| Page 6 Diablo Blue June, 2002 |
| Tonight’s warm-up theme for discussion was traffic cops. It seems most of those present have at least one story they are willing to tell involving petty moving violations. (Who knows how many more serious incidents they are keeping to themselves? Doubtless quite a few.) Charlie seems prone to trouble whenever he gets near a motorcycle. He offered up two stories: being stopped because the cycle he had on a rack was blocking his taillights (the officer let him go when Charlie promised to go fight to the auto store and buy cable and auxiliary stoplights, which Charlie maintains he promptly did); and being stopped for muffler and lights violations. Nick was stopped when the bike he was towing came loose and was dragging along the pavement — shades of Chevy Chase and his aunt’s dog in Family Vacation. Craig described the tremendous willpower he was able to show when, as a young sailor, he rented a red Camero in Reno and drove it to the Bay area. There is obviously more to this story (a sailor finds himself in Reno and needs to rent a car???), but this is all we heard. Nick also told of helping a friend move when the SWAT team descended on them. It seems there had been recent burglaries in the neighborhood and an alert neighbor called in the law. Nick somehow managed to look innocent and escape incarceration. One of my more unusual contacts with law enforcement, which I did not get to share at the meeting as the pizza arrived and everyone ran to the kitchen, was during a commute from Concord to Rancho Cordova. As I entered Sacramento on route 50, flashing lights appeared directly behind me. I pulled over and a CHP officer ran up to my car. He told me he had to get somewhere else and didn’t have time to write a ticket, but he couldn’t just let me get away with passing him. (Technically, he merged from an on-ramp as I cruised past at 80+ miles per hour, so I don’t think you can call it “passing” him, but I chose not to argue the point). Then he got in his car and drove off. As pizza was being served Nick shared with us a poster illustrating the MPEG-2 Transport Stream. Let me just say that it answered all my questions. There was miscellaneous discussion about future speakers. We kicked around the idea of a hardware swap event, but arrived at no solid decision. Charlie described the new HD projector he just installed in his home and offered a demonstration after the meeting. The meeting ended early so those interested could attend the demo. |
| XRay Vision is very simple to install but the setup can raise a few questions since some settings are not supported and the manual is….not great. Their website is not filled with a lot of helpful info and the tech support although friendly was not overly knowledgeable about their product. (One tech had no idea what the software was supposed to do.) It turned out the problem was on my hosting service’s end and a call to Pac Bell solved the problem. Once the setup is |