This prompted me to write up a long detailed e-mail on good backup tips and some free tools and general good advice about saving data. I didn’t get a thank you. I didn’t get one response.

E-Mail is my thing. I love e-mail I find it 100x easier to solve problems with an e-mail then a phone call. I am always on e-mail. You send me an e-mail it gets forwarded to my Mobile Me account which instantly puts it on my iPhone and boom I know you sent something and i will get back to you ASAP. To make things easier for my family I setup a Google Group so that you can just send an e-mail to 1 address and everyone gets it. But people seem afraid to use it.

Here are the current stats on the group.

185 Tristan
118 Mom
49 Aunt
31 Grandpa
31 Uncle
27 Cousin
20 Family Friend
20 Alex
15 Family Friend Old Account
14 Grandma

This has been up for over 2 years and doesn’t seem like it’s getting that much use. Getting people involved in the discussion on things like planning birthday’s is near impossible. My girlfriend her family seems to have e-mail and planning family events in the digital realm down. I don’t get why it’s so hard to reply to an e-mail or click a link and fill out a form.

I finally got my grandma hooked up with a Jitterbug cell phone. That is the oddest phone I have ever seen. Only cell phone I had ever used that has a dialtone when you flip it open. And that everything on the phone is either “Yes” or “No” Do you want to call Tristan?

My family has a ton of videotape so I got the means necessary to work on converting them to the digital format.  My desk is kinda loaded at the moment. Two Apple laptops got some VCR’s going here and just piles of technology at the beck and call to get all this done. Here is an picture of my desk at the moment.

Sent out an e-mail for that no response not a person in the world seems to care. I tested out the technology with my High School Senior Slideshow. I wasn’t in it but it was the only video tape I had around the house.

You can view that at the following link North Kitsap High School Graduating Class of 2001 But I would be careful. It’s 46 minutes of a slideshow of people you probably have no clue about. It was really just a visual test to see how well it worked. I also changed the audio to be a bit better quality.

But I hope to get on this project there are tons of funny. (Well I would find funny) videos that we recorded over our childhood years. That I would like to convert to a digital format. I don’t think I would want to convert them to DVD. Since would be easier to grab a video file and make a DVD if you so choose.

But anyways I guess I just wanted to rant that my family doesn’t use technology in a way that seems to be the most productive. Or seem to care about any of the efforts that I put forth into helping them. But what do I know. It’s late I am going to bed thanks for reading.

But I am still I am never sure what I can talk about or mention. People say “How have you been since I have seen you last” I could talk about my trip to Maui which was awesome. Or the video I made with my sister that at last check was almost up to 400 hits on YouTube. But all I can ever seem to find myself talking about is work. Nobody really cares about work. It’s something we all do. We all have different jobs but it just seems easier to talk about.

I could talk someones ear off about all things tech. But I always assume people would find that boring. I think I need to quit thinking of myself as boring. I need to just assume that if someone asks what I have been up to that I should just tell them. I will also do a better job of telling the readers that still come to TristanPipo.com and now that these get imported in Facebook those readers as well.

But as January winds down to a close. I hope everyone is ready for February and the lovely marketing holiday of Valentines Day where single people feel guilty about not having a mate and people in relationships worry about not making their partner as happy as they could be.

I would love to hear what’s been going on with you since our last chat.

You used to walk up turn on the sink pump out some soap. Grab some paper towels out of a normal dispenser. Dry your hands toss it in the trash and move along with life. But for some reason people decided to get greedy with the paper towels, water and soap. We used to have an awesome system like this.

But we went from having the greatness of taking care of things ourselves. To the man saying “Hey there! thanks for spending some money in our store. But we don’t trust you to dispense the proper amount of soap water and paper towels”

Now you walk into the toilet take care of business go to wash your hands you need to maneuver them under some sensor. Then hope the water turns on. Or you have the sinks with the push down button and you get a teaspoon of water and it shuts off. Most soap is still manual. The soaps that are not you get the same problem with the sink. Find the sensor and hope you get some soap. But my gripe with bathrooms is the paper towel dispenser since they have switched to an automatic system.

