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2007 Mariners in HD

Thursday, March 22, 2007

All I have to say is that it’s about f’ing time:

SEATTLE, March 21 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ — Comcast (Nasdaq: CMCSA,
CMCSK) and FSN Northwest today announced that all of FSN’s Seattle Mariners
home telecasts and six road games will be available to Comcast customers in
super clear high definition format (HDTV), beginning with the Mariners home
opener April 2nd against the Oakland Athletics.

That’ll be over half the games, so it’s a good start. Maybe we’ll get all of them next year.

(Thanks, Aaron, who hates baseball.)

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Fondue at The Melting Pot

Tuesday, March 13, 2007

Carol’s 30th birthday was last weekend and her mom, aunt, and two sisters came out to visit. It was mostly a (successful) surprise for Carol, and we all had a good time. On Saturday night, we all went out to The Melting Pot for fondue. None of us had been there before, so it was a lot of fun. It was a long night, though, so if you’re thinking about going, give your self at least 3 hours and definitely make reservations. Luckily, I made reservations late and got stuck with 4:45 pm instead of 6:00 like I wanted. With a group of jetlagged Eastern Timezoners, getting out of there by 8:00pm was a good thing.

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We’re back (minus luggage)

Monday, February 26, 2007

I said I’d post while I was in Sweden, but we only had internet access on our final night. The trip was lots of fun and I woke up this morning in my own bed feeling a bit depressed that I was back in the mundane world. Our luggage apparently was feeling the same way yesterday and spent an extra night in Copenhagen. We hope it decided to catch the flight to Seattle today.

I’ve got a bunch of pictures that I’m sorting through, and I’ll post them on Flickr once I’m done. I’m also planning on writing up some good posts about our day-to-day adventures. In the meantime, here’s a video of a band doing a sound check at the Ice Hotel.

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Great start to my vacation

Friday, February 16, 2007

After a 2-hour commute home, we walked into a 56° house. Apparently our furnace decided to go on vacation, too. After a bit of calling around, I found a guy to come out and install a new igniter. It wasn’t cheap, but at least it was a quick fix. I hope the cats appreciate it while we’re gone. :)

We’re just about packed and ready to go. Hopefully our flights stay on schedule and I can get some sleep on the plane. Twenty four hours from now we should be touching down in Stockholm.

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Not another website!

Monday, January 8, 2007

In an attempt to see how easy it would be to rebrand the software for Foodry, I sat down last night and set up fish-stores.com, a community directory of local fish stores. The rebranding was fairly easy: just some text changes and whipping up a new logo. The big problem is the lack of data. For Foodry, I found Chef Moz, an open source restaurant database. I’m fairly certain such a thing doesn’t exist for fish stores. Perhaps a niche community like home aquarists can support a dataset like this.

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New Foodry Features

Wednesday, December 27, 2006

Between work and my Xbox 360, I’ve had little time to work on Foodry. I’ve added a few little things to improve the usability and to make it a bit more interesting in general.

First, I’ve added a Top Reviewers list to the home page. Looks like Aaron has taken a huge lead with 31 reviews.

I’ve also improved the city pages a bit. Where they were just a search results page, now they are more of a summary page, with a tag cloud and most viewed restaurants list. Future features will include top reviewed restaurants, top reviewers for the city, and a list of nearby cities. Take a look at a few: Seattle, WA, Cleveland Heights, OH, and, one of the most popular, thanks to Aaron’s reviews, Stevensville, MI.

Not quite as recently, but not mentioned on this blog, I added the ability to mark other users as friends, so you can visit your profile and surf on over to a list of their reviews. Future improvements will include being able to filter, search, and combine your friend’s reviews into more useful lists, as well as being able to track friend’s reviews via RSS feeds.

Technorati tags:

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Poor Xbox 360

Monday, December 25, 2006

So, I’m home alone for Christmas, since the wife has to work. It’s OK, though, since I have my Xbox 360 to keep me company, right? Well, a couple hours into hunting down necromancers in Oblivion, the 360 makes an awful buzzing sound that doesn’t stop. The game’s still playable, though, so I save it and shut the Xbox off and let it cool down for a few minutes.

Turning it back on, I hear the optical drive make some unusual noises: “Uhhn, chirp, chirp. Uhhn, chirp, chirp. Uhhn, chirp, chirp. Buzzzzzz.” Instead of going to the starting screens of Oblivion, it drops me off at the dashboard, where, in the disc status area, it says “Reading” and then “Unplayable Disc”. Taking the disc out, it appears to be spotless, but I wipe it off anyway and get the same result upon reloading it. I then try Tiger Woods 2007 and NHL 2007, and get the same result. I then try a DVD: Charmed, Season 1. Same results.

I think my optical drive is not feeling so well. The rest of the system seems fine, in that I can connect to Xbox Live with no issues and play the Xbox Arcade games that are on the hard drive with no problem.

I guess I get to call Customer Support tomorrow morning. How fun.

Update: 12/26 9:00AM – I just got off the phone with the Xbox support folks. It was surprisingly easy. After telling the annoyingly casual-sounding robot he couldn’t help me (I half expected him to call me “dude”), I was immediately transfered to a nice woman named Inez. I told her my problem, she took my contact information, and we ran through some basic troubleshooting.

I unplugged the cables and plugged them back in and still had the problem. I removed the hard drive and still had the problem. That was about it. After that, she set up a repair order and is sending me a shipping box, so it shouldn’t cost me a cent. I should have it back within 14 days, though I’m not sure if that starts now or when they receive it. It’s the latter, I’m sure.

By the way, in case you missed it, Microsoft extended
Xbox 360 warranty to one year, instead of the former paltry 90 days.

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Power’s Back

Saturday, December 16, 2006



Wind Storm

Originally uploaded by Mike A..

Our power was out for about 53 hours after the wind storm. Here are some photos. It was cold, but at least we have a gas fireplace, so we huddled around it and kept as warm as we could.

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Antonetti in ‘08

Friday, December 8, 2006

antonetti_08.jpg

From this winter’s trades it already looks like the Mariners are throwing in the towel for a winning season in 2007. Time for a regime change. Chris Antonetti for Mariners General Manager in 2008.

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Goldbox RSS Feed

Wednesday, November 29, 2006

If you haven’t noticed, Amazon’s Gold Box has been redesigned. Now there’s a “Deal of the Day” and a number of other, smaller deals and a bunch of personalized deals, as well. I have to say that I think I like this version better than the last, in which you had to page through a number of deals in a take-it-or-leave-it sort of way. My problem is that I forget to check what today’s deal is, and may miss out on something, like last week’s 12-pack of Pirate Booty snacks or yesterday’s case of Wonka Nerds candy. To alleviate that problem, I repurposed a script I had sitting around to create an unofficial Gold Box Deal of the Day RSS Feed. Hopefully something official and more functional will be officially created by Amazon, but in the mean time, feel free to subscribe to this.

Subscribe to the Unofficial Gold Box Feed

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