Morris "Mojo" Jones

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  • Cutting the cord, life without DirecTV (or cable)

    “Thank you for calling DirecTV, and thank you for being a loyal customer since 2004! How may I assist you today?”

    “I’m calling to close my account.”

    It took some doing. After being transfered to a specialist in such matters, who tried to tempt me with such things as a six-month discount, a new TiVo box when they become available, a free premium channel or two, and so on, they finally did disconnect the account.

    When asked why, I was armed with:

    • Their migrating all HD services away from my HR10-250 TiVo DirecTV receiver
    • Their continuing inability to deliver a new TiVo model years after the first offered “release date”
    • Being forced to pay for hundreds of channels when I only ever rarely watch half a dozen

    Call me a TiVo fanboy if you like; I won’t dispute it. I’ve just never been entirely happy with the user experience of the DirecTV models and DirecTV’s insistence on lobotomizing the TiVo software to get rid of streaming and sharing features.

    Nearly everything Jane and I watch (Jeopardy, Glee, The Mentalist, House, The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson) is available free over the air. Our home is spittin’ distance from the transmitters on Mt. Wilson — I could get the signals with a paper clip stuck in the antenna port, but I have an antenna in the attic.

    So my DirecTV bill of some $90/month would get me an occasional glimpse at the Daily Show, the Weather Channel, Conan on TBS, rarely CNN, and NASA-TV. DirecTV pulled ESPN and the local Fox sports channels from the HR10-250 in HD, so I never even bothered with the games there.

    Three months ago I put a Roku box in my system, and we’ve been loving streaming from Netflix, Amazon, even Radio Paradise HD. (Current favorites in our queue: Dr. Who, Have Gun – Will Travel.)

    Everything else we might want to watch (Entourage, Saving Grace, Big Love) is either available on disks or streaming. I’ve long since lost the need to see a show the night it’s broadcast.

    Now in place of my DirecTV receivers, I have a pair of TiVo Premiere models. I put an XL model in the living room home theater and the standard model in the bedroom. I’ve had enough experience with TiVo to know that I should go ahead and buy the lifetime service subscriptions for both boxes. The total bill was roughly equivalent to 13 months of DirecTV.

    I’m tickled with the new TiVos. I love how they work to download a rented (or purchased!) movie from Amazon. The RSS feed support is going to be fun — Jane’s What’s Up podcast will just appear in the Now Showing queue. I love being able to share recorded shows between the two boxes. (But not downloads, why TiVo?)

    It’s also fun to see what the local broadcasters are doing to make use of their digital bandwidth. KTLA is using sub-channel 5.2 to market their library of classic TV using the moniker Antenna TV. It’s like having a free version of Nickelodeon on hand (Mad About You, Gidget).

    Just before I wrote this, I did a Google search, “life without cable,” yielding 11,600,000 results. Interestingly, the first page of results all seemed to imply that giving up cable meant giving up network programming as well. Not one of them mentioned the bounty that was available in free over-the-air broadcasting.

    I have every reason to believe that our deprivation will be barely noticed and short-lived, and I’m happy to do my part to disrupt the MVPD business model. Give me a la carte programming choices and I could change my mind.

    And of course if Verizon were to install FiOS in my neighborhood …. 🙂

  • Pathology Report

    Here’s the deal: All along, this whole “prostate cancer” thing seemed to me like a gigantic fraud. Well not fraud, but maybe “surreal.” That all changed yesterday.

    I felt fine, always did. I wasn’t running to the bathroom two or three times a night. My doctor never felt anything. I have no family history of prostate cancer. It was just a blood test, an imprecise secondary indicator, that suggested a biopsy.

    Okay, I believed the biopsy, but still it all seemed abstract.

    So I had the surgery. Sure, take it out. I don’t really need it. But I want to know.

    This is why I picked surgery over radiation. The radiation therapy is known to be effective, but it’s still all abstract, not real.

    Yesterday I went in to have my staples and catheter removed. (Yay!) (Anyone who is facing this procedure and wants to know more about it, I’m happy to share in a private exchange.) Meanwhile my nurse practitioner delivered the pathology report, and I asked her for a printed copy.

