The virus-from-hell is still hanging around. Every morning, I wake up with a sore throat and go through a few tissues before heading to work. Fortunately, it doesn’t affect my work day much. The next morning, though, I can count on things repeating themselves.

Gotta make a follow-up appointment with the Doc to see if there are any other solutions to this problem. Enough is enough.

Work has got me slammed, which is why I haven’t been posting much. I’ve been put in charge of finding a new office for the company and its driving me nuts.

If that wasn’t all, my boss has put in his resignation. I would be concerned about this if it weren’t that he’d been pursuing this opportunity for well over a year. One one hand, it could mean more work for me. On the other, it could be a chance for me to advance. Time will tell which way the chips fall.
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there’s too much
that i keep to myself
and i turn my back on my faith
it’s like glass
when we break
i wish no one in my place
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After leading in my NCAA Tournament Pool since the first tip-off, I have been knocked from my perch. My only hope of winning was dashed when Kentucky folded yesterday. I’ll be lucky now to hang on to second place.

The whole tournament, I’ve been under the mistaken impression that I picked Illinois to win it all (the printed bracket I’ve been carrying around doesn’t indicate a winner). It turns out I actually picked Connecticut to repeat as champions – something only one team (Duke) has recently done. For such a stupid blunder, I deserve to lose.

Ah, well. It was fun while it lasted. I agree with my dad, though. Wouldn’t it be great if football did the same thing? It’s a shame it will never happen.

(Bonus: Most relavent fan sign: “No more Coach K ads!” – seen in the crowd after the Tar Heels game.)

Apparently, my car doesn’t like to get wet. It would not start this morning. The electrical system seemed to be fine, but the engine wouldn’t crank in two or three minutes worth of trying.

I suspect it might be the engine computer, located under the passenger seat, an area prone to getting soaked when it rains. I could be facing $500 of repairs if it won’t snap out of it. Whee.

I woke up this morning expecting rough weather, as I’d kept up with the forecast for the past few days. This low pressure system was expected a few days ago, but somehow got slowed down enough to pass only this morning. Hearing the rain begin outside, I turned on my weather radio for an update. Moments later, a bulletin went out about a storm in southern Wake county, moving northeast at an astonishing 100 MPH with the potential for producing nickel-size hail.

The bulletin didn’t mention northern Wake at all, but any storm moving at 100 MPH can be on you in no time flat, so I took my ham radio with me on the way to breakfast. Not long after I pulled up the blinds at our kitchen window, the sky got very, very dark. The radio began to buzz with reports of large hail, with one report only two miles away. Sure enough, hail began to fall. Hallie got excited and went up to the window for a look.

This was no ordinary hail! Suddenly huge chunks were falling out of the sky! The house was thundering with the sound of falling ice, the racket scaring the cat silly and making Hallie worried and tearful. Fortunately, the fast-moving nature of the storm meant it didn’t last long, and soon we were looking at a relatively-peaceful yard covered with huge hailstones. Then the floodgates opened up, dumping torrents of rain on us. According to my rain gauge, it fell at a rate of 4.3 inches per hour!

Once the floods had subsided, I ventured out to measure a hailstone. After ten minutes of heavy rain, the hailstone measured over 1.5 inches in width. Incredible!

After wolfing down a bite to eat, I just had to have a record of this storm, so I returned outside to snap a picture of another hailstone. This one measured over an inch. Still quite impressive.

It was the largest hail I’d ever seen, even more remarkable considering the speed in which it came and went.

This Skywarn stuff is pretty cool.

Happy friday, everyone!!!!!111!!!

A prankster changed the names of the plants outside of a drug store. Amusing and creative.

From Paul Jones‘s weblog, Durham’s Independent Weekly covers municipal Wi-Fi setups, like Carrboro’s.

Glad to see this getting coverage. Anything that makes Bellsouth stomp its feet in protest has got to be a good thing!

Well, last night I finally did it: I succeeded in watching satellite TV from my Linux box. Turns out that DVB support is weak in Red Hat Linux (no surprise there). My Fedora Core 3 machine didn’t properly configure DVB devices until I upgraded the udev package to the latest update. I also used the CVS sources for LinuxTV for the DVB drivers and apps. It also took a little Googling to discover the importance of the lnb option of dvbscan. Putting it all together got me the satellite signal I wanted.

The only remaining issue is figuring out why dvbscan is ignoring my polarization settings for the transponders and using horizontal exclusively. If I specify it manually in the channels file, the szap tuner app will correctly lock on to the signal. But dvbscan ignores it, for some reason. It isn’t much of a bother now, as I’ve got the channels defined that I want to watch. If I start adding new channels, however, or want to automatically search for some, I’ll be in trouble.

I’m also surprised there is no graphical front-end for organizing these channels. Then again, I haven’t installed MythTV in this whole setup, which is the ultimate goal. I’m confident MythTV has some nice interface for all of this.

My other find from yesterday is an ATSC PCI card, which will allow me to use LinuxTV drivers to pull in terrestial HDTV signals (conveniently, the only HDTV channels LinuxTV includes are in the Raleigh-Durham market). It decodes both high-definition (HD) and standard-definition (SD) channels. Thus, this $180 card will get me an HD receiver which I can stream to any computer in the house. I can also distribute digital SD-quality channels from the local stations to my standard-definition TVs. That will provide my TVs with a signal whose quality far surpasses that available on Time Warner Cable, as TWC offers local channels on analog only, last I checked.

There’s one thing I’m sure of: I’ve not taken this thing as far as it will go. It opens up whole new ways of using television. MythTV is TiVo on steroids. DVB-S satellite allows for cheap uplinks/downlinks. The HD PCI card provides an easy way to snarf local signals. I could literally have a whole cable TV “headend” inside my PC.

I can’t wait to add MythTV to this mix. This is fun stuff.