The Pressley Press

In case you’ve never heard of it, Top Gear is a BBC automotive television show featuring the perfectly complimentary personalities or Jeremy Clarkson, Richard Hammond, and James May. What’s great about the show, is not necessarily the car reviews but the interactions between the show’s hosts. Jeremy, a tall sarcasm-filled, wiseass with an equally tall ego, is the guy everyone in your group of friends love to complain about. Richard Hammond, a short boyish speed-loving car junkie is your scrappy little brother that your friends like tagging along, because he doesn’t take any of their crap. James is well, James - your stuffy older brother who thinks everything is stupid unless it’s “dignified”, bland, and super-practical. Each one of the hosts checks and balances each other, and the friendship between them as depicted on the show really makes for some entertaining television.

Another impressive aspect of the show that’s rarely mentioned is its production quality. Whoever the director of photography is for the on-location footage needs an award. The landscape shots are simply gorgeous. The editor needs some recognition as well because the editing of all the driving and on-location footage is just excellent.

Even if you’re not a car guy, the adventures of these 3 TV hosts, along with excellent production value makes this show well worth the watch.

Our dog, Ruby died last night. She was the sweetest, most loving, and charismatic dog I’ve ever met. She will be sorely missed.

It seems that Time Warner and Viacom are in a contract battle regarding the fees associated with Viacom channels appearing on the media giant’s cable system. HuffingtonPost.com states :

“Media giant Viacom Inc. said its Nickelodeon, MTV, Comedy Central and 16 other channels will go dark on Time Warner Cable Inc. at 12:01 a.m. Thursday if a new carriage fee deal is not agreed upon by then.

Viacom has asked for fee increases of between 22 percent and 36 percent per channel, an amount that could increase customers’ cable bills, Dudley said. Viacom spokeswoman Kelly McAndrew said the requested increase was in the very low double-digit percentage range.”

I’d hate to lose Comedy Central, and the children’s programming but on the bright side, if I lose all these channels there’s no reason to pay for cable anymore, so I could save a lot of money every month.

Today at work I was informed that my work laptop was “spamming” the network and bringing down cell relays. The network traffic sniffer identified the offending traffic as “Apple TV” related. So after some digging in iTunes (which I have installed only for Outlook calendar syncing with my iPhone) we disabled the “Look for Apple TVs” option, the “Look for Shared Libraries” option, the “Look for AirTunes ” option, and the “Look for iPhone and iTouch Remotes” option. As you can guess all that “looking” creates a lot of broadcast network traffic. So, if you don’t want a stressed Network Engineer coming to your desk at work wonding what you’re doing to his network, I recommend that you disable the Bonjour service all together.

Go to Start-> All Programs -> Administrative Tools -> Services, select “Bonjour Service”, right-click, go to “Properties”, set the “Startup type” to “disabled” and then click the “Stop” button. Trust me, your friendly neighborhood Network Engineer will thank you for it.

Here’s why…