Monday, March 12, 2012

Home Log (2012-03-12)

Nothing much to report on the home front. I'm still adapting to the new job & schedule. The wife is back to work, so it gave me more time to catch up on the TV series that were accumulating on the PVR. I've binged on Alcatraz and Unforgettable (my two favourites this season), as well as NCIS, Hawaii 5-0 and Vampire Diaries (but I still have to watch Grey's Anatomy and The Walking Dead). But it's on my writing that I should be catching up. I have a pile of books to comment on and many ideas of blog entries that I would like to share with the blogosphere. (Read more of my daily adventures beyond the jump).

I had to deal with two technical problems this week. First, one of my favourite HD channels, Oasis, stopped working about two weeks ago. Whenever I was dialing that channel the cable box was crashing and rebooting. Quite annoying for a channel that cost me two bucks per month. I called Videotron customers' service and they sent a technician. He couldn't find anything wrong, so he boosted my signal (he thought it was a bit weak) and suggested that the problem was maybe with the decoder (I have an older Scientific Atlanta's Explorer 8300 HD+). I was not happy with the idea of shelling another six hundred loonies for a new HD PVR cable decoder (although they are currently offering a two hundred bucks rebate). The tech finally called Videotron to make sure they were not seeing any problems from their end and then we learned that the problem was known: apparently the latest software update created a glitch between the close-captions and Oasis. Simply turning off the close-captions solved the problem until a new software patch was made (they were already working with Cisco to resolve the issue).

Secundo, one of my iMac's memory bay broke down a while ago when I tried to upgrade its memory from 2 Gb to 4 Gb. I therefore found myself with the same amount of memory than before and the computer was running quite slow after the lastest OS update to Lion. That was quite annoying. So, in preparation for sending it for repair, I bought a new hard drive and cloned the iMac drive for security. But before scheduling an appointment with the always humble Apple specialist of the Genius Bar, I decided to try re-installing the memory again. And, you know what?, this time it worked! My iMac had self-healed and now it runs much faster with its maximum memory of four gigs (although if Apple refresh the iMac line this year I will be seriously considering buying the latest model in order to get a more powerful computer).

Anyway, beside doing a bunch of back-ups and software upgrades (with their new devices annoucement, Apple released many sofware and apps updates) or the usual basement clean-up or reading news online, I dug up some old notebooks and text files to find material to maybe beef up my blog's content and feed some of my epublishing projects. Strangely, I always amaze myself when I read my old writings. Most of the time I don't remember writing it, but I also feel I've lost so much edge (and vocabulary) in the last ten or twenty years... This time I read some poetry and texts from my twenties and I was surprised how dark they were. I had forgotten how much angst and despair I felt in those years. I might use some of those texts here, but the decision of using such texts is always difficult since they might be too personal to share. Some should be left for postumous publication (if there's anybody left to oversee their publication of course). Or maybe I should limit myself to simply comment on my readings...

No comments: