Cap’n Ken’s Homespun Wisdom

Having been on the road all last week, I hadn”t fired up my SharpReader since a week ago Friday (I see RSS as a workplace tool, so I don”t feed at home).

In between trying to catch up on 1,000 work things today, I also attempted to get caught up on my feeds. I made it through friends” blogs and most of the developments in my little corner of the Internet business, but I”ve decided to let most of the 2,737 items I”ve accumulated go unread.

So if any of you heard about cool gadgets, weird online things or the like last week, feel free to hip the Cap”n to them.

[editor"s note: The wife did send me a story about merger speculation between Sirius and XM Radio. I"ll just say that if that happens, I hope they use the XM equipment and keep the Sirius programming.]

The Cap”n would like to apologize to The Wisdom Nation for his inexcusable lack of output over the past week. There was plenty of fodder on the trip out west, but just not a lot of time to write.

So in the spirit of catching up, here”s a roundup of things that have been on my mind lately:

• For an American car, the Pontiac G6 (the one Oprah gave away) isn”t bad. I had one as my rental out in L.A. Good performance, decent interior, doesn”t look bad. Its stereo had XM Radio built in, but it was probably the worst integration of XM I could imagine. The data came across only on a single nine-character line, so unless you realize that “Catherine” is actually “Catherine Wheel”, a lot of the value of satellite radio data is lost.

• Compared to Sirius, XM Radio kind of blows. Their stupidly-named rock stations (Fred, Ethel, Lucy, Squizz) are more or less programmed like commercial stations. And don”t get me started on their amazingly lame country stations. Give me Sirius” Underground Garage or Outlaw Country any day.

• A9’s new Visual Yellow Pages product is bizarre. They actually drove around cities with a GPS-enabled digital camera mounted on an SUV to capture images of storefronts to marry with business searches. If you “walk the block” in East Atlanta, you can almost get to our house.

• Maybe someday security at LAX will stop this “I highly recommend you remove your shoes” crap. I was too tired Friday morning to mess around with the TSA guys, but a co-worker (who also travels in specific airport-friendly shoes) fell for the “highly recommend” trick and went through with his shoes on. Of course, he got pulled aside for the full-on terrorist search. Note to the TSA at LAX: If you are going to keep this non-TSA policy of searching people who go through security with their shoes on, just say it”s policy to hand-search anyone who comes through in shoes. The “highly recommend” line is not helpful to anybody.

• I was at a Starbucks in San Jose Tuesday and asked for my traditional non-morning beverage: iced venti unsweet coffee. I was told by the Starbucks dude that they were not stocking iced coffee - the secret to Starbucks” iced coffee is that they make it extra-strong specifically for use as iced coffee - that day because it was cold outside. This is the first time I”ve ever been told this, and I hope it”s not a trend. If you have an item on your permanent menu, I expect to be able to buy it any day. If you think not a lot of people are going to buy it on a given day, just don”t make as much of it, dude.

• Note to VH1″s Best Week Ever: Stop with the stupid skits. Just talk about the stupid pop culture stuff that happened in the last week. None of the changes you”ve made to the format over the past six months have been improvements. The show is on the verge of getting de-listed on the TiFaux.

OK, I feel somewhat caught up now. I”ve got a big adventure coming up Friday in L.A., so stay tuned for that.

I got down to L.A. yesterday after a day and a half of meetin” and eatin” up in The Valley. And while in L.A., I”m staying at The Forbidden Hotel.

The Forbidden Hotel is the stuff of legend around my office. It used to be the standard choice for people coming out west, but someone at some point decided it didn”t look good for the Atlanta people to be “in residence” here when visiting the L.A. office.

And thus it is now Forbidden.

I”m at The Forbidden Hotel because The Favored Hotel and Backup Hotels 1 & 2 are all booked up. So I won”t be in trouble for staying here. Several of us are holed up here, and it should be noted that our rate is lower than what”s being paid at The Favored Hotel.

But I can see why the company declared this place Forbidden. The Forbidden Hotel is all about “service”. There”s only valet parking; I was escorted to the front desk by a bellman even though I said I didn”t need help with my bags - he needed to “announce” my arrival to the clerk - and I had to turn down an offer from yet another bellman to “guide me” to my room.

When I stopped at the front desk to change a $20 for all the palms I need to grease, I actually felt like I might have to tip the clerk for making the change I needed to tip everybody else. He presented my change like some kind of magic trick - holding it high in the air and dramatically thumbing off each bill.

I came back from dinner last night and discovered that the “turndown service” had left a little tube of toothpaste in my bathroom, apparently having noticed the gimpy remnant of my Crest tube. That”ll earn housekeeping a nicer tip.

I”m pretty frugal with company money - I won”t be getting a $30 breakfast or expensing any massages or “eyelash tinting” - so I can see how this place can get out of hand. And honestly, after several days of travel, I”d rather stay at a place where I feel more comfortable throwing dirty laundry on the floor in my room. Here, I”ve got my dirties stashed in a laundry bag inside my suitcase, and my coat it neatly hung on the in-room “valet”. I even hang the plush robe back up on the back of the bathroom door.

I”ll be back out in L.A. next week. I”ve booked a room at Backup Hotel 1, where there”s no valet, no room service and no bellman. Call it Forbidden Hotel guilt.

Good news for The Cap”n on the HDTV front. Dish Network is buying the satellite TV operation of Cablevision - which is basically the HD satellite service VOOM.

This is big for a couple of reasons. First, I”m glad I didn”t take the Voom route to getting HD (thankfully, they never rolled out their TiFaux). But more significantly, it gives Dish a new satellite. Hard to argue with the logic behind buying Voom (including its already-deployed satellite) for $200 million when it would cost $250 million to put up a new Dish bird.

So once the deal is finalized, Dish will all of a sudden have an extra satellite to send me programming on. And it sends HD signals [editor"s note: maybe all satellites can send HD. The Cap"n is no satellite technology expert]. So maybe - hopefully - Dish will put local HD channels up on this bird and get me an integrated local HD package sometime this year.

DirecTV is planning to launch local HD on new satellites sometime this year, assuming they can get the gear up to space. And until now, their DirecTV HD DVR was the leading contender for The Cap”n”s HD dollars (on the assumption that they”ll drop the ridiculous $1,000 price tag). Comcast was second, and Dish was third.

And now? We”ll have to see what happens with Dish / VOOM, but with a good strategy and execution (lose the DVR fee, give me local HD for the price of non-HD local), Dish could make its way back into the HD equation.

As for The Cap”n, I”m off to the west coast again today for a full week of hob-nobbing with industry giants. The Wisdom”s policies on work-related pieces prevent more details, but it should be interesting. So look for weird publish schedules through Thursday.

Found in the blogosphere - a fabulous photo stream of shots taken by some guy from Chicago when he was down in Atlanta for the Falcons / Rams game:

• Atlanta photos - SkyscraperPage.

Dude did a great job of showing my city”s great neighborhoods - he got around to Grant Park, Cabbagetown, Little 5 Points, Virginia-Highland and East Atlanta.

For the uninitiated, here”s a brief glimpse into a small part of Cap”n Ken”s world (click on images for full-sized views):

The Flatiron, East Atlanta (the closest bar to Casa Cap”n Ken and a frequent destination)

Old-school barber shop in East Atlanta Village between Joe”s Coffee Shop and The EARL. No, The Cap”n does not get his hair cut there.

View of Six Feet Under (Grant Park-ish) from Oakland Cemetery.

As I said, great photos. But what got me about the photo series were some of the comments left about it:

WTF… you made Atlanta look… urban.

Your Atlanta looks vibrant and interesting.

So is this not Buckhead? Ive heard thats one of the most happening spots. These pictures are great! I love to see vibrant stores and urban areas doin their thing.

Apparently this is the weird part of town. Which means I won”t be swinging by there, but nice pics anyway

I”m not surprised that “this Atlanta” is so foreign to people, and witnessed by the Buckhead comment, there”s a definite - incorrect - perception people have of the city. I”d imagine to most people (including both out-of-towners and suburban Atlantans), Hartsfield + Downtown + Buckhead = Atlanta. And that”s fine. To most people, American Idol winners = good music, too.

But in reality, Atlanta is a city of great neighborhoods. They”re not all “the weird part of town” - but the fun ones are.

So thanks, random dude, for finding the cool part of Atlanta.

Loyal readers of The Wisdom are aware that I”ve given up (for now) trying to bring HDTV into the house while retaining my basic requirement of a dual-tuner DVR. The best solution seems to be the DirecTV HD DVR, but at $1,000 for hardware in addition to HD and TiVo fees, I”m sitting on the sidelines for a while.

But in reading the new CNet Review of the DirecTV unit, I was struck with a consideration I”ve never even thought of before:

Unlike standalone DVRs, the HD TiVo records the raw DirecTV signal feed, so there”s no signal degradation. As a result, recordings look exactly the same as live feeds. That means most standard channels, and even some high-def networks, exhibit softness or noticeable jaggies, at least on large displays, thanks to DirecTV”s aggressive compression techniques.

“Noticeable jaggies” on “most standard channels”? I”ve noticed a few jaggies on my 44″ DLP while watching really dark scenes (the black gets jaggy) through Dish Network, but everything else looks super.

So are jaggies an issue in general with DirecTV on a large screen? Is DirecTV more “aggressive” with their compression technique than Dish Network? And DirecTV users got thoughts on this?

God, it used to be so easy to pick TV service …