webmages

I’ve been hearing for months that comcast is going to start offering a pvr. First it’s “beginning 4th quarter 2003″. Then it’s “sometime next month” at the beginning of November. Then it’s by the “end of the year”. Then it’s “by the end of 1st quarter 2004″. Well, I check out their site today, and surprise surprise, when I check out what’s available in my area, it lets me order the PVR.

So I thought great, it’s available. I call them up to add it. Because of course you can’t make changes on their website. Heck, their website doesn’t even have channel listings for the packages they offer! It’s something like: “you get everything in this package and that package, plus more, but we won’t tell you what’s in any of them, or what the plus more is exactly”. Just about the only thing you can do on the website is view and pay your bill, and place a new order - they provide the bare minimum required for them to make more money.

What’s their representitives response? It’s not available in Richmond yet, it’s only available in Chesterfield. Oh, I can order it, but I can’t use it because they don’t have the boxes. You see, Chesterfield County has been a Comcast monopoly for years. Henrico County has had, in order, Continental Cablevision, then MediaOne, then AT&T Broadbad, and now Comcast. 3 owners all within the last 3 years. This just goes to show that Chesterfield comes first, and everyone else in the Richmond area just gets to eat their leftovers. They don’t make any distinction between Richmond and Henrico County either apparently.

Apparently their setup allows you to order items that aren’t yet available - you have to cross reference what’s listed with what’s checked off as available on the right hand side of the screen. Comcast’s website is a joke.

I’m very ready to switch back to DirecTV. The only problem? The townhouse my wife and I are renting doesn’t have line of sight. Well, it does, but there’s no place we’re allowed to put the dish (the back porch, the only “private” area, doesn’t have line of sight). If the back porches were big enough I would even go door to door and ask neighbors with line of site if I could sublet part of their porch, but they’re about 4′x4′. I miss DirecTV - making changes online, paying less for more channels, and best of all DirecTivo. If I could switch I would.

Thanks to the hardwork of Bonnie, and a recent trip to Maymont Park, there are bunch of new pictures in the photo gallery for your enjoyment.

Our cat Stark had a little problem this last December. His urinary tract became blocked and infected. We had to take him to the 24 hour emergency vet, and then to our regular vet for treatment. He had both kinds of crystals, so the vet had us put him on distilled water. Last week he became blocked again.

We took him in (this time fortunately we caught it before our regular vet’s office closed), they catheterized him, got his bladder cleared out, and kept him for a few days for observation to make sure he was drinking and urinating ok. Now he’s on prescription food. Of course he would have to have the more difficult kind of crystal to treat.

The evening we get him home, he starts sneezing. Now he’s sneezing, coughing, and running a low-grade fever. He’s got the kitty flu. Apparently it’s virus nearly all cats carry, but it doesn’t cause them any problems unless they get stressed out (He was definately stressed out, his anal glands were all backed up too). I suppose being catheterized and spending 3 days at the vet really stressed him out. It should take about a week for him to get back to normal. We really miss our happy go-lucky attack cat.

If he becomes blocked again, he’ll have to undergo surgery to rebuild his urethra to prevent further blockages. We’re hoping it won’t come to that - talk about stress!

After using my own custom written and functionally limited software for some time, I’ve switched over to using wordpress. It’s a pretty decent PHP/MySQL driven blogging system, and very customizable. I was able to import my old entries and transfer over my old look and feel within a matter of minutes. I spent a little time this evening applying some custom tweaks to add left-0 padding in for all the date based links so 1/1/2004 would be 01/01/2004.

The only real problem I had was with the permalinks system, part of which was my own fault (didn’t add post_name to the database of transferred entries), and the other part just being the way it works (%year% must come before %monthnum%, which means my old “permalinks” won’t work anymore).

Using this new system allows cool things like RSS feeds, trackback, pingback, comments, and even multiple users so my wife will be able to post entries!