I just realized that I did not include my only service call in the American Home Shield post regarding the Pool Warranty exclusions.

To set the frame, this was last summer. The temperature was above 100 degrees every day. My air conditioner would not cool the house. It would finally get the house down to 80 degrees around 3 in the morning (when it was in the 70’s outside). The air conditioner itself was only 2 years old, so definitely not a candidate for replacement.

AHS sent a technician to my home, it took them 4 days to do so. The service company they sent never called, and never set up an appointment. When I called the service companies office to find out when someone was coming I was told they would be there that same day and that I needed to be at the house to work with them or they would cancel my call. I don’t know about everyone, but for me it is difficult to drop everything at the office in the middle of the morning to run home and meet the technician, but I did so anyway.

So the technician shows up. Never looks at the air handler, never measures inlet/outlet temp, he just goes to the condenser and checks gas pressure. He does not have a temperature probe to tell him the temperature of the coolant lines (which according to my info you have to have the specific temperature to know what the gas pressure needs to be). Then based on the pressure check, he announced that the AC unit was “doing all it could do” and repeatedly cited that it was “awful hot out”. Then he handed me a the bill for his work, which amounted to $60. Not being a complete idiot I had already measured temperature drop, wet bulb temp and dry bulb temp in my house before I had ever called American Home Shield, and that the unit was not “doing all it could do”. When I gave the service representative the details of my analysis, he was completely unimpressed and started alternating between the mantras of “doing all it could do” and “awful hot out”. He also took the time to inform me that if I called AHS for another technician, he would come back out, but the answer and the cost would be the same. So he went on his way.

I can tell you that I have spent around 15 years of my life in some form or another of electro-mechanical service industry. I know technicians, I know troubleshooting, and I can generally figure out when the drivers for a technician are not lined up with the best interest of the consumer. It was not difficult to come to the conclusion that the guy was just hitting as many homes as he could and getting out the door.

So I called the company whose sticker was on the side of the air conditioner, since they were the original installers of the system they agreed to come out that day. They arrived in less than 2 hours after the AHS technician left. They looked the system over, found that the unit was 2lb low on Puron (the name for the new freon/coolant) and found an air leak in the intake of the air handler which was sucking hot air from the attic into the system. Total cost was $210.

With my air working now I called AHS to see if they would reimburse me for the cost of a technician who actually planned to fix the issue when they arrived and reimburse me for the cost of the technician who had no interest in fixing the issue. They said that they would not reimburse either. If I wanted to continue to pursue the issue I could fax my bill to a number they supplied, but they could not give me the number or name of anyone who I could talk to about it before or after I faxed the document. They also spent the time to assure me that the bill would not be paid and that my $60 service fee would not be refunded. I informed them that my warranty was almost up for renewal and that I would not be renewing. I also let them know that instead of taking my time to participate in their futile claim process, I would wait to join the next class action lawsuit against them.

After their outright lying about the pool coverage when I signed up for the service and having to pay for technicians who have no interest in actually fixing the issue, I told AHS to stuff their warranty. If I follow up on this rant I think it will be a cost benefit analysis of paying for a home warranty in the first place.

You can determine the device that is you CD/DVD drive using the following command:

drutil status

Vendor Product Rev
MATSHITA DVD-R UJ-825 DAM5

Type: CD-ROM Name: /dev/disk1
Cur Write: 16x CD Sessions: 1
Max Write: 16x CD Tracks: 3
Overwritable: 00:00:00 blocks: 0 / 0.00MB / 0.00MiB
Space Free: 00:00:00 blocks: 0 / 0.00MB / 0.00MiB
Space Used: 66:55:27 blocks: 301152 / 616.76MB / 588.19MiB
Writability:

Now you will need to umount the disk with the following command:

diskutil unmountDisk disk1

Now you can write the ISO file with the dd utility:

dd if=/dev/disk1 of=file.iso

When finished you will want to remount the disk:

diskutil mountDisk disk1

Video on YourTuber

In handbrakecli you need to use the –optimize flag

At least it’s the only way I’ve had any luck.

Try using Handbrake to make a streaming version with the following command arguments (remember if you have spaces in your file name or path you will have to put the input file and output file in quotes):

handbrakecli –input –output –format MP4 –markers –x264opts level=30:bframes=0:cabac=0:ref=1:vbv-maxrate=768:vbv-bufsize=2000:analyse=all:me=umh:no-fast-pskip=1:subq=6:8x8dct=0:trellis=0:weightb=0:mixed-refs=0:ref=1:subme=2 –vb 1536 –two-pass –optimize –keep-display-aspect –turbo –audio 1 –aencoder faac –ab 160 –mixdown dpl2 –arate 48 –drc 2.0 –native-language eng –subtitle-forced scan –subtitle scan

If you are having trouble setting up a DLNA server it’s real easy to pop up mezzmo and it will stream files encoded with the above command line without fail here.

Just as a FYI… Of all the DLNA servers I have played with in the effort to get the Droid-X to stream transcoded media my favorite so far is the Mezzmo DLNA server from Conceiva. The support people are “Johnny on the spot” with bug fixes so far, they actually have a profile set up for the Droid-X, and the features are coming fast and quick. It runs on Windows so transcoding is slower, but the menus etc are better than the rest and so far it has been less finicky than the others I’ve tried.

