I’ve been away from Bootcamp for a while — a combination of travel and an office move which put me on the north side of the building, away from the satellite signal. But after some fiddling, I found a spot for my antenna where there’s just enough signal from a repeater to give reception with no dropouts, though I’m sure that I’m not getting the best signal that XM can deliver.

It’s going to be a challenge to get caught up before the official end of Bootcamp (especially since I’ve got all-day meetings Monday and Tuesday of next week), but I’m going to do it — though that means shorter reviews (and at least one member of my reading audience will approve of that change!).

Top Tracks is today’s Bootcamp choice. I expected to like it, and I do — it plays familiar Classic Rock tracks, though its playlist is clearly deeper than that of the local Clear Channel classic rock outlet, KUFX/98.5, and so I’ve heard songs I hadn’t heard in many years, a rare event when listening to FM.

It’d be nice if the channel had a bit more personality, but it’s still worthy of a preset.

Our garage door opener is getting pretty unreliable — at times, I know it’s heard the signal because it turns on the light, but the door doesn’t move. So it’s time to replace it (it’s at least 19 years old, so I can’t complain), and I’ve been looking at what’s on the market today.

There are two obvious choices: Genie and LiftMaster. Both seem to make pretty good garage door openers, and both have competent local installers (I am hardware-impaired, so installing my own garage door opener is not high on my list of life experiences to learn from). So I checked out various web sites, and still didn’t really have much to go by. But then a Google search turned up this article: Replacing Your Garage Door Opener, from which I learned that Chamberlain, the parent company of LiftMaster, tried to use the DMCA to stop a competitor from marketing a replacement remote control. Their suit was dismissed, but I don’t want to do business with a company which tried to so blatantly misapply the DMCA (which is a lousy law, anyway) to block competition.

This isn’t quite how I expected to make my decision on which garage door opener to buy, but it makes the choice very easy.