Daniel J. Luke's Weblog

If you have an old (first generation) AirPort Base station that you need to reset, there are instructions on Apple's support site.

However, you'll also need a copy of the AirPort Admin Utility for Graphite and Snow.

Of course, this ends up not being enough, as there appears to be an endian issue when running the reset procedure on Intel Macs. A workaround would be to force the application to run under Rosetta, but the checkbox to do that in the 'Get Info' window was disabled when I looked. Fortunately one can use the command line program 'arch' to force execution of the ppc version of the application.

`arch -ppc /Applications/Utilities/AirPort\ Admin\ Utility\ for\ Graphite\ and\ Snow.app/Contents/MacOS/AirPort\ Admin\ Utility\ for\ Graphite\ and\ Snow`

Since there are plenty of cheap base stations available (often with significantly better features and faster wireless and wired support), there are probably very few people who are even bothering to use these old base stations anymore. However, there are a few cases where they are still useful, and that beats sending them to the recycler (or throwing them away).

I own a house.

In order to make this possible, I have a mortgage.

Banks like to sell mortgages. So, through no choice of my own, my mortgage is owned by Chase Bank [aside: Chase probably only owns the contract to service the loan, but that's not really important in this case].

Since I have an 'existing business relationship' with them, they can call me (via phone numbers that are on the National Do Not Call List). Additionally, it's very unlikely that they have all of the 'opt out of offers' paperwork I signed when I first got my mortgage.

Which is all just setup for something stupid.

Yesterday, I get a call from a local number that I don't recognize. The caller leaves a message saying that there is an "urgent, but not critical" issue with my account at Chase, and that I need to call back at the local number.

First, I do some looking, and with a little effort, I am able to verify that the number is indeed a number for Chase bank (for a local branch, though, not for the mortgage division, and importantly not the number that is on my mortgage statements). If the bank actually cared about my not being vulnerable to scams, they would have asked me to call a number that I already knew was them (i.e. the number that is printed on the mortgage statement).

Since Chase has been sending me junk mail for a while trying to get me to open a checking account with them (no thanks), I was somewhat suspicious that there wasn't an issue with my account as much as they were trying to sell me something.

With some hope that this wasn't the case (and because if there really is an issue with my mortgage, I need to know about it), I called the number today. I was put on hold for about a minute while the person I spoke to "looked up the details of my account". When the person came back to the line, she tried to schedule me for an in person meeting with an account rep. for tomorrow morning (i.e. she tried to get me to come in to the bank where someone would hard-sell their checking account). I asked if she could remove me from further 'offer' calls, and she said she would (while throwing in a "but you are missing out because since you have a mortgage with us, you are eligible for $100 if you open a new checking account with us").

I can appreciate them wanting me to open a new account (or accounts) with them, and I don't find it entirely unreasonable that they called me about it. I have two problems with what happened, though:

1. Chase should stop conditioning customers to accept that a person calling them is "from the bank" just because the caller says so.
2. Leaving a message saying that there is an "issue" with an existing account is not an acceptable way to generate sales leads.

Sounds like Brent wants svk.

This Paul Krugman blog post finally answers the question I had about current Fed policy (that I didn't know who to ask):

"What comes down to is this: once you've pushed the short-term interest rate down to zero, money becomes a perfect substitute for short-term debt. And any further increase in the money supply therefore displaces an equal amount of debt, with no effect on anything. Period, end of story."

I hadn't thought of money becoming a perfect substitute for short-term debt, so missed this idea (and was wondering why the Fed wasn't just increasing M).

I picked up a Tivo HD and a big disk to upgrade it to attach to TVsa.

Some notes:
mfstools (both the linux version and the version I cajoled into compiling on Mac OS X) crapped out on the 10th partition of the drive (when trying to read from the original drive or trying to work with the image of the original drive I copied to the new drive with dd).

winmfs beta 9.3 worked fine, though. (It was also significantly faster as the backup image is only ~400MB instead of ~150GB). I used my handy usb<->every kind of HD adaptor with VMware (connect original drive and image it, then connect new drive. Restore the image onto the new drive and say "yes" when winmfs asks to expand it to fill the drive).

Comcast should arrive Friday morning with the cablecard(s) ($24 install fee - they don't offer a self-install option).

UPDATE: Comcast tech said it was the easiest cablecard install he has done (it worked on the first M card he tried - he said it usually takes a couple of tries with different cards to get things to work). Most of the time was spent with him waiting on hold to the same number that normal people call and then him waiting for the TiVo to download/process updated guide data because he wanted to make sure that the dual-tuner worked.

And because I'll forget unless I put it somewhere:
To make the 'return to live' button do 30 second skip instead -
Select -> Play -> Select -> 3 -> 0 -> Select

Unsurprising.

The article mentions the Milgram experiment (which has had a lasting effect on how I think about things ever since I first heard about it), and also links to the very interesting Implicit Associations Tests.

I'm sure David already knows about them, but if not, I'm sure at least he will find them interesting.

I would encourage anyone who has a few minutes to take at least one of those tests.

My parents' dog, Peaches, had to be euthanized last weekend.

I've uploaded a few pictures to my gallery.

Thanks to AVS Forum, I've got the local network HD channels that TVisa (my new TV) pics up mapped correctly.

Here are the details:
73.3 WLAJ-HD (ABC)
73.5 WSYM-HD (Fox)
74.2 WKAR-HD 23.1 (PBS)
74.3 WLNS-HD (CBS)
74.5 WKAR 23.3 SD (Create)
74.6 WKAR 23.4 SD (World)
75.3 WILX-HD (NBC)

I don't have HD service from Comcast yet (since the ReplayTV doesn't do HD), so recorded shows are all SD and I don't get all of the extra HD goodness (like Pistons games on FSD in HD).

I'll probably eventually get a HD Tivo (with CableCard). I don't really use "On Demand" or do pay-per-view, so the limitations of that setup shouldn't be a big deal.

Of course, I might end up taking the opportunity to act like Jared, and just cancel TV service (use an antenna for the local digital broadcasts and purchase other shows from iTunes).

The other alternative would be to go with one of the satellite providers (like Danny), likely candidate there would be DirecTV with the new DirecTivo service that is rumored to appear soon (of course, Comcast supposedly is going to have Tivo service at some point too, so that might enter the competition as well).

I really need to call Comcast and get a better service rate, though, as the online special is significantly cheaper than my current service (and the new signup packages from Dish and DirecTV are also significantly cheaper).

An interesting sample of some of the challenged ballots in the MN senate race.

I find both the kinds of errors that people make particularly interesting. The other notable thing, to me, is that people on the internet either mostly agree or are occasionally split not between the two candidates, but between wether to throw a ballot out as an overvote or to consider it valid for one candidate or the other.

The article also links to the MN state statue that says: "A ballot shall not be rejected for a technical error that does not make it impossible to determine the voter's intent."

... since I just put the snow tires on both the IS300 and the Matrix.