes library all in one fell swoop. Love it. So, the other day I was at my desk and started ripping some new CDs that I had recently purchased. I noticed that they were going in to a new iTunes music directory. When I looked, I noticed that it was set up EXACTLY as I wanted it. Every track was ripped and set up in a perfect directory structure:

\Artist\CD Title\01 song title.mp3

I was so giddy! A thought ran through my head… “You should delete all your current MP3s and re-rip them all so they all are perfectly named and organized.” What a great idea, I told myself. I quickly went over to the MP3 directory that currently existed and hit delete. Windows even tried to save me from myself by asking me, “Are you sure you want to delete 2245 files?” - “Of course I do”, I answered out loud as I hit confirmed and watched 4+ years worth of MP3s hit the bit-bucket.

It was about 2 minutes later when I realized what exactly I had just done. I threw up in my mouth a little bit.

The picture above is what “Phase 1″ of my CD ripping will consist of. Gotta go now, it’s time to switch CDs again.

TV reinstall hell!

I month or two back I picked up a second Tivo to use in the bedroom. It’s one of the Series 2, dual tuner types that let you record 2 shows at once. They way this is done is you use a splitter on the cable coming out of the wall and plug one directly in to Tivo and the second goes in to your cable box as normal… The feed going directly in to the Tivo will pick up the low channels (in my case, 2 - 99) and the other will pick up all the channels, or 1 - 999.

When I installed it myself something wasn’t working quite right. It wasn’t completely screwed, so I didn’t get around to fixing it right away… Then, the unthinkable happened. On the Tivo downstairs I had 3 programs set up to record via the Season Pass that all came on at the exact same time. I didn’t realize that there were 3 shows I actually cared about on TV at all, let alone on the same day and time… Sadly, I didn’t realize this until Tuesday when I tried to watch Heroes and nearly blew a gasket when I found out it didn’t record. Thankfully, NBC.com is kind enough to let you watch the entire show of Heroes directly from their site, so the crisis was averted.

After figuring out where the problem was, I made a quick adjustment and moved the High Stakes Poker season pass to the TV upstairs. No sweat, all’s right in the world. NOT!

The following Monday when I climbed in to bed around 11:00 and loaded up Tivo to watch some poker before sleep, I was upset once again when my show DID record, but the channel was completely black.

After messing with every cable configuration and every TV and Tivo setting, I finally gave up and figured it was time to call in the heavy hitters. I call Cox and ask them to come out and check on the issue. The guy that came out did a couple things:

1. Replaced a coax cable that was bad
2. Replaced the cable box that was faulty
3. Re-wired everything so that I was taking advantage of the TV’s HD capabilities.

While I’m thrilled with #1 and #2, #3 here has completely hosed me! The way the wiring is set up, I can only use Tivo to record shows on any of the low channels. Plus, I know have to jump through a couple hoops to get back and forth between sets of channels. While this would be fine if it was just me watching the TV, but I’d have to draw a map for the wife just so she could watch TV. This configuration was NOT going to work!

After putting it off for another week, it was finally time to do something about it. So, I spent about 90 minutes today messing around with the wiring trying to come up with a combination that would leave me with everything I wanted. Unfortunately, that just wasn’t going to happen. So, after getting really really frustrated, I was going to put the wiring back to almost the exact same way that the guy from Cox had installed it, but I was going to need one additional cable. When I left for Best Buy, everything seemed to be working except for this one final piece. Oh, how sadly mistaken I was…

When I get back from Best Buy I install the new cable, move the TV stand (which is quite heavy, btw) back in place and sit down to make a little how-to page for the TV. I now have 3 input sources going to the TV:

#1 AV1, This is the DVD player - working perfectly
#2 Cable3, This is for Tivo and all channels 0-99 (using the newly installed cable) - working perfectly
#3 Component, This uses 5 cables and should allow me to watch channels 1 - 999 - NO SOUND and I can only get channels 100 and above.

OK, I could live with the channels 100 and above thing, but no sound? This fucking worked before I left! What the fuck happened?!?!?!!

I tried 2 separate sets of cables for this, but no dice. Nothing worked. No sound is how it’s been left…

I was able to move my season pass for Heroes to this TV which should work no problem since cable3 is working and has sound, but still, I’m overly frustrated and may need to borrow the help of a fellow geek (cough cough Todd cough cough) to try and solve this one.

Clearing out the brain clutter

Man, I sure do love to start project! Finishing project, not so much…

Over the past year or so, I’ve launched several websites that all had potential for making money. Most of them still have the potential. What they were lacking was somebody with enough focus and drive to actually see them through to completion and then put some time in to actually advertising them properly.

What’s worse is that after I start the project, it sits in the back of my brain nagging at me for some attention. You can ignore and even forget about them for days or even weeks at a time, but they are always there… relentless little bastards that they are.

Last week, every time I sat down at my desk to work on a project, those tiny voices would all start chiming in at the same time… “Hey, work on me. No, work on me. Hey, I’ll make you lot’s of money so work on me.” It was so bad that I couldn’t work an anything because I wanted to work on everything. So, I did what I think any sane person would do… I sold all my project sites to a buddy of mine. Now those tiny voices can call out to him every time he sits down at the computer. Sorry, bro.

So, what am I going to do with all my newly found free time? I don’t know, but I tell you what I won’t be doing… starting any more projects! I have a website I’m building for a guy I know and another that I need to build for my uncle. Those two projects should now receive the attention they deserve.

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