Nick Postagulous
Thursday, August 26, 2004
The Replay is Dead, Long Live the Replay
Well, to make a long story short, I fixed the replaytv hard drive. Alison says I saved us around $400, which just shows that she, like me, would love to get one of the newer, but still obsolete, Replay 4000 series units.
They’re unique that they have non-upgradable operating systems and were made during the time that Rio owned Replay, and they lost tons of money in lawsuits since they would not abandon the automatic commercial skip feature. Eventually, Rio sold to Marantz and that feature was removed from the 5000 series. But, hey, remember, 4000 has non-upgradable OS.
The way I fixed it, and this is the long version of the short story, I tested the old drive with Maxtor’s Powermax free software while I used the old, original replay drive to connect and start editing out channels which have changed since that drive was removed from the unit. I had to cancel the full surface scan of the dead drive, as it was hanging up and would take a week to claw its way through the entire drive. Low level format, quick version, and then use RTVPatch to turn the big, formerly dead drive into a replay drive again. Ta-da. I then recorded and watched Judgement Day, or whatever that show is called on G4TechTV, just to test it.
Wreckage
In the middle of that hardware fixit session, after the original drive had gotten all the information off the replay servers but before the formerly dead drive had been diagnosed, the next door neighbor, Sunny, came by, panicking. One of the kids had the van so she had no car. Her female roommate person had just called saying she was having a seizure while driving and managed to tell Sun where she was before the sound of the phone being dropped was heard.
We got to the site before the firemen. Sunny’s roommate was conscious, but didn’t feel any pain, which really, she should have. During her seizure she had apparently floored it. A Dodge Intrepid took most of the damage, but it also an early 90s Accord and a late 80s small pickup truck were also hit. The SUV was on the pavement, but had mud on it’s roof, so it had been upside down on the hill that I stood on with the Apartment people.
The Firemen were very efficient cutting Sunny’s roommate out of the SUV. The apartment people were very insensitive. I think it almost came to blows when I told this one apartment guy that he was not going to go tell Sunny to put out her cigarette. Hell, she’s standing with six firemen. They’d tell her if she needed to.
The guy in the little pickup got a neck brace before being moved. The old lady in the passenger seat of the Intrepid was taken in a stretcher. So was Sunny’s roommate.
After I was sure that Sunny didn’t need me anymore, I went back home. It wasn’t hard weaving between the fire trucks (3), police cars (around 6), ambulances (3), and urban responder units (2) in the Focus. Traffic was backed up for only about a mile since HPD was turning people around before they entered the wooded area on Old Madison Pike.
One Person, One Vote
There is a riverside community about an hour from here that had some interesting election stuff go on. The new mayor of Guntersville won by one vote. It was an absentee vote, the kind you get if you won’t be available for election day. And, it turns out, the reason he couldn’t vote on election day was because he died after he sent the absentee ballot in. Legal wrangling will ensue, I’m sure.
