Hey all.

Hank ha been doing well staying out when we leave. We put a folding chair in the stairs so he doesn't go up there.

I gave him a bath yesterday and he seemed to like it. He's a good smellin' pup now!

The neighbor that gave us the kitchen cabinets called me yesterday and is ready for her new garage to be organized. I'm heading over today to get started. It isn't as bad as the one she had here but will take a few days. I'm taking my little electric heater because it is cold in there. No insulation whatsoever. Odd because the rest of the house is a high line build.

We are supposed to hit 50+ degrees over the weekend. It would great if the yard wasn't so muddy.

Guten Tag.

Exercise in futility. Having cox cable repair out. I'm complaining because after 4 hours of not touching any remote buttons my cable box goes to some bandwidth save mode. It displays was to long with inactivity and plays some sorry guitar music. Very annoying as I leave it on for background noise/music etc while I am working and DO NOT want to have to babysit the thing to keep it from going to low bandwidth mode. It just started this about 6 months ago.

The stupid thing is that it changes to another Channel that displays the message and plays the music. IT STILL USES A CHANNEL BANDWIDTH to save bandwidth!!!

When I first called they tried to tell me it didn't exist and there was no way my cable was doing that.

This time they told me it was a power saver for me. Told them it doesn't save me a singe watt if the everything on my end stays on, TV, Cable Box, etc. Then they said it was to save bandwidth. Said I was the customer and did not ask for their programming to stop to save them bandwidth. Told them whomever came up with this "Feature" needs to be repeatedly kicked in their nether regions with vigor. Said they need to figure out a way to turn it off or I, a customer of 30 years, will be forced to find another media source.

I am betting it is a system level thing and there is nothing they can do about it.

morning all. short day for me. time to go meet the new doctor.

Richard, it is stuff like that that makes me glad we don't pay for cable or satellite.

David, good luck?

The guy said the music channels all go into this mode to prevent burn in on the TV. I know that is BS. Then he tells my my TV is sending the sleep signal to the Cable Box to to save the screen on the TV. Said there were HDMI ports that the TV would not send that signal. I call BS again. He changed the HDMI port the cable box is on and said to call him if it happens again and he would replace the Cable Box. Before the tech came out a higher up server tech told me there is a setting on the box to turn the inactivity thing off and the tech would show me where it was. He couldn't find it, then told me in 8 years he had never had anyone complain about the inactivity thing. Guess I will be calling a getting a new cable box.

Guess I am going to have to check into if replacing the umbilical cable to my TV. I've had it for 30 years. Well except for the 3 months I shut it off and my Mom asked me to turn it back on because cable had more religious channels. It's all the 700 Club's fault!

Our home theater receiver has Pandora, Sirius et al on it so we use that for music stuff. We have some good radio stations as well. Sometimes I use the HTPC to play a Youtube playlist through the receiver as well.

If you threaten enough Cox will send out a actual Cox employee tech. Most of the repair guys are just contract installers. I had 5 Cox employees here at once trying to find an issue. They fixed it.

My brain hurts. I figured I would do a "easy" upgrade on the monster workstation we have. I added two matching one TB SSD drives and I want to set them up as a stripe RAID. Even faster throughput that way. After 6 hours I think I can maybe start cloning the old drive. What a total cluster fudge. It should be easy, but Win 10 is there to "help" and disable that. What a pain.

I gots a Smart Sony TV, an Apple TV, and a Kodi Box besides my Cable Box.
The Sony TV stuff was the cheapest by $1 on the Pay Per View and had more stuff as well.
Haven't done a pay per view on a movie since I setup the Kodi Box.
The TV and Apple TV do Netfix, Youtube, Crackle, etc.
And if I find something on the internet via the web browser on my Laptop, can stream it thru the Apple TV. Or Watch it using the Mac Mini that is my Kodi Box.

Just need to go thru and find where to get the channels like Velocity, Spike, Comedy Central, History, A&E, Action, Western, Elray, Sifi, BBC and whereever they are going to broadcast F1.

The employee tech is the guy they sent out. The were supposed to send out the hardware tech for the stuff at their office, but he just called instead of coming out.
That's why the guy gave me his number and said to call if it goes to sleep again and he will replace the box.

Dang it, my Cable Box has not gone into that inactivity mode thing again and it's been over 12 hours.

Maybe they fixed it finally.

Good over the hump day day.

Back to beating the workstation to bend to my will. I did get the two SSD drives to run as a stripe RAID. It SHALL yield to my will!

Mertnin,

Glen, thought you were supposed to follow those kinds of statements with maniacal laughter?

Morning.

I got a good start on the garage yesterday. She has a ton of stuff. I'll be taking my Carhart coveralls today, though. It was chilly yesterday and today is colder. My little heater didn't do much.

We discussed the job cost as well. I told her my price and she told me it wasn't enough. I expect she will give me a bit more and know better than to argue about it. I've gotten good at pricing out car detail jobs but these odd ones are difficult.

Just a sneer and stern look from this nerd. :o

There was a show where they cleaned out garages for what they could sell what they found for. Figured they didn't stay on the air because the couldn't make much. Or the owners decided they wanted to keep the valuable stuff.

I recall seeing that.

Her stuff is just all over the garage. She had a lot of work done on the house right after she moved in and so things that we boxed up at the old house just got stashed in the garage. Lots of construction material as well which we will donate to Habitat.

Have a good Thursday, gentlefolk.

morning all. well good news the doc is taking me off the bp meds for now. its low enough after skipping for two weeks she wants to see if it stays that way. Say good bye head aches!!!!!

It is astonishing to me to see the crap so many people store in a garage that is maybe a couple of hundred bucks, and they park a $50,000 vehicle outside. It makes no sense to me. Even dumber is to pay a couple hundred per month to store it in at some storage facility. At my last job if I walked out the back door of the business it was right into a storage facility. We would leave to go to lunch and see their crew going unit to unit cutting off a lock on a unit that had past due rent. They would look inside and to see if it was empty and then throw a new padlock on it. If there was anything it went up for a auction once per month. They did not inventory anything unless it smelled bad then they looked for something dead.

It is a very profitable business evidently.

My Brother has kept a 72 Chevy Beauville 7/8 ton window van in various storage facilities since the late 70's. He has been dong a complete frame off restore on it.

Can you guess which brother it is? You got a 50/50 chance. Tom, the brother that sold his 56 T-bird verbally, then was offered $20K more and didn't take it because he is a person of his word...Or Bob, the brother that can barely afford his apartment and believes in Extraterrestrial Conspiracy Theories.

Any guesses or is the choice too rhetorical?