Wednesday, September 24, 2003Where Did Dewey File Those Law Books?. Who knew that someone owned the Dewey Decimal System? Apparently not the owners of the Library Hotel, nestled in the shadow of the New York Public Library. By Michael Luo. [New York Times: Books]
Who'd've thunk? The Online Computer Library Center wants to protect the trademark of the Dewey Decimal System. I agree with the librarian - the hotel is all about books and reading and the OCLC sees this as a threat? Strange. I originally thought that the OCLC was nuts. The detail that keeps jumping up is that the Library Hotel won't attribute the OCLC. I suspect there are some dumb management decisions on both sides of this fence. The hotel should be reasonable and realize that they need to attribute the OCLC. But the OCLC should also have worked to see this resolved more gracefully. Everybody seems to be sharing in the dumb fruit on this one.
2:36:14 PM # comment [] trackback []
Created my first video dvd
One of the main reasons I was trying to setup a computer to record television was so that I could create a video DVD of a show or two. There are some friends of ours (Bruce and Jessica) who are just moved and won't be able to watch much of anything - and they like CSI. Our pastor (Steve) is in Iraq and he liked ER and Alias and can't watch them either. So, I wanted to be able to create video DVD's of shows for them.
Last night I finally created my first one. YEAH! It's a copy of last nights Frasier - I put both episodes on a DVD+R and there's even a menu to select the episode you want to see. Everything is there - ads and all. Once I got it created, I tried it out on our DVD player and ... blamo - it worked like a charm.
My little iBook doesn't seem to like it at all. I'm suspecting that my iBook is allergic to DVD+R media. There's a lot of different DVD disks out there. DVD+R, DVD-R, DVD+RW, DVD-RW, DVD-RAM, and others - bleck, what a maze of confused one character differences (- or + or RW or R or EEK!) The kind of dvd disk that works on most everything (over 90% of dvd players) is DVD-R. So, now I need to chase down some pretty cheap DVD-R media :-)
Sage TV is working out pretty well. Not quite perfect... but it's at least making it possible to do what I really wanted - record stuff and create dvd's - cool.
Last night Sage TV recorded all kinds of stuff - kind of like the little piggy squeal of joy now that it knows how to record. I only wanted a program or two recorded - so it recorded everything on the last channel all night long. It'd be nice not to see that again...
The other thing I noticed is that ER starts at 9:59pm. Since CSI ends at 10pm, this creates a recording scheduling conflict. On the replay I could just start recording ER at 10pm... but Sage TV doesn't appear to let me do this yet. Instead I'll just jump through some hoops another way. If I record CSI on the sage tv and ER on the replay (starting it at 10pm) then I can plug the replay into the sage tv and have sage tv record the replaytv version of ER later. I gotta be a cheap geek and just plug a few more wires in to work around this problem for now.
1:35:06 PM # comment [] trackback []
One of the main reasons I was trying to setup a computer to record television was so that I could create a video DVD of a show or two. There are some friends of ours (Bruce and Jessica) who are just moved and won't be able to watch much of anything - and they like CSI. Our pastor (Steve) is in Iraq and he liked ER and Alias and can't watch them either. So, I wanted to be able to create video DVD's of shows for them.
Last night I finally created my first one. YEAH! It's a copy of last nights Frasier - I put both episodes on a DVD+R and there's even a menu to select the episode you want to see. Everything is there - ads and all. Once I got it created, I tried it out on our DVD player and ... blamo - it worked like a charm.
My little iBook doesn't seem to like it at all. I'm suspecting that my iBook is allergic to DVD+R media. There's a lot of different DVD disks out there. DVD+R, DVD-R, DVD+RW, DVD-RW, DVD-RAM, and others - bleck, what a maze of confused one character differences (- or + or RW or R or EEK!) The kind of dvd disk that works on most everything (over 90% of dvd players) is DVD-R. So, now I need to chase down some pretty cheap DVD-R media :-)
Sage TV is working out pretty well. Not quite perfect... but it's at least making it possible to do what I really wanted - record stuff and create dvd's - cool.
Last night Sage TV recorded all kinds of stuff - kind of like the little piggy squeal of joy now that it knows how to record. I only wanted a program or two recorded - so it recorded everything on the last channel all night long. It'd be nice not to see that again...
The other thing I noticed is that ER starts at 9:59pm. Since CSI ends at 10pm, this creates a recording scheduling conflict. On the replay I could just start recording ER at 10pm... but Sage TV doesn't appear to let me do this yet. Instead I'll just jump through some hoops another way. If I record CSI on the sage tv and ER on the replay (starting it at 10pm) then I can plug the replay into the sage tv and have sage tv record the replaytv version of ER later. I gotta be a cheap geek and just plug a few more wires in to work around this problem for now.
1:35:06 PM # comment [] trackback []
House insurance fixed...
Yahoo!
Last year we refinanced our mortgage and everything went just fine... until I got a cancellation notice for the house insurance. We called the insurance folks and quickly sent in the check and all was cured. Ok - so we thought.
This year I got the same cancellation notice. Rats. Somehow it just seems strange to me that the first mail from the insurance folks is a cancellation notice. If they would send a bill, then I'd (almost) gladly pay it. But, it's really hard to pay someone when they won't send you a bill.
We know the routine from last year - call the insurance folks and explain and even they were surprised. Quick - send a check and we're payed for this year. The insurance folks (Andrea) was going to look into what was going on so we can really fix this problem.
That was a couple months ago. Today I finally got the call back from Andrea. The problem was that the insurance renewal said that the mortgage company was going to send them the insurance payment. When we refinanced this should have been changed to direct billing (i.e. I get to pay them), but somehow it wasn't changed. Andrea was just checking if I really wanted direct billing (Yes Yes Yes - and Yes once more). This should fix it for real... maybe.
I'm figuring that next year we'll get another cancellation notice.
1:19:44 PM # comment [] trackback []
Yahoo!
Last year we refinanced our mortgage and everything went just fine... until I got a cancellation notice for the house insurance. We called the insurance folks and quickly sent in the check and all was cured. Ok - so we thought.
This year I got the same cancellation notice. Rats. Somehow it just seems strange to me that the first mail from the insurance folks is a cancellation notice. If they would send a bill, then I'd (almost) gladly pay it. But, it's really hard to pay someone when they won't send you a bill.
We know the routine from last year - call the insurance folks and explain and even they were surprised. Quick - send a check and we're payed for this year. The insurance folks (Andrea) was going to look into what was going on so we can really fix this problem.
That was a couple months ago. Today I finally got the call back from Andrea. The problem was that the insurance renewal said that the mortgage company was going to send them the insurance payment. When we refinanced this should have been changed to direct billing (i.e. I get to pay them), but somehow it wasn't changed. Andrea was just checking if I really wanted direct billing (Yes Yes Yes - and Yes once more). This should fix it for real... maybe.
I'm figuring that next year we'll get another cancellation notice.
1:19:44 PM # comment [] trackback []
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