    I’ll post all of the relevant parts below, followed by a few word interpretations.

    (more…)

  • Prostate Cancer

    With Jane’s encouragement, I thought I would write this blog entry. I want to keep my friends and family up to date, and for the most part they are the only ones reading this blog anyway.

    The short version is that I was diagnosed with a small but clinically significant prostate cancer in September, and will have RP surgery (Radical Prostatectomy) using robotics on January 19. I’ll be at Kaiser’s West L.A. Medical Center for one night, then recovering at home for about three weeks. Within a few months, the expectation is that I’ll be pretty much back to normal for the duration.

    For those of you who really want all the details, how this came about, and what decisions were involved, I’ll go into it all below. For lots of people this comes under the category of “too much information,” and you are certainly excused without prejudice.

    (more…)

  • First cruise: The Sea Princess, San Francisco to Alaska

    Jane and I are in our first port of call on our first-ever vacation cruise. We’re in a coffee shop in Ketchikan, Alaska.

    Photos from our first three days with Jane’s family are here.

    The cruise went non-stop from San Francisco to Ketchikan, which involved two days at sea. About 36 hours of the cruise were spent in 15-foot swells, which made for quite a rolling shuddering ship and a lot of dramamine patches given out by the medical staff. Luckily Jane and I aren’t susceptible to motion sickness, and mostly just enjoyed being rocked to sleep in our stateroom.

    I joined a bridge game for the first time since 2000, and dusted off a little of my bridge muscle memory. I played two games with a delightful 70-year-old lady from near Austin, TX.

    Ketchikan is a scenic town, and I’ll have lots of pictures for Day 4 of the photo album. Right now there are at least four giant cruise ships berthed at the town, and the merchants are busy sucking every dime out of them they can manage.

    Internet access is available on the ship. You can buy packages for as little as $0.35/minute if you buy $175 worth, or pay $0.75 per minute pay-as-you-go. I think I’ll be content to visit internet coffee houses on our shore stops.

    Next stop is Juneau, AK, and hopefully new pictures from there.

  • Watching the Atlantis STS-125 launch

    It’s been several weeks since NASA launched Atlantis to service the Hubble Space Telescope. Watching the launch, I heard several calls that made me sit up in my seat. You probably didn’t hear them. Watch it with me here:

    Listen to the audio …

    At 0:49 into the video, about 15 seconds into the launch, CAPCOM says “Bypass across the board Scooter, no action!”

    Wow! I was just imagining what the flight controllers must have been seeing. This is what I heard in my mind as he said that, “Yes we see that you have multiple warning lights and alarms going off, but don’t do anything!” Holy crap!

    Listen again at 1:20 into the video, “Atlantis, Houston, No action on the MPS H2 Out key.” In other words, “Yes, we see that additional warning, but don’t do anything about it.” Scooter called back, “Houston, we copy, no action.”

    (I can’t believe at 3:20 in the video the public affairs guy (“Mission Control Houston”) says “No issues heading to orbit.”)

    At 3:40 into the video, Houston calls up with some explanations for the earlier calls, “Atlantis, Houston, H2 out key is a ducer only, and the ASA-1 is a power only.”

    “Copy ASA-1 is power only, and the H2 is ducer,” called back Scooter.

    Later on in the post-launch press conference, we got to find out what was going on, and this article on nasaspaceflight.com had a lot more detail:

    “A post launch review of the data showed that the failure seemed to have occurred two to four seconds prior to liftoff after main engine ignition and the resulting shake and bake. An EPD (Electrical Power Distribution) review of their BMU data of Main Bus A shows that Main A bus saw a 400 hz signal with a peak to peak of 100 amps. EPD is going to look at the Main B data next.

    Wow! I had to wonder if that was a typo. 100 amps of current at 400 hz shorting into an avionics bus! No wonder several warnings and alarms went off.

    Later the Flight Director had the commander turn off the power to ASA-1, which is one of four Aerosurface Servo Amplifiers on the orbiter. These are critical components that actually power the rudder and elevons during aerodynamic operations (flying in the atmosphere). With three remaining, they could continue the mission, but another failure would call for an immediate de-orbit.

