CmdrTaco's Journal: Apple Cider, The Great North, Movin' Right Along

Our office is cold. Well, actually I believe our office exists in a temperature flux zone since it randomly changes temp from like 45 degrees to 95 degrees. I need to keep a muscle-t & a sweater on hand at all times just to make sure that I have a chance to survive the extreme temp swings. Fortunately the coffee shop down the street is carrying hot apple cider. Nothing warms a body up like hot apple cider.

This weekend was a nice little vacation. Kathleen & I went up north (near Charlevoix for you michiganders) and spent the weekend at a cottage with 23 other people. While others opted to do outdoorsy type things like "Walking", I spent a lot of time enjoying the peace, tranquilty, and lack of laptop by reading comics. Had a great time. Needed serious unwinding, and that was just what the doctor prescribed: Couch, Beer, Comics. Its a lot like home, except that there are more trees, more people, and no laptops.

XChat Aqua is an ongoing project designed to rememdy the fact that every IRC client on OS X sucks. Currently I'm running X-Chat via XDarwin just cuz the 5-6 IRC apps I've found for OS X are all either ugly, clumsy, limited, or all 3.

Of course, a vacation has the enjoyable side affect of leaving a heaping helping of goodness on the Tivo. Firefly continues to get better- this episode was absolutely hilarious. The Sopranos was once again excellent (especially the dream sequences).

I've yet to sucessfully extract video from my tivo. I can get the .ty stream file, but I've been unable to convert either seperate it into discrete streams, or convert that into a usable mpeg. The problem really seems to be that I've been trying to do this on my Mac, and the half dozen different proggies available for extracting and splitting out the usable streams all seem to either segfault, or report nothing but bad data in my tystream. Could also be that I have a DirecTivo and a lot of the stuff is for 1.x tivos, or non dish tivo. I dunno how much more I'll mess with it. I really don't need video extraction as much as I want it. But I don't want it enough to boot up a windows box to do the voodoo. TivoWeb is a vastly superior interface to using the remote control to search for shows, with the added benefit that you can edit your season passes, TODO list etc, but while watching a show. Which is great since I'm obsessive about pruning my TODO list.

We're consolidating servers @ OSDN, which means that Slashdot has to move once again. Hopefully users will notice little or no interruption save maybe some time for DNS to migrate, but I'm always wary about these things. This time around I'll likely have almost no involvement: our netops guys are really good, and our setup, while convoluted, shouldn't be that difficult to replicate (especially since most of the boxes are essentially identical webheads, its really only the DBs that require wackyness).