You have seem them right? They look something like this.

You run your hand under this thing and you get some paper. Has anyone ever found that the amount of paper you get on your first swipe to be worth anything? This is supposed to save money or something is all I can figure. But just seems to make the overall bathroom experience a very crappy one.

Instant Rimshot Drum

I love that sound effect. Always good for a laugh. But I feel like all this germ phobia has gotten out of hand. Nobody wants to touch anyone or anything and it’s just making life shittier overall. I think we need to ditch all the automatic crap in the bathroom. Because the only thing left is toilet paper. I don’t want to be sitting there for minutes running my hand underneath the dispenser getting two sheets at a time.

Some Tech Specs : We captured this on December 14th 2009 at various locations around my hometown of Kitsap County, WA. I used a Flip Ultra HD camera for all of the video and we went to various locations and I would capture my sister dancing from 15-30 seconds depending on the location. The video was inspired by the “Where the Hell is Matt” video which you can see here.

The music is Praan and you can grab it off iTunes at the following location : http://bit.ly/91XPu4

I edited the movie on my MacBook Pro using iMovie 2009. Which made it incredibly easy to do. I captured about 58 minutes of video in various locations and had to cut it down to 4 minutes and 29 seconds to match the other video. If you have any questions I would be happy to answer them leave them in a comment below. I am not sure if we will do this again next year but who knows what the future holds.

November is usually the month where the world is winding down. Getting ready to bundle up for the holidays. I am really excited for Thanksgiving. I was listening to this podcast called No Agenda and they were discussing Turkey. They were talking about this thing called Heritage Turkey’s so I decided to order one of those for the family thanksgiving. They are the “original” style of Turkey and they are supposed to taste amazing. So looking forward to that.

Today I had the carpets in the Pipo Palace shampooed. It had been a while since it had been done and it really brought some new life back into the place. Taking a little longer to try then I expected. So having a rather chill Friday night lounging around the bedroom updating the world via laptops.

The household has 2 Mac Laptops a Mac Mini and Raleigh uses some old 2003 Dell. I can’t say I understand why she keeps that thing. But I bought a new laptop last June to replace my old Powerbook G4 that I bought in September 2004.

Other then that work has been rather insane. Everyone is drinking from the fire hose lately and it seems like patience is wearing a bit thin and we are hoping the holiday lock downs mean we get a little break for a short while.

Raleigh and I are heading to Hawaii in December so look forward to tweets and facebook pics of that while we are away. If you don’t already follow me on twitter you can check me out at http://www.twitter.com/tristanpipo

But I wish everyone a great weekend and I will work on getting back into this blogging thing and lay some social commentary on the line soon. Next weekend I will be heading back to Poulsbo, WA to go to my mothers art gallery. If you would like to grab lunch or something let me know.

Tristan Out.

We have arrived at October. It has been a rather interesting month so far. My schedule changed at work which has been nice. I got moved to 10-7 last October and was told I would only be on that work schedule for 3 months. Here it is next October and finally getting it changed back. Which is awesome on my end.

Coming up this weekend the girlfriend and I have a fall party to attend. With one of my girlfriends coworkers which should be a good time. I always dig carving pumpkins getting drunk and making scarecrows. I will be posting pictures to Facebook most likely or perhaps my tumblelog. Which if you care to find it’s located at tristan.tumblr.com it’s also a nice aggregation of everything I do online.

But anyways it’s getting a bit late. I think I will hit up a little Beatles Rock Band before I go to bed.

Hopefully everyone has a great week. Send me an e-mail or text message let me know what you are up too.

Later went to the Apple Store and played with one and just couldn’t justify the switch to AT&T at the time and the $499 & $599 price tag. When the iPhone 3G came out just over a year later I had to have it. Then a year later the iPhone 3GS came out. Getting video and a compass didn’t seem worth the upgrade to me at the time.

