If you didn’t already know, I am visiting Cincinnati this week. I flew in late on Saturday after our snowboarding trip. Our departure out of Denver was delayed and we were forced to switch aircraft after the engines wouldn’t start on the first! Fortunately, we all received free DirecTV service during the whole flight for the inconvenience. Unfortunately, I couldn’t watch basketball as that channel was not available. I spent most of the time watching Animal Planet instead. I am still holding out that Frontier Airlines will offer the TV service for free on all flights, and maybe add some more channels. Even if this doesn’t happen, more airlines should start following in their footsteps and adding TV service. It is a wonderful way to pass the time while in flight.

It was announced a couple of days ago, that Volkswagen is recalling nearly 80,000 cars. The problem that this recall addresses is “the malfunctioning brake lights and brake light switches could fail to come on or remain stuck on.” This is the same exact problem we’ve had with our Jetta, not just once but twice. Even though we had all the signs of the defect, and replaced the part multiple times, our car was never under one of the previous recalls for the same issue. Luckily I found some replacement directions online and I only paid for the parts. I guess VW finally realized that the issue was larger than originally thought.

When I decide to take the car into the dealer for the free fix, I’ll be sure to mention the brake light switches that I’ve replaced in the past. In fact I still have the receipt for one of them, so I’m hoping I can be reimbursed. I’ve been reading about the recall and I guess that VW has personally redesigned the switch themselves this time, and are no longer using a third party. I hope that this is the final fix for the switch!

I use a package called XAMPP on my web server to run this here website. Well they released a new version (1.6.0) the other day and as usual I updated pretty quickly. After the update, I could not get apache to stay running for longer than a minute tops. After running it manually, I was able to use the error logs to diagnose the problem. It appears the version of eAccelerator that they included was not the correct one. eAccelarator is a plugin that caches PHP scripts so the speed of the site can be improved. Obviously this was something that I didn’t want to just turn off.

The version of eAccelerator that was included was for PHP version 5.2.0, but this version of XAMPP included PHP 5.2.1. After searching the web for awhile, I was able to find the eAccelerator binaries for the new version on this site. Once I downloaded both eAccelerator.dll and eLoader.dll my server was back to running normally. Hopefully this little bit of info will help anyone else who may be having problems.

And as I am writing this, I just realized that there is another version of XAMPP available today, 1.6.0a. I’ll likely install this soon and see if they have solved this issue or not.

For those of you yet to experience the wonders of a DVR (are you living in a cave?) I am selling our old ReplayTV box on eBay. The beauty of this system is that it can be used with just about any cable, satellite, or standard TV setup, as long as you activate and pay the monthly $12.95 fee for the programming guide. We loved this system, but currently Comcast offers a built in DVR for cheaper than $12.95, so we switched over to that.

We used our DVR to tape American Idol last night and zoom through the 2 hour show in less than an hour and a half, just by skipping the commercials. I’m still a fan of Chris Sligh even though I had no idea what song he was singing. I also think that Blake Lewis is going to do really well in the competition as well. I though the show was a little below average when compared to past seasons, but it was just the first real episode. The girls will be singing tonight. Be sure to check out the early predictions on DialIdol.com, if you want to ruin the surprise all season.

I finally ditched my Sprint phone plan and old cell phone in favor a new plan with Verizon and a new phone that has a camera, bluetooth, speaker phone, among other new features. I considered other new phones including the Chocolate, enV, and Q, but in the end I didn’t think I would use the advanced features enough to make it worthwhile. I had mobile internet on my old phone and I only used it to get my text messages (aka short mail). Now that I have real text messaging on my phone (including picture mail) I have no use for the mobile internet.

Since I ordered everything online, I was able to port my old phone number even though it is a Cincinnati area code. I’ve had my number for so long that I really don’t feel like changing it. Ever. I figured this makes it easy for everyone.

My site is back to being hosted from one of my home PCs. This means that the gallery is working once again! Now that brings me to a new dilemma, and I am going to rely on all of you to help me decide on the future of the site.

