zen.org Communal Weblog

A friend of ours was selling little red heart pins as a fund-raiser for his school. He was up in the main thoroughfare of our town just south of Dublin, trying to get people to buy one. Lots of folks did, happily, knowing they were helping a good cause. Then there were the other people.

They would dash across the street up ahead of him, just so they didn’t walk past. Or they’d go by as if they didn’t see him—Oh my, look at the great shoes on sale! their expressions told him. After a little while, this façade grew old and sparked his creativity. This called for an experiment.

He moved over to a blank wall stretched between two buildings. Nothing but concrete blocks and cement, from the ground up to about six feet, nearly his own height. Having found his position and putting on his most engaging face, he called out to people to help support their local schools. After only a couple of examples, he knew his theory was true: they’re all faking it, they just want to avoid him.

The next person came by, a middle-aged man with eyes lost somewhere in the land of middle-aged thoughts. As he approached my friend standing only a few feet ahead of him, his face shot to the right about 45 degrees to focus intently on—the wall. There was no shop, no window looking in on products he might (never) buy, no other people suitable for distraction. But that didn’t matter. The wall would do. As long as he could go by without eye contact with the teenager selling stuff for his school, it was all cool. La la la.

He continued on his way, joining a frighteningly large group of people who are too bothered and too selfish to offer 50 cents or 1 Euro to contribute to an always-underfunded, forever-understaffed part of our lives. It doesn’t matter if it’s in the United States, Ireland, or Crete, the problem is the same. Don’t bother me, it’s my money and why should you get it?

But watch out, for the mirk of hell doth rise when I find you’re not spending enough to teach my kid.

Ok, so maybe the word “R00lz” only works when you’re talking about Motley Crue or a good hack. But I think it fits. On a tip from a friend this morning, I went up the road to try to get U2 tickets at our local T*cketm*ster shop. They had two shows scheduled for Croke Park, the big stadium-like arena for some of the larger shows. U2 recently announced a third show for the end of June, but it wasn’t clear when tickets were going to come out. Suddenly, they started selling at 9am this morning. You can only get two seats per person, the total price being a whopping €164.00 for seats.

I got to the shop just a bit past 10am, and there was a really long queue going from inside the shop out the door and up along the sidewalk. It took just over half an hour from when I arrived to when I reached the stairs that took you upstairs to where they were actually selling the tickets. Kind of like your entry to heaven or something.

At first, you could get tickets for two places: either down on the ground in the pitch, or up in the seats. By the time I was 25 people away from the steps, the pitch had sold out and you could only get seats. (S’ok, those were my goal anyway.) While waiting and chatting with the folks around me, I noticed something really entertaining on the shelves. Only in Ireland would you see a commemorative DVD for Pope John Paul II placed right next to a copy of The Exorcist.

As I left, a couple of friends also in line told me the people at the shop had made a big mistake. When they went outside to announce that only the seats were available for €164 for two, they omitted the last part. What they heard on the sidewalk was “only the €164 tickets are left”. They thought the price had suddenly changed, and that was the cost of a single seat. A good number of people immediately left really angry. A minute or two later, the embarrassed employee tried to clarify what he meant. But the folks fuming their way home were out of earshot by then.

Oops.

My friends in line got their tickets, and E and I have ours. We didn’t expect to be able to go, and now even if we might need opera glasses to see anything we’re certainly looking forward to it!

Today was the third time I received the call on my mobile phone: “Brendan, we’ve no judge.” The third time I was up late getting prepped to sound reasonably informed as an expert witness to the High Court in Dublin. Once in November 2004, once in February 2005 (after I’d gone thru the turnstile at the DART station on my way up to the Four Courts), and now in April 2005 the same again. This one seemed like a sure thing. There was no other case on the docket for today. But somehow neither of the two judges “on call” today were available.

The next try is in June or July—well over a year since my part in this whole adventure actually started. The Irish legal system is too mysterious for words.

Pulling into Tara Street station on the DART, our full train was about to give back half of its passengers. I saw my opportunity: at the end of the car the seats were empty! I wasn’t sure if they’d been taken when I boarded at Connolly Street, but they sure looked free now. I got up from my seat in the middle of the train car and went over to those seats just as folks finished leaving and others came on board.

As I turned to sit down, I noticed the LED display up on the wall and how it looked a little weird. Normally it’s either blank (more often than not), or it is doing its job of naming the train’s destination and our next stop. Added as a feature of the “new” DART trains, this attempt to inform is only working perhaps half the time. Today was a new twist on its problems—it said only one word: FUNCION. Not only is there a bug in its software that makes it fail on a regular basis, this time it’s crashing with a misspelled word as its only message. Hmm. (Update: No, no, no, had I just tried to google it I would’ve quickly found función to be a Spanish version of “function”. My friend Cyril pointed out my silliness. Boy do I feel foolish.)

I sat down, my brain trying to figure out what makes it have a funcion failure. At the same instant, my nose got a whiff of something foul. I was in the seat for only a few seconds before I identified the smell—and realized that the bottom of my pants were suddenly damp. Someone had pissed liberally over all four seats, mine included.

I jumped back up only after I knew some of this horrid stuff would be on me until I got home. I went right back to my previous seat before those boarding the train claimed it. (This all sounds really territorial, doesn’t it? If we were dogs it’d make sense that someone marked their spot back there.) Hoping those around me didn’t think I actually wet my pants, I started to read my book and let its story accelerate the train, bringing me home that much faster.

We arrived at my station and I glanced at the corner seats as I got off the train. Two people were sitting there. This was their alternative to standing up in the train for another half hour or more, I guess. A man and a woman, each reading a newspaper, sat with no real expressions and no hint of the secret the were sharing.

I got onto a mostly empty DART train. It left Connolly Station, the stop just before Tara Station and Pearse Station. Those two that do the majority of the work loading up train cars with passengers headed in either direction. (Well, the stop at Lansdowne Road is an epidemic in itself when there’s a rugby or football match on at Lansdowne Road Stadium, the site for 50,000 boisterous inebriated fans.) I went to an empty pair of (long) seats on one end of the front car. My Rio500 is loaded up with a bunch of podcasts; this time, it’s lots of the cool stories from The Seanachai.

The next stop, Tara, half-fills the car with people heading home from work. Across from me half of the empty seat is taken by a guy who looks like he’s about 20 years old. Wearing blue corduroy pants and a dark jacket over a t-shirt, he puts his backpack down beneath the seat and opens it up. Out comes a copy of Nuts: Everything For Men magazine. He closes the backpack, scratches his 5 o’clock shadow, and opens the newly-purchased periodical. The train’s doors close with a loud beeping and we start moving. The fellow across from me starts—um, I guess reading—his magazine. PAGE 1: An article well placed by a word processor to not run into the many large pictures of nude women clutching their breasts.

As we pull into Pearse, the number of people waiting on the platform is not a surprise to me but is still impressive. We slow down, come to a stop, and the doors open. The flood begins. There are so many people, the seats fill up quickly and the remainder stand. Even when it’s obvious there can’t possibly be room, still more people come in.

The other part of my seat, and the one opposite me with the Magazine Reader, both get quickly claimed by a man and a woman in their 50s, I’d guess. They’re friends. Conversations start all over the train, headphones are pushed into ears of those who are alone, books are opened even by those still standing, and we keep moving. The two new residents of our area of the train continue whatever they were talking about just before the doors opened to board the train.

Magazine Reader glances over and sees the person next to him.

—
Flip. The page with the cup size contest is gone. This new page of the magazine has plenty of text and pictures of cars. Thank God. Flip.

Oh crap, more boobs, quick, before she stops talking to the man sitting across from her. She’ll see! Quick! Flip. Whew, a story about Ozzy Osbourne. Flip.

Cameras, cars, flip, free beer contest, flip girls in bikinis including Charlotte Church?? Eyes wide reading the story, then realizes half the page is only the bottom half of bikinis. Flip.

