Stupid Foot

I’ve posted previously about my unhappiness with Sylvania and Funai Corp in regards to the Sylvania 6842THG 42″ plasma TV I own. My level of satisfaction had done nothing but do down each and every time I have an interaction with them.

I received a phone call last week from a shipping company telling me that they had my TV and to schedule a drop off. I was excited to say the least. It had been about two months sense I had finally had it picked up for repair. I couldn’t wait to watch HD TV and play some GTA IV in HD again. 

The TV sat all boxed up at my parents house for a few days until I could stop by and pick it up to bring it home. Before I brought it home I wanted to make sure the blue / purple pixels had actually been fixed so we hooked up an Xbox with XBMC and let it run on screen saver mode for hours. Everything looked great. I didn’t see a hint of the blue / purple pixels.

Cut to today. After work today I drove over and my brother helped me load up the TV for the drive to my house. The TV made it home safe and sound. My wife couldn’t wait to have it hooked up so while she made dinner I hooked it up. HDMI to the Xbox 360, coax to the wall, original Xbox to input 1. We were set.

The first thing we watched was Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles. We both thought we saw a hit or a flash of the blue or purple but not enough to really make us question it. After the show she recommended some GTA IV.

I dive right in. Driving around shooting guys. It’s great. I make a left under a bridge and the scenery goes from mostly light outside to dark inside and boom there it is. The blue / purple is back. Oh wait what is this? It is easily 10 times worse off than it was before I sent it in. This is great. I hate this tv. I hate Sylvania and Funi Corp.

I turn to my friend Google to see if I can come up with any sort of reason why this is happening other than “There is something wrong with the TV”. Some people suggest that it could be as simple as the HDMI connector causing problems. I needed to let the TV scan all the channels so I could get the digital ones back.

Once the TV is scanning channels the blue / purple goes away. It was like magic. It was there one second and gone the next. While it was scanning channels I swapped out the HDMI cable with the component cables.

Scan finishes no blue or purple. Ok so maybe it was the HDMI. Back to GTA IV. not two minutes into the game its back, just as before. I’ve taken a few pictures of it and plan to call Funi Corp or Sylvania or who ever I can get on the phone tomorrow and try to find out what exactly was done to fix my TV and what can be done about it in its current state.

After being frustrated with the permalink redirect problems I was having last month I pretty much stopped writing anything. It was not just the permalink issues that caused me to stop it was the mad rush to get everything ready for our daughter who is now just days away from being born.

After quite a bit of putzing around with wordpress I finally gave up and used mod_rewrite to fix the urls. The changes I made can be explained like this.

If mod_rewrite is available, turn the rewrite engine on, set the rewrite base to the root of the url. The RewriteRule works like this, Any request made to this site for example this post: /2008/06/15/a-followup-to-wordpress-25-permalink-redirect-plugin-issues.html. The bolded part of the request is stored in $1 and redirected to /2008/06/15/a-followup-to-wordpress-25-permalink-redirect-plugin-issues with a 301 (moved permanently). the new request for /2008/06/15/a-followup-to-wordpress-25-permalink-redirect-plugin-issues is then handled normaly by wordpress.

That is the contents of my .htaccess file and so far it seems to be doing just what I wanted.

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^(.*).html$ /$1 [R=301,L]
</IfModule>

# BEGIN WordPress
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]
</IfModule>

# END WordPress

I was just trying to convert my permalink structure from 

/%year%/%monthnum%/%day%/%postname%.html

 to 

/%year%/%monthnum%/%day%/%postname%/.

This seems like it would be a trivial thing to do with the Permalink Redirect Plugin. I followed the instructions and then was getting 404s on the old links. I don’t really have time to dig into it now but I’m guessing it has something to do with the .html in my original link structure. Maybe some regular expression issue.

I’ll take another look at it in the future. I would like to find a way to do this without manually coding mod_rewrite rules. I’m open to anyone leaving comments and I’ll be sure to post anything I find out.

My wife and I went to the OB today for a scheluded appointment. My wife is 36 weeks pregnant and getting ever closer to popping like a thing of Jiffy Pop on the stove. While we were there we had it confirmed that she is measuring about 2 weeks ahead of schedule, ie she is measuring like she’s 38 weeks.

This is a good thing becuase it means we don’t have to wait as long to meet my daughter. From what I understand anything over 37 weeks is pretty much as good as full term. That being the case there really is no down side to her coming early.

This has reminded me that I need to hurry up and decide what I’m going to do on a site I bought for her when we actually decided on a name, http://www.GraceElizabethCampbell.com. Right now it has drupal 6 up and running and I think it does a fine job for displaying the few posts I have up on it.

I’ve recently been coding a plugin for WordPress to integrate the ebay EPN network so you can manage auction items in your posts. I’m leaning towards making it something like BANS but its still really early in development.

That being said, I’m really starting to like WordPress more and more. It is very good at what it does, giving you a way to post stories and posts. The admin interface, especially in 2.5 is such a pleasure to work with. Everything feels right about it. Being that it is WordPress you also get all of the other nifty plugins that other people have created, like the All in one SEO plugin and the WPG2 plugin to integrate Gallery2 into WordPress.

