Houston H. Haynes

I’ve recently re-hired Time Warner Cable as my Internet and TV provider. I’m not exactly thrilled about it, since just six months ago I fired them out of frustration. I was really irritated that they didn’t have certain HD channels (History Channel principal among them). On top of that, I was seeing a few too many outages of their Internet service – with two episodes occurring at critical times when I had to deliver projects to clients. [cite Murphy's Law here] From my perspective, I should have been getting better products and services for my $125+ per month.

Six months (and one failed experiment with AT&T) later, I’ve gone back to TWC and things seem to be going fairly well. The web service has been good (in some cases very, very good – 30% higher than advertised download rate) and the HD channel selection has grown (hello, History Channel HD). What’s more, their rates have improved – to the tune of $75 per month (about $50 cheaper than when we parted ways late last year).

So I went channel surfing for some favorite TV shows, and noticed that certain channels weren’t coming up. Uh oh… no Travel or Science Channel? Seriously? Is this a joke? Well it looks like they changed their billing model when then added to their channel lineup (go figure) so I didn’t get all of the “packages of channels” that I had before. Hmmm… so that’s why my cable bill was so much cheaper. Well, if I don’t get my weekly dose of vicarious smarm from Anthony Bourdain’s “No Reservations”, someone’s going to get their feelings hurt. I don’t watch that much TV aside from sports and news (mainly Dodgers and MSNBC, with some Lakers and local thrown in for good measure), but I definitely have a highly developed preference for those things that I *do* want to watch – and I want it in HD, no less.

You win this round, Time Warner Cable! I get to call in tomorrow to see how much I’m going to have to fork over to have the two or three HD channels I want, while paying for a few dozen others that I could care less about. If I didn’t have to use TWC for high speed Internet, they’d be *so* fired right now…

Good Eats, TV

No – not me [thank God] – but rather all of the women lounging around the pool right next to the gym…

…it’s great motivation to keep pressing on sets. However, I was praying for death at the end of an hour. I don’t believe that I *over*did it, but when it actually hurts my arms to raise them above my head to wash my hair I’m thinking that a quick session in the jet tub before crashing in bed tonight might be a good idea.

Resistance Training

Well – I’ve had a bit of technical difficulty with the back end of this blog. I was unable to log in to the admin console because of an issue with one of the plugins – Automatic Category Excluder. It does a really good job of keeping certain blog posts out of my RSS feed – which ties into my Twitter cross-posting plugin. I was a bit afraid to touch anything until I had properly researched the problem — “first, do no harm” and all that. The “trick” was to go behind the admin console (to the web server) and rename the folder that the “ACE” plugin resides. Once Wordpress failed to recognize it as an active plugin, the remainder of the page loaded and I was able to update ACE and re-activate it. Disaster averted – at least as far as I can now…

Site Stuff

Today was a simply gorgeous day, and it seemed to be a crime to stay cooped up in the studio (at least until the sun fades for the day). So I decided to take my laptop desk and perch it on the porch to blog for a bit and enjoy some sunshine through the trees.

It’s really nice right now, but later on in the summer it will be unbearable except for the earliest and latest parts of the day. So I’m going to enjoy this while I can. As you can see, I’ve got my laptop, an external mouse and a drink (a screwdriver mixed with fresh-squeezed OJ and Boru vodka, if you *must* know)

What you *can’t* see is that I’m wearing a stereo bluetooth headset and playing a selection of tunes from my Blackberry – something I usually only do when I’m working out. It’s a really nice experience to have a playlist of non-frenetic music piped into my head – most times I’m playing tunes that keep me going on the daily run or workout. Every once in a while a sound from the street below or the sky above (like the helicopter going overhead right now) will encroach, but just enough to let me know that the world is still turning.

For now, I’m going to sound off on my studio blog about some product updates that have me really excited about cutting a new, wide swath in the studio. Until then, cheers!

Computing, Life in LA LA Land, Site Stuff

I’m working on an article for the SCORECast online web portal, and decided to dig up a classic tome on music, sound and psychoacoustics - The Psychology of Music, by Carl E. Seashore. It’s a 1960s era work, and I expected it to be hard to find. To my surprise I found not only that Barnes & Noble listed it, but that they had a copy at their store at the Grove. So I reserved it and rode over the hill into Hollywood to pick it up.

It occured to me that I could take this opportunity to look up a few other books that I’ve had in mind for a while, and if they were available I’d check them out in person and consider adding them to my bookshelf. I went to the customer service counter to inquire about a book on video editing – Sony Vegas Pro 8 Workshop by Douglas Spotted Eagle. When I got there, the lady working the desk was caught on the phone with someone that seemed to have both a hearing problem and a speech impediment. While I was waiting my turn, I noticed that there was a stack of books that caught my eye…

Mind you – I think digestive health is a very important subject. But it struck me as an “only in LA” thing where they’d put the book right on the front edge of the customer service desk. I know that this town is notorious for pushing every kind of self-help book under the sun, but this is a bit over the top.

So I found the the Vegas book as well as another, and went to find a place to sit down for a few minutes, thumb through each of my choices to decide whether or not I was going to take them home. I found a bench right in front of a reading/signing area that was fully stocked for their next event.

Speaking of self-help (of a sort), here’s another example of “only in LA” – but then of course that’s probably not completely true. After all, I’m sure there will be other stops on the book tour for this reality TV celeb. I’ve worked on “unscripted TV” projects, so I’m not going to reflexively turn my nose up – particularly when it’s a book signing at a store in Hollywood of all places.

But by the same token it does kind of feel like it’s impossible to get away from the “reality TV” vibe that seems to be taking over our pop culture. This isn’t to rail against this person, their TV show, or the sub-genre of television that it represents for that matter. It’s more about taking note that this is just a blatant sign-o-the-times, that what sells gets the marquee, and in the search for intellectual stimulation you’d do better to find a public or university library.

So I paid for the books, packed up the bike and dashed through early rush-hour traffic to get home before things got really crazy. It’ll give me time to set up for dinner and then do something I’ve not done in a long time – read a good book.

Life in LA LA Land