Indoor Times

After my eye surgery on December 11, the rest of Decmber seems to have whizzed by in a blur.

Really.  I went to two great private parties, hosted one great party myself (little more than a week ago but it seems like a month ago), and had a nice movie date followed by a christmas light tour.  Beyond that there was work and indoor fiddling with electronics.  That last bit is what this post is about.

For at least 4 days I tinkered with my living room audio system, and got better sound with less boom.  I re-centered the bedroom audio system.  I fixed the dvd recording drive in the Sony RDR-HX900 dvd recorder that had been broken for two years.  (I had fixed the hard drive in that unit about 2 months earlier.)  That repair was a huge accomplishment--last weekend.  By the first weekend of the new year, after making two new DVD's, it had broken again and I have now purchased two replacement units (a Pioneer DVR-LX70…perhaps the best such unit of all time…and the Magnavox MDR537H--perhaps the best DVD recorder you can buy in the USA today).

I got my Dish Network service fixed.  They had told me (!) I was losing connectivity back in August and they would immediately come out and fix it.  But I was busy with other things and did not get back to them until late December when, after the healing of my second eye surgery, I could move around the stuff in the kitchen to make the Dish DVR box accessible (otherwise, it's behind lots of stuff).  They needed to replace my old 722 ViP box with a new 722k box.  The new box left out the OTA (over-the-air) broadcast tuner my previous box had in order to get the sub channels of the PBS station KLRN.  The installer knew nothing about this or anything (or so he pretended).  I did some research online and determined that I could get Dish to send me the needed OTA MT2 module.  I called technical support and once again they pretended to know nothing, until after about 30 minutes of argument they offered to send me the OTA module and waive the usual $50 charge (as they should have, since my previous box had it, as did the previous boxes before that which I paid for!).  The OTA module took more than 2 days it was supposed to take to arrive, I kept getting notices from UPS about rescheduling.  Finally, UPS told me it had been delivered, and I looked all around the house and saw nothing.  I tried to file a claim with UPS but UPS wouldn't let me do that until 24 hours.  The next evening my neighbor called, they had delivered it to him.  I told him to leave it by my front door, and the next day I installed it, and scanned in all the local channels.  It seems to work flawlessly on all local channels though I only designed the antenna to get KLRN.  The new OTA module has two tuners so you can record one program while watching another.  Now I've reset the programs I want to record (including one on a OTA sub channel) and all is back to normal.  I also figured out how to use all my old RF remotes (the installer was totally unhelpful in that regard, as expected) so I have a total of 3 working RF remotes (which I can use anywhere inside the house).  Afraid I wouldn't be able to use my old RF remotes I also ordered 3 brand new ones, which I haven't programmed yet.  All in all, my satellite service is back and better than ever.  The picture quality from the 722k seems incredibly better than the old 722Vip.  The HD channels (which is most of them) are really HD now.

I got two new Sony alarm clocks with auto-time-set feature, which works great.  One of them is now THE clock in the Queen's room.  It sits right next to the genuine Lucent desk phone (which is actually my old phone from work which I saved from recycling).

I finally put the brass feet on my Aragon amplifier in the living room, and it looks nicer, runs cooler, sounds better, and doesn't require a big wood board underneath it any more--which means I get about 9 inches more foot room.  I had ordered these Mapleshade brass feet more than 2 years ago.

Last Saturday (first in January) I moved the DVD rack in the kitchen out to Lyndhurst.  I was able to put most of the DVD's there into the new rack in the King's Room.  The rest I moved to Lyndhurst, also leaving just a tad more room in the rack.  This makes the working area in the kitchen about 25% larger and frees up two cabinets and a shelf that had been blocked by the DVD rack.  I reorganized the new video and network wires that had been in front of the cabinet so they are now attached to the wall and out of the way.  I still need to remove many of the wires near the floor which have become redundant.

Last Sunday I sorted LP records.  One box of records from the kings room is going to be moved to Lyndhurst.  I had noticed previously that some of them seemed to smell moldy.  I found one obviously moldy or ruined record set box, which has been trashed, but the individual records inside seemed fine and have been saved in the outgoing box.  I also filled another box from some of the records in the Queen's room, and some of the records in King.  Some of the records in the Queen's room were deemed to be part of the "inside collection" and moved to the record cabinet there.  However, to make room for them, I had to cull records already in the king's room.  So the second box going to Lyndhurst has some records that had been in Queen's, and some that had been in King's, but the King's cabinet now contains only records that are going to be kept inside.  Two additional boxes will be obtained to move out the remaining records in the Queen's room.

I started examining the Sony turntable (PSX-800, arguably their best ever) I took out-of-service in 2010 because it wasn't working and I thought I smelled smoke.  I detected no problems inside, and plugged it into power carefully, this time being sure there was no smoke.  Now that I've determined that it is safe, I could possibly fix the problem by adjusting the power regulator.  That's a project I'd put off for 3 years.

Well these are the kinds of things you finally get around to doing when it's cold outside.