So iPhone released OS 3.0 and now 3.1. Tomorrow we get MMS which I have had on my phone for a while now but the copy and paste has been awesome. Especially when adding all of my shipments to my Delivery App. I highly recommend Delivery Status Touch. But I do have some complaints about the iPhone.

If I get a text message my phone alerts me and shows the name and says “Text Message” seems like it gets angry sometimes and I never get the text message but that doesn’t really concern me. What I don’t like is how I get notice that I get a new e-mail but I don’t get any notice on the lock screen when I get an e-mail. I need to unlock my phone. Tap the mail app and then I get to see who sent the mail. I would rather have a notification like the SMS alert for e-mail as well. I understand not everyone would want this so it would nice if you could shut that off as well. It would also be cool if I could have an updated weather forecast on the locked home screen.

Other then that the iPhone has been evolving rather nicely and I have been pretty happy with all the updates. Picture messaging comes out tomorrow. I have had it on my iPhone for 10 days or so now. I have enjoyed it so far. I have tried every hack on my iPhone.  I have Jailbroken, Unlocked, MMS, Tethering if there has been a guide for it I have done it.  Jailbreaking is cool and all but it doesn’t seemed like I have ever gained much from doing it. Other then changing the theme on my iPhone and a few funny apps. I keep thinking I should jailbreak 3.1 to try out the Google Voice App.  Speaking of Google Voice. I am loving that service. I like it better then Grandcentral when they were the dudes in charge. Mainly due to the new interface.

But that is all not much going on really. Weekend is almost here.

Just thought I would take the time to stop by to let you know that I have not died. Life has just been chugging along. Had a pretty good weekend last weekend.

Friday my coworker Jon and I went to check out the Seattle Lingerie Football team. The Seattle Mist Women in Lingerie playing football can’t go wrong. Seattle won 21 to 6 against San Diego. I must say San Diego had the more attractive team. But this one girl on the Seattle team. #15 she wasn’t in the program was totally the MVP of the game. She was like 5′11′ and totally just dominated.

Check out some of the Swag we scored. I got some more pictures up on my Facebook profile if you care to know more.

Saturday bought a new computer chair and went to a Lighthouse Festival up in Mukilteo saw some Fireworks. Good time overall went with the girlfriend and her coworkers. It was a bit of a triple date kinda thing. We were chiling on the beach in front of a firepit. We all ended up smelling like smoke by the end of the show. I got this awesome picture of the sunset.

Sunday was a pretty lazy day which was nice before the workday began. But thanks for stopping by and I hope everyone is doing well. It’s almost fall and I am a bit excited. I can’t wait for the weather to finally cool down again. I enjoy the cold more then the heat of the summer. We had some 100F+ days that I did not enjoy. But thanks for stopping by. Enjoy the rest of your week.

I purchased a new MacBook Pro and have found myself undertaking other projects mostly cutting together videos for mostly personal use. Things I have captured for my family etc and been publishing those internally. I miss the blogging realm when I felt like I had a bunch of people reading. But lately I feel like my blog has become a lost cause in some ways. They say that a place with people in it attracts more customers. I tend to think a blog is like that as well. The more people read it the more people want to read it. Currently my RSS feed has 26 subscribers by my count and my Podcast still has 16. It was recently removed from the Apple Store since it hasn’t been updated in two years. But I like the thought that 26 people still subscribe to the blog.

I feel like since I finished school and got an internship that turned into my full time career I have been shoved into what the American Adult should be. I have a career and I get up at the same time every day and go to work and find myself learning and pushing myself constantly. Working in the IT world is always interesting I must say. It never stops evolving. I love my job and happy to be employed but sometimes a bit more variety would be nice you know. But work is work and you can’t really expect things to be different all the time. But it’s like I never expected being an adult to be the same all the time. I was never warned of this and none of my previous jobs gave me any clue since they were always rather free form. You are doing Job A today and Job B tomorrow under the same roof. But who knows maybe this is a bit of a slump.

I have been in a relationship for two years now. She is a wonderful and amazing girl. But we have our moments like everyone does. I remember being single and going on all these dates with women that didn’t really fit me. I think it was more about finding some female attention then a real companion. A great deal of women I found to be rather insane. But I was also a great deal younger then and it seems like as I age women also begin to make a bit more sense. I had a few do a bunch of mean stuff to me and I got to do that to one woman. I felt like a dick about it afterwards then she did that typical thing that women do say some mean things about me and life went on. I still have yet to figure out why women always need to have the last word in every argument. But I am happy now and I try to make my girlfriend happy.

Friends seems to be an odd topic as well I think that goes along with the adult thing. Most of my friends all live at different distances and it makes it hard to go and see them. I still chat with them online or via SMS or phone but face to face contact it all has to be scheduled with everyone now. It’s not like the days of old where I could call a few people and say lets hang out. I kinda miss those days but kinda don’t. Like it used to be “Hey I’m Bored Fix It” sent off to a bunch of people in my phone. Group used to get together and just hang out and it was great. I just don’t find myself doing that lately. Most of the people I hang out with and call my friends are coworkers. Which is great but at times I miss my other friends. There are internet friends as well they can be cool the people that follow me on Twitter and my Facebook friends they are cool and all. But again the whole internet thing can be scary for some people. I send out a twitter update “Anyone wanna go see a movie” I don’t get many responses and if I do they are things like “I would but I am in Spokane” the thought it nice but I also don’t see the point in responding if you can’t go. That is a bit of a mixed bag and would love to dive into the social networking trend of quizzes later.

But as with all things this post must come to an end. Thank you for taking the time to read and I hope everyone will continue to do so.

So back in Februrary of 2009 I my girlfriends cousin sent out an e-mail to everyone asking if we would be interested in going to Ross Lake in the North Cascades. Me being the Tristan I thought hey why not and my girlfriend said I was going. So that was the end of that.

I didn’t give much thought about it since I haven’t been on a real vacation since before High School. I did some trips out to Indiana when I was dating a girl online back in 2000 but nothing really exciting. I put in a request for some time off work and at that point we were good to go.

A little 411 on Ross Lake Resort.

• It is a man made lake due to Ross Damn.
• It’s glacier fed and very cold.
• There is no Internet or Cell Service.
• I was going with all of Raleigh’s family.
• You have to be boated or trucked in or hiked.
• You are required to bring all of your own food and drink. (Except Water)
• They have power.
• You stay in Cabins.

So when the time came and being a bit under experienced in Vacation Lore. It caused me a good deal of stress making sure everything was ready on my end not knowing what I needed or anything like that. When I get stressed out about something the girlfriend usually gets mad at me. So the few days prior there was a great deal of tension in the Pipo Pad. Had to make her understand I had no clue what needed to be done and she had to realize I needed some help and life was good again.

The options for getting to Ross Lake are taking a ferry. Which leaves at 8:00am and 3:00pm. So we were shooting for Sunday June 21st 3:00pm ferry leaving the dock.

We left fairly early in the morning and ran into a few snags. The brake light went out on my girlfriends car so we had to pull over and get that replaced. Then we were back on track for our Northern journey.

On the way up since we had women in the car we had to stop at some Outlet mall. I will still never understand the concept of why going to a store and looking at things is a good experience. I much prefer loading up my web browser going to Amazon finding what I need and since I have Amazon Prime 2 day Free Shipping or I can overnight it for $3.00.

Looking at that seems a great deal friendlier and easier to cope with then.  The average visit to a Costco.

So being a bit of a hypocrite I walk over to the Samsonite Outlet store and pickup a leather Passport Holder. I am not sure how long we spent at the shopping establishments but it seemed to long.

So then we hit up a grocery store and tried a KFC Clone and we were on our way. We had 50 miles to drive in 90 minutes. We figured this would be cutting it close but we could make it.