Girl stripping. Crap. Flip. Girl holding only one breast, Jesus C—Flip. Girl tanning her—dammit! Mobile’s ringing, I’ll never—flip—manage to get to—flip—something without. More. Naked. Girls. Mobile should just get turned off.

Screw it. Slam.

Magazine closed, rolled up, crammed on the seat pressed between hip and the inside of the train. Staring out the window, clearly pissed off. Can’t believe it, almost caught (caught?) by someone who looking just like mom. Damn magazine.
—

Makes you wonder why he bothered to buy it just before taking the train…

About a week ago we were able to display live TV thru the box, but the remote didn’t work and we couldn’t move through channels. It’s much happier now. Problems that still need to be fixed:

• Sound for non-AVI video files is out of sync
• The X display is bigger than the TV screen
• I have to switch the audio output between the Shuttle’s L/R audio out for video files and the audio out of the PVR-350 for live and recorded TV.
• I need a way to make MythTV be able to change channels on the NTL Pace 4001NC box, which reportedly uses RC-5 protocol for the remote. Given that, we can also record everything coming from NTL Digital Cable. There is one cool serial hack that on its main page seems to clearly indicate it will work with my box, which after some clarification is confirmed to work with it. So we’re ordering one now and will share the results once we’ve got it.
• Sometimes after a reboot the live TV doesn’t work for more than a few seconds, and more notably the name of the tuner and the current time don’t appear at the top of the screen. After only a minute or two, it goes back to the menu. If I restart mythbackend, it’s then all happy and can keep going.
• The PVR-350 can accept the FM antenna; can MythTV record radio shows too into mp3 format? A google for “MythRadio” has a few hits for recent conversation. But anything I’d try for this has to wait til everything else works. 🙂

What we’ve got now is pretty usable for day-to-day stuff, with the one physical hurdle of having to use an audio switch box to change which of the two audio sources actually gets emitted. There must be a system/MythTV fix, or we could just get some sort of an RCA jack Y-joiner/junction thing to accept output from either one…Hmm….

Some details on how we got it working:

1. The remote problem was because /etc/lircd.conf defines particular names for each button like

   
CH+ 0X00000000000017E0
CH- 0X00000000000017E1
VOL+ 0X00000000000017D0


   The entries in ~/.mythtv/lircrc need to match those names in some fashion. I just had to change
   
begin
prog = mythtv
button = chanup
repeat = 5
config = Up
end

   to instead have
   
begin
prog = mythtv
button = CH+
repeat = 5
config = Up
end


   This helped improve watching live TV or shows recorded by the box. But we were stuck when watching a video file like an MPG (which has its own problems anyway) or AVI file; you couldn’t get it to return to the menu after starting to watch it.

2. I came across Adam Rubin’s description of how he made the remote more usable with MythTV. So I just needed to give ~/.mythtv/lircrc a few entries like
   
begin
remote = hauppauge_pvr
button = Pause
prog = mplayer
repeat = 3
config = Pause
end

   to help improve things.
3. The file ~/.mythtv/NTL Basic Cable.xmltv contains the final list of channels I’m using. It omits the pay channels.
4. I had to make /etc/rc.d/rc.local do modprobe ivtv so the driver, and its ivtv_fb framebuffer driver, are all loaded up before anything else. I also added the lines
   
/usr/X11R6/bin/xset -dpms
/usr/X11R6/bin/xset s off

   to make it stop having a blank screen until I hit a key on the (tucked away) keyboard.
5. My final /etc/X11/xorg.conf file makes everything show up on the TV from the PVR-350’s S-Video feed, but the X display is still just slightly larger than the TV screen. When I’m going through the MythTV setup menus it’s impossible to see the selection boxes along the left side.
6. Playing AVI files using the default mplayer now works by giving it the options
   -ao oss -vo x11 -nocache
   However, playing MPG files doesn’t work quite as well. I found others talking about this and how audio seems to come out directly via the sound port, but the video is going through the MPG decoder first. I did find some bits in the MythTV Digital Sound HOWTO and put them into my ~/.asoundrc. But I’ve not spent enough time looking at it to remember how to make MythTV use that, as opposed to the default /dev/dsp device.