Ok here are my experiences so far getting a DLNA server to transcode to the DroidX:
I have tried nearly every UP&P/DLNA server out there on virtually every platform (Mac, Linux, Windows).

Observations so far:

I’ve put up about 12 different DLNA server/platform combinations, so far there isn’t one that does everything I want. Mezzmo is the closest, but it still doesn’t have a few features I really crave.

Windows is the slowest at transcoding everything. So my current recommendation is to run in Linux or Mac (Linux is quickest so far)

The droid-x processor only supports MP4 natively (maybe wmv or some other format that I will not use, but MP4 as far as I’m concerned). That is the only format that will spool from a DLNA server to the phone.

Problem is that the phone requires the MP4 files to have specific data at the beginning of the file (lookup MP4 ATOMs for more detail). Well it seems that the information for some of the required ATOMs cannot be calculated until the file is converted to MP4 (it is also possible the FFMPEG could but just does not create these up front, since almost everyone uses FFMPEG for transcoding…). Most of the media servers will stream you a MP4 file that does not require transcoding. And most of the media servers will transcode the MP4 files into whatever format your other devices like. So it appears that your best convergence option is to re-encode (and take the quality hit) your video as MP4 so your phone can view it natively, then let your media server transcode for all the other systems (XBOX/TV/DVR/PS3/etc…). Note if you are using handbrake to convert, I have to set the file to enable streaming to get the phone to play it.

Other than that I’m off to my next level of convergence… The phone captures in .3gp I have one media server on a Linux VM (twonky I believe) that supports DLNA uploads. So I can seamlessly upload video to the server. Unfortunately I haven’t found one of the DLNA servers that will transcode the .3gp files… It would be really nice if I could simply DLNA copy videos and pics from my phone to the DLNA server then have them instantly available via transcode on the other DLNA clients around the house…

Anybody else have a DLNA that supports uploads or .3gp transcode?

Ok, first make the share  (I assume you already have a pool)

zfs create -o casesensitivity=mixed -o nbmand=on (poolname)/(newshare)

zfs set sharesmb=on (poolname)/(newshare)

(to define the name for the share  zfs set sharesmb=name=(sharename) (poolname)/(newshare)

zfs set compression=on (poolname)/(newshare)

If you screw up just zfs destroy (poolname)/(newshare)

Now just set the acl’s and you are ready to go… :)

zfs set dedup=on (poolname)/(newshare)

Check the share with

sharemgr show -vp

I saw this and really liked it…  Interesting thought…

So let’s set rations and turn the excess over to the DEA… ;)

The Story of Oedipus in 8 minutes performed by vegetables…

And in Hi Def.  ;)

Kayak provides flight destination information by price and more…

Instructions here.
Apparently many sites will allow googlebot in without being a registered user too… ;)

This is odd… The Ohio Supreme Court has ruled in a case that a police officer’s estimate that a car was going 73 miles an hour was acceptable enough to give the person a ticket. Even though the officer’s radar (which the court determined he was not qualified to use) read 83 miles per hour and the officer had apparently just decided to write the ticket for 79 miles per hour. I especially like the part where the ticket places the driver in a different lane than the one she claimed
to occupy.

I’d love to hear the actual details of the case as the difference between my immediate perception of what should have been decided by a Supreme Court and what was decided usually differs. Then when I hear the actual case details and the points that were argued the court’s decision makes sense. 

From TheSilentNumber

Strange enough though… the climate change crowd does not seem to consider inexplicable behavior associated with the source of our heat worthy of consideration as a forcing…

Solar Scientists Agree That the Sun’s Recent Behavior Is Odd, but the Explanation Remains Elusive

Just want to get this out there so it is searchable for people looking for information on AHS American Home Shield and swimming pool coverage.

Make sure of what you are signing up for before you buy American home shield’s swimming pool coverage.

When I signed up with AHS I was told that the contract would cover everything associate with the pool except the liner. When my pool developed a leak I discovered that they only cover components (pump, filter, and plumbing) that are above ground (which you could fix yourself for little or no money)…

If you pay extra for the pool coverage for an in-ground pool please be aware that AHS will not cover skimmers, drains, lights, liner, steps, and any plumbing under the dirt. I have no idea if they cover the diving board, but I bet they have an exclusion for that too.

exerpts from www.towelday.org

Today is Towel Day. Don’t forget your towel!

Douglas Adams, picture by Jill Furmanovsky

Towel Day is an annual celebration on the 25th of May, as a tribute to
the late author Douglas Adams (1952-2001).
On that day, fans around the universe proudly carry a towel in his
honour.

I love Douglas Adams! How can I get involved?

On the 25th of May, carry a towel. Where? Everywhere!

Proudly show the world you’ve observed Towel Day and upload a picture to
Flickr, tagging it with “towelday” (most interesting – latest – group)
or make a YouTube video (most relevant – latest). We look forward to seeing yours!

Want to help the cause? Tweet about #towelday, blog,
post in forums, share a link in Facebook, link to the site… The
more we are, the merrier!

More: FAQ

Everybody should stop by graphjam.com. It’s a funny site… :)