It started to rain and I began to think. I probably should have figured I would need a coat. I didn’t have one so we kinda made a screech into this mini mart place on the side of the road in the North Cascades. They didn’t have any alternatives like a ponch or anything like that. But the nice asian lady offered me a garbage bag for the trip. We bought some $9 bug spray because we felt bad for taking advantage of this poor woman.

Time: 2:28

We still have a ways to go and we get stuck behind this old man driving 35 in the 50. This continued for way to long and when we got to a town with a left turn lane this genius decided to drive in that lane confusing the hell out of everyone else and then he pulls back in front of us.

Time: 2:48

We think we see a sign for the ferry to ross lake and it turns out to be some community for Ross Lake that Seattle City Power setup for the people that work and manage the states hydro electric power.

Time: 2:55

We drive further on the road and finally find the turn off and this turns out into a very high tense situation. There is no boat we see her family’s car. It appears that they have gone and we are kinda SOL.

But all is not lost we have two options at this point. Drive a few miles up the road and hike the “1 mile” down to the lake. Or drive back into town and grab a Hotel for the night.

Well being the city folk that we have become we figure “1 mile” not a big deal we can hike that no problem. Probably take 25 minutes at the max. Well we didn’t account for all the stuff we had to pack in.

So we drive up the road and start to unload the car. I had my Large Laptop Timbuk2 bag and a large duffle bag with clothes. The girlfriend and I also had a large cooler packed with food.

The girlfriend also had her bags that we were expecting to have hauled on the ferry and tossed on a truck. As this was not the case anymore we were hiking all of this in. Raleigh’s mom was also with us and she had a nice rolling suitcase that well was a great idea but wouldn’t do so well hiking down the trail.

Here is a basic outline of the trail.

The sign and all the adverts on the website claimed this to be “1 mile downhill”. After this hike I don’t believe that was a mile for one second.  I used to walk 2.3 miles to work and from work everyday. I think I have a pretty good mental grasp on what a mile is. That wasn’t no mile. I would say 2 miles.

Which still wouldn’t be that bad but I had two heavy bags and had to carry half of a cooler. My girlfriend was carrying the other side of the cooler so we kinda had a push me pull you type system going on. It kinda looked like this.

Everything was loaded up to the max and the trail was not smooth. To start off the trail I had my iPhone with headphones going. The music of choice was the Engadget Podcast. I figured listening to talk of the new Palm Pre would distract my mind enough from carrying all this heavy shit down the mountain. None of us had it easy. Raleigh’s mom had the least amount of bulk. The saddest part of the whole trip down was we couldn’t take all of our beer.

I drank a beer as fast as I could at the top of the trail to make it slightly easier. So with a very mild buzz and Engadge Podcast. With this rather daunting trail carrying all of this crap we began our journey down the mountain. This stopped after 15-20 paces or so.

Raleigh’s mom had this wheeled luggage well I can say wasn’t designed for going down a trail. So I sat down on a rock and waited for thier return with a modified carrying set. We began our trip again. The first look was nice it was downhill and looked promsing until we turned a corner and there was this rather large uphill. At this point I was a cranky son of a bitch. Carrying all this shit down a mountain and now up a mountain.

We got to a clearing and I dropped gear and went and found a spot to take care of nature.

Loaded up my arms and we started down the trail again. We ran into some women who were hiking that kinda gave us this “What the fuck is wrong with you look” they were probably pondering why these people coming down a trail with multiple coolers and so much crap.

This happened a few times along the way. So we eventually reach a spot where we can see a road. The directions we had printed out said “When you see a road take a right and you will see a phone” turns out that phone wasn’t for another 1/2 mile or so.

By this point I was a rather short fuse and pretty much everything was pissing me off. I was at the point where rocks were annoying me. So I recall blurting out obsenities about dinosaurs and how if I ever saw one I would kill it.

