Personal Dork Assistant

Slunged

I had it all worked out. Bought the new Slingbox AV and set it up at home in the States, paired it with the old Series 1 Tivo which had lifetime subscription but was otherwise gathering dust. Stashed them in the wiring closet with a direct connections to the cable feed and the network router and it was all set. The Tivo would record the shows and the Slingbox would stream it over the Net so I could finally watch football in Taiwan.

However I found one flaw in my master plan when I got back to Taiwan. I'd bought a new MIMO G router to try to help the wireless coverage in the house (result: meh). But I didn't re-run the Slingbox setup to open the ports necessary for the video stream in the new router. Had to wait until Sam went home to run the Slingbox setup from the inside. At least I remembered to enable UPNP in the router so all Sam had to do was let the software do its thing automagically. Kudos to the Sling team for making the whole setup easy to use despite the vagaries of home networking, NAT redirection, and limited upstream bandwidth.

I was in business once Sam helped open the door. Stayed away from the sports sites in the morning and was able to watch the USC-Notre Dame football game via Slingstream. The quality was barely watchable on the 50" TV, but the software fought to keep the video stream moving smoothly audio was rock-solid, so at worst it was a radio broadcast with crappy video as a bonus. It's been ages since I've been able to sit down and watch a good-old football game on a Sunday afternoon, so just being able to do that was enough for me to feel I got my $'s worth.

Had the Tivo all setup to record the Niners game the next day. However, I couldn't help but peek at the news feed in the morning and saw the headline "Rams snap S.F. winning streak with touchdown late in game". That pretty much let all the air of anticipation out of the balloon in a hurry. There's no fancy gadget out there I can buy to fix the Niners, unfortunately.

Move Moving On

Moved the site to the new host and I bet you didn't even notice.

The 1and1.com free web-hosting deal was a great way to get into running my own domain. But all good things must come to an end and I started to receive ominous emails regarding the impending end of the three freebie years. To be honest 1and1 offered very compelling and inexpensive upgrade options. I could even keep the current package for only $3.99 per month. The current package allows SSH access, but only had 500 megabytes in disk quota, and new packages offered much more disk space, but don't offer SSH access until you get to the $10/month level.

Now, I've been doing Unix on the command-line since the SparcStation days and I wasn't about to give that up. So it was time to troll through WebHostingTalk and see what I can find. Almost went with Dreamhost and their too-good-to-be-true offer, but there were too many scary reviews of oversold servers and unresponsive service. Plus $7.95 per month just wasn't quite cheap enough for a crappy little blog site. Finally found Site5 which offered everything I was looking for at five bucks per month. Of course the disk and bandwidth quotas were wildly over-exaggerated and oversold, but for five a month I was willing to be the under-utilizing schmuck who subsidizes the heavy-duty leeches.

Had to wait a day and send them an email to get the account provisioned since I was ordering from China, which must've appeared a bit suspicious. But once I had the account, it was trivial to tar-gzip up the entire site on 1and1 and squirt it over to the new host via the CLI. The Movable Type database transfer was a bit trickier since I had to first create an empty database at site5 and edit the 1and1 export file to make it use the pre-made shell database instead of CREATE-ing its own in order to get around permission issues. Also took a few tries before I realized I had to import the file as Binary instead of UTF-8 to keep all my precious Chinese characters from being mangled in the process.

Finally, it was just a matter of changing the DNS server pointer at the domain registrar and the new PersonalDork (same as the old PersonalDork) was open for business. Before I could blink spam mail was already trickling into the new mail server. Ah, good to be home.

Serviced

I bought the Etymotic ER-4S headphones five years ago to block out airplane noise on long flights. Starting with a Sony Diskmen and moving on to various iPods, the in-ear headphones have served well as an impenetrable barrier to aural interference, and they've proven to be a godsend once again for my daily subway commute. But one day as I was about to stick them in my ear, I found one of the transducer stalks had snapped off, just days before my 12-hour trans-Pacific flight back to the States. Bought a set of cheap Audio-Technicas to get me through the day, but the cheapies didn't offer near the isolation nor the sound quality of the Etys. :Sad:

Got an RMA# over email and brought the broken Etys home with me to send off to the mothership for repairs. Resigned myself to a big bill and even considered writing the Etys off and going with a different pair. No news for a week, then out of the blue I get a UPS shipping notification from Etymotic saying a package is on the way. Sent another query to customer service asking for the repair invoice, and quickly received a reply:

Hi Michael,

Both transducers have been replaced and there is no charge. : )

Best Regards,
Customer Service
Etymotic Research, Inc.

I don't expect much from any customer service people these days and I'm usually not disappointed. So the news was certainly a most pleasant surprise. That is what makes buying high-end things really worthwhile, as opposed to the logo-chasing vanity so typical here.