2 Bit Hacker

Okay, LG is going on my personal vendor blacklist, at least for LCD TVs. I bought this LG 37LB5D LCD television back in December to replace my Sony WEGA CRT, and initially I was very happy with it. Then it started having audio issues, which I worked around. Then it started having video issues, where the screen would blank out randomly. I called a repair place, and the guy came out and swapped in a new power supply and control board, and everything was happy once again.

And so it went till today. The audio issue just resurfaced. I’m sitting here watching History HD off my TiVo, with no audio. First it was quick cut outs, now it’s just totally silent.

I suspect it’s something with the HDMI audio decoder. My suspicion is that it overheated and did some permanent damage to itself. I should probably contact the repair guy again and find out if the replacement parts were also under warranty, as it’s probably going to take another set of replacements to make this thing work again.

At this point though, I’m tempted to chuck this one off the balcony and go buy a Sharp AQUOS. We’ve got three of those at work and they’re running great. I suppose this is what I get for trying to save a buck and going with the cheap brand.

It’s that time again, when I get bored waiting for Delia to get out of work and I don’t feel like doing anything productive, when I decide it’s time to update ye olde weblog. As usual, I don’t think much is really going on in my life, I continue to work, my left leg is still weird from my last back problem, my car is still running good, though the mileage is hurting in the cold.

One somewhat interesting thing is that I finally broke down and ordered a shiny new HDTV last week. It’s an LG 37LB5D, which is a 37″ widescreen LCD at full 1080p resolution. To go with it, I also ordered a TiVo HD so I’ll have some HD content to watch. They should both arrive tomorrow, at which point I’ll get to have fun getting CableCARDs from Comcast. Oh yeah, and if anyone out there is interested in a used 27″ Sony WEGA tube, let me know. It’s too big to really go anywhere else in my apartment.

The new TV has also got me thinking about picking up an Xbox 360. I haven’t really been doing a lot of console gaming lately, but it looks like there are some decent new games out there, and the whole online thing looks interesting. I think Delia wants one too, though I’m not sure why. Maybe I’ll just get the PS2 hooked up again, and if we actually use it, I’ll get the newer thing.

Other than that, not a lot going on. Some people have asked what I want for the upcoming holiday, so I’ve started tagging some things as “want” on my del.icio.us. Nothing terribly fancy. I’m trying to get the apartment cleaned up and presentable so that people can actually come over. If that project gets complete soon, maybe we’ll have some people over for a holiday party of some sort.

As usual, it’s been a while since I’ve posted anything. For one reason or another I just don’t seem to feel I have enough going on that the world needs to know about. For some reason I feel like posting a general update at the moment, and so I shall.

My works is going along nicely. The new office space is rather nice, and it’s network is ticking along quite happily to itself. I’m enjoying the System Administrator position, although it does mean the occaisional late night when a server decides to act up. Apparently I’ve been assigned to more of a projects roll than a maintainence roll, working on improving things and setting up new tools for internal use. In the near future I’ll be rolling out Cacti to replace our MRTG instances, and probably upgrading Nagios. All in all, rather good.

On the home front, we’re looking for a new one. The new landlords at the current location have decided to increase our rent while at the same time taking away our storage space in the basement (claiming it’s a fire hazard, while also saying they’re planning on pouring concrete down there, apparently.) So, Delia and I looked at a few townhouses, one of which we rathered liked in Merrimack. Unforunately, I don’t think my credit is going to be good enough at this time to swing a loan. The combination of lack of credit history and my inconsistent bills payments from last year (from the whole unemployment/PepBoys time period) don’t look so great to the banks.

So, it looks like we’ll be renting for a while longer. I’d like to get out of where we are though, and are currently leaning toward a complex in Bedford. While more expensive than the current location, it’s also quite a lot nicer, so I think it’ll be worth it. My plan is to rent for another year or two, keeping better documentation on my bill payments, so that when we go for the buying-a-place option again, I’ll have everything all put together to give to the loan people.

