I've been very happy with DirecTV's service here but the monthly bill is like a car loan.  Or at least mine is thanks to my soup-to-nuts Platinum HD DVR package.

Over the past year I've been on a mission to trim the monthly nut.  Quitting tobacco products in May 2009 was a great start.  So was dumping my $119/month aDSL service with Speakeasy.net in December, moving this server to Panix.com and installing Roadrunner at home.  Okay, I didn't really save anything with that but I got a lot more bang for the buck.

Next on the plate was my crippling monthly satellite bill.  By my reckoning, I could save at least $51/month if I dumped all my movie channels -- HBO, Cinemax, Encore, the works.  I don't watch a lot of TV but when I do it's usually a movie.  However even with ALL the movie channels it's not as though I feast on a cornucopia of video variety.  Like bad oldies radio, it seems to be the same hundred-plus movies broadcast over and over again.  Just how many times CAN you watch Step Brothers anyway?

A lot of my friends are long-time Netflix fans and many tried to convert me to their wicked ways.  But the process of logging into a web site to search for a movie, make a selection, wait a couple of days for the DVD to arrive, watch it, put it back in the envelope and drop it in a mailbox was just too freakin' much work!  I'm the kind of guy who walks around with three month old uncashed checks in my wallet.

But when I heard about Netflix On Demand, that caught my attention.  How do I bridge that movie feed to my TV?   My Sharp Aquos in the master bedroom has an ethernet port and, using a powerline LAN, I had successfully downloaded many DirecTV video-on-demand titles over the internet.

Let's hit PAUSE for a second to note that, yes, I did wire every floor in the house with CAT5 the month I moved in and, yes, I did completely gut and renovate the master bedroom and, yes, I did pull two runs of coax inside those walls for the dish.  Guess what I forgot to run?  The CAT5.   Duh.

So, it was on to Google to see what I needed to do to get Netflix on my TV.   One solution was based on an inexpensive piece of Windows software called PlayOn. It bridges the Netflix video queue as well as several other popular sites like Hulu to your local LAN and makes them compatible with  DLNA-compliant devices, like the Aquos.  But PlayOn's performance was shaky at best.   I would have to select something several times to get it to "stick" and Netflix movies were even more problematic.

My doorbell rang this afternoon. It was Kevin, my postman, and he had a certified letter for me.

Certified letters are always bad news and I could see on the envelope that this one was from DOT so I knew it wasn't Publishers Clearinghouse telling me about my windfall.

Kevin said that every house on the block, except one, got certified letters from DOT. WTH, I've got nothing to be afraid of.  My sidewalk and curb are in excellent condition.  I signed for it and opened it up.

Inside was a Notice of Violation that my sidewalk had been inspected and was found to have a "trip hazard". The notice said that I needed to replace ten square feet of sidewalk. There was a graphic indicating this general section of my sidewalk.

In NYC -- and I presume that this is the case in most large cities -- a homeowner is responsible for the condition of his sidewalk.  If the sidewalk falls out of repair it's the homeowner's job to repair it, just as it's his job to keep it clean and clear of snow.  But actual enforcement of this has usually been limited to third party complaints and not as a result of proactive, formal inspections.

Last year around this time, a non-DOT crew, which I presumed to be an independent contractor, was tearing up and replacing sidewalks all over the neighborhood.  It was the same sort of thing: an anonymous inspector had run around the neighborhood tagging damaged sidewalks for repair. 

Certified letters were sent to homeowners with vague indications of the nature of the violation.   They were given 45 days to either apply for a permit and get the job done by a licensed contractor or the city would do the job @ $9+ square foot and bill the homeowner.

The thing is, I walked those sidewalks several times a day.  While a few of them did have some issues with tree roots, most of the sidewalks that were replaced I remember as being in fine shape.  At least, I never saw an issue with them.  The entire process struck me at the time as being somewhat arbitrary, which is to say fishy.  And now