Speakers arrived!

My speakers arrived today for my home audio system. 9 pair of various types of speakers are now sitting in our spare room (soon to be our TV room). I've posted some pictures in my gallery. I'm real excited to now get everything installed, but the person that was going to run the cable is in Florida doing hurricane repair work. One of his co-workers is supposed to get back to me about pulling the wire, but it looks like I may be searching for someone else to pull the cable.

Home Audio System Update

Our speakers should be here by Friday which means that we can start installing everything. Very exciting. Unfortunately the person who was supposed to pull the wires is in Florida doing hurricane related work. Luckily, one of his colleagues is available to do the work. There is a ton to do as we have 9 pair of speakers, 8 controllers, and 3 audio sources. My dad is going to help me cut in the boxes for the controllers. Maybe next week we will be well underway with this. I didn't realize the scope of this project until recently. I have a ton of equipment on my floor and just got a box of Cat 6 wire today. As part of this work, I'm upgrading our home network to Gigabit ethernet. I'll try to post pictures (if I remember) as things progress.

Macs on Intel and DRM

I've seen rants lately that have been complaining about Apple putting DRM (digital rights management) into their Intel based Macs such as the Developer Transition Kits some developers have "rented". The complaints are that Apple should allow people to run OS X on any old Intel based machine. I think that this idea is a complete mistake and am happy that Apple is going to lock down the OS to their hardware. There are a number of reasons for this. First off, by having Apple control the hardware and the software, things just work better. Second, from a troubleshooting point of view, there are already enough combinations of Macs and OS versions, that adding any old Intel hardware would make supporting products a nightmare (look at how much trouble Windows users have). The rants are just short sighted; who cares if Apple is moving to Intel from a consumer's point of view? The consumer just wants a Mac and doesn't care what processor it runs. Developers care as they have to do work to support it. All I can say, is "give me a break" and I hope that Apple doesn't change its stance and let OS X run on generic Intel hardware.

Automated Telephone Menu Systems

I received mail from Time Warner Cable thanking me for being a business class customer for a year and offered me a free 2 Mbps upgrade. So, I called the toll free number and tried to navigate through the menus to claim my "prize". After the system hung up on me the first time, I tried again. Next time, I got it to connect me to the Desert Cities office which isn't where I am. So I called my local office (I memorized the phone number a long time ago) and after miss navigating the first time, I tried again and managed to get a person in sales. I asked for business class sales and he gave me the same phone number I already tried. He them transferred me to a live person who then asked for my zip code and transferred me to my "local" rep. The local rep answered (obviously on a cell phone) and asked if I was transferred to the number or I called it. He said he'd call me back when he gets in the office.

While I really like the service and have only had a few hours of downtime in the last year, talking to a human who has a clue is nearly impossible. We'll see if I get my upgrade (I'm not sure I will as all residential and home business customers got upgraded from 3 MBps down to 5 MBps down earlier this year. Maybe I can convince them to give me a free upgrade to better upstream bandwidth.)