I’ve also been giving some thought to taking a stab at the HTPC project again. I’ve got all the hardware I need, it’s just a matter of throwing it together an making it work. With the recent upgrade to Delia’s PC, I even have my original motherboard and CPU back. I think I’m going to go with an external VGA< ->NTSC adapter this time around though, since I wasn’t very pleased with the TV-out support for my chipset under Linux, and I really want to use MythTV. Also not too sure about controlling the new cable box. My old box had a nice RS-232 port on the back which allowed for direct serial control. The new one does not, which means I’ll probably end up having to go with an IR blaster of some sort. We shall see.

Well, I decided that paying off my rent debt was more important than a new laptop, so I’ve done the financially resposible thing and put more tax return toward that. Now I just have to pay off a couple smaller debts and I’ll be debt free once again. Yay!

In other news, the apartment building we’re living in is up for sale. Looks like the asking price is about $350k, and I’m trying to think of a way to get together with our friends on the first floor to buy the building. One person suggested working out a system by which the building is split into individual condo units and purchased seperately, but I have no idea whatsoever on how to go about doing such a thing.

Other than that, not a whole lot going on in life. We had a party for Delia’s birthday last night (I’m actually still awake from that, haven’t felt the inclination to sleep yet.) Much fun was had, lots of Karaoke Revolution, a suprising amount of alcohol and more than enough pizza. I’m sure Delia will post more about it at some point.

Not really sure what I’m going to do with the rest of my weekend. I’ve been tossing around the idea of going geocaching, since I haven’t done that in quite a while. I should do some work on the SimPro stuff as well. Maybe I’ll even get a chance to work on one of my own projects for a change.

Old building wiring is such a pain. Near as I can tell, our floor has 5 circuits, one dedicated for the washer dryer, then 4 that are apparently used at random around the floor. Somehow, I think we managed to do something very bad to one or two of them. Earlier this evening, we had two air conditioners running (one in bedroom, one in living room), two computers running (same room, but one powered from the other bedroom), and Delia attempted to make nachos in the microwave, which apparently put something over the top, and blew at least one circuit. Here’s the weird part; resetting the breakers in the basement did nothing. They weren’t even tripped when I went down there. We have no power in the bedrooms or the dining room/kitchen. We do have power in the front half of the living room, one plug on the outside wall of the dining room/kitchen, the bathroom, and the pantry/kitchen. I was only able to determine that one of the breakers actually does anything.

I really have no idea what’s wrong with it at this point. I’m guessing either something in the panel fried (though it’s brand new, installed just after we moved in) or some of the wiring along the way cooked itself.

At least we still have one A/C working, so we’re not cooking in here, and I managed to use some heavy duty extension cords to get my computer, the cable modem, and the router back up. Not going to leave them up though, since I have no idea what’s going on with power at the moment.

Overall, today has sucked.

Well, we made it! karnil and I are pretty much all moved into our new apartment on the west side. There’s just a few items left at the old place the I’m going to go grab tonight, then we’ll be all done. I’m still amazed that we got it all done as quickly as we did, and would like to thank all the people who helped us move, absinthexl, anuttycoffee, kat_ra, kittybrat, metron2001, and redenife. And a large portion of thanks to jpallan for the use of her van, without which we would have given a much larger chunk of money to U-Haul. Oh, and I’d like to recommend the cleaning services of teddymackinnon, who we had clean the old apartment up a bit for us. It looks just like it did when I moved in, it’s kindof weird…

Anyway, thanks to all who helped, we’re planning to throw a party once we get unpacked and settled a bit, probably near the end of March or early April, depending on how things go. I’ll also take some pictures and get them posted as soon as I remember too.

And now I collapse again.

Well, I’m not entirely sure I’m going to be able to get a mortgage in order to buy a place, so it looks like we may be renting for another year or so. This would give me time to get some money in the bank again (assuming I can stick to my automatic savings transfers and not touch that account) as well as try to get some of the items on my credit report cleared up.

On the plus side, we found a pretty nice apartment on the west side of Manchester, two floors above where kyotemusings and redenife are living now. It’s a pretty big 3 bedroom place for about what I’m paying for my 1 bedroom currently. We’d be able to take on a roommate, too, which would help with trying to put some money away.