Bikerscum - Patrick St. Jean

I found a 10% off coupon that I'd gotten with the Vonage rebates and went back over to the store to see if they could apply it. It turned out that they could and I saved another 10% on the purchase price, which I'm not going to scoff at.

When I signed up for Vonage, Circuit City was doing a pretty sweet deal with rebates and such. They paid for the adapter, the signup fees, and left me with a gift card to put towards an upgrade of my receiver. The only problem was that the card had a rather short expiration date.

So, that being said, since there was a sale going on today, I picked up a Sony STR-DE898. It does component video switching so I can run the TV on component input and have the receiver do all of the video switching. I've got everything running now and it's working well. Even got the Harmony remote reprogrammed.

I've been seeing a lot of commercials for those so calledstarving artist sales coming up here in the metromess and started to do a little digging. Well, here's some info from someone with a Ph.D. in art that helps set the record straight.

Personalli, these sales fall under the "if it sounds too good to be true" category.

Today was the big day. I finally got fed up with 35 hours on my Hughes SD-DVR40 and upgraded it with The Zipper. I had two 60 gig drives laying around and decided to put them to good use. The Tivo came apart easily and after a few missteps with burning the CDs, I got everything going. I've now got a 100 hour unit with networking, but the only problem was that the USB Ethernet adapter I bought, a Linksys USB200M Version 2, wasn't supported until I could log in. That needed a serial cable, and luckily I had some parts laying around to make one.

I've got everything running now, the channels are all back, the season passes have been re-done, and it's all working again. Next step is to replace the drives with bigger ones when money permits.

There's a lot of problems with getting Tivos to work with Vonage and DirecTV made it worse by disabling the USB ports, which means that we can't hook up an Ethernet adapter. After digging around for a while I foind a combination that worked for me and my Hughes SD-DVR40 Series 2 DVR.

First, connect a DSL filter in between the DVR and the phone jack. Then go in to the configuration settings and set the dialing prefix to ",#096,12122773895". This will make the Tivo dial out to the New York number and will force it down to 9600 bps. I didn't bother changing my area code or dialin number because what's in the prefix is what gets called. The test call worked and it's got a scheduled call planned for overnight, so hopefully it will work.

I went to Stroker's Icehouse for lunch today and got to watch them taping part of an episode of Texas Hardtails. It was a lot of fun to see what goes on behind the scenes. Kind of like dinner theater, just with bikers and beer.

The SciFi Channel had their season openers of Stargate SG-1, Stargate Atlantis, and Battlestar Galactica tonight. Other than a burp in my Tivo which got corrected, I got to see all of them.

The new SG-1 has some potential. It's nice to see some new faces, and I think that Ben Browder is going to be a good addition. I always liked him in Farscape. And I hate cliffhanger endings, regardless of whether they're at the end of a season or at the end of an episode!

Atlantis picked up where the season 1 finale left off and has started wrapping up those plots well, but I'm still wondering what's going to happen the first time the Wraith run into some Atlantis personnel. Are they going to come back?

Galactica's just as great as it was last season. They're really doing a good job of not pressing the magic reset button at the end of each episode. It's refreshing to see a story arc thought of in seasons instead of episodes. Baltar's losing it and the humans on Caprica are in a real mess. Tune in next week...

The mailman left me a bunch of presents today. The new right angle bite valve and the spare bladder arrived from Hydrapak. It's a little bit longer than I'd like, but fits inside the chin bar of the helmet so that problem is solved. The spare bladder came with another one so I've got spares all the way down the line.

I also got my shirt from Blue Sun Shirts. It's great! I'm thinking about ordering another. But they've got a Fighting Elves shirt that's calling my name...

Link: http://www.bluesunshirts.com/

I've been a big fan of Firefly since it aired on Fox. The DVD Boxed Set is great, with episodes that were never broadcast, and we've got a movie, titled Serenity coming out on September 30.

In that vein, I found a site on the net that's selling the Blue Sun shirts that Jayne wears in the show. Sweet! Mine's on the way.

Link: http://www.sledgehammeronline.com/

Dear Lord they've released it on DVD.

I can't wait to get my copy.