A Day Hike on the Coast of Fife, Scotland

While Jack Frost was toying with family and friends back home in Dallas, Scotland was enjoying a bit of warmer-than-normal weather.  With the business meetings over, I escaped for a few hours of coastal walking before heading home.  After a short train and bus ride from Edinburgh, I was in St. Andrews.  Here are a few (cellphone) photos from my trip.

How to Coil a Cable, Hose, Cord, etc.

I found this video eye-opening. I have always tried to wrap cables, hoses, power cords, etc. neatly, but it never seems to work well. Turns out I was trying to do the wrong thing all along.

http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2013/08/tnhyut-coil-cable/

Once your cable has been coiled "wrong", it takes a while to work out all the twists but once that's done this method seems to work quite well.

Shoe Sole Repair

The sole on one of my dress shoes had come loose on one edge.  I went to fix it with ShoeGoo, but found my tube had dried out (no surprise -- I have no idea how many years I've had it).

Looking around for an alternative, I found some Loctite "Pit Crew's Choice Adhesive and Sealant".  It worked perfectly, maybe even better than the ShoeGoo.

Bicycle Commute: Cost vs. Benefit

[Update:  On Oct. 1 2013, I broke-even on my initial investment :-))]

I have started occasionally riding my bicycle to work.  The commute is about 6miles, one way, and almost entirely on a bike trail through park land.  It is really an ideal bicycle commute.

One concern is that I would use it as an excuse to spend big $$ on bike equipment, but never recover the cost.  To keep expenditure in check, I decided to keep track.  Costs are self explanatory.  I have set the $ benefit of a bike commute at $5.  About $3 is direct gas savings, and the rest is just a fudge factor to give me a fighting chance of "earning" more than I spent.  (In my defense, using the tax code's standard mileage deduction, the car commute is worth $6).

Here's where I'm at right now:

SiliconDust HD Homerun and Windows 7 Media Center

Every so often the cable company changes the frequency of it's channels and my Windows 7 Media Center and my HDHomerun get out of sync.

For some reason, none of the automatic methods for program assignment work for me.  I searched for it a bit and concluded it was most likely a setup issue from my cable vendor (TimeWarner).  I decided to bite-the-bullet and do it manually, but even that took some work.

My Process

1. Open HDHomeRun Setup and get a list of channels that the HDHomeRun sees.  

2. Look-up your TV signal's information on http://www.silicondust.com/support/channels/

This will tell you the type of signal (QAM64, QAM256) and helped me decode the real channel number.

3. Open Windows Media Center and go to the "Add Missing Channels" menu option.

4. Click "Add QAM Channel".  Enter the channel number.  This is the number from the "Tune" column of the  HDHomeRun Setup.  For instance, "CH18-1" would be entered as 18.1.

5. Select the proper QAM setting.  This information is available from the SiliconDust Channels website. 

6. Give the channel and name and add it.

7. Go to "Edit Channels" and click the channel you just added.

8. Go to "Edit Listings"

9. Find the proper listing for the channel.  You can type the first few characters of the channel name (i.e. KTVT) and it will take you to the matches.  Select the proper channel.

  You're done...with one channel.

10. Repeat for all the channels.  Fortunately there are only a few free unscrambled OTA channels.

Android Contacts App Crashing

I noticed recently that my Android Contacts app.  I noticed that it started after installing the Outlook.com app, so I uninstalled that app but it did not resolve the problem.

It turns out that I needed to uninstall the original Hotmail app.  Once that was uninstalled, Contacts works fine and I was able install Outlook.com no problem.

Tennis Serve: The Slice

A few notes from my coach on how the hit a slice serve.

1. Continental grip
2. Toss to front right, i.e. towards the far corner towards your front right. (In 1 o'clock direction a few inches into the court).
3. Pause in trophy position
4. Rotate shoulders, horizontally, first
5. Follow with arm and wrist motion; be sure to add speed with arm and wrist.  Don't just use your shoulder rotation to whip your arm.
6. Follow through in the direction that you would like the ball to go.  

Things I Like: Mountain Hardwear Kelvinator Down Jacket

I have avoided down gear most of my lift based on a suspected childhood allergy.  Realizing that most of my childhood allergies have disappeared (except Mountain Cedar!!), I decided to give down a chance.

My first piece of the down gear:  the Mountain Hardwear Kelvinator Jacket.  I love it!  It fits me perfectly, and the Cherry Bomb color is awesome ("Great Balls of Fire" by Jerry Lee Lewis pops in to my head every time I put it on).

Disclaimer:  I'm not a very good judge of down gear, obviously, since this is my first piece.  But I won't every be without a down jacket again.

A Letter to Amazon on Sales Tax

If anyone knows how to easily generate a sales-tax-paid report from your Amazon account, please share in the comments below.

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Dear Amazon,

Would you add a feature in the “Your Account” section of the Amazon website to generate a sales-tax-paid report?  The goal is to provide your customers an easy method for deducting sales tax paid through Amazon from our federal taxes.

Benefits:  

• Your customers are happy that their tax bill is reduced.
• You earn more money as customers view taxes paid at Amazon as less than taxes paid elsewhere. 
• It is completely legal.
• The cost to implement is tiny; you have already provided the capability for generating annual purchase reports.

I look forward to hearing from you, and seeing this new benefit.

Best Regards,

Will