Lower Cable Bill… More Stuff

Last night I called up Time Warner, my cable and ISP provider. I was calling to complain about my bill, which seemed high. For starters I was being charged for HDTV service yet they advertise all over that HD is free. I was also paying for addition e-mail accounts when there packages online show the default number of e-mail address is greater than I am using. I was also concerned with how much they were charging me for my package price and the extra fees for DVR cable boxes.

Well, it pays to complain. My new package plus two options costs me $114 a month compared to the old price of $163. I am saving $49. As a bonus I get Showtime (yes.. I can watch Dexter this fall) and The Movie Channel packages free for two years (I’ll have to complain again in two years to get them free again). Finally, they increased the speed of my Internet service from 7 mbps to 15 mbps.

Wow, less money and more stuff. Cool!

Call your provider and complain to get a lower rate for yourself. You have nothing to lose.

BMW Speedometer Error

I brought my BMW 335i in for service over the weekend. The air bag light came on. It turned out to be the sensor under the passenger’s seat. You know, the sensor that tells if there is a child there and the air bag should be disabled. They replaced it with no fuss.

While I had the car in I asked if they could fix the speedometer. I was sure the speedometer was off by approximately 5 mph on the highway. How did I determine this? Simple. On a recent trip to the coast my wife and I loaded up our family and some extended family memebers in our vehicles. I drove the 335i (complete with the radar detector) and my wife drove our Acura MDX. While talking to each other I was going one speed and she was going significantly slower. We both had cruise control on during this comparison.

Not easily convinced, I wanted more proof. I recently got a watch that includes a chronograph. Hmm. I drove each car along the highway to work and clocked how long it took to go 1 mile by the highway mile markers. Granted, this is not the most scientific method, but I think it worked well enough.

It took 47.5 seconds to cover 1 mile in the BMW 335i, and it took 45.0 seconds to cover the same mile markers in the Acura MDX. Both vehicles were on cruise control set at 80 mph. Here’s the formula:

3600 / seconds = mph

3600 / 47.5 = 75.8 mph

3600 / 45.0 – 80.0 mph

It seems the Acura’s speedometer is accurate and the BMW’s is off by at least 4 mph at 80 mph. I explained this to the service manager and he said they would fix it. Unfortunately, when I picked up the car they showed me a BMW bulletin regarding speedometer error. Apparently, BMW feels that an error of up to 10% + 2.4 mph is acceptable. Their example was this:

50 mph * 10% = 5 mph + 2.4 mph = 7.4 mph, 50mph = 57.4 mph

I am not kidding. The notice said that under no circumstance should the speedometer ever read slower than the actual speed of the car, but anything within 10% + 2.4 mph was normal.

So I have to live with the error.

The Beatles on Zune 80

I was listening to (or trying to listen to) The Beatles on my Zune yesterday. My Beatles collection is large. I own about 10 albums. The Red and Blue collection sets, Beatles 1, and at least 5 other regular Beatles that I can think of off the top of my head.

When I ripped my entire CD collection on my laptop with Media Player I ripped all my Beatles CDs. This left me with duplicate songs. I didn’t mind. In fact, I decided to recreate all the Beatles albums I could with the songs from the 5 collection albums and other songs I had downloaded. All went perfectly. I had almost every Beatles album (though many were incomplete) on my Zune plus the collections. cool!

Our problem started when I copied all my music to my new desktop for syncing with my Zune 80. All the music came over just fine, but the Zune software does not recognize many of the duplicate files. That’s especially strange because the files are not technically duplicates. I copied all the songs into an album structure and edited their tag information so they would look like different songs that just happen to have the same title, just like the songs I had ripped from the original CDs as well as from the collection CDs.

I tried manually dragging and dropping songs into the Zune application but this did not help. What was really weird was that it was not all the duplicates. Maybe 60-70%. and weirder still, it would show the song from the collection folder in the album of the original fake album. How strange is that? So the collections only had 3-8 songs per album instead of 13-14.

As an interim fix I create a red and blue playlist for The Beatles.

On another Beatles note… I listen to music at work with one ear bud only, leaving the other on my desk. I am not good at work with both earphones in. I went through all my Beatles songs and built a playlist of songs that are acceptable to listen to with only the left channel. There are a quite a few songs that have serious stereo separation and have the main lyrics are on the right channel. In case your curious the playlist is 75 songs long.

Sony T700… My Next Camera

I may be late on this, but I just read about Sony’s new Cyber-shot T700 camera. I would need to spend some time with a camera that has touch screen controls before making up my mind, but otherwise I love this little camera.

• 10 Megapixel Resolution
• 4 GB Memory Built In
• 4x Optical Zoom
• 3.5″ Screen (almost 1 megapixel resolution, 921,000 actually)

What’s not to love?

13″ MacBooks and GoToMyPC

I have played around with Macs a bit. From my experiments with Mac OSX on my Toshiba laptop (final report) to comparing Mac laptops to Windows based laptops on price.

Recently I was in an Apple store. No, I was not buying an iPhone 3G. I was checking out the 13.3″ Macbook laptops. I wanted to know how well it would work with GoToMyPC. I really want my next laptop to be a Mac. However, the MacBook Pros with a 15.4″ screen are expensive and I don’t think I will spend 2 grand for a laptop.

That leaves the smaller screen MacBook or an outside chance of a MacBook Air. I work from home using GoToMyPC to contect to my computer at work. This works very well. I don’t have to worry about installing a ton of tools on my home computer(s) so I can work from home.

I am concerned about screen size. At work I have two 19″ LCD monitors. Each one is set at 1280×1024 making for an actual desktop of 2560×1024. At home I have a 22″ wide screen desktop (1680×1050) and a 17″ wide screen laptop (1440×900). When I connect to work through GoToMyPC the default is to show me one screen at a time. I can toggle betwen the two displays on my work PC, or I can maximize the GoToMyPC viewer and I see my main screen with part of the second screen. I move the mouse to “slide” around the larger desktop. It is really cool.

How will this look on a tiny 13.3″ display with only 1280×800 resolution. That’s what I was trying to find out in the Apple store. I managed to connect to work, and see my desktop. However it was small. Too small to do any real work. When I tried to maximize the browser window on the MacBook it got slightly smaller. Oops! I could not find anything to click on to get it larger, or even get it back to where it was. Right off I can say that the Dock (this is the main application launching program at the bottom of every Mac screen capture you have ever seen) takes up a fair amount of real estate. Next is the System Menu. This is the menu bar at the top of the screen that changes based on what application you are running. When manually trying to drag the browser larger it will not exceed these items.

With my home desktop I don’t need to access my work machine from a laptop. but I still want it for quick connects to work for troubleshooting. So far my first attempt was a failure. I will need to learn how I can hide the Dock and the System menu to provide greater screen real estate. I am hoping there are auto hide options for them similar to Windows auto hide function for its Start Button/Task Bar. Also, if the Safari web browser (or Firefox for Mac) has some kind of full screen mode it might be acceptable. Certainly the screen ws very crisp so if I can get more of teh screen to do what i want and not what Apple wants I may be able to get the Mac.

2010 Camaro Public Reveal Photos

Click here to see some pictures from Chevrolet’s public reveal of the production Camaro. Unfortunately they are low resolution images, but it’s better than nothing.