There is some relief in site, People have the replay images available, you can find them at replaytvupgrade so I just need to find a deal on a disk for $50 or so.

Well it sounds like my ReplayTV has abrubtly died

There was a short period where it was acting strange, but that was only for a few days, I came home and found it rebooting and never quite finishing, a hard reboot fixed that.

But this morning it wouldn’t come on when I hit the power button. Undaunted I did another hard reboot. This time I was pierced to the bone with a rapid clicking sound from hell, I could feel it vibrate in the hollow of my temples and hammer against my soul.

Looks like Mikeyboy of replaytvparts is going to get a few of my bucks, unless there is somewhere out there I can get the ReplayTV software image to push onto a new disk that I buy, which I would do just to save some money. First thing to do when I get the replacement drive is to pull the OS image off of it in case a similar need arises in the future.

Again and again I come to this conclusion. The lazy man is way more efficient, and works on interesting things rather than repetitive dumb things. For a very good discussion on this go to a library or a book store and grab a copy of Time Enough for Love by Robert Heinlein and find the story in there about “The Man who was too lazy to fail.”

I’d tell you more about it, but I am feeling a bit put out by the effort.

So I struck a sweet deal with my brother.

Tom: if i make a million dollars, yuo get an 8 pack of hot dogs a month for 5 years. Me: deal.

Now he just needs to write, publish and sell that novel.

overcome procrastination. Do something, do anything. What the hell?

So where is the internet company that will produce those rubber bracelets in arbitrary colors with whatever you want printed on them?

It might be time to start the get Kevin central AC cause. Show your support buy a “McAllister Nation” bracelet today!? From somewhere.

Vacation draws nigh. Just the little matter of work and then a wedding, and then some very crowded relaxation. I must distract myself from the fixated gaze of the clock, as it has a power to paralyze action and run nearly backward if given too much attention.

In my line of work I am constantly confronted by hype of some new silver bullet technology, that will solve all the worlds problems, make coffee and let any idiot jump in and program up the best thing ever. Java, XML, J2EE, anything.NET and then as I got more involved with Java I see pieces of it hyped so much that I can never find a clear understanding of what they are examples are JSF, Portlets, Annotation, Inversion of Control. It actually seems to happen quite a bit with all kinds of products that aren’t even necesarily IT related (Have you tried to buy a television lately?). And this is one reason I hate advertisement.

On the flip-side I have to “work” for a living, and I understand the need to somehow advertise, to let people know you are there. I take advantage of some Firefox plugins to block ads from the pages I browse, and someone asked me, “How do you find out what’s out there?” Currently I guess I find out through reading various blogs and slashdot and this is probably something that would be of great interest to people, because how do you advertise? But this is a rampant tangent to my original thought, probably fit for a different post. The original thought was, I hate advertisement hype, and how do I get past that to find out what new technology is worth investigation and what is just a bunch of noise.

Well I have heard much lately about Java Portlets and Portals. And in the interest of trying to figure out what it is so I can either dismiss it or pay some attention I took a look at the spec, JSR-000168 Portlet Specification. In about 4 paragraphs of direct writing I have a good feel for what was meant to be acomplished with this technology, that 100,000 words of hype couldn’t even bring me close to understanding. So my advice to myself, is next time I am hit with hype that may be of some interest, if there is a spec available, read it first. At least the first few pages. This also leads to a second point the Java Community Process is a good thing.

Sure the hype eventually led me to the real meat. But wouldn’t it be possible for the purveyors of hype to give me some real information first, rather than the pie in the sky crap that everyone knows is bogus?

The ability to extend software is awesome. This is evident by all the great extensions to Firefox. But I was just sent one of the best extensions I have seen so far. Aardvark. It is great for removing crap from a page prior to printing or examining a page for web development work.

Download and enjoy. If you don’t use Firefox as your browser, then what the heck are you waiting for? IE is trash.

When you are a bank that bills yourself as “convenient” it is best if your customers aren’t telling stories like this:

“but I told them they better do whatever they have to do to get me a card in the next 10 minutes or I’m leaving with my card & all my money…that was the only thing that got thier attention”

Anyway thanks Michelle for getting my replacement ATM card.