Jingle Bells, Jingle Bells Jingle All Ma Bells

Manhole tents are used to provide protection from rain and falling pedestrians, as well as to keep all the delicious asbestos inside.

Upon seeing this tent the first thing that came to my mind was – hey, shouldn’t it say Verizon? I guess it would be too expensive to rebrand all the manhole tents.

I also remembered the old radio jingle “We’re All Connected, New York Telephone”. I wonder if anyone created an mp3 of it. I think later New York telephone became NYNEX (can’t make a jingle out of that, can you?), then Bell Atlantic and then Verizon. And with Verizon, instead of a melodic jingle we got the stupid dork saying “can you hear me?” in commercials.

I was very amazed when the unholy union of NYNEX, Bell Atlantic and GTE (you can read all about crazy little Bell matings here) they decided that all of their brands with years of history (apparently history of bad customer service) were not worth crap and decided to come up with a new name.

Yes, it looks like maybe one of them Voice Over IP companies will create a good jingle. It’s not that hard – Sirius Satellite Radio has an awesome jingle (unfortunately I can’t find an example online).

Tivo Tivo Tivo!

TurboNet card arrived yesterday. It’s an amazing feat of engineering – a tiny little custom-made ethernet card that fits into Tivo’s ISA slot and is powered by the motherboard. Install took 3 minutes (good hearted Tivo engineers included drivers for it with the latest version of software) + 5 minutes to staple cat5 to the wall. Well, and half an hour contemplating Tivo’s insides.

What am I gaining from having an ethernet card in Tivo?

Well, for one, it will not be phoning home every day. 30 calls per month at 5 cents each is not a huge saving, but I will not have to unplug the phone cord during thunderstorms.

I already had a burned out modem once. The nasty thing about it breaking was that it kept phone line “of the hook” so that nobody could call me. I had to send my Tivo to a Texan who goes by the handle Electriclegs. He figured out how to fix Tivo modems by replacing a few parts and even made a repair kit available, but I was not brave enough to solder surface mount components myself. The repair cost me $50 + shipping, but the worst thing was being without Tivo for a couple of weeks. Brrrr.

Things left to do:
1) Install bigger hard drive (not simple because I have a double drive model)
2) Mount the ethernet jack flush in Tivo’s case (cold not do it this time because my nibbling tool broke during cutting a hole for exhaust fan on my computer)
3) Install TivoWeb, other neato hacks
4) Learn to solder surface mount components, install memory kit from Electriclegs