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Cox Crow

Asking the Stupid Questions Since 1971
 Friday, June 20, 2003

Doing My Part to Increase the Costs of Support

Installation came with the DirecTiVo gift, so I was privileged to let the guy come out and plug things in for me. We've had DirecTV for almost two years now, and thoughtfully had the original installer upgrade it to a dual LNB converter despite not using a second receiver. The Hughes Network Systems HDVR2, however, has two tuners, so that foresight thing worked.

Unfortunately the second line was not transmitting signal from the even transponders.

After some cable tracing, I identified the source of the failure: one half of the dual grounding block.

Since the installer did not check the signal on both lines — or either, for all I know — I called for a replacement. They could improve their customer support systems a bit: the transfers from support to sales to sales support to dispatch were clumsy. This was not helped by my not being able to adequately describe what I wanted replaced.

The dual grounding block is $1.

(I spared DirecTV the truck roll and replaced it myself, after the downpour stopped.)

1:32:47 PM # Google It!

Updated Bookmarks

Joel Spolsky points out that Jason Fried noticed that OmniWeb 4.5 updates bookmarks if they have been permanently redirected. About time. Do the other browsers do this? Firebird doesn't.

By the way, I concur with Joel's UI assessment. Jason should have never noticed.

10:52:47 AM # Google It!

She Came in Through the Bathroom Window

Tim Bray noted that MSNbot leaves a referrer behind, so I checked my logs to see where he came from.
%zcat www.20030619.gz | grep msnbot | head
131.107.163.46 - - [19/Jun/2003:06:36:57 -0400] "GET /robots.txt HTTP/1.1" 200 108 "-" "MSNBOT/0.1 (http://search.msn.com/msnbot.htm)"
131.107.163.46 - - [19/Jun/2003:06:36:57 -0400] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 200 6668 "-" "MSNBOT/0.1 (http://search.msn.com/msnbot.htm)"
131.107.163.46 - - [19/Jun/2003:08:06:25 -0400] "GET /journal/2003/06/17.html HTTP/1.1" 200 116935 "http://www.goldenloewe.de/" "MSNBOT/0.1 (http://search.msn.com/msnbot.htm)"

Looks like Klaus Schallhorn does not attribute his sources, except by including the link. Mr. Schallhorn might want to distinguish re-published works from his original art.

9:36:34 AM # Google It!