    The other interesting call was related to a transducer (“Ducer” in NASA-speak) that monitors the pressure of the hydrogen being fed to the main shuttle engines. That’s the “H2 out key.” If that warning lights, it could mean that one of the three engines is suddenly not getting enough fuel pressure.

    So why did the controllers call “No action!”?

    I can almost feel the heart pounding of a “steely-eyed missle man” monitoring all of the systems. One warning by itself is not a drastic call to action. They could see that all of the other systems were functioning correctly, and most importantly, the flight dynamics and performance of the craft as a whole were safe and correct. Doing something could have been a bigger disaster than doing nothing.

    The H2 out key warning was a simple call. The controller can see immediately that all three engines are still producing their normal thrust. In the press conference someone pointed out that if there were a real problem, Scooter would have felt it in the seat of his pants, big time. The problem there wasn’t with the H2 pressure, it was with the transducer. “H2 out key is a ducer only.”

    But that ASA-1 problem is still a concern, and even today, while Atlantis is in California being mated to a 747 for ferry operations back to Kennedy, technicians are crawling through the orbiter trying  to diagnose the problem. They suggest that a power wire shorted to ground, which fed all that current directly into the bus ground. That would make a lot of systems go a bit funny.

    Hats off to the guys behind the screens in Houston. I know hardly anyone shared in those few moments of heart-pounding pressure, but a few of us heard what you were dealing with. Because of your heads-up attention, we can today look back and call it a nearly flawless mission.

    If nothing else, for me it was an interesting foreshadow to a mission that would be as dramatic in its problems and solutions as any I’ve seen.

    [Edit: The video I was linked to was made private by the uploader, so I found another copy and updated the time notes in the post.]

  • What’s wrong with Caesar’s Palace?

    Registration lobby at Caesar's Palace Las Vegas
    Registration lobby at Caesar's Palace Las Vegas

    This past week, my wife and I spent four nights in a deluxe room at Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas. I was attending TheServerSide Java Symposium, and she went along for three days of pampering and relaxing.

    Caesar’s is a fine place, a grand old warhorse of the Vegas strip. It’s probably known good times on its own, but is now part of the Harrah’s conglomerate of gaming properties.

    While the building seems tired, it’s clear that it has seen much refreshing and remodeling over the years.The gaming and shopping areas are opulent and clean, with very attractive eye-candy sight lines throughout the property. In the rooms, the marble bathrooms are luxurious, and the suite appointments are in good condition.

    (It amazes me that they fill the suites with flat widescreen TVs, but can’t manage to feed them with any high-definition content. The delivered video quality is really bad. The same is true for the giant standard-def projectors in the sports book.)

    So why do I feel uncomfortable at Caesar’s Palace?

    Everywhere you go throughout the property, there are subtle signs that “we don’t want you here.  You’re not good enough.”

    Start with the key-locked gilded private elevator in my elevator bank in the Augustus tower. In the casino, everywhere you look are private exclusive gaming areas where you aren’t welcome. There are the empty lines for “Platinum” casino guests only, closed doors marked “7-star Registration,” a gold rope around the sports book seating for “VIP reserved” customers only. My wife drove back to the hotel on Friday to find the valet parking limited to “Platinum and 7-star guests” only.

    Sure every big Las Vegas casino has its exclusive services for the whales, and private luxury gaming areas and apartments. Certainly you want to encourage people to play more, and perhaps tease them with the promise of forbidden pleasures.

    But nowhere else on the strip have I been to a place where the number of closed doors seemed so plentiful or so obvious. Not at Harrah’s other properties, including the Rio, and Harrah’s Las Vegas. (Harrah’s casino is really a festival of the everyman.) The subtle hidden message is that Caesar’s is mostly for the whales. We might let you walk through our halls and play at our slots, but we really don’t want you here.

    Okay Caesar’s, I get the message!

    P.S. This should not reflect at all on the fine employees at Caesar’s who made our stay very pleasant. Nor on the top-notch convention facilities and services provided for TheServerSide. Indeed Jane and I left a few personal items behind in our room, and I’m certainly grateful for the time taken by their staff to bundle up the package and forward them. I think the subtext I write about above is built into the very bones of the place. It’s just how it is. — Mojo