CmdrTaco's Journal: Bluegrass, HDTV,

Last night Kathleen & I went to see Allison Kraus, along with a host of other folk singers at the Fox Theater in Detroit. (Thanks Cliff!). Over the course of the evening, we saw like a half a dozen acts, and many of the performers from the Oh Brother Where Art Thou soundtrack. It was a pretty impressive show. It was in stark contrast to The Strokes who we saw earlier this week... much less body surfing, many more bald heads. I enjoyed both shows, but for completely different reasons.

I got my HD Tivo finally. I read on the Tivo Community Forums that ABC warehouse had a few (ABC is a midwest electronics store.. they have a dozen or so outlets around michigan and often they have slimey sales people. I hate people working on commission usually.). I called a few of the local stores and got vastly conflicting stories, but mostly they amounted to "They have them in the central warehouse, but not here." Since a guy in the forum claimed he bought 6 from his local outlet, I figured out where their central warehouse is, and called all the ABC outlets near it. On my third call I got lucky- they had one on a truck, just 30 or so minutes away. Victory is mine!

I've since hooked up an antenna with mixed results. I get all the stations I wanted except UPN (No Star Trek Enterprise for me!). A few of the channels break up a little. Since pretty much everything I care about watching on network TV ends in the next week or so, I'm not super broke up, and I have the summer to figure out how to resolve it. Of course, I'm quite scared of heights, so clomping around on the roof assembling an antenna, and aiming it was quite the treat. Yikes. But DAMN HDTV is cool. I just wish everything I watched was available high def.

What's strange is that while my direction antenna is aimed at detroit (east) I'm actually getting signals from Toledo (south). Not GREAT signals, but pretty good. From my location I probably can get Toledo, Lansing, and Detroit. No particular reason to actually bother, and I don't want the roof of my house to look like I'm conducting elaborate science in the basement, but it is pretty neat. Its strange how HDTV is resurecting the old fashioned antenna, just when it seemed like satellites and cable would kill it.

In work related news, I have an odd story to relay. A guy emailed me a few weeks ago to complain that he was being "Mod Bombed". Specificly, he cited the potential for abuse in the Overrated mod tag... since Over/Underrated aren't subject to M2, a bad moderator can use those tags to escape the wrath of the meta moderator. Of course, there are other checks in there too, and statistically, people don't substantially use these tags more than the others, so while there is potential for abuse, it's actually not as large of a problem as people think. But it CAN be abused, and occasionally it is. Anyway, this guy feared conspiracy, so I checked in on him... and sure enough, someone had moderated him down 5 times, overrated, in a very short amount of time. None of his comments were particularly bad or good. Probably not worthy of the abuse.

But thats not the funny part... the funny part is that the complainer did the exact same thing. He used the overrated tag on another user a bunch of times... in FACT, he used his mod points on the very user who moderated him down. The two of them were waging a little mod war against each other, and one tattled on the other. I guess this is something else I need to consider in a future revision of the mod system. But I'm still preetty amazed... it takes a lot of balls to try to tattle on someone when you are doing the very thing you are tattling about.

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[account_deleted]

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Re:

[account_deleted]

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mod bomb

[JDizzy]

I have to say I've been doing this as long as i've been aware of the potential. In my user perspective, mod bombing somebody is not an ilegitimate use of mod points. Fact is we are granted points to use as we see fit. Certainly moderating has become more anoying that a fun thing, and I have to ask myself what do I get out of moderating except to pump the ego some some stranger. So why not use mod points to bomb somebody? At least that way They go to somebody I know, either friend or foe. In fact I find that