Two Weeks in Tampa, Florida

Our two weeks in Tampa were wonderful. Our daughter Jackie helped us find an RV park that was close to her, and it was very nice. We were able to get together with Jackie every day.

Saturday we toured Ybor City, eating a Cuban sandwich and watching them make cigars.

On the return trip we stayed for a week at an RV park right on the Mississippi. There was a constant stream of tugboats pushing strings of barges up and down the river.

It was the oddest sensation hearing them going by. They sounded a lot like high speed trains going by, except they were only moving a few nautical mph.

Stephen Foster Folk Culture Center

Saturday night we stayed at the Stephen Foster Folk Culture Center State Park in White Springs, FL. This was an amazing experience. The roads are small, so I was a bit nervous driving our big rig in the small, twisty turny roads. It was worth it though. Our site was fairly secluded, and the foliage so dense that it was like it was fenced. We were a bit sad that we only had one night here.

Speaking at the Austin IoT Meetup

Arduino and ChihuahuaLast night I gave a presentation at the Austin IoT Meetup group about my RV home automation work. It was well received, and a lot of great discussion ensued.

You can see a PDF of the presentation here.

 

 

Alexa Controlled Motorized Drawer

Now that I’ve integrated Alexa into my custom Arduino based RV control system, I’ve been looking for unusual ways to leverage motors. An opportunity recently presented itself. I use a Varidesk standing desk at work, and I really like it. So I’ve been thinking about how to setup a standing desk in my RV.

My computer is currently setup on a booth table that converts to a bed. So my initial thought was to replace the solid pedestal with some sort of motorized post. This would be great, but I was unable to find any motorized pedestals that can raise and lower far enough. Too bad, because having Alexa “make the bed” would be pretty cool.

Hand drawn design for piano cabinet
Piano cabinet sketch

So upon further thought, I decided to build a stand-up desk area on the wall near the booth where I have my piano setup. Measuring the height of the stand-up desk that I use at work, I realized that I could build a shelf above the piano, and make a drawer for the piano to slide out from under it when I’m playing piano.

PianoCabinet1 PianoCabinet2

So work is underway on the cabinet.

And then it occurred to me. If this isn’t an opportunity for gratuitous use of Alexa controlled motors, then I don’t know what is! So my plan at this point is to use some very low cost stepper motors to slide the piano drawer in or out using voice commands. Can you say “Alexa, ask My RV to hand me that piano”.

Why I’m Firing TimeWarner Cable TV

I’ve been pretty dissatisfied with TimeWarner cable for a long time. Some of this stems from having run across several lousy contractors/technicians. But my more recent complaints include:

  1. A very high number of bugs in their DVR programming.
    It seems that each DVR code update fixes one or two bugs, but always adds a few new bugs. They evidently do not test their code before delivering it to my DVR. I say this because I typically find bugs within minutes of using the updated code. I can’t recall a time when there weren’t bugs in my DVR, even after exchanging units, trying different models, etc. As the director of a large group of programmers, I know that I shouldn’t be discovering their bugs for them. That’s what Software Testing and QA is all about.
  2. Dishonest technical support
    They appear to have a standard response of “Oh, we fixed something in our back-end (or database).” I’ve heard this multiple times in situations where it was pretty clear to me that this was a stalling tactic, or an item on their support check-list. For example, on New Year’s day I was unable to watch video-on-demand, including trailers. I suspect that a lot of folks were home that day, and the high volume of on-demand streaming overloaded their back-end systems. I remember thinking at the time “this will be resolved tomorrow when everyone goes back to work”. Well, a few days later I started getting recorded phone calls informing me that “they had done some investigating and fixed some settings in their database, would I please retry the problem to see if it had been fixed.” Sheesh. Liars.
  3. Automated, nagging phone calls. They’re using computer generated phone calls to repeatedly call me day and night. I scheduled a technician to come out as a result of the New Years outage, but I’ve also been having low signal problems (intermittent pixellation). Now their computer is calling me with a recorded message lying to me about having “fixed the problem”, and would I please confirm and call them back at some stated phone number, otherwise my technician appointment might be cancelled. The message is fairly short, and the phone number stated twice before hanging up. WTF? How about giving me a chance to write the number down? To make matters worse, their computer wouldn’t leave a message when I didn’t answer, so I couldn’t even get the number from replaying their message. Does anybody at TimeWarner every try using their own service?

On the one hand, they provide the fastest internet service in my area. The RV park where my RV is currently parked provides cable hookups at the site, so TimeWarner is conveniently available to me when not traveling. And it’s pretty time consuming and inconvenient to switch provides (eg. cable to Dish or DirecTV). However, I feel like I’m not being a responsible consumer by continuing to subscribe to such an unethical, incompetent company.

