Thanksgiving with Wassermans and friends

Real Thanksgiving we spent with Rob & Lee, Mark & Miriam and friends.  Here are a couple of photos courtesy of Mark.  As always a good time was had with plenty of food and friendship.

Pre Thanksgiving in Charlotte & we adopt Titan

BB & I went down to visit family in Charlotte and have a pre Thanksgiving Thanksgiving.  Had a great time.

While there we stayed at E lake cottage.  It's just charming.  I took a few photos.


The other big news is that J let us adopt Titan, one of her Aussies.  Great dog.  Here are some photos.

Synergy

One of the issues I've been unhappy about with the TV is that I needed to have a separate keyboard for the computer TV.  A bit of searching found Synergy.  It provides a facility to remote the keyboard and mouse for a machine.  For my purposes it's just what's wanted so that I can control the TV computer from my laptop.  Now if disk prices would just come down I'd be done with the Fire Comcast TV project.

Comcast fired!

Verizon was by yesterday and installed fiber.  The Internet is definitely faster, although not dramatically so.  I did have to reconfigure some of the house network.  The router I'd been using to run DHCP had a reservation feature that allowed me to assign static IPs.  I needed these to support some of applications I run across the local net.  The Verizon provided router, a generally much more advanced device, doesn't have an explicit static reserved IP feature.  It does seem to create the same effect by always using the same IP for a given MAC address.  The net was that I had to do a bit of reconfiguration of some software that for whatever reason needed a real IP instead of a host name.

With everything running again properly, I called Comcast to terminate the remaining service.  There was some entirely needless fuss and bother over verifying my identity.  It seems that calling from the registered phone number, identifying the account holder, and verifying the address isn't enough.  We finally got past that and Comcast service is now terminated.

We are still having a bit of issue with the USB disk drive I'm using to hold downloaded media.  From time to time it gratuitously dismounts.  That's a bit frustrating when watching something.  I'd like to replace it with a 2TB internal drive but sadly drive prices have skyrocketed with the flooding in Asia.  I'll put up with the dismounts until prices return to a sane level then replace it.

Bottom line now, though, is that I no longer pay for TV, have cut my Internet bill by 1/3, and my phone bill to 1/8 of what it was.  Well worth the couple of hundred I spent on equipment!

Fall bike ride with BB

On this lovely warm fall day BB and I took a 10 mile bike ride.  We went to Wayside Inn by way of Rt 20.  We'll probably not use that route again as Rt 20 is busy and noisy even on Sundays.  Wayside was, as always, nice but we decided not to stop as neither of us were tired or thirsty.  The fall colors were very good even after last weeks heavy snow.  There is still a fair number of downed trees and debris on roads and sidewalks.  Even so, the ride was outstanding.  Here are some photos:

BB and I went for a short bike ride today.  The plan was to bike over to Wayside Inn and stop for a mulled cider.  We got to the inn OK but, sadly, no cider and thus no mulled cider.  We stopped at the mill and I took some photos.  Here's the story:

Bike ride to 9 acre corner

Between the weather, girls weekend away, and a back issue we've not been biking for a bit.  But today with bright sunny sky we rode to 9 Acre Corner and the farm stand.  It was good to be out again.  We had to detour a few times as the storm damage is still being cleared.  While we didn't get to much damage, just one tree dropped a large limb, nearby areas were really hit.  Otherwise, it was a great ride on a brisk fall day with Monday's heavy wet snow gone.