It seemed to provide some comic relief but I just wasn’t happy. So when we got to the phone it all went fairly well after that we called for a boat and they picked us up and took us across the lake to our cabin.

The girlfriends Aunt’s were shocked to see us and the neighbors we had were also shocked.

So the ross lake adventure will be continued shortly in part 2. Comments are welcomed.

Just been slammed at work and doing weekend things and then the holiday so hopefully get some time to write that all up and make the drawings and all that jazz.

Until then I hope everyone is doing well.

Oh yeah not crazy. See him or her? Back to Saturday!

I picked up a Flip Ultra HD video camera so that I can record all kinds of awesome videos in HD.  You can check out my adventure the the grocery store here.

http://gallery.me.com/tristan.pipo#100087

But other then doing the life thing. Started going back to the gym. Nice to get back in the groove after a few years of vacation from it. I haven’t lost that much strength and the belly is slowly going away.

But next week I am on vacation and I won’t have any cell phone or internet access so hopefully the world doesn’t blow up while I am gone. It will be odd turning on that vacation auto responder I haven’t used that ever since I got gMail back in 2004.

Well hope to here from everyone soon drop me a line.

experience.  Raleigh surprised me on May 12th 2009 with tickets to the Flight of the Conchords concert at the Paramount. I must say an epic show. I love Flight of the Conchords I got Raleigh hooked a bit as well. It all happened about a year ago actually.

We were down in Portland for Memorial Day and we stayed in a Holiday Inn. They had an HDTV in there and HBO. I must say one of my pet peeves is people that have an HDTV and don’t have it setup properly. But I can also understand that they have to pump analog to all these TV’s in a Hotel so most cable systems decode the digital signal and multiplex down their own systems so you can view all channels. So end result most Hotels with HDTV’s don’t have the HD setup properly. Also drives me nuts when going to someones house with an HDTV and they have their cable or satellite box hooked up via RCA. But anyways that was a tangent that has nothign to do with this. Well we had HBO in the room and they were rerunning some episodes of Flight of the Conchords.

It happened to be the episode featuring the awesome song of Business Time.

After that I bought their CD’s and Season one on DVD. It also spawned me to get HBO. Also for Entourage. After that HBO is like a bit of an obsession for me. I really only have it for their TV shows and don’t really watch the movies. But anyways the concert was awesome. One thing that was interesting was that they had someone doing Sign Language in the front. I must say I bet that ladies arms were tired. I wish I could have made out the motions for curse words. Also I can’t imagine doing sign language for a song is easy.

I must say that the concert was epic and thank you so much Raleigh for the awesome gift. In the meantime pretty much went along as normal. Nothing out of the ordinary and then the 20th came around.

I went to work on my Birthday and must say it was what you would expect for work on your Birthday. I went fairly low key didn’t tell anyone except for the people at work on my Facebook Friends List.

Raleigh picked me up from work and we went to Red Mill scored a Creamsicle Shake. I have been wanting one of those for probably a year now. I must say it was awesome and delicious. After that we went home and we were planning on going to see a movie but tiredness overwhelmed us so we popped on the AppleTV and rented a movie.  Raleigh got me some awesome video games. She picked up the Metal Gear Solid collection. Nice to replace all my old games. Metal Gear Solid 1, 2 and 3. Also picked up God of War for the PSP which is a totally awesome and radical game.  I must say seeing a game designed back in 1998. I remember getting it as a Christmas Present from my Dad. But now playing it on a HDTV 11 years later I must say I thought these graphics were crazy awesome. Comparing it to Metal Gear Solid 4 it’s like night and day. Time to play with some nostolgia.

This weekend we are heading to Portland so I call that Birthday Extension 2009 Memorial Day Awesome Fun Time. Pictures will be posted as things happen.

I check out the hits on the site and people still come here which is encouraging. I am sometimes shocked I still have people that read this when I never post pictures of myself and I don’t really pimp out my site anymore. Since I finished school and joined the workforce back in 2006 it’s like life has gotten busy. But I am not really any busier then I was back then. It’s just that I work on a computer all day. When I get home I don’t want to touch the computer. Finding time at work to blog is close to impossible these days. So consider yourself lucky.

