Category Archives: Blog
Direct Message from AT&T Twitter
I recieved a Direct Message from AT&T’s twitter folks today. Appearantly they liked my tweet last night “Could have so worked from bed today. With @attnews 3G, my iPhone, and remote desktop… I never need to shower again!” I recieved this message this morning. Nothing huge, but nice to know their is a real person working somewhere at AT&T. Next time I need some customer service, maybe I’ll just message them back.Â
FOUND: AT&T Towers in Clarksville
Well, I didn’t much sleep last night… Being the huge geek that I am, I stayed up late messing with my new 3G signal. I’m loving it. I wanted to find just where AT&T put those shiny new antennae, but could quite find them. I stumbled across an AT&T website called ATTTowers.com. You have to register, but it is free to use and search. They even have pictures of the towers. Below are two screenshots of the google map that was generated from my search on that website, and an excel doc listing towers in the Clarksville City limits. I’m curious how far the 3G signal goes… Let me know where you are and if you have 3G in Clarksville, TN or Montgomery County, TN. Thanks!
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- Towers in Clarksville & Nashville
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- Clarksville Towers
Spreadsheet of Towers: ATTTowers
3G in Clarksville! Whaa?!
I was just about to go to bed when I checked my phone and discovered something that I never thought inwould live to see… The 3G symbol on my phone! Clarksville has arrived! I wasn’t sure how long this would last so I grabbed some screen shots from kayce’s phone (my power button still doesn’t work, see post about water and iPhones…). Those pics are below. Notice the speed tests I ran. Pretty sweet! I’m pumped. I’ve been so irritated not having 3G for so long. Finally! I feel like u should stay up late watching YouTube videos just to make up for lost time and bandwidth… I won’t. Did I mention how pumped I am?!?! The pics are thus: 1) Home Screen with 3G symbol. 2) Speed test on 3G. 3) Speed test on Edge. 4) Speed test on WiFi. 5) All the speed test results.
Using YouTube, but Not Really
So, the new iPhone 3G-S is really great (once you dry it out, see post). It does video really well, and I like the “idea” of being able to upload from my phone to youtube. I just wish apple would make it alittle more robust and let us determine where we upload our video. I don’t really like the idea of putting my personal/family videos up on youtube. The only people I want to look at them already have access to this site. Plus, I have noticed some not so related “related” videos showing up on the side. I know there are ways to configure youtube to make “family friendly”, but why bother when my site is already such. So, I just discovered (I’m sure most have figured this out already) that if I upload to youtube, let it do all the encoding, and then log into my youtube account and download the resulting mp4. I can then upload that to my wordpress and use wordtube to view it on my site. You might notice how I like the word “my” there. I really like for most of my content, especially family related, to stay on my site. Call lme paranoid. Go ahead. Do it! I know its a few more steps, but it beats, hooking my phone up to my laptop, transferring the video, using qt-pro to export the video as an avi, use Riva to encode the flv, and then upload it to my site. I just let youtube do all the hard work, then I download it and delete it. Nice. Thanks youtube. Oh, see the resulting videos below.
Pre-“School Days”…
Well, the boys have been in preschool all week. This is the first time either of them have been in a regular daycare (even though they don’t like to call it daycare anymore). It’s always been either Mommy or Nina watching them, so this is a big change for them. Parker is doing great. He has a real shy side that comes out in public. Today for instance, is his class’ turn to swim. We got to school and I saw everyone else already had their swimsuits on, so I asked him if he wanted to change… Perfectly reasonable to me. He looked scowled at me, and in his most hateful/offended/embarrassed/lips- pursed voice said, “No, I’m not going to”. Woah! Sorry, I brought it up. Well, maybe its just being 4, who knows. Carson, has been crying every morning when I drop him off, but by the time I take Parker to his room, he is fine. We had a note come home with the boys with two pieces of construction paper, asking for us to make a picture collage for the boys. Well, we don’t have any pictures printed out, and I didn’t want to have to run to Walgreen’s to pick them up, then cut them out, and glue them on the paper… So, being me, I went alittle overboard and used a puzzle piece vector I had made a year or so ago to create the collages below. Enjoy.Â
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- Parker Collage
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- Carson Collage
The Storm…
While it wasn’t the worst storm Clarksville has seen in awhile… It did have one of the most awesome wall clouds that I have seen roll through. U caught these pictures at a friends house for small group.