Most of the people I know switched to Dish, DirecTV, or U-Verse long ago. Since I live in an RV, my options are somewhat limited. I don’t have the option of U-Verse, and until recently the mobile antennas available for Dish and DirecTV only support 1 channel viewing/recording. This has changed recently though, so I’ll be investigating my options and making a switch to Dish or DirecTV.

As inconvenient and expensive as it will be to switch, I refuse to continue to support a company that treats its customers like this.

TimeWarner, your monopoly on cable service is not enough to keep me as a customer. Get your act together or go out of business.

Follow up note 1/15/14

We had Dish installed last week and have been delighted. I’m sorry that I waited so long to make the switch. Primetime Anytime is awesome, and the responsiveness of the box to the remote is astounding. Installation was a breeze. We called on Saturday, and they installed it on Monday morning!

Not much blogging activity during 2013

2013 is winding down. I’ve been fairly busy blogging and writing technical stuff over on iOSUnitTesting.com, finishing up a new lynda.com course, and managing the best group of iOS developers on the planet. I haven’t posted here since last March.

I’m going to try to start doing more blogging here, keeping it more personal. Look for my iOS unit testing musing and reporting over at my iOS Unit Testing website. I’m going to try to keep this website more personal, talking about vacations, hobbies, family, travels, and travails.

 

Celestino Couture Website

image of Celestino Couture home page

I just finished completely revising the Celestino Couture website. During the update, I converted everything to Flash. This has allowed doing a lot of subtle transitions, and will enable more as the site evolves.

Check it out.

Our First RV Headache

After the heavy rains earlier this week, we’ve had to really check out the RV for leaks. We didn’t find any major leaks. However, we did find evidence of a significant amount of old water damage. When we purchased the RV we were told that there had been a leak along the front, but that it had been fixed. It turns out that there had been a significant amount of water damage, rot, and mold which had not been fixed.

Rotting floor

So we rolled up our sleeves and got to work this weekend.

We had to completely dismantle the closet doors and shelves to get at the rear panels. Upon pulling up the carpet we realized that we’d need to replace the flooring, at least for the back part.

Rotting wood in closet
Rotting wood behind closet rear wall

The framework behind the rear wall panelling was rotten, so we had to replace it.

We looked into using teak, but this appeared cost prohibitive. Instead we’ve opted to go with an inexpensive hardwood and paint it with Kilz.

It appears that the closet was built before the front end fiberglass end cap was installed. We really didn’t want to remove any outside panels, so we were delighted to find that we could reach everything containing rot from inside. Thank you Jesus.

I’ll post more pictures as we go.

Adding Website Workshops Forum

I’m looking into selection of a forum (bulletin board) for use with Build a Website Workshops as well as for my WordPress plugin. For Workshops I want something that integrates nicely with Joomla! but I may choose something different for my WordPress plugins since it needs to integrate nicely with WordPress 🙂
At first glance, Joo!BB looks attractive. However, forum.joomla.org uses phpBB. I’m guessing that this might be because they selected phpBB long ago, and it doesn’t make sense to switch even if there are better options now.
I’m going to try installing joo!BB on my BuildAWebsiteWorkshops.com site and see how it works.

Installing Win 7 in Boot Camp

This morning I replaced my Macbook Pro’s internal optical drive. Back when it went out, I opted to be cheap and use an external drive at about half the cost of replacing the internal drive. Since then I had tried to install Windows 7 into Boot Camp using the external drive, and kept running into problems. I had attributed the problems to the optical drive being external. Now with the fixed internal drive I gave it another try.

I’ve been running Windows 7 under Parallels for awhile now. Parallels allows installation using the raw .iso file, so this was easy.

I’ve also upgraded my Macbook Pro’s internal hard disk to 500G, so I thought I’d recreate my boot camp partition since I have plenty of space now.

It turns out that the problems that I’ve been having were not caused by the external drive, but by the .iso format used by MS (this is an MSDN image). So after searching around a bit, I came across various instructions for fixing it. All of the instructions I found however required a Windows system, which I currently do not have.

I have a Parallels Windows simulator on my Mac, so I considered running the instructions in Parallels. I also found some blogs commenting that this approach had worked. However, while searching this it occurred to me that if running things within Parallels worked ok, then why did I need to bother installing boot camp, which is really quite inconvenient anyways.

The only real reason that I have for wanting to run boot camp is to get better performance for running my C&C style games. So I decided to reinstall them into an XP Parallels session and see how the performance compared to running the Mac version of the games (which isn’t very good). The results were quite good. I can run the PC version of C&C3 KR full screen at 1680 x 1050 with medium rendering settings without audio hiccups or obvious video glitches.

So I deleted my boot camp partition and will simply use Parallels 5 for running Windows XP and Windows 7. I also have a Ubuntu session. I’m a happy camper.