Corcoran Brothers

Tweet: Late leaving work. 128 traffic sucks.

Tweet: Thining about coming off of on call. Why do I feel compelled to either drink or take Daddy’s lil helper to come down after 7 days of hell.

Twitter

kinshay: Cleaning mail off my desk. I can’t leave anything unread in my email inbox, but I have some paper envelopes from 2007 I am just opening now.

• I dont give a fuck you didnt see the email because of filters, you set them up, you deal with the shit you missed #
• Just emailed a users group mailing list for the first time. i feel all shy and dorklike. #
• Missed getting NIN tickets on pre-sale, first concert in a long while I wanted to go to. #
• @btoc Just planning our next great business venture #
• Tom Sizemore V David Caruso on csi: battle of the over acting. Awesome. #
• http://www.fuelfrog.com/ Looks interesting I always hit my trip when I fill up. This will feed my OCD. #

• Whiskey @ omni parker. Drunk 40 year old special needs woman tossed out. Surreal. #
• Season finales coming up next week. This makes me sad. #

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• Trying twitter. From mah blackberry. Maybe I will post more with this. #
• Can I twitter from BASH? I think so… http://tinyurl.com/2jyb95 #

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Not a great long term thinker, but a giant set o’ balls on him

13 Year Old Steals Dad’s Credit Card to Buy Hookers

A 13 year old from Texas who stole his Dad’s credit card and ordered two hookers from an escort agency, has today been convicted of fraud and given a three year community order.

Ralph Hardy, a 13 year old from Newark, Texas confessed to ordering an extra credit card from his father’s existing credit card company, and took his friends on a $30,000 spending spree, culminating in playing “Halo” on an Xbox with a couple of hookers in a Texas motel.

Fios TV is still not available in Stoughton, even though I have the internets. So when I got my HD tv, I went with Comcast DVR with TiVo service. I oft times have this discussion with the geeks at work, which is the better route to take, Buy the expensive hardware and pay smaller monthly fee to TiVo, with better functionality, or take less functionality and a slightly higher monthly cost, but on leased equipment.

First, new TiVo:

Pros: Work awesome, best DVR their is. Integration with new cable cards should make things seamless. Expandable with somewhat expensive external hard drive. Plays well with other TiVos, great features. 7/10 on the updates scale, come often and usually have something useful, ok at QA it first. Never had a TiVo fail on the software layer outside of annoying bugs.

Cons: Costs a boatload, higher monthly fees. You own it, so any future upgraded hardware, you have to buy new hardware. Worry about dropping $600 on a setup to find it won’t work with your next tv service option.

Comcast DVR:

Pros: Leased equipment. When it breaks, Comcast is there with a replacement or service call inside 48 hours. Best integration with on demand.Next Gen hardware means you call and get the new hardware (may have some wait time) for the same or close to same monthly fee. Decent DVR software. Leaves a little tv window when going through the guides, etc…, like Picture in Picture.

Cons: Bunches of features inherit to the hardware locked out. No hooks into system, so no 3rd party development. Not nearly as feature rich. No moving shows back and forth across different DVRs. Can’t eliminate channels from lineup so guide is way bloated.

Comcast DVR w/TiVo service:

Should be the best of both worlds. A lot TiVo’s features, familiar guide, record suggestions, channel lineup, etc for $3 more than the hardware you are going to get anyways. What could go wrong?

How about, uhm, QA’ing it before you send it out. Comcast has to come out to enable it on your box, you can  not pick up one from the Comcast storefront. I am on my 4th box. The first one they installed would not play ESPN in Hi def. They pulled that and put in another. That lasted for a little while, until an update was sent out that fried the box. The tv was on in the background but the TiVo starting up was blocking it at 4×3 over the 16×9. No saving that box, put in a new one. Setup channels, season passes, etc all over again.

Then we had the infinite reboot issue. They say there was no update, but somehow the box rebooted itself and just would not start up fully. Think windows blue screening before it loads all the way, over and over again. No saving that box, put in a new one. Setup channels, season passes, etc all over again.

Also, standard def channels sometimes turn completely green until you blindly find an HD channel. Oh yeah, and setting a season pass can sometimes take up to 10 minutes to work it’s way through and return to the normal screen.

It is quite apparent the TiVo software is thrown on top of the Comcast software. It does not have direct access to the guide, and is not properly tested. I’ll see how long this box lasts, but then comes the decision…

Do I go with straight  Comcast DVR, or lay out the cake for an HD-TiVo? Either way - I recommend no one get the Comcast DVR w/TiVo service

I was not one to hop on the HDTV bandwagon. I was quite content watching my programs in normal sd, I tivo’d everything so HD wouldn’t work for me. Besides, HD Tivo was almost a grand for hardware alone. (Rumor is the series 3 is getting phased out, way too expensive.)

Then I got into football. I was fine on my tv, til I went and watched a game at kinyahbrutha’s. Then my tv was not good enough. I decided I would bank my year end bonus, wait for prices to drop, then score me one in August.

Then I saw a woot. 52 inch, 1080p Olevia for $1599.00 American + $5 shipping. An engineer at happened in to ask about HDTV, he bought it in 3 minutes flat. I called the wife, and got the go ahead.

Woot is fun, but you know you have to wait for shipment. I was shocked when I got the fedex number the next day, expected delivery on the 8th. Turns out woot screwed up sending the numbers when only the labels had been printed. A lot of people bitched about taking the day off for delivery, but fedex guestimates delivery as soon as the label is generated. Fedex completely blows for online tracking, UPS eats their lunch for proper updates, etc…

Anyway, fedex sent trailers for the tvs to be loaded on, but picked them up very slowly. I didn’t mind waiting, but I was following the oft times angry woot thread on the product. A lot of broken tvs, mostly from shipment, some from powering up while the tv was still cold, others just bad tv. I was getting nervous.

It showed up today, box a bit beaten. The Fedex guy was very helpful to Rachel, they both lugged the 145 pounder upstairs. It came around 1, so it had warmed up enough for me to get it to fire up. It is big. Way big. Really too big considering I sit about 12 feet away from it. And I love it.

Don’t mind the mess. It is actually wider than the stand, covering an inch or two of the bookcases on either end. Comcast is coming tomorrow to hook up the the HD-DVR with Tivo. Can’t wait.

As for the old tv, I actually mounted into the downstairs chimney, with no help from a real guy who knows how to use tools. The bruthahs are amazed I am sure.

Also, anyone know anything about optical audio cables? I have the lil square pull thingy on my receiver, and on the tv out, is this the right kind of cable? It doesn’t look like it would fit, or hold.