So it’s May. My birthday is in May. I found out yesterday that my 15 year old step niece gave birth to a baby boy. So now I am a Step Great Uncle. My step sister is married to a guy that is a year younger then me. He is now a grandfather at 24. I am 25 now and I look back at my life. I rewind a decade and look at life. All I can think about is that I was a dumbass compared to now. I hope that kid does okay. I am sure when I am 35 I will look at 25 and think “Man, I was a dumbass at 25″. I think people need to think about that more often. I also think that logic should be applied if you ever think about getting a tattoo. 10 years from now I will probably think this was a stupid idea.

But Birthday’s are never my thing. My girlfriend keeps asking me. “So what do you want for your Birthday?” I have no idea what I want since she told me no DVD’s or Video Games. Well that is all that I really want. I am still wondering where the new wallet I was promised for Christmas is. I ponder just buying it myself but I feel like that’s not the point.

I am the type of person that found out at an early age that you are hardly ever given anything and hand outs should not be expected. You gotta bust your ass for everything. I wanted a Playstation 3 I saved pennies and went out and bought the thing. I remember chopping wood as a child for the neighbors to get $20 to buy a Seattle Mariners hat. I chopped wood over an entire weekend for 6hrs a day for $20. They got a sweet deal and my 9 year old ass thought I was making a ton of cash. When I was 19 I looked back at that moment and thought I was a complete dumbass for getting so little money.

So I have no idea what I want for my birthday. If you would like to pick up a DVD or a Blu Ray you can get that info from my Amazon Wishlist Page. Just search for Tristan Pipo. There are not many. Though some girl on Facebook from the Philippines said I was her cousin. I said no but she has a cousin named Tristan Pipo who lives in San Diego. I recall seeing this info before back in 1996 looking on ICQ people search and there was another Tristan Pipo from San Diego, CA. I hope to one day meet this fellow. But until then I sit casually and lurk as my new facebook friend updates with pictures.

I look at the blog and I really need to get working on the fonts it is pretty hard to read. I will see about working on that sometime. Need to bust out the MacBook Pro and hack it up with some CSS action.

So I have been reading about this whole Swine Flu thing. Seems like another plot to install fear into people and keep them controlled. 13 cases in Washington State at time of this posting. 13,000 people on average die of the Flu every year. So far 1 person in the USA that was from Mexico and 2 years old with no immune system has died. Not like you had much of a life at 2 years old but thanks for fueling the stupid panic machine. Seems like everyone is recovering from the illness here in America. So I am confident that everything will be fine and all the idiots and hypochondriacs will be put in there place eventually.

On that note thanks for reading. I will work on being in touch. =) You can always follow me on twitter. twitter.com/tristanpipo

So I thought I would give a quick update on what is going on around the Tristan circle of life. Last week I ordered a Tivo. This thing has been a pain in the ass. It took a week to get here. But there have been 2 major causes of frustration.

1. The Cable Card Experience.

So in order for the TivoHD to work you need to get a CableCard from the Cable Company. In the Seattle area we have Comcast. Usually for most of my issues I either hop on the Comcast Chat or get on Twitter and send a note to @ComcastCares. So my first try was with the Chat. I got one guy saying that I could just drive to the local Comcast Office and pickup the cable card. Slide it into the Tivo and drive home and call Comcast. Sounds good to me.

Some time passes…..

Tivo is actually coming now so I hop on Comcast Chat again and get a new person they tell me I need to schedule a tech to come out and install the card for a fee of $25. Previous guy told me I could do it myself.

The process of installing a cable card is basically moving one flap down and sliding in a PCMCIA card into the device. Didn’t seem $25 worthy to me. But I do recall charging people at Best Buy $160 for Hard Drive and OS Install.

Now that I had a conflicting argument from two different people. I hopped on twitter and sent a note to @ComcastCares I got the following reply.