Bob, Larry, a Mouse, and Coffee
Well, the Susong crew made a trek to Lifeway on Saturday to meet Bob and Larry. We had a good time, but sorry Lifeway, we didn’t buy anything. Nice try, though. Carson would not go near Bob or Larry. And he wasn’t even too excited to see Parker see up to them. He walked behind Parker just to make sure Parker was ok, then came back to us. It was pretty funny. Carson likes his big Bubba and didn’t want the giant tomato or cucumber to get him.
Kayce is starting back to school next week, and the boys had their first day at preschool.  Things have really began to pick up around here. We had a crazy week last week, with all the network issues and change over at church. At the same time, Kayce was trying to get her room done at school. She tried taking the boys, but that never ends up well. So, I would go to work at 7am and then go over to school at 6pm and watch the boys while she worked. It was a very LONG week. The whole reason we had so many network issues turned out to be a mouse that had chew completely through our fiber optic cable that ties the buildings together. One little mouse brought everything to a grinding hault. We (and by “we”, I mean the awesome guys that we brought in to replace the damaged length of fiber), finally got the network up and going this afternoon. That’s 3 days of no network. Not good in this day and time, not good at all. But, now that I know some of our weak points, I’m on a mission to make sure we have a backup and some redundancy in place in case something else goes wrong. What a mess. Glad its over.
Speaking of a bad week. I found this picture in my phone and thought it was funny. I snapped this while we were driving home from my parent’s home a month or so ago. It made me laugh and thirsty at the same time. Oh, what I would give for a giant tanker truck full of coffee. Too bad it was just a gas truck advertising some gas stations nasty coffee. Oh well.Â
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- What the mouse did…
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- Parker and Larry
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- Parker and Bob
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- I dream about this truck
iTune Movies to DVD
So, as I’m sure alot of people do, I buy and download movies and tv shows from iTune pretty regularlly. Kayce and I both have iPhones and it is nice when we are out with the boys to just be able to hand them our phones with all their favorite shows on it. Especially, when we go out to eat. The downside is, to be able to view any of these on our tv at home, I have to hook up my laptop to our LCD tv. Not a huge problem, except when I’m at work. So, how are we to get these movies to DVD so we can watch them at home without my laptop? Well, you can’t. That’s right, even though you buy and pay for the videos, you can’t burn them. I’m not entirely sure why that is, I’m sure it has something to do with crazy hollywood copyright deals. So, there are several paid programs you can buy to “strip” the DRM out of the video file so you can re-encode it and burn to DVD. The problem with this is, well, you have to pay $30 for the software.Â
Well, in trying a demo of one of these programs, I saw what it was doing looked to be something like a screen capture. That made me start thinking… I use Windows Media Encoder (A free download from Microsoft) to make training videos at work by doing a video screen capture and recording my voice with an external microphone. Why couldn’t I somehow use that free software to do this same thing. Well, you can. You just need alittle patiences, and a sincere desire to beat the system. My next post will be the how I did it post. I’m taking screen shots right now. Stay tuned.
Firepit Fun
So, I lost my mind today and decided to build a fire pit. I’m not sure what started it, or why I had to do it today (It was really hot, and humid). But we have a huge amount of firewood, which we burn during the winter in our wood stove downstairs. But we keep getting more and more wood, and we never use it all anyway. So, I’ve had this idea for a few weeks. I had several old concrete pavers, and plenty of large stones laying around, so I did it. Below is the result. I think it turned out pretty good. I did go to Lowe’s and get some river rock to put around the large stones to fill in the cracks. All in all, pretty good Saturday project. It will get alot more use in August when it starts to cool down. Even now it is so hot and sticky outside, you have to really want some s’mores to brave the heat of a fire. But it was fun, Kayce and the boys liked it. Parker really wanted to make s’mores, even though he wouldn’t eat one. He just ate the marshmallows “plain”, as he calls it.Â
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- Making Dinner by the Fire (Hotdogs and marshmallows, yum.)
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- Carson with cheese dust on his face (Cheetos), Parker wouldn’t look.
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- The fire… Ooo!
