I can't decide if I think Black & White 2 is a good game or not. It certainly has some bad glitches. I was playing the second island this evening (for the second time see - because the patch won't load pre-patch saved games. WTF?). I was enjoying it, so much so that it didn't occur to me to save. Until it locked up, taking my two hours of playtime with it. Sigh. Note to self: B & W 2 is a "save early, save often" game. Good to know.

So for a long period of time my Treo had been dying a slow death as a cell phone. At first I thought that maybe Sprint had lost a local tower, as it seemed very tempermental about making or receiving calls, but only at home. Then I realized that Karin's phone still worked fine. The problem slowly worsened, and it got to the point that I would borrow Karin's phone to make calls (we never use all our minutes). Then one day a few weeks ago I had the Eureka moment - it only made phone calls when it was plugged into the charger. I looked around, ordered a replacement battery online and waited for shipping with great excitement. So one day the battery arrives. That night I leave it plugged in overnight and the next morning I back it up and then popped open the Treo to change the battery. That's not exactly easy, but it wasn't too bad. Plug in the new battery, close it all back up, plug it in - and it won't charge. Much messing around later I determine it's just the new battery - it says it has 0% charge, starts a charge cycle and then immediately stops it. So I get a RMA for the battery, and put the old battery back in the Treo. Close it up, plug it in and it claims to be at 45% charge. Note that this battery was supposed to be at 100% charge when I unplugged it. I let it charge up to full again and tried a phone call on batteries. No problem. I played with it for the next several days and it make every call I tried. I even ran the battery down lower than 45% and it still made a call. Mind you it had gotten to the point where I could make a call on the charger and disconnect the charger and it would immediately hang up before I took it apart and reassembled it. What caused this behavior? I have no real idea. The real interesting question is this - now I have another replacement battery. Should I mess with it, or should I leave well enough alone? I'm thinking don't fix what ain't broke. I run the slight risk that the second battery is also bogus, but I paid the money and now the phone works - so no complaints here I guess.

So when we moved to this house 13 months ago I called Anderson's TV - the people who we bought the TV from and wanted them to install a rooftop antenna for HD reception. We had one at the old house, and it worked great. I knew we were in for some trouble when they started telling me it wouldn't work that far out, blah blah. (Keeping in mind that we're about ten miles away from the last point and that's not 10 miles in a straight line away from the SF tower.) Ultimately they came out, put the antenna up and it only received the San Jose channels, not the SF ones. This is pretty much useless - San Jose has NBC, Univision, and Telemundo. There was a lot of hemming and hawwing, and it ultimately became clear they just were convinced it wasn't going to work and they weren't really going to try. I had a bunch of other stuff to worry about, so I pretty much ignored it. We were getting a fair amount of HD from DirecTV so yeah. Occasionally I poked a bit around on the web and began to realize that many people around us (or even further away) said they got signal from Mt. Sutro (the SF antenna that all SF HD stations use). Furthermore I learned enough about the antenna to confirm it was pointed away from Sutro, which is sort of stupid for a directional antenna. Yes, it's pointed at the SJ antenna ten miles away, but a Pringles can and string can probably pull that in. Today I finally got around to getting up on the roof and spinning the antenna. Guess what - on the scale of 1-100 I get 90's from all the SF stations and we still pull in the SJ stations through the back of the antenna. So now I have all the major networks in HD - including Fox (blocked on DirecTV), UPN, and WB (not carried on DTV in HD). I've got 2 PBS channels from SF and a bunch of independent stuff. Took me less than an hour, and most of that was figuring out messing with the guy wires they installed pointing the wrong way. And here's the final, funny irony. We'll watch the next episode of Bones in HD after watching the first two in NTSC, off of DirecTV. And those first episodes proudly sport the logo "Brought to you in HD by DirecTV". Except Fox, the network that airs Bones is the only network to block getting the "west coast feeds" from DTV. See, the national feeds are the LA stations for west coasters and the NY stations for east coasters. So I get the LA NBC, ABC, and CBS through the satellite in HD - but not Fox because Fox 2 blocks it. So my HD Fox feed is brought to me by DirecTV, but is the only one I have to use an antenna to get. Good work everyone! Way to spend the marketing dollars!

Cory Doctorow gave a talk about DRM to HP recently - in some ways a follow up to his talk at Microsoft last year. It's good reading - take a look. He briefly mentions the TiVo changes recently where TiVo has started tagging some shows with a limited lifespan regardless of your wishes. TiVo claims these are errors, and those flags are only supposed to apply to Pay Per View, but their claims make no technical sense (translation - they are lying about what their software actually does). I've been a staunch TiVo supporter since 2000 when I bought a first generation TiVo box. I have two of them in the house right now. Now DirecTV is moving away from TiVo, so I'll probably have to switch tech anyway, but TiVo is going down a dark path. When I first heard about the DirecTV changeover I thought "Oh crap." Now I would be thinking about ditching TiVo anyway. I'm going to start looking into a MythTV box - TiVo is becoming a company that I don't trust to have my best interests at heart. I truly expect to hate setting up and administering MythTV - it's Linux after all. But until the software people get out of Hollywood's pocket - well they can jolly well get out of mine :-)