General

I made a post a couple of years ago about how frustrating my experience was when trying to cancel my XBox Live subscription.  The post still gets hundreds of visitors a month so I thought I would update it with some new information from a comment at the end of the post.  Thanks to David for his comment!

You can cancel the auto renew of the Xbox live gold if you go to xbox.com and login to your live account, click you gamertag, click contact information, click membership level, and where it says automatic renewel, click where it says on. You will then have to click through a few screens where they are trying to keep you but then you will finally be able to set it to off!!!

Let me get this straight. A top 10 list of websites with the best top 10 lists. I believe top 10 lists have officially jumped the shark.

I just noticed one of my sites dragging when trying to load and it seems the link to jquery-latest.pack.js was the culprit. After some quick research I see code.jquery.com has been redirected to Googles AJAX Libraries API. If you have links to code.jquery.com in your websites, now would be a good time to change them.

Here is a blog post from jquery discussing the move to Google’s API.

We just got back from a week at the lake recently so I am now starting to get back in the swing of things.  As you can see in the picture, coming back to work wasn’t high on my priority list.

Every year we go with some friends to a cabin on probably the cleanest lake I have ever been in. The only way to get to the cabin is by boat.  We have to ferry all of our supplies over on the boat and carry the trash off each day by boat.  You have to do the trash daily or you may wake up with a bear eating you or your food.  It is a small price to pay for the relaxing atmosphere.

I have two HD TV’s in my house and currently get my HD channels from my cable company. The provide around 15 channels which include some of the main ones I would want. I get the locals and the main ones from the big 5 movie channels. It hasn’t been a bad service, but it is also a long way away from the 84 HD channels DirectTV offers.

With that in mind, I was all set to make the switch to DirectTV. I called up AT&T and picked out my programming, selected my hardware, and picked an install date. I went ahead and took a day off from work to stay at home and wait on the installer to show. It certainly felt like the day before Christmas. The day progressed and about 30 minutes early the installer showed up at the house. He started looking around the house and took out his compass to try and find a location he could put the dish.

My house is really unique to be in a subdivision because the back of it actually faces some woods. The house has some very large trees in the back yard including some pines and an oak that are easily 100′ high. We can be sitting at our kitchen table and actually see deer or wild turkeys behind the house. This has always been something we loved about our house. It really is the perfect house to be in a subdivision. You couldn’t ask for a better location.

So the installer climbs up on the roof and continues his measurements looking for a spot he can mount the dish. He gets to the very top of the roof and the heads back down. He then proceeds to tell me he can’t get enough clearance to put the dish anywhere on the house. My tree line is about 5 degrees too much. It seems the only place he can put the dish is right in the middle of my front yard. Needless to say, the HOA would and my wife and I did veto that idea. It would just be way too tacky. I did however start thinking about a way to run one up a 100′ pole in the backyard. I haven’t given up that idea just yet.

DirectTV was also very nice and apologetic and of course they refunded my hardware purchase. It is just one of those things.

You have probably seen me playing around with the design of this blog.  I am working on a new look so don’t be surprised when you see the mess.  The funny thing is I no longer need a designer or a coder, it just seems like I need a blogger.

Well, that was a pretty painless upgrade. I went from 2.0 – 2.2.

The site is looking pretty bare at the moment and I am working on some inspiration for a re-design.  Hopefully I will get some time to redo this place soon.  I am over the current look.

Great movie. Not 100% factual, but it was very well done.

My wife and I generally spend at least an hour a day in driving to and back home. We would listen crappy FM radio drive shows to pass the time, but they are all the same old tired act. I decided I was gonna start making my commute time more productive so I got me a subscription to audible.com. Not only does it make the once wasted hour in the car more productive, it makes the trip go by much faster.

My wife and I have the luxury of riding to work together so I started downloading my books to my Pocket PC. I started with some marketing books by Seth Godin and some investing books by Jim Cramer. These were books I wanted to read, but didn’t have the extra time and I am definitely ADD when it comes to sitting down and reading. I listened to a few books like this with my headphones when my wife decided she would like to listen to try listening to some books as well. I decided at this point to move away from my educational/informative books and get some mysteries and horror books. What a great decision this has been. We have really been enjoying books and it actually makes the commutes enjoyable.

If you haven’t already done so, try out some audio books during your commute. They are so much better than the mindless crap you will find on the radio.

Well, it looks like Mark Cuban is a little smarter than some people give him credit for. Everyone laughed and mocked him when he said buying Youtube was stupid because the big video players were just waiting for someone with money to purchase YouTube so they would have someone to sue.

Here is his vindication. Viacom Sues Google, YouTube for 1 Billion Dollars