So two months ago I re-subscribed to Cox cable tv services. I’d had the net service for years but just objected to paying all that money for video. Alas, when I got the Wii I needed a little larger screen to put it on. So I found a 40″ 1080p set for $350.

All was well and I’d actually managed a wire antenna that picked up about 20 stations. It’s just that depending on time of day, weather, etc. some stations would come in, others would pixelate, or just go black.

And it lacked the 24/7 cooking channels and HGTV (For Keyron).

So I had them hook it up.

Been having a problem with the Motorola DCX3200-M cable box. It’s more an annoyance that Cox refuses to address than anything so I think a little public shaming is in order here.

It keeps going into Auto Power Down mode. I had called Cox about this and they told me that it was my television and not the cable box. So I checked the TV settings and the auto power down/off settings were disabled.

Well after I told the Cox representative that the TV wasn’t doing it, that the APD notice said “Press any button on your cable remote to cancel.”, and that they couldn’t help me, I told her have a good day and hung up.

But it is still occurring. This time I grabbed a photo:

And while I’m on a rant, could Flickr please fix the photo link issue? I’m getting tired of having to get the HTML/BB code, paste into a text editor and pick out the fucking link. Are you at Flickr TRYING to push me to Picassa?

***UPDATE***

I found Cox’s Facebook page, Liked it, and posted that they may want to look at my profile since this blog cross posts to Facebook. Let’s see if they answer now.

****UPDATE II****
The Cox folks said they couldn’t see my FB profile. So they referred me to the Cox New England page. I posted my complaint on there. We’ll see what they say.

Yesterday (Saturday) we were invited our friends Gina and Troy’s home for some libations and food in belated celebration of yet another year passing for Keyron.

I should explain, among Gina’s many talents is that she actually attended bar tending school and is the Goddess of Alcoholic Libations.

Last night she made her Sangria, only this time she substituted rum for the normal ingredient, and added a little bit of seltzer water to the drinks too.

I know my effective dose of alcohol, but when you have wine combined with rum, lets just say you can down quite a bit of it and actually blow past your effective dose into somewhere just below lethal dose.

But you’re getting some fruit with the drink too, severely pickled fruit but fruit none the less.

Anyhow I tied one on big time. But I wasn’t able to deploy my usual strategy of roughly 500ml of water somewhere in the mix. That usually heads off any major issues.

At last count I believe it was about six wine glasses full of Sangria, and a couple glasses of wine. Knowing that a 750ml bottle of wine will fill four glasses, it means I drank the equivalent of 1.5 bottles with the rest being rum and other ingredients. Yikes!

Woke up at 5:30AM wondering if I should do the old hair of the dog that bit you, but instead settled on downing about a 700ml of water and my allergy meds, and then went back to bed.

Woke around 10AM and took a couple of ibuprofen. Then had a little something to eat.

It’s strange, I can down beer and wine with no ill effect, but put in some rum and it’s hangover city!

It seems I’ve completely replaced the iPod Touch now with my Samsung Forte/Indulge Android phone.

Not only could I sync my ENTIRE iTunes library to the device using DoubleTwist and AirSync, but I have no discovered a new application. It’s called TuneIn. I believe it’s available on both Android and IOS.

The music is organized by Local Radio, Music, Talk, Sports, By Location, By Language and Podcasts.

For an example, I chose Music, then R&B, then scrolled down and found Motown. Tap a station and it buffers and then plays. Much of it is mp3 format at 128kbps.

So those of you with capped data connections, and there are few of us that don’t have that these days need to be cognizant of the bandwidth used.

Lets say you listen to TuneIn for 4 hours a day. 128kbps = 128 * 1024 = 131,072 bits per second. In an hour you use 7,864,320 bits, or 7mb. In 4 hours you’d use 31mb. In 30 days 943mb.

So those of you on Verizon and at&t, beware. Me, I went MetroPCS because it’s flat fee for all you can eat service. Plus 99.9% of my travel is in metropolitan areas where the service is almost all 4G now. When I go to the places that aren’t I at least get voice and text.

With all the news that DOMA is being attacked on all sides I started thinking about the half effort that is the RI Civil Unions law. The usual cast of characters is weighing in on the law, most notably Bishop Tobin of the Diocese of Providence who pushes the usual bovine effluent of gay unions or marriages as being immoral and unnatural.

But here’s the thing. The language in Rhode Island’s Civil Union law that carves out the exceptions for the religious institutions was unwarranted. The opposition to any equality would have you believe that if said equality were granted, then their rights would be curtailed.

But that notion is patently false. I’ll explain why. Rhode Island has had an Employment, Housing and Credit Non Discrimination law since 1996 for the LGB community, and since 2001 for the transgender community. So now all of the LGBT community enjoys freedom from discrimination in those areas.

But to my knowledge there hasn’t been a case where a religious entity was on the losing side of a lawsuit over any of those things. I know of gay people who teach in Catholic schools, and there hasn’t been any backlash.

So the notion that if we had fully equality we’d punish the religious bigots is incorrect. Granted, I’d like to see the likes of Tobin and his ilk shut up about the issue already. You can only say “Because my god said so!” so many times before the arguments and the stories of the harms visited upon LGBT people because of religious discrimination or discrimination in general become real indicators of the true motivations of the religious bigotry.

A friend and I were talking. He is in the education field and I explained that I wish the proposal to forgive student loan debt for those in math, science and engineering if they committed to teaching for two to four years was a great idea.

I’m not one to tolerate misbehavior or idiocy. So when my friend asked how I’d control the classroom I explained I’d have a medium sized dog cage in the back of the room with a huge padlock on it.

Never would put anyone inside but it’s the implied threat that works.

I promised I’d post em’. I’ve uploaded all of it, named, tagged and set rights on about a third so far. But here are a few, and you can see the rest on my YouTube page.

The Brazilian Contingent, I love the costumes and the colors. Gotta get down to Rio for Carnival some day.

The L Word marchers, interesting the big pink L on the roof of a U-Haul. You know the joke about lesbians and hauling heavy shit right?

Gay Peruvians of the Americas

Isreali Marchers.

Aid for Aids, interesting group that re-directs medications from people who no longer need them, to people that do.

The Google Marchers, and of course Android was their logo and this video was shot using an Andorid OS phone.

The Gay Flag passes by:

Ali Forney Center marchers. I have given money to this organization, you should too.

There are a LOT more videos to come. I shot well over 50 clips of this parade. It just takes time to re-watch, title and do all the administrivia.

I’m not pleased about it. I know we had a solid lead on true marriage equality in the state, so much so that we scared a bunch of politicians due to the fact that we knew how to organize as a political entity. That’s what happens when you get a bunch of smart and talented people together, you get results. That is until the usual players like the RI State Democratic Party, Speaker Gordon Fox, and HRC come in and completely throw the game.

So let me state it loudly and clearly. I want HRC the fuck out of Rhode Island. I will not give them a dime, I will not help the marriage equality movement, I will not do anything until HRC is out and Ray Sullivan steps down as director of MERI.

As it is now, there is no effectual group left in RI. PEAC is gone, Queer Action is gone, and MERI is a mere shell of itself.

That said, they RI civil unions bill got voted by the RI Senate. It’s a horrible bill, because the exemptions they’ve carved out for religious institutions go a bit too far. For example, if you have the misfortune of being injured and are transported to either Our Lady of Fatima or St. Josephs, they could potentially deny that persons civil unioned partner the ability to make decisions for them, etc.

The bill makes such tenuous connections for religious exemption that it makes it almost inevitable that there will be a law suit filed sooner than later. I say this because I see how horribly the whole “civil unioned” term flows. I don’t want to be civil unioned, I want to be married! And this civil union bill sets up two distinct classes in violation of both the RI Constitution Article 1 Section 2 and the U.S. Constitution under the 14th Amendment.