Finally, this semester is over.  I was beginning to think it would never end, like I was stuck in some sort of Groundhog’s Day hell.

Now the decompression begins.  A week of doing as little as possible, and then I start on the summer projects: build a fence, update Screencap Comics, start on A:DoE.

What’s that, I’m taking summer classes?

Crap.

For the semester, anyway.

Finished the term paper.  Took about twelve hours, research included.  Would have taken only around ten, but at 1:30 in the morning my brain turned off and I didn’t realize it.  Around three that morning when my eyes wouldn’t focus on the screen for longer than a minute at a time I started re-reading what I wrote.

Yeah, that was a wasted hour and a half worth of writing.

I did manage to procrastinate until the very last minute possible before starting the paper, so my record is intact.

One major project down, two to go.

It amazes me the number of scams out there.  Not so much that there are scammers, that part I accept.  The part that amazes me is the fact that to support so many scams there have to be people that fall for them.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m against scams and scammers.  Scam artists are life forms just above that slimy brown algae that forms in a fish tank filter.

I have to wonder though who the people are that fall for some of these scams.  Many of them are so obvious that’s it almost seems like a spoof on scams.

Take for instance SatelliteDirect.

I was first made aware of SatelliteDirect from a comment on this blog.  The comment read:

I really like this blog. I’m thinking of utilizing A similar format for my own. I’ll keep an eye out for your following postings since I definitely liked visiting. Thank You

My first thought was yay!  Someone found something useful on my site.

Then I read it again, and the stinkings of spam started to penetrate my senses.

Notice the very generic tone.  Now notice how complimentary they are, even thinking of mimicking their blog based on mine.  However they never say what they like or what they want to duplicate.

I get several of these a week, however this is actually the first one that has come from the States and not Russia (no, I have nothing against Russia.  When someone comments on my blog I get a WHOIS trace on the comment.)

Out of curiosity I check out the link attached to the comment.  It takes me to an actual blog that was created on Tripod of all places (I didn’t even realize they still existed).  There was a long blog post about watching satellite TV on your computer for a low price.

Again, warning bells go off.

This being a hobby of mine, I decide to check this out further.  Oddly enough they don’t drop the name of the software on the Tripod page.  At the bottom there are two more links, one to another blog on WordPress and one to a Blogspot blog.

The Blogspot blog shows paydirt.  There is a banner ad right in the middle of the post for SatelliteDirect.

I head to their site.  It’s not a bad looking site, professional and even legit looking.  They have a “product review” at the top.  According to Interactive Media Magazine, SatelliteDirect is “[u]nequivocally the best TV to PC software on the Net!”  They also have some award badges for fake internet awards at the bottom (note to scammers, if you are going to give yourself fake awards, at least make a fake award site to link to).

What really should set off alarms are the promises of 3,500 HD channels for only $49.95.

Right.

The U.S. alone apparently has over 700 HD channels.  I don’t think the U.S. has 700 channels alone, much less in HD.

A quick search for Interactive Media Magazine leads me to a site that basically says SatelliteDirect is a scam.  I haven’t fully studied that site or the site it directs to (No Bull TV on PC Reviews), so I’m not linking them here.  However, a quick search will get you there if you are curious, however tread lightly.  Like I said, I haven’t checked them out so I don’t know if they carry any malicious code.

A further search on SatelliteDirect shows some very disgruntled customers.

Yep, people have paid the approximately fifty dollars for the promise of free TV.  They aren’t happy with the returns, citing unresponsive customer service and broken promises.

Who would’ve thunk it.

Satellite TV is not to be had for a one time cost of fifty bucks.  There are plenty of free options to watch TV on the internet for free on top of that.  I, in fact, have a dear friend who has found the wonders of Chinese fed Internet TV.  Even if you don’t want to wade through pages of Chinese characters to watch your favorite TV shows, most are offered online by the networks that broadcast them or sites like Hulu.  There is usually a time delay, but hey, it’s free.

I’m still confused.  ”Too good to be true” didn’t become a cliche because it wasn’t accurate.  I think the drive to get something for nothing has ended up costing many people a lot more than they were trying to save.  Especially if the scam ends up harvesting credit information for fraud or identity theft.

Update: The site for SatelliteDirect is registered to ETV Corp out of Miami, FL.  I’m curious if “Corp” is a protected term in Florida and if the company is an actual registered corporation.

On a non-related and very morbid note, I saw someone literally run over by a car today.  It’s not something I would recommend.

I just finished spending several hours re-editing all of the channels on my Media Center PC.

Again.

Suddenlink decided it was going to restructure its channels.  That’s fine, they gave plenty of warning and they even sent out a nifty new guide in the mail.

I was pleasantly surprised to see an alternative channel listing in the guide for TVs that don’t grab the correct channel mapping.  This is perfect for me since Media Center doesn’t quite get everything mapped out correctly.  It also, for some unknown reason, doesn’t grab the HD channels at all, I have to add those manually.

Not a problem now, I’ve got a channel map!

I’m glad Suddenlink doesn’t make actual maps because they would probably guide people off of cliffs or into major bodies of water if they did.

About a week before the official March 22 transition the HD channels went dark.  I figured they were switching things early so I went ahead and manually added the new HD channels.  Out of the five I manually added, I received two.

Again, cutting Suddenlink some slack, I figured they were in transition on moving everything over and eventually the signal would come back.  I could live a week without the three HD channels I wasn’t getting since we don’t frequent those very often.

March 22nd comes and still no HD on those three channels.  I become worried that I didn’t enter them correctly, so I delete them and re-enter them.

No joy.

Surely Suddenlink isn’t having that hard a time transitioning over.  I decide to find out and give them a call.  After waiting on hold for forty five minutes (they were having some issues with the transition) I get a rep.  I ask if they are having problems with some of their broadcast HD channels because I was only receiving two of the five.  She says not that she knows of but she will send a signal to my box to check it out.  I inform her I have no box, that I’m running a Media Center PC and just need to verify the alternate channel mapping.  This totally baffles her and she puts me on hold to ask someone what to do.

I’m getting a sinking feeling at this point.

She comes back and says she will schedule a technician to come out and check on things.  I tell her that it probably isn’t necessary to send someone out but she says she can’t do anything other than that.

They fortunately had an opening for the next day.

The next day the tech comes out.  I explain the problem and he starts checking things out.

Before this point, I hadn’t tried to do a channel scan on the TV itself.  My TV actually has a very good built in tuner and maps everything perfectly.  While he’s checking the cable connections and signals in the back of the house, I start a scan.  About ten minutes later, all the channels, including the HD channels are found.

That sinking feeling is getting worse.

The tech says the signal isn’t great, but it’s not bad either.  I tell him that the TV is picking up the HD but not the MC PC, and ask him if the flyer that Suddenlink sent out with the alternate channel mappings was accurate.  He went out to his truck and grabbed a sheet of paper and compared it to what was on the flyer.  He said that everything matched.

At this point he said that since the signal wasn’t as strong as it should be I might look at replacing the old line (and it is old, crappy coax) and that should take care of the signal problem.  He called in a request to have the lines on the pole checked to make sure they were okay and said that would take a few days for that crew to come out and work the order.

After the tech was on his way I decided to wait for the pole check and see if that would help.  I checked periodically the missing HD channels hoping that the problem was up there and once fixed the channels would come in.

A week later, I decide they either didn’t fix anything and weren’t going to, or nothing needed to be fixed.  I resigned myself to replacing the cable in the house.

Before doing that though, I wanted to check the signal strength since I was getting two HD channels.  I hook up the coax to the TV and use the built in signal strength indicator.  All of the HD channels showed the same strength.  It wasn’t full strength, but it wasn’t off by much.

This piqued my curiosity.  I couldn’t grab the actual channel mapping from the TV, but I could use the software that came with the tuner.  So I install WinTV 7 (uhg) and have it do a channel scan.  Lo and behold, it picked up all of the HD channels.  And the three that I wasn’t getting after manually adding them?

That’s because Suddenlink didn’t print the right channel mappings.

Yep, all this time I was working off of faulty information.

I appreciate Suddenlink sending out a heads up on the switch, and even sending out an alternative channel guide.  I have to wonder how hard it is to PROOFREAD the information for accuracy.

I certainly hope this is an isolated incident and that they aren’t truly this incompetent.  Checking through other channels and the flyer, there are a lot of channels that are mis-printed.

So now that I have the correct mapping, I’m going to scan the corrected flyer and post it for reference.

On a side note, just for giggles I checked out Silicon Dust’s channel guide.  For the past few months they didn’t have the local line-up.

True to form, I could have saved a lot of time and effort checking their info first since they now have the updated local line-up.

Update: I’ve posted a scan of the alternate channel guide with corrections.  There is a link in the header to the page with the scan.  Enjoy!

I’ve mentioned a few times the ten page term paper due at the end of the semester.

Yeah, it’s due April 11th.

Oops.

Entering panic mode in 10… 9… 8…

It seems like spring break just started and it’s almost over.

I had big plans for spring break:

1. Do nothing – check
2. Take the kids shooting – check
3. Work on building up a buffer for Screencap Comics – not check
4. Start working on modeling with Sketchup – opposite of check
5. Get started on the 10 page term paper due at the end of the semester – so far removed from check that it doesn’t even know check exists

Oh well, I at least feel a little relaxed.

… and I won!

Well, sort of.

By “law” I mean “Parking Rules and Regulations,” and by “I won” I mean “Found Not In Violation.”

Basically I parked my motorcycle on a patch of curb about four feet long.  This curb is painted brown (which denotes commuter parking) but the white line that was placed was four feet from the end for some unknown reason, so where I was parked was outside of that white line.

I’ve parked in this spot for about the last year and a half.  It’s convenient while being out of the way.  I don’t block traffic (pedestrian or vehicular) and it allows the three marked parking spaces in front to be filled with cars.

I come back after class one day to see a ticket attached to my motorcycle.

Yay!  As if I didn’t have enough to do.  I take pictures of the parked motorcycle and proceed to the campus police station.

Anyway, I pay the fine, which is required before you get to appeal.  Then I grab an appeal form and take it to file.

Fortunately, that same day the appeals panel was meeting.  Put my name on the list and come back later that day to state my case.

It was a quick and painless process.  A panel of three campus representatives (one student, one faculty and one staff) hear your argument and ask questions.  My argument was simple: I was parked in an area marked for commuter parking, my permit was valid and there is nothing in the published parking regulations that state that I have to be within a white line.

The panel found in my favor, but stated that in the future I need to be within a white line.

So I get my $35 back, which is a win.  However, I get to watch that four foot area of perfectly good parking go to waste.

Sometimes I wonder just how deeply my glutton for punishment goes.

I’m exhausted.  Two and a half years of full time school, full time job and full time family has finally started to wear me down.  Fortunately I can see the end.

I just don’t know if I have the legs to make it.

This blog and my other have been neglected.  That will probably be the case for the foreseeable future.

I’ll dump thoughts here when I can, but Screencap Comics will be on indefinite hiatus.

Cheers!

Ubisoft, one of the premier game publishing houses has decided to jump on the intrusive idiocy that is digital rights management.

The basic gist of their plan is to require an Internet connection to not only play their games, but to save game progress and access that saved progress.

Good luck to you if your Internet connection is down or you are in an area (say, an airplane or in the sticks somewhere) where there is no Internet.

When I buy a game, I expect to be able to play it whenever and wherever I please.  Looks like I won’t be buying Ubisoft games once this is implemented, which is a shame because they make some great games.

I’m finally able to walk again.

My legs have recovered from the elliptical torture device training extravaganza.  They aren’t sore and I don’t feel like every step might make my face intimately familiar with the ground.

So I wake up this morning and head to the gym.  It’s another day of weight training.  This time the instructor has printed out a workout routine for us to use for the next two weeks.  It only includes Tuesday and Thursday on mine, so either he a) hasn’t read my email (I couldn’t be that lucky), b) realizes that I’m old and out of shape and that my email probably bit off more than I could ever begin to chew (again, not that lucky), or c) just made the same routine for everyone.  Since the guy that arrived at around the same time I did got the same routine, I’m voting for c.

I scan over the routine while he’s explaining some of the workout and I breathe a sigh of relief to see that an elliptical machine is nowhere to be found.

Is it bad when you have nightmares about ellipticals chasing you only to find you have no legs to run with?  I think I hate ellipticals more than I hate clowns.

Great, now I’m probably going to have nightmares about being chased by clowns on ellipticals.

Anyway, today the sheet says I get to warm up on a stationary bike.  To my surprise, I find one available.  The class must be thinning out already.

Warm up and most of the routine go great.  It’s mostly upper body with a few leg exercises.  I take it a little easy on the legs.  They have made it clear that if I mess them up again they will pack up and leave.

I finish all of the machine exercises which leaves just the core workout left.  It’s abs and obliques today, and I mull over which to start with.

In my younger days, I was the sit-up master.  I could do sit-ups all day.  I could out-sit-up just about everyone.  I did sit-ups on the ground, in an incline or even upside down.  I was fast, I was good at it.  Sitting-up was my thing.

Again, I stress that I’m no longer young.

I was feeling good.  I had successfully completed a workout routine without killing myself and was feeling worked, but not exhausted.  I decided it was time to do what I did best: sit-ups

I’m laying down, feeling good, about to perform my pièce de résistance.

I do a sit-up.

Well, it was my intention to do a sit-up.  What happened was my upper body left the ground, hit a forty degree angle and stopped.  My feet soon thereafter proceeded to come up off the floor, which then threw off the whole process and I collapsed back down in a heap of disbelief.

I start wondering exactly how long it had been since I had last done a sit-up.

Okay, the square root of… carry the one… subtract by the angular momentum of Pluto…

Yeah, it’s been a while.

I figure that I’m just rusty.  My technique is a little off, but once I get started it will all come back to me.  I am the sit-up master, after all.

Take two.  I do a sit-up. I attempt to do a sit-up.  Again, my upper body leaves the ground, lower body leaves the ground, I collapse back to the ground.

Yet again, reality rears it’s ugly head.

I’m really beginning to hate reality.

At this point I realize that a sit-up is probably beyond me.  I’ve already flopped on the ground twice like non-sitting up fish, so to save face I continue to do some crunches like that was my intention all along.

I didn’t even attempt the obliques.  It involves balancing on one elbow and twisting my body.  I can’t even do a sit-up, how do I expect to hold myself up with one arm and twist my body towards the ground with out breaking something, curling up into a fetal position and dying.

I head home, defeated again.  This time by gravity and my apparent lack of abdominal muscles.

Stupid reality.