So I have two people saying the same thing. So I decide to shoot an e-mail off to Comcast Cares. we_can_help@comcast.com I get a prompt reply from a Detreon Roberts. He says they need to schedule a tech to come out. So I accept that answer for the time being.

So I get home that night and make a phone call to Comcast. I get to speak to an incredibly seductive sounding woman named Jen or Jenn. I didn’t ask for the spelling but I wanted info about my Cable Card. She said that I can just go down to the Comcast Office and pick it up. I tell her about all of my experiences thus far. She says “They don’t know what they are talking about. I setup a CableCard for a guy today took 3 mins over the phone” So I e-mailed Detreon back and he says. “You should really get an installer out” So on Saturday the girlfriend of awesomeness decided to partake on the adventure of the Comcast store and we got the CableCard. Came home and installed it and it took about 3 minutes and we were golden.

So I guess I would like to thank the first Chat Person and Jen from Comcast in Washington for being the most helpful. Everyone else needs to think about what they are doing.

2. Upgrading the Hard Drive in the Tivo.

So this was a fun process that I did when the girlfriend was out tending to her late kitty cat Indy. So I was home alone which was probably a good thing because I was incredibly frustrated by a few sources. So I was cranky and just wasn’t a pleasant person.

So the scenario is that the Tivo HD comes with a 160GB HDD which gives you about 20hrs of HD recording. This was not enough for me so I bought a 1TB external eSATA drive hoping I could just plug it in and be good to go. This was not the case as Tivo doesn’t like this idea so I had to hack the box to get it working. So I take the TIVO apart and pull the hard drive. I come to find out that it would just be easier to install the external drive into the TIVO. So I have to take apart this external drive which I didn’t want to do but kinda have to.

At this point I haven’t even powered up the Tivo. So I take apart the external drive and then go to my Computer. I have this Pentium 4 3.6ghz machine I use to just screw around with when I am not using my Mac’s. Luckily I had this thing around otherwise I would have been screwed. So I open up the computer and need to free 2 SATA ports. Currently I have all 4 being used so I boot up the machine and find the HDD that I am not using and power it back off and unplug the two drives. Come to find out that I had these in a RAID 0 configuration so the computer won’t boot. So decide to say screw it all I can just reinstall Windows 7 Beta and just use one drive and setup the other drives later.

So I had to install Windows 7 again to just do what I needed to do. After that process completes I go download the TIVO hacking software called WinMFS.

I then shutoff the computer hookup the 160GB tivo drive and the 1TB HDD. Boot up the machine and followed the instructions located here.

http://www.engadgethd.com/2008/04/17/how-to-upgrade-your-tivo-hd-with-winmfs/

I am always baffled when people ask me questions on how to do things with their computer. Since I can find every answer by googling. See here is how you can do it to.

http://tinyurl.com/d9obnl

So I followed that process and swapped out the 160GB HDD with the 1TB and the unit would power on and then crash. So I said WTF! I spent over an hour reimaging my PC with Windows 7 and the process didn’t work. So I swapped the 160GB drive back in and powered it on. This worked great. So I went through the setup process and then took the whole thing apart again to reimage the 1TB HDD with the above instructions. This process worked but took a great deal longer I was getting a bit more positive messages.

As a note if you are going to use WinMFS with Windows 7. Be sure you click “Run as Administrator” or this whole process will never work. So now with all of that completed I have 141hrs of HD recording and something like 1500 hrs of Standard Def recording.

So I got home at 8pm last Thursday and I didn’t finish with the Tivo Hacking until 1:30am. I was rather cranky by the end of the experience. The girlfriend doesn’t even appreciate the Tivo yet. Hopefully she will and I will get some good appreciatin back.

So that has been my Tivo experience. I must say after all of that work I am now an expert in the process of expanding the storage of the Series 3 Tivo’s.

I am sure there are more important things in the world to focus on. Anyone have any ideas?