Mets 6, Cubs 2 (at Wrigley Field)

A four-run rally in the ninth inning against Cubs closer Ryan Dempster broke a 2-2 tie and lifted the Mets past the Cubs. Cubs ace Carlos Zambrano only surrendered 1 run but issued 7 walks, and left the game after only 5 innings. El Duque gave up 2 runs over 6 2/3 innings.

The game was scorless for the first 5 innings; the Mets drew first blood with a solo home run by Ramon Castro in the top of the 6th inning. Zambrano then left the game with cramps and dehydration. The Cubs tied the game in the bottom of the 6th inning with a Derek Lee solo home run. Marlon Anderson's 2 out RBI single in the top of the 7th inning put the Mets ahead 2-1. Jason Kendall hit a 2 out RBI double in the bottom of the 7th, scoring Mark DeRosa and chasing Orlando Hernandez from the game. In the 9th, David Wright drew a leadoff walk. Carlos Delgado doubled, scoring Wright, and Delgado went to third on the throw to the plate. Shawn Green's two out double scored Delgado, and Green came home on an RBI single by Ruben Gotay. Moises Alou, pinch-hitting for Guillermo Mota, singled, moving Gotay into scoring position. Gotay scored on a Jose Reyes single. Billy Wagner pitched a scoreless inning for the Mets.

The NL East-leading Mets moved to 15 games over .500 (62-47) and extended their lead over the Philadelphia Phillies to 5 games, as a result of the Brewers beating the Phillies 2-1 at Miller Park. The win, along with the Cubs' loss, allowed the Brewers to take a 1 game lead in the NL Central.

Overall, it was a solid effort by a team that has been short-handed due to injuries. Second-stringers David Newhan (left field), Marlon Anderson (playing centerfield, due to the Beltran injury) and Ramon Castro (catcher) started for the Mets.

AM Bandscan

Here's a list of some of the more interesting stations I came across on tonight's AM bandscan:

530 AM: Radio Vision from Turks and Caicos Islands; rather weak

555 AM: Radio ZIZ from St. Kitts - was surprised to get this at all (there have been thunderstorms all night), but then again, it's not competing against anything.

670 AM: Spanish language station - possibly Cuba?

690 AM: CINF from Quebec

700 AM: WLW is very weak; good thing I can listen on XM.

750 AM: WSB; also weak.

840 AM: WHAS (airing Coast To Coast AM)

890 AM: WLS is coming in clearly, even though WGN isn't.

1070 AM: Old stalwart CBA is coming in with CBC Radio Overnight, but very weakly.

1120 AM: KMOX coming in with significant adjacent channel interference.

1140 AM: WRVA, also airing Coast To Coast.

1170 AM: WWVA. If I didn't have XM and wanted to listen to Steve Sommers, I could listen to this station. (It comes in much more clearly than WLW.)

1530 AM: I think this is the Cincinnati station that briefly had a liberal talk format (used to be WSAI). Apparently, they did not do well as a liberal talk station, and switched to sports talk last year. I'm listening at 2:24 AM, however, and they have some religious programming now.

1650 AM: Should be Radio Disney from Portsmouth, Virginia, but it's being overpowered by some other station broadcasting a report on Little League baseball in Israel (?). They identified themselves as Radio Shalom, Montreal.

Back in the saddle

I've resumed posting to this blog after a 4-month hiatus. I was able to get MythTV running, but only after acquiring a new system. The specs of my new MythTV box are as follows:

Processor: Intel 3.0 GHz Dual-Core
Motherboard: NVIDIA chipset
Memory: 2 GB SDRAM
Hard Drive: 400 GB SATA drive, 300 GB IDE drive
Video Adapter: NVIDIA GeForce 7300
TV Tuner: 2 Hauppauge PVR-150s

So far, the biggest problems were (1) the SATA drivers timing out when I capture to the SATA drive, and (2) an IVTV driver timeout problem.

I didn't really solve the SATA timeout issue; I just switched the MythTV file share to the IDE drive. The IVTV timeout issue was solved by disabling the irqbalance daemon. Apparently, if you have a dual processor system, the irqbalance daemon is enabled by default. The irqbalance daemon "balances" the irq requests across both sets of IRQs (each processor gets 24). If it's not enabled, Linux will still use both processors' IRQs if necessary, but it won't be balanced across the processors. Apparently, IVTV doesn't like IRQ balancing, at least in those cases where a tuner shares a resource with something else - in this case, the on-board sound chipset. After disabling irqbalance, both tuner cards worked fine.

Stossel Comments on the Boston Terror Scare

This isn't really germane to the main focus of this blog; nevertheless, I found John Stossel's take on Boston being brought to its knees by the Mooninites to be rather insightful, particularly with respect to the potential pitfalls of centralization:

Boston's crazy reaction reinforces the theme I've been sounding in recent columns: Decentralization of authority is always better than centralized power. Imagine if the federal Department of Homeland Security imposed procedures on all cities for when suspicious devices are spotted. The whole country might have come to a standstill.

Also worth checking out is this article about how the Boston incident did not significantly boost the ratings for Aqua Teen Hunger Force. The article failed to mention that the show is currently in reruns (and almost all the previous episodes are available on DVD), which may have something to do with the stagnant ratings.

Installation of MythTV (part three)

After the re-installation of FC6 and compiling/installing MythTV v. 0.20, I found there were three outstanding issues:

(1) MythTV had a tendency to crash while recording (and sometimes when watching live TV;

(2) I could not get video to display at a higher resolution than 320 X 240; and

(3) I could not get MythArchive to work.

I noted that Linux reported "Unsupported SiS chipset" on boot, and decided that #2 was probably the result of Linux not supported the on-board graphics chipset. I therefore took a chance on buying a new graphics card. Since my MythTV system has a PCI Express (X16) slot, I could have gone all-out and ordered a state-of-the-art video card like Nvidia's GeForce 8800. As it happened, I went with a more budget-priced option: Connect3D's ATI Radeon X300. I probably should have procured an Nvidia graphics card, but as it turns out, the Radeon X300 proved adequate. Here's the specs for this card:

ATI Radeon X300 graphics processor
128 MB DDR
VGA/DVI/TV Out output
Maximum 2D display mode: 2048 X 1536
Maximum 3D display mode: 2048 X 1536
64-bit memory interface
Four extreme parallel 3D rendering pixel pipelines
Two programmable vertex shader pipelines
Full DX9 support

Again, the X300 is essentially a budget-priced card, yet it's a good indication of recent technological advances. I paid about $50 (USD) for this card. I paid the same amount for a graphics card for a system I was putting together about 6 or 7 years ago whose motherboard didn't have an onboard graphics chip. I was able to get a PCI graphics card with 16 MB of memory. A few years before that, the same amount of money would have bought a card with maybe 4 MB of memory (just enough for a resolution of 1280 X 1024 in 24-bit true color mode).

Anyhow, once I installed the new graphics card, I was able to run MythTV at any resolution it supports (anywhere from 720 X 480 to 320 X 240, and anywhere in between). Problem #2 seemed to be solved. #1 and #3 will be discussed in a future posting.

WDHA cancels Tour Bus

I haven't been following the going-ons in local radio, for awhile, but I just read on radio-info.com that WDHA has cancelled The Tour Bus. Does anyone know what's going on at DHA, other than the obvious answer (Terrie Carr left and since then, the station's been in disarray)?

Installation of Myth TV (Part Two)

The second in a series of posts documenting the tortuous process of getting Myth TV to work on a PC running FC6:

Once I installed FC6 (the second time, with all the MySQL plugins included, as well as QT), I downloaded the Myth TV tarball. Compiling and installing Myth TV was a trivial process, as was setting up the SQL database. Mythtv-setup recognized my WinTV-Go card even without installation of the ivtv drivers. I typed in the login information for zap2it.com, and setup retrieved the program listings.

I ran alsamixer to mute the WinTV-Go card and set the volume. I declined to set up lirc (the remote control software), since it required recompiling the kernel.

When I ran mythfrontend, I selected "Watch TV". This was the first real problem I had since solving the SQL problem; the video output covered the entire screen, but the bottom third of the screen displayed garbage (vertical lines). I played around with different resolutions until I found one that worked (320 X 240). I set the bitrate to 3000 bps (about 1.4 GB/hour) - probably too high in retrospect. I then set about to put the program through the paces, and programmed it to tape some shows.

What I found was that the system had a propensity for crashing; typically, this could happen anywhere from 15 minutes to an hour after it started taping (it would also crash sometimes while watching live TV). Solving this problem has proven to be a daunting task.

First Post

This is a new blog devoted to radio and tech issues of interest to me.

First I note that apparently blogger.com does not work with Opera (8.51). This has forced me to switch over to Internet Explorer to edit these posts.

I'm trying to put together a Myth TV system, with some difficulties. Here's my system:

Shuttle XPC SS31T
LGA 775 P4 3.2 GHz
1.0 GB SDRAM
Maxtor 300 GB HD

My Linux distro of choice was Fedora Core 6. Advice to anyone trying to install Myth TV onto this system: install all the MySQL plugins; it will save you a world of hurt later on. There was one shared library MythTV needs in order to connect to the SQL database (libqsqlmysql.so, if I remember correctly), and the setup program wouldn't work even after I installed the plugin. A true Linux wizard would have been able to figure this one out; as it happened, I simply reinstalled FC6 with the right plugins.

More to come...