I won’t take the elevator from the first to the second floor, even if it’s sitting there waiting for me. I’ll walk around the corner and use the stairs. It’s actually quicker that way.

What does this say about me? Am I just more impatient than lazy? Discuss.

While I’m asking random questions that just one person reading this needs to have an answer for…

I’m looking at mounting my surround sound speakers to the ceiling, at last.  The speakers are small.  They’re less than two pounds apiece.  So weight isn’t an issue.

Wiring isn’t an issue, either, since this is happening in a drop ceiling.  So snaking wires above the ceiling is the easiest part of the job.

The problem IS the drop ceiling. All the gadgets to put speakers up on the ceilings of walls give you screws to drill it into place.  I can’t screw things into a drop ceiling.  Is there a special mount for this, to hang a lightweight speaker onto the drop ceiling?  Or do I need to mount them higher and drill holes in the ceiling tiles to hang the speaker? Or, do I just take a lot of string and tie the speaker up competely.

So — any ideas?

UPDATE: My solution is to just mount the speakers on the back wall, a few feet behind the couch.  I can increase the volume of those two speakers, in particular, to make up for the distance they’ll be. Hopefully, I’ll be doing this over the coming weekend. . .

I have the Harmony Remote 880. I wrote about it a couple of years ago when I first picked it up, funded by the Amazon Associates points you find folks helped me round up.  I’ve since added a new TV to the house, and it’s turned into a nightmare to try to program the thing around it.  So let me throw this out there, on the off chance that one of the dozen of you still reading this blog have had the same problem.

The issue is in setting up the remote to automatically choose an input from the back of the TV. When I play a DVD, for example, I need the TV to look for HDMI 3 for the signal. When using the cable box, I point to Component 1. On the other TV, this wasn’t a problem.  There were eight inputs in the back and you just hit the “Input” button to cycle through them until you got to the one you wanted.

With this new TV, I can’t do that.  The TV changes the order of the inputs around so that they are in the order last used.  So if I switch from HDMI 1 to Component 1, suddenly HDMI 1 is the second item on the list and HDMI 1 — the currently used port — is first.  So there’s no set list of inputs in a given order.

So how can I program my remote around that? I’m still searching through the Harmony forums, but it’s a bit difficult. It’s a very well-trafficked forum where each search brings up 500 results, most of which are talking about a variation on what I have.

Any ideas, remote programmers?

Back in the late 1970s, one town was preparing to dome itself over. Depending on your point of view, it was a great way to score some free money from HUD, or it was the Greenest and boldest plan of all time.

Either way: Only in Vermont. . .

One night in 1979 a group of its creative young city planners went to dinner and Mark Tigan, then the city’s 32-year-old director of community development and planning, decided that not enough attention was being paid to energy conservation. Then, in the way that only a few glasses of wine can facilitate brainstorming, someone said, half tongue-in-cheek, they should put a dome over the city.

The next morning it still seemed like a good idea — or, at least, not necessarily completely absurd.

Disgruntled Star Editor Takes Constructive Revenge

Earlier this week the Toronto Star announced, among other changes, that it was planning to outsource some one hundred in-house, union editing jobs.

What do you do when you, an editor, are laid off? Why, you edit the pink slip! This is hilarious, with a picture included.

• Man, Microsoft’s push on-line isn’t making them very much money, is it?

• Could be worse.  You could be a newspaper.

• What happens in an electric car pile-up? See for yourself.

• 10 recently discovered photos. Very historic.  Very cool. Includes Florence Nightengale as a young woman, Neil Armstrong’s face (while on the moon), Lincoln’s inaugurations, and more.

I gave up waiting for Twitter to answer their help desk tickets.  So I started new, using @AugieShoots as my handle, borrowing from my photography blog name.  I’ve been on there a few days now and am getting in to the swing of things again.  Here’s a sampling of recent Tweets:

• A short list of NFL players charged with murder, or related crimes:  http://bit.ly/26fPE0
• @JAFlanagan – Baby kicking is the coolest, especially since it’s not the man’s stomach baby is kicking. :)
• Now that I’m back on Twitter, I need to decide if I’ll be judicious about blocking the spammer types, or just let it go and not waste time. [So far, I'm being all laissez faire.]
• @mikesterling ALF was always the first topic of discussion in Art Class on Tuesday mornings. But then that was sixth grade or so. Heh
• Doc says my daughter is developing normally. Too bad I’m falling apart.
• I’m getting 1 photo approved on iStockPhoto.com for every 4 I upload, I think, now. At this rate, I’ll have a portfolio there in a decade.
• Went to a Fall Festival type thing today and didn’t get any good nature shots. You have to try really hard to throw an unphotogenic event.

Wow:

Music publishers: iTunes not paying fair share

Songwriters, composers, and music publishers are making preparations to one day collect performance fees from Apple and other e-tailers for not just traditional music downloads but for downloads of films and TV shows as well. Those downloads contain music after all.

These groups even want compensation for iTunes’ 30-second song samples.

You play a thirty second clip to see if it’s the song you want to buy, and the music industry feels it’s owed money. How’s THAT for entitlement?

(Via DaringFireball)

Man, I haven’t done one of these posts in an awfully long time.  Welcome back:

Avril Lavigne and Sum 41 Husband Split

Pop-punk rocker Avril Lavigne and Sum 41 husband Deryck Whibley are separating but on good terms.

Avril will next be seen on “American Idol” as a guest judge at one of the audition stops, and might consider putting out a record for a change someday, too. You never know. . .

I forced myself to watch the first five minutes of the debut of tonight’s “The Jay Leno Show,” before giving up without laughing. OK, that’s a lie. The “Cash for Clunkers” line made me laugh, though the dollar amount he made up for the gag oversold the joke a tad. See? Even when Leno has a good line, he steps over it.
Some quick thoughts:

• So, what, this “The Cheaters” thing is an actual reality show? Is that one of those daytime things they sell to stay at home moms that I’ll never see?
• Watching Jay shakes all those hands at the show open, I kept thinking, “Swine Flu Alert!” Seriously, would you want to shake all those random hands without have a quart of hand sanitizer in your pockets? (You know, those pockets Leno thrusts his hands into after every sentence…)
• Leno at least knows when the joke is bad and isn’t going to work. He always looks over to his sidekick for a cheap laugh. He gets it, but it’s the only one.
• I couldn’t even wait around for the inevitable Kanye apology.  Not that it matters, that guy is a punk who deserves to be derided and hated till the end of days.  I wonder if his apology will be auto tuned?

This is the savior of network television?  The networks are doomed.

* Apologies if you’re still blocked from the website.  The malware injection issue has been taken care of.  It infected two scripts that don’t even appear on the blog, and haven’t for years.  I guess the bad guys just picked random old script names and happened across one from the archives.
 
* I’d give up the copyright to my life’s work (past AND present) for $24 million dollars.  Are we supposed to feel sad for Annie Leibovitz?
 
* Dear Mac developers: I have a good screenshot capturing program already. Hell, I have three.  Go be more productive elsewhere.  Thanks!
 
* Dammit, people, if you’re going to use Facebook, at least learn to write consistently in either the first person OR the third person. Not BOTH in the same update!
 

I was always taught that, as a business, you shouldn’t leave bags of money sitting there onthe side of the road.

So why is it that my phone calls to an HVAC guy and a plumber went unreturned this week?  I guess I’m too small fry to deal with?  (The latter’s ad actually said “no job too small.”)

I want to give these people money, but they can’t be bothered to return a simple phone call? Crazy.

The plumber already lost his chance — I fixed the problem myself with $10 and a trip to Home Depot. So nyah!

I shipped a DVD this past week via the US Postal Service. It turned out to be cheaper to use their first class mail option than their media mail option. It was cheaper to use the option that took half the time. How messed up is the Post Office, exactly? I’m not complaining. It was a good deal for me. But shouldn’t they charge more for packages that they promise to deliver faster?

I can’t be sure if this is just South Carolina, or the entire South, but I did notice this:

Every commercial on TV is for Wal-Mart.  Sure, at first it seems like a random food commercial or eyeglass commercial or HDTV set commercial or pharmacy commercial or food store commercial — but it always ends at “At Wal-Mart!”

And, yes, there was one less than five minutes from where I stayed.  Handy.

Also, the local news is wildly different from the NYC news we get up here.  NYC News starts with political corruption before moving onto unsolved mysteries, brutal murders, and car crash theater.  South Carolina news begins with tips on supporting your roof in case of hurricane, moves on to a local fender bender, then talks about what’s going on to help tourists spend money locally.  It’s all rather laid back, by comparison, though the anchors don’t sport Southern accents.  I guess they’re all aiming at larger market jobs or something?

“Barney” isn’t such a bad thing.

But I don’t want to hear, “The more we get together, the happier we’ll be” one more time.  Damned dinosaur has no clue how much people really stink.

And, really, is Barney any worse than the wisemouth sidekick character employed by Disney in every one of their animated movies of the 90s?