So far so good; much more productive than the efforts with KnoppMyth, seemingly just because the version of the mythtv stuff is much more up-to-date.

Every damn coffee house around the River Liffey in central Dublin seems to close promptly at 5pm. Does no one in this damn town work late? Don’t they ever want a latte to get some energy?

Dublin’s commuter rail, the DART, runs between Greystones south of Dublin up to Malahide north of the city. A few days ago I was riding the DART and listening to Adam Curry’s Daily Source Code podcast. The route stays uncovered, but often cuts its way through hills and sometimes just beneath street level. The train had just left the Blackrock station and I watched the scenery change out the window.

As we started to work up some speed (this isn’t the TGV), I looked across the other set of tracks and saw someone up on the grass at the top edge of the wall. He had a blue long-sleeve shirt and didn’t look much older than thirty. He was in a crouch position, his feet and hands on the grass with his knees bent. He kept leaning over enough so he could see ahead on the track—to where a train would be coming in the opposite direction. He sure didn’t look like he was there to watch it go by. Then in a blink we’d passed him.

I was hit with an awful dread of seeing a mash of green siding and passengers the image of ghosts go rushing by. Luckily nothing appeared on the other track and we made it to the next station. I was able to get out and run up to the front car, where the conductor’s head was leaning out of the window, watching for the last person to board the train. I told the him what I’d seen, and he said someone jumped on his route only a few weeks ago. Random thoughts ran through my head: I wonder what sort of counseling employees get when someone pulls such a stunt? What did he see when it happened?

He thanked me for the information and said he’d call it in. Did I know exactly where it was? Not really, but I could give a rough description of its position relative to the Blackrock station.

I got back on board and sat down; we started to move again. A couple of minutes later, there was an intermittent blaring of the horn and a train headed in the other direction slowly came to a stop alongside us. I was relieved to see its conductor lean out of his window to talk to the driver of my train for at least a couple of minutes. They said some closing comments, and both trains continued on their way. And maybe my hunch was wrong.

But I don’t think so. I do know my hesitation reporting what I’d seen weirded me out—all I kept thinking of was hearing of disruption (again) on the DART line because someone had committed suicide on the tracks. Seeing clear as day in my mind the person it would have involved. I hope they got to him—even more than hoping he changed his mind and disappeared; it would leave open the chance he’d give it another try.

And there wouldn’t be such a time gap between passing trains.

Nearly four years ago, we got a bunch of stuff from someone who was moving from Ireland back to the US. Part of it was a Cambridge Sound Works DTT3500 speaker system, but it’s sat untouched ever since.

Today is St Patrick’s Day, a national (“bank”) holiday in Ireland. We took advantage of the gorgeous weather to do tons of stuff in the back yard, and I spent some time hooking up the speakers. The cables aren’t actually long enough for the rear surround speakers, but that’s okay—our livingroom isn’t arranged in a way that we could put the speakers behind us anyway. All of the speakers are hooked up, the DVD player’s optical feed is plugged in, and I was able to hook the cable TV up as well. (I used a SCART splitter to take the audio signal from the NTL digital cable TV box and feed it into the DTT3500’s audio inputs; I chose Analog Front, whatever that means.)

The end result sounds great! Fellowship of the Ring on DVD sounds amazing. An episode of The Outer Limits on the SciFi channel sounded really cool and well distributed around the room. Music from the various radio stations carried as part of the digital cable package also sounded great. Granted, it’s not a multiple-$$$ Bose system or the like, nor do we (yet) have a good receiver to handle multiple audio inputs really intelligently. We also need to get some longer cables and secure and paint all of them so they’re less obvious.

But I’m certainly happy for something that took about half an hour from start to finish and was originally purchased second-hand in 2001. 🙂

Seen on a wall in Dublin, which really drives home (sic) the high prices for rental or purchase: