Had a flashback last night and had to go find this on youtube….

*disclosure: I work for AT&T, but do not work for Uverse. My opinions are my personal ones*

While everything was going on with my web server being migrated (and me changing from Movable Type to Wordpress) we had Uverse installed on 1/25. It has now been over a month since then so I feel I can finally go into detail on how everything has worked out.

So first thing’s first….I needed to figure out how the wiring would be done to get TV to all the rooms that need it. To do that the way I wanted I’d need to get some cable from the basement to the attic. My original plans were something like this:

I managed to get two cat 5’s and two RG-6 cables run all the way from the attic to the basement over the course of a few months.  I tell you what if I ever build my own house I’ll make sure there is a cable conduit run between the two. It would have made things a lot easier. Anyways back to the Uverse.

My goal was to use cat5 for all the Set Top Boxes (STB’s) to avoid any HPNA issues since I knew the RG-59 in the existing walls was pretty much garbage. So once the tech arrived I showed him the mounting place in the basement (next to the existing alarm panel) and explained we could use the cat 5 I ran previously to get into the attic where we could drop down to the office and master bedroom. He agreed to use the cable and actually came up with a better idea…instead of putting a switch in the attic (yes I know it was a bad idea to begin with) why not just run one to the master bedroom and the other to the office.

My original goal had been to keep the STB traffic seperate from the LAN but this idea was better than mine so that’s what we did.  Beyond the time it took to terminate the wires, punch down blocks, etc I think it took me longest just to rewire the entertainment center downstairs due to all the baby gates.

Here’s what the RG looked like:

I know it looks close to the water heater but there’s no heat transfer. The home run from the NI was brand new cat5 taht we installed as was the run to the STB in the family room (there were holes to a wall plate I had previously drilled for a phone line for the DISH DVR). Which brings me to the wall plates…they have these really neat ones that are branded as Suttle plates that have a RG45, RG11 and a coax connector on them. The really interesting part is they are larger than normal wall plates by like an 1/8′ of an inch…which I assume is meant to hide any wall damage from removing old plates. They’re pretty darn slick honestly:
  

Since I’m using coax to backfeed a video source to our TV’s the plates worked out really nice. In fact every wall plate we installed has cat5 and coax running out of them. The only place this was an issue really was in the master bedroom were we couldn’t get both cat5 and RG6 through the fire break in the wall but we were able to squeeze cat5 and RG59 through….don’t ask me how but we did it. Since it was a vaulted ceiling I wasn’t going to be able to really play with it much so I was just happy to get cat5 and a coax through it.

So getting every wired up was arduous but not really hard. The service is great but we did have a rocky road in the beginning that was resolved after a couple of RG swaps and then finally a port swap in the VRAD (RG’s would lock up green but remain unpingable). The telephone and internet seem to work just fine (in fact it’s faster than my DSL since I was so far out) even though we are about 2950 from the VRAD. Our stats actually have been good enough to upgrade to the 25/2 from our current 19/2 profile but I wanted to make sure we were stable before making any changes.

Once final thing to note is power consumption. Our old Dish 522 used to pull a constant 32 watts and towards the end started to sound like a jet taking off. The new Uverse DVR seems to pull 16 watts (although I saw it drop to 11 watts once so it might have a sleep mode) and the STB’s seem to pull 10 watts.

The last thing I’ve been trying to do was get gallery to only display images from a specific album (for the Judd family site). I used to do this using an iFrame and passing variables via php but for some reason while the iFrame still worked the php script stopped passing any variables at all.

If figure it has something to do with the new server but modifying the global register in php.ini didn’t do squat. So I did the next best thing…figured out how to modify the block-random.php script manually to only pull from the kid’s pictures album (which is all I need).

 

//      $album = chooseAlbum();
$loadthisalbum = “Baby-pictures”;
if ($loadthisalbum) {
        $album = new Album();
        $album->load($loadthisalbum);
}

It’s a lot better than the iframe stuff I was using and all I had to do was save a new copy of the block-random to use just for that site.

I’ve been trying to get a random picture thing working like I did originally with MovableType but wasn’t having any luck with WordPresses method of editing templates. It’s not as forward as with MT and utilizes a lof of php calls that I just don’t understand.

Anyways I was trying to use the “arbitrary text” widget that came with Wordpress and having no luck with a php include. Example:

<?php include (“/home/djudd/docs/gallery/block-random.php”); ?>

Well it turns out that somebody put out a php code widget that does what I need. Thank god cause using iFrames was not going to cut it due to the limitations of style they have (can’t modify text color or background…wtf?).  So now finally…a month after the server change I finally feel like the site is mostly back up and running.

Why does wanting to add something on a sidebar in wordpress have to be so difficult? In Movable Type I could just edit the HTML but apparently I have to create a whole new widget and import it for wordpress?

So one of the things I’ve been wanting to add for a while was support to leave comments via other social sites like Facebook or Twitter.

I mean typepad was supported in Movabletype of course and I think OpenID was but I couldn’t find any real good support for Facebook via MT 5.0. Of course switching over to WordPress and there’s a plugin called RPX which seems to work pretty good. I’m going to play with it a bit more and see how well it works.

I have to say that I was really let down by MT 5….so I”m giving wordpress a test drive.

I’m sure I”ll be able to import the database…i’m more interested in the themes and integrating facebook commenting.

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So yesterday there was a horrible snow storm here in the Chicago area. There was also an appointment at Lutheran Advocate Hospital in Park Ridge for Amelia. We ended up driving for over two and a half hours through the snow storm (a trip that should only have taken thirty minutes) in order to make sure we could be there in time. Because of Amelia’s age her UTI made the Pediatrician recomment getting an ultrasound on her kidneys and another test called a Voiding CystoUrethroGram.
Well the end result is that she does have bilateral urinary reflux (ie pee goes back into the kidney’s) so that just kind of sucks. We have to go see another specialist next week to see what they recommend. Do we operate or just wait and see if she grows out of it. The whole thing just sucks and theres nothing you can do but sit and wait. Drives me crazy.
She’s just so small and pudgy and cute I can’t imagine anything really wrong with her.

please go suck a bag of dicks. really. seriously. you suck.