Tag Archives: personal

The family in MS History

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Today on MPB they had an interview with one of the players on the MS State basketball team that snuck out of the State to play against a mostly black team back in 1963. (Look it up, it’s an interesting story.) The guy they interviewed was my Dad’s second cousin. I had no idea a family member was a part of that particular piece of Mississippi college/racial history.

What I really found cool about finding this out was the fact that my Dad was a freshman member of the Ole Miss football team the year James Meredith started there. So apparently my family was present for two of the bigger college/racial historical events in the state. NEAT!

iTunes won’t sync my apps anymore

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I haven’t synced my iPhone 4s in quite a while so I decided to do it on Monday, (1/21/2013). iTunes needed to be updated, so I let that run first, and once it was finished, I started the sync. I was watching an online video when the sync started so I was a bit distracted, but still, I knew the sync went WAY to quickly. So I decided to do it again, and again the sync finished very quickly. When I tried to navigate around the iTunes app, I had a hard time, because they’ve changed things up quite a bit. In the end, I managed to get to the computer’s apps, and lo-and-behold 93 apps needed to be updated. Which meant they WEREN’T syncing with my phone like it used to. After 20 frustrating minutes I finally figured out how to make it work.

Navigate to Devices, choose your phone, then ‘Transfer Purchases’ or hit ‘control-s’ to bring back the side bar that iTunes USED to have choose your phone and right click to get to the ‘Transfer Purchases’ selection. That makes the updated apps from your phone transfer to your computer. That is it MAY work if iTunes decides your phone is actually connected. For some reason my iTunes keeps disconnecting the phone so it doesn’t show up in my device list. I got around it by unplugging the phone from the computer and re-connecting it. I have NO idea why iTunes keeps doing this. I haven’t figured that problem out yet. If you do let me know.

Phone: iPhone 4s with iOS 6.0.1

iTunes: 11.0.1.12

Colds suck ass

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As everyone knows, colds just simply suck ass but are a part of life. Well after a week of Christmas traveling we got home and THE VERY NEXT DAY, I come down with something. Throat is sore as hell can hardly sleep at night because swallowing HURTS. After a couple of days I decided to go to the local MEA and get checked out. They gave me a shot and a prescription. Hopefully I’ll be fine by Monday.

THIS IS NOT THE WAY I WANTED AN EXTRA 3 DAYS OFF WORK DAMMIT!

Feel like shit, don’t wanna do shit. I mostly just sit and watch TV. I DON’T LIKE TV!

Thanks for guaranteeing I cut the cord Comcast

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So on Tuesday morning my cable goes out. I have the triple play plan and when the cable goes so does my phone and my internet. Yay! NOTHING IS WORKING.

Like most of the people on the planet I work for a living, so I call Comcast once I get to work on my cell phone. The lady on the other end is nice but she wants my social security number(or the last 4 digits of it) as my security password because I’m NOT calling from my home phone(its out remember). I give it to her and apparently Comcast has the WRONG info in their system. I don’t know what number they have but it ISN’T my ssn. I get past this by giving them my account number. I have my old bills at work so I had the number handy. First crisis avoided.Second crisis ends the call with NOTHING done. Apparently she won’t send out a technician unless I fiddle with the cable, which I cannot do because I AM NOT HOME! Great! So the wife is at home I have HER call them and give her the account number because she’ll need it too. They have her do some things, which freaks her out, because as far as she’s concerned anything more advance than a rotary phone is voodoo death magic.

After her jiggling of cables fails to get any results they tell her they will forward our ticket to the local dispatchers and they should call us back within 2 hours. They are given my wife’s cell phone number AND mine. THEY NEVER CALL.

Wife calls the 800 number AGAIN. They are very nice, look up the ticket, see that the locals have scheduled a technician to show up on MONDAY. 5 DAYS LATER! Might also want to mention that would be Christmas EVE for crying out loud. The wife informs the nice 800 operator that we won’t be home on Monday. They cancel the ticket and escalate it. They tell her the local dispatchers should call within one (1) hour. As of Thursday at 10:30 THEY STILL HAVEN’T CALLED!

Apparently the local Comcast group is so busy or incompetent they won’t even bother to CALL their customers to let them know whats going on, AND they expect us to wait at least 5 days with NO INTERNET, NO CABLE, and NO PHONE! I find this intolerable.

The wife and I will be out of town the last 2 weeks of the year. We get back on the 1st. The wife is trying to make sure a technician shows up on Jan. 2nd. I’ve decided that even if that technician shows up, I’m cutting the cord on my cable. I’ve been thinking about cutting the cord anyway, and this episode has pushed me over the edge. The wife pretty much only watches the ‘big 4′, the cut won’t hurt her. It’ll hurt me, because I lose my time waster channels like Cartoon network, History and Science channels. I also lose the only reason I HAVE cable in the first place ESPN. I’ve decided that ESPN (and college football) just isn’t worth $1500-$1800 a year. I’ll just pocket that money, set up as good a digital antenna as I can and stream stuff I really want that I can’t get over the air.

Oh, and when I stream stuff, it’ll be from AT&T even if it’s DSL. Comcast doesn’t get any more of my money for a LONG time.

 

UPDATE: Lesson learned. When you deal with Comcast do it through Twitter.

24 hours after multiple 1-800 calls I’m simply pissed.

3 Hours after my complaint hit twitter, I’ve got my cable back, an apology from ‘corporate’ and a $20 credit on my bill. Also, I’m a lot less pissed at Comcast so well done ComcastCares guys and gals.

Computer build; request for assistance

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I have built almost every computer I’ve ever used, but the last one I purchased from Dell, around 4-5 years ago. My last purchase I used the excuse of “getting a Dell is only around $50-100 more, so building isn’t really worth it”. Well, I’m not using that excuse again. It IS worth it. I’ve just not been happy with the Dell. The performance has been fine, but I don’t like the case at all. It’s way to bulky and frankly poorly made.  So I’m going back to the basics and building my next video game box. I’ve tooled around my usual haunts and gotten some good ideas for a build from Ars Technica. I also check out The Tech Report for ideas, because they seem to do hardware reviews more often and in more detail than Ars.

This is the first iteration of my new PC build. I build my box for gaming, and I try to get ‘middle price point’ parts, so that I get the biggest bang for my buck.  I’m trying to keep the computer in the $1500 or less price range and as you see I’m a little over right now. It’s been around 8 years since I built a computer and 4-5 since I even looked into the components of building one, so I could use some help in the planning stage for sure.  Please feel free to offer ideas, and criticisms. I especially want opinions about the video card. I may be over buying getting a GeForce 670; would a GeForce 660 Ti, or the equivalent Radeon(7950 I think) be plenty of card for my needs?

Pain and gain

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So the plan was to work half a day and go see the latest Batman movie then get dinner with the wife to celebrate my birthday. In the end I got dinner but no movie. You see I had purchased as a ‘self gift’ in the form of an Onkyo TX-NR414 receiver and getting the thing to work took MORE than the half a day I took off work.

Tearing down the old Sony took a while, because there are a TON of wires connected to it. Though no HDMI cables, the Sony is so old it predates HDMI being a standard feature. (Now you’re getting the idea of why I’m replacing it even though it still works. OLD!)

Anyway, I made sure to use some tape to label each speaker wire so I could re-attach them correctly, and tore the whole thing out. Putting everything back was a bit of a bother because my wireless headset for the xBox requires composite cables instead of HDMI, and I didn’t even bother re-connecting the Wii, because I haven’t used it in over a year. In the end, I simply have the cable box connected by HDMI to the receiver, the xBox by composite and my CD player hooked up with those 2 wire connectors, can’t remember their name.

I attached a USB wireless connector(TP-Link TL-WN722N) to the front of the box and remarkably, setting up the wireless network connection was pain free. It’s worked superbly, with absolutely no complaints.  I was even able to update the firmware using that USB connection. The firmware update took around 20-30 minutes as there were 2 updates required, but no real problems. I should have known my luck couldn’t be this good.

The problems happened AFTER everything was connected. I tried to confirm the physical connections (all 3 of them). The CD works fine, though I now have no remote that can talk to it. The Comcast cable works fine, but the xBox has sound but no picture. I’ve tried everything to get the composite in input from the xBox, to output through the HDMI out connection to the TV, but no dice. I had to use another set of composite cables(So glad I had a couple extra around!) to connect to the TV. So I solve that by having the Comcast 3 in one remote flip the TV input from HDMI to Composite. Inelegant but works. Not too bad a hurdle, but now, the biggie. The 3-in-one simply would NOT control the new receiver. I spent the rest of the day getting that damn thing to work. You have no idea how lucky I feel to have finally come across the AVS forum where a guy named “3FingeredGlove” had the solution to my problem. So it took all day, some sweat and rug-burned knees but I now have a new receiver connected to my sound system, and after a half a decade my center channel speaker finally works!

Happy Birthday me! (me: Screw you nerd! I wanted to see the movie!)