I suspect I’ll be making a final decision in the next week or so. I’m mostly looking for something that I can build up with her pictures and little things she does over the years.

At the office today the idea was tossed around to replace our Point Of Sale terminals which currently are PCs that have a CPU, motherboard, memory and a cdrom drive. They boot a customised Knoppix CD that loads into a full screen Kiosk mode Konqueror. The start page is pos.store.domain.tld which is unique to each store with their local server.

One of the main reasons we are looking for something better is we seem to be going through cdroms about one every 5 months. That in itself isn’t a huge problem the larger problem is that we’re looking for something that doesn’t cost $300.00 for a new terminal. We actually talked about using the Linux Terminal Server Project but the Point Of Sale server is a 500mhz soekris net5501 and we didn’t think it would handle running its normal server duties along with X and KDE for 5 clients at a time.

I’m kind of hoping that I can get the thin client into some sort of kiosk mode then have use Internet explorer to load the same pos.store.domain.tld un full screen window. One thing that I’m a little concerned about after doing some research, which I should have really done before I ordered anything, but its too late for that, is that the one I ordered runs Windows CE 4.20 which seems to have a ghetto version of Internet explorer. From what I’ve read I think I would be better off with a thin client that runs Windows XP embedded.

I’ll actually be posting more as I work through this in hopes that someone elise could use this information too.

I was just catching up on my RSS feeds and came across a post on thenichestorebuilder.com linking to Jeremy Schoemaker (aka Shoemoney) where Jeremy shows you how to make $1,000 an hour. About half way into it it gets to be full of static and hissy. I immediately knew where this was going and by the comments on his forum it seems like he did a good job of pulling the wool over some peoples eyes.

In true April Fools fashion thinkgeek.com is up to their usual post some fake products shtick. I actually want to buy two of them though, the first is Spazztroids - Caffeinated Breakfast Cereal. How could this not be good? Caffeine… Check, Crazy Cartoon Icon… Check, Cereal… Check. The second thing I want is the Defendius Labyrinth Security Lock. I’m aware that it wouldn’t be practical but it sure would be a neat thing to show off.

April Fools also seems to hit slashdot and digg hard. On digg tons of stuff gets pushed up to the front page and it all seems interesting but it is a pain to sort out real news from the april fools stories. At least this only happens once a year, where the internet turns to crap…. oh wait…

With the rate at which Facebook is growing I’m going to assume that most everyone I know has an account. Normally I wouldn’t feel so conferable about making such a broad generalisation but in the last few weeks I’ve received friend requests from my mother in-law and some people I used to work with years ago.

Now that we are going on the assumption that everyone and their brother has a Facebook account and Facebook has setup their developer program there are literally hundreds if not thousands of applications that you can install. I’ve seen everything. Games like Warbook which is strategy style game which is kinda neat but gets boring quickly. Social applications like Zombies, Warewolves, and Slayers the basic premise of all three of these games is to infect or recruit you’re friends and build yourself and army which can then do battle with other players. To me this isn’t very interesting because you’ll see requests from your friends to join the games again and again. One of the more interesting applications I’ve seen is Friends for sale, this application allows you to buy and sell your friends. You end up making money when you buy one of your friends and then someone buys them from you. This one application has made me start to notice a few things about people.

• Girls seem to cost more than guys.
• The more popular someone is the more their cost is.
• Some people have way way too much time on their hands to be able to afford some of the crazy prices others are going for.

You can acquire money in a few ways with this application.

• You receive $2,000.00 every time you log-in and check the application, but only every two hours.
• You receive $10,000.00 for recruiting 10 friends.

At first I thought it would be interesting to script some sort of automagic log-in thing every two hours to build my fortune but I really do have better things to do than hax0r an online facebook application. Then I got to thinking how are these people making the millions they have. I’ve spent some time and the answer that I think fits the question best is that they really do login every two hours to check their facebook account. Call me crazy but I think I can find something better to do than check my facebook page every 2 hours.

I’m really waiting for some new cool applications to come out. I really do understand that the developer program really is very new and that with time the community will grow and evolve. I am looking forward to being able to use the next killer app that will be created by a 14 year old kid in his bedroom late at night.

The following is a quote from me on another one of my blogs, networknazi.org

I’m really starting to think that I’m trying to run too many sites and not able to give any one of them the attention that it would need to really grow. As of right now I have something like 5 blogs up and running 2 corporate home pages and a hand full of Internet Marketing sites. This is a sad realisation for me because I’ve really grown attached to some of the domains over the last few years.

I’m not really sure what I may do with some of the domains that I will not have time to update. Should I take them down by removing DNS entries? Should they serve up a blank index page? Should I 301 redirect them to one of my other sites? Quite a few choices here really.

The original plan was to use the separate sites to try to keep work and personal stuff separate but as time has gone on it has become more and more mixed together where people from work know my online pseudonyms and a few people from online know my work information so that isn’t as much of a concern anymore.

I’ll be keeping everything up with a few more updates or maybe leave everything as is until I come up with a final solution that makes sense.