We had more success with getting our TV repaired by Sound Techniques of Los Gatos; the culprit was a $1.50 capacitor in the power supply, and the total bill wasn’t unreasonable. So now we have two working TVs in the house, which seems almost excessive after so many years of only having one. Jeffrey has volunteered to take the second set, but it’s not going to happen — and there’s no cable outlet in his room anyway, so it wouldn’t do him any good!

If anyone has any experience with the Go-Video DVR5000 (sorry, Flash 5 is required), please drop me a line or mention it in the discussion group. The combination of a VCR and a DVD player in one box seems like a good idea for the second set, but I’m always eager to learn from other peoples’ experience.

Shabbat Shalom!

Now comes the hard part, trying to figure out what combinations will work. There are all sorts of things to worry about: similar Hebrew levels, similar levels of confidence in public speaking, big family versus small, whether you want to do a creative service or not, and so forth. I’m sure that no matter who we get paired with, both families will have to make some compromises, but in most cases, it shouldn’t be a big problem.

There were two families who might be hard to match up with, though. In one case, the father is a professional DJ and musician, and he plans to have a very elaborate party, and that doesn’t match up well with what we want. On the other hand, sharing a party with that family would certainly make for easy planning! Another parent might be even harder to work with — one of the questions was “if the kids are sharing a service, how can I keep the other family out of my pictures?” I thought about suggesting that cattle prods would be a good tool, but then I decided to keep my mouth shut.

The next few years are going to be interesting. And at the end of the time, not only will we have an official Jewish adult, but we’ll also have a teenager. Oy!

That business model is so last millenium!

We’ve been having near-shortages of electricity here in California for the past few days, and the utilities have had to buy power on the spot market to keep the lights on for us all. According to a story on KCBS radio, P G and E‘s John Nelson says the utility has been forced to pay 25 cents for a kilowatt but only allowed to charge customers 5 cents. The result has been a loss of almost $5 billion to the utility.

And here I thought it was only dot-com’s which thought that losing money on every transaction was a good idea.

Wine of the Day

1999 Buena Vista Sauvignon Blanc, $5.99 at Trader Joe’s. So good, we finished the bottle before the wine oxidized!

Speaking of the Federal Communications Commission, I was very pleasantly surprised to see how quickly they processed my upgrade; I took the test on Monday night, and the upgrade was in their database this morning, and if I read things correctly, the paper license is already in the mail. That is a far cry from the way Things Used To Be — these computers do make some tasks easier and faster, I guess.

I spent most of today reinstalling my Linux system at work; I wanted to boot up the Windows 2000 partition to check out a couple of things, but somehow, while I was playing with LILO, I managed to corrupt the partition, and then I followed up by making the Linux partition unbootable, too. So I decided to blow away everything on the machine and make it a pure Linux environment; now that I know what I’m doing, it went pretty smoothly, and I even figured out how to use linuxconf to get xdm to start up automatically (for some reason, the install sees the wrong video card — one which is disabled in the BIOS — and so it installs the non-graphic login handler). I still don’t know what I’m going to do with the system, but since IBM is serious about Linux, I should learn more about it.

Holiday Shopping Ideas

If you haven’t finished your holiday shopping yet, may I suggest a visit to Archie McPhee for something tasteful or tasty. Or you might want to consider one of the fine items chosen for this year’s edition of Dave Barry’s Gift Guide, an annual holiday staple around these parts.

It will feel very strange to turn on a newscast and hear a different story being discussed. I’ve heard that the rest of the world has had the temerity to continue to function while the US was busy worrying about the election; of course, I won’t know that it’s true until CNN tells me so.

Red Hat is up

This afternoon, I finally got my old weird PC Server 330 running under Red Hat 7.0. I’ve been fighting it for about a month; trying to install over the LAN was a total failure. Copying the CD images to the local hard drive and installing there almost worked — the install went OK, but then the system wouldn’t boot (I may just have been suffering from having the Linux partition above the 4GB line, but it was too painful to try to figure it out). So I burned CDs, and then the install went smoothly — except that I couldn’t get X to start. Eventually, I brought down XFree86 4.0.1, and now I can get by; I still don’t get a graphical login screen (just the plain old text login), but I can tolerate that.

I wish I knew what I was going to do with the machine, but I couldn’t leave it just sitting idle.

Oh — the reason the system is weird is that it has a RAID disk controller (but I think only one disk), and two video cards but only one display. This machine has, shall we say, somewhat unsavory parentage.

DVDs may be taking over

Jeffrey is doing a book report on a biography of Henry VIII (in the Famous Dead People series), and Diane happened to mention that the BBC series on the Six Wives of Henry VIII was good. So I went to Amazon to look for it; the VHS version was $70 and out-of-stock, while the DVD version was $68 and “usually ships in 24 hours”. Well, I can hope. But I don’t think I ever saw a Laser Disc more available than the corresponding VHS tape, so maybe this is a Good Sign.

I drove to Fremont (about 30 miles from my office) this afternoon to take the tests to upgrade my ham license. I am so glad I don’t have to make that commute on a regular basis — it took well over an hour, most of it on Highway 880 (the “Nasty Nimitz”, as they call it on the radio), most of it at very slow speeds. But I got there in plenty of time to have dinner and review the General Class exam book again before going to the test session.

I got to the session a few minutes late, but still in plenty of time to be tested — there were about 7 other examinees, several of whom were going for their first license, Technician Class (the old Novice class is no longer being issued. You don’t have to learn Morse Code for the Technician, but if you do pass the 5 words-per-minute exam, you get the old Novice privileges; 5 words-per-minute is all that’s required for any class now, which made it reasonable for me to consider upgrading).

I filled out the form (of course there’s a form!) and they gave me the exam for Element 3 (General Class). I was pretty sure I’d do well on it, since I’d read the whole manual over the weekend (not to mention reading through the entire question pool at dinner), but I took my time and double-checked everything before turning it in. The examiner took a quick look, decided I’d probably passed, and asked me if I wanted to take the Element 4 (Extra Class) test; even though I hadn’t studied for it other than trying a couple of sample tests, I had nothing to lose and said yes.

The Extra Class test covers many areas — I was ready for some (the simpler electronics and most of the FCC questions); for the others, it was time to dust off strategies from Test Taking 101. The mandatory Smith Chart question wasn’t too bad — they wanted to know what kinds of calculations you could do with a Smith Chart, and that was one I could answer (it’s impedance and SWR, in case you’re curious). In the end, I missed 11 questions, but that was few enough to pass the test, so now I have a Certificate of Successful Completion of an Examination for Elements 3 and 4 in my hot little hands, and very soon, my new Extra Class license will arrive in the mail. And who knows, I might even use it some day!