Category: Uncategorized

For some reason, I don’t even remember why, I was checking out my Dish Network account online. One of the choices is My Pay Per View Certificates. So I clicked it and it said I had certificates for 2 free movies. The certificates were effective back in October, but they expired that day (January 31). Well, I was at work, so I couldn’t watch movies and the odds couldn’t be good for me to get home and be able to find and watch two movies back-to-back that I really wanted to see. But they have a neat feature where you can go online from anywhere and tell your DVR to record things, so I tried that, but the site isn’t compatible with Internet Explorer 7. So once I got home, I went through and found Moneyball, which I had really been wanting to see anyway. Then I had to look for another movie and found Ides of March, where George Clooney is running for president. I guess. But then somewhere in the rules when I was picking the movies it told me that once I started watching the movie I would only have 24 hours to watch it. Well, that gave me some time. I could watch one tonight and one tomorrow night. But, also I could also start watching it any time up until April. Even better. I love having a DVR. And those terms are pretty decent (although the movies were something like $6.99 each which I would never pay).

So I wanted to start watching it a couple of days later and got an error message saying I couldn’t watch it with the digital output device I had connected to my receiver. I have a really old HDTV that doesn’t even have HDMI jacks, so I didn’t think anything was digital, but I figured that rather than deal with it now, I would look that up later.

This weekend I thought that maybe my digital output device was the toslink audio cable. Instead of carrying an electrical signal, the cord is fiber optic and carries light from the satellite to my audio receiver without any loss in quality or interference. So I disconnected it and the movie played no problem. I could play audio through the TV instead of the surround sound system.

Good movie. I’m glad I checked my Dish account. I checked again just now and no new certificates. Don’t know when I’ll get around to Ides of March.

I have an offline browser on my iPod that I can use to store my entire blog. By pointing it at my archives page I was able to get it to download everything (takes a while), but the problem is the iPod has an awful browser, Safari, that does a terrible job of rendering pages on a small screen. With the blog it shows the banner image at the top of the page and then a thin, microscopic column of text for the blog entry. So you have to zoom in on the column, but it is a pain.

I started looking for solutions and found a plugin for WordPress that completely changes the look of the blog if you try to view it on a portable device. The plugin is called WPtouch and was specifically designed for the iPod Touch and iPhone, but works for Android and Blackberry as well. I don’t think it does anything for iPad, but that’s okay because the iPad has a bigger screen. Although WPtouch is free, they have a pay version called WPtouch Pro that gives you the ability to configure the look more and also control how it looks on an iPad. Well, I’m not going to pay, but I am very particular how things look.

Continue reading “WPtouch”

When I was writing about my banner images, I wanted to identify the name of the bridge in one picture from Dublin. I wound up finding a website and was able to narrow it down to the Mellows Bridge, but no thanks to Wikipedia where the picture of the bridge looked like this:

Continue reading “My Picture on Wikipedia”

Here are all the pictures I use in the blog’s banner and how those pictures came to be.

Biltmore Estate
In May 2018 we had a Peace Corps reunion in Asheville and went to the Biltmore. They had some Dale Chihuly glasswork on display including these two boats.

Munich and Prague

In May 2018 I went with Bob, Eric and Andrew to Munich and Prague. The first picture is the New City Hall from St. Peter’s belltower while the second is from the Theatine Church in Munich, while the others were taken in Prague including some subway art and pictures of the Charles Bridge and the art nouveau Svatopluk Čech Bridge.

California

For my 50th birthday in 2015, I took a trip to San Francisco. San Francisco has a couple of great bridges including the Golden Gate bridge and the Bay Bridge.

I drove south of San Francisco to Monterey and beyond that where the Pacific Coast Highway runs along some beautiful coastline, including this picture and the Bixby Creek Bridge.

In that same area is a great state park called Point Lobos State Reserve which lets you get up close the shore.

Cozumel

On Mom’s 75th birthday cruise, one of the stops was Cozumel, Mexico. We hired a van and stopped at a beach with some neat rock and a blowhole that wasn’t working due to low tide.

Colorado National Monument and Arches National Park

In September 2013 I drove a U Haul truck out to Salt Lake City and we stopped by these two national parks. This first image is Colorado National Monument, a panorama image from the Grand View viewpoint:

And here is a shot from Arches National Park of the South Window:

Yellowstone and Grand Tetons

In May 2013 I went out to Salt Lake City and visited the Bonneville Salt Flats, Golden Spike National Historic Site, Grand Teton National Park, and Yellowstone National Park. This first picture was taken at Golden Spike where they have replica trains and replica train tracks from the completion of the transcontinental railroad:

Later that day I drove out to the Bonneville Salt Flats and took this picture:

Also at Bonneville I took this picture of the sun setting over Nevada:

In Grand Teton National Park I took this picture of the Tetons from the Willow Flats area:

On the Cascade Canyon hike from Jenny Lake, Susan said she liked the texture of this log:

Then in Yellowstone, I took this picture of the Sapphire Pool hot spring:

Also in Yellowstone, I took this picture of travertine terrace formations at Mammoth Hot Springs:

Ireland

A lot of pictures come from my July 2008 trip to Ireland (gallery). In chronological order, they pretty much tell everywhere I went. We started in Dublin, and while Susan’s choir was practicing, I walked down to the River Liffey and took pictures of a lot of different cool bridges. This is the Mellows Bridge. I uploaded this picture to Wikipedia.

Leaving Dublin and heading south, we stopped by the Rock of Cashel, a hill with some old churches on top of it. This is a neat picture, not as good cropped as at full size.

Continue reading “Banner Images”

I never watched the TV sitcom Big Bang Theory, but recently Channel 17 (used to be TBS but is now WPCH, Peachtree TV, and has different programming than TBS) has started airing two episodes a day Monday through Friday. With a DVR it is easy to get every episode and WPCH has been very considerate by airing them in order separated about halfway through the four season run. I have been watching for a month but can’t possibly keep up with so many episodes, thus filling up my hard drive. But there are less than 100 shows so it only takes 9 weeks of recording to get everything. I am getting pretty close, and I have been able to delete one of the timers since it has caught up with the shows I recorded with the other timer. Plus the show is still airing on prime time so I get the most recent season once a week.

It’s a pretty good show, about 4 science geeks and a normal girl. It is usually pretty dumb with it’s oversimplified exaggerated portrayal of nerdom, but occasionally brilliant. And it comes up day-to-day, with a person at work pointing out a parallel with a group of us who eat lunch together at designated places for the day of the week, which the nerds do for dinner (and you have to admit that it is pretty geeky to do that for dinner).

Several episodes have included the song “Soft Kitty” which the weirdest science geek, Sheldon, likes to have sung to him when he is sick (in one episode, the girl offers to sing the song to him when he is sad after feeling betrayed by his friends, but he points out that “Soft Kitty” is only for when he is sick, and there is no song for when he is sad, concluding “I’m not a child”).

Soft kitty, warm kitty
Little ball of fur
Happy kitty, sleepy kitty
Purr, purr, purr

I looked this up on some wikis about the show. They pointed out (I don’t know how they know things like this) that the song is real, though it is called “Warm Kitty” and reverses the kitties in the first and second lines (“Warm kitty, soft kitty” and “Sleepy kitty, happy kitty”). Maybe the writers of the TV show changed it to avoid copyright problems (don’t know if that would hold up, since it’s still obviously the same thing), but I do think they improved it. “Soft kitty” is a much funnier name for the song and it seems appropriate to end on “sleepy kitty” if the idea is to put someone to sleep.