I’ve really enjoyed my experience with Flickr, but I’ve often heard complaints of slowness and have actually experienced them myself. Another thing to consider is that I would probably have to upgrade to Pro account to host everything.

I probably don’t have much room to complain about speed, since my site is hosted locally via cable modem service. However, I do think the site is faster than it was when I was using Time Warner. The 8 Mbps package from Comcast appears to be working very well so far (although my download speed is not nearly as fast as I was hoping).

FYI, I’m leaning towards going back to Gallery, since that is what I am most familiar with.

It’s official, we are now second time home owners! Late yesterday we finally closed on the house I talked about long. Our furniture was delivered today and therefore we’ll be pretty busy the next week or so. It’s nice to have all the worries and troubles out of the way. I’m finally really excited about the house once again!

I do have one more issue to figure out, cable service. Fortunately Time Warner doesn’t exist here, but unfortunately Comcast does. So far I’m not sure which is worse. Anyway, I’m pretty sure we’ll end up with digital cable package and DVR. So the question now remains, what about internet service? It appears that they try to get you to lease your modem for $3/month, at least Time Warner gave you one to use for free. So now I’m thinking of buying my own cable modem, the Motorola SURFBoard SB5101 or SB5120. Does anyone own either of these? Once I get that, the service should be pretty good. Their standard connection is 6 Mbps and you can pay $10 extra for 8 Mbps. I’m still undecided on that as well. I better make up my mind soon as my home office depends on it.

With the upcoming move I’ve been considering how I will communicate with my colleagues back in Kansas City. I can easily forward my phone here to another number automatically, so everyone in KC should be able to call me just as before. However, I have realized that this could quickly eat up all of my cell phone minutes. Currently I do not use my work phone often at all, but I can see using a phone much more when I can’t walk down the hall to ask a simple question or have a longer conversation that wouldn’t work well in email.

I’ve come up with a few options to solve this. First, I could ask for a company cell phone just like most of the trainers out on the road all the time have. Obviously I wouldn’t have to worry about the minutes or the bill. The other option is to get another phone, but not a cell phone, one of those fancy internet phones. I’m not sure if the company would pick up the bill for this or not, but there are affordable plans, some even include unlimited minutes. I’ve looked at Vonage and Skype very briefly, but I’m still fairly new to all of this.

Are there any other options that I haven’t considered? If both options were free, which would you choose? I’m trying to keep my options open since I have no idea what will happen, but it’s never too early to start thinking about the future, right?

Sorry for two tech posts in a row, but according to my tracker over 50% of you (the readers) use Firefox to browse the web and I wanted to let you know that a new version is now available. If you didn’t already know, Firefox 2.0 offers even more tabbed browsing features, a built in spell check, and lots more. I’m a huge fan of the built in spell check, especially since English classes never really were my thing. In the past I ran Firefox plugins and even put my blog entries into Microsoft Word to be sure they were free of spelling errors.

For those who still use Internet Explorer I would highly encourage you to try Firefox out. Once you do you will never go back. I know that I haven’t.

Update: Even the Internet Explorer Team was happy about the release.

Today I stumbled upon a widget for the Yahoo! engine that plays the online Sirius streams. Since I got Sirius last Christmas I have listened to the streams almost every day at work, but I’ve never really be a fan of the official streaming web app. For starters, it doesn’t even display what artist/song you are listening to or playing on other stations. This makes it hard to switch between stations and most of the time I would just leave it set on one station for the entire day.

Now that I’ve installed this widget, I can not only see what’s playing but I can also have preset stations that I can tune to with the press of one button. In addition, the widget has Alerts that can be configured to alert you when a certain artist or song is on any of the stations. The functionality of this is much closer to my Starmate unit and much improved over the standard online player.

Download the widget here to begin using it now. Please note that it does require that the Yahoo! widget engine is installed as well.

For those of you without Sirius, be sure to take advantage of the free online trial, including 48 hours of Howard Stern starting tomorrow.