Author: Ian

South Beach Florida

I think I have mentioned this, but I am staying with a friend in Florida. Yesterady we went down to Miami to walk around Lincon Road. I am now on my 5 or is it 6 roll of film for this trip. Then in the evening we hung out on the street next to South Beach drinking a few beers and looking around. Today is going to be a beach day. Spending a little time sunning myself before hedaing back up to wet Washington D.C. I am going to drive back up tomorrow and should make it back to D.C. by the 5th just in time to pay my rent.

I got up this morning at 3:30 am to drive down route 1 to go watch the shuttle launch. It was assume. The shuttle was supposed to launch yesterday, but was delayed because of the cold weather. So yesterday I spent the day at the Kennedy Space Center which is a really really cool place. If you get a chance to visit this part of the world then you have to come here. I went on a up close to our that took me all round the NASA base. I stood next to the shuttle assembly building. I drove passed the run way where the shuttle lands. I watched 2 Imax films, one of them was in 3D which was really impressive. I went to a QA session with an astronaut. I got there at 9am and left at closing. I could have spent an over day there. Over all I am having a great time, except for getting access to the internet. The last two night I have been sleeping in my tent so no way to dial in. I am planning on spending a couple days in Fort Lauderdale

I am borrowing a fax line in Jacksonville FL 🙂 Dialing in has been a real real pain. However I am now in Florida and need to check that the shuttle launch is still on time 🙂

Well I am doing it, for lack of any better to I am driving down to Florida to go see a shuttle launch. I read an article on a couple days ago and I thought it would be fun. I talked to one of my friends who is in between jobs and he thought it would be cool as well, but decided not to come.
So at 4pm I left to drive down to Florida. As usual I was running a little late so I ended up wasting a lot of time on I95 just past the beltway. I am now in summerton SC in the middle of no where I tried dialing in but i think I am in hicks vill. When dialing I here the clicking of the old telephone exchanges, the number I have doesn’t seem to work so I guess I am not in a local area. I will try connecting tomorrow. I saw a dataport in on of the larger Petrol stations. On the way down I could have stopped and eaten at the “We Dare Topless diner” or at the “Gentlemans Club”. I had the idea that it would be fun to take photos at the state signs. but i missed the first one at NC then didn’t realise I was in SC until I went past the welcome center and realised why the last Petrol stop was called “South of the Border”. I didn’t even see the sign.
Hopefully I won’t get any charges for the local calls. We will see.
I need to sleep now

There is a shuttle launch at 6:30 am on the 28th of feb. Since I am not doing anything else at the moment I am thinking about going to see it. So it is an 850 mile drive or a plane ride plus hire car trip away.

This is way cool

Ok this rocks!!!
Geek Stuff
I have been playing on and off for a week or so with getting my tivo connected to my network. I went to Microcenter and picked up some of those 5 dollar 50 foot network cables. I also picked up some RJ45 to 9 pin serial connectors. These are really cool because you don’t have to solder the connectors. Following the instructions on Tivo web. I pulled my tivo apart and booted from a tivo boot floppy I used for upgrading a tivo. After much pulling out of hair and stuff I first got a serial connection working, then changed that to be a ppp connection. I can now telnet into my Tivo and also transfer files back and forward on it. I did have two porblems, the tivo was dropping packets (solved by disabling compression, guess the little processor in the tivo couldn’t cope with the extra work of compressing the data FYI I used the “nodeflate” option). It also stopped making daily calls, (solved by telling pppd not to set a default route on the serial connection “nodefaultroute”). I then installed Tivo web. This is the part that really rocks. You can go in and see why it records stuff, I laughed out loud when I saw
Animals -2 Implied
Basketball -1 Implied
Bodybuilding -1 Implied
The list goes on, but I thought it was interesting.

Now the really cool part is you can change the channel remotely using a web page, so I can now change the channel when I am sitting upstairs on the computer watching the tivo via the tv card on that machine. This also means that if I set up real server and real encoder again. I can then ssh into my home network from work and watch the output of my tivo via real video on my computer at work then change channels and watch recorded programs on the tivo.

I still need to get set up the network so it picks up the tv data via my cable modem instead of using my phone line. At some point I will probably buy a network card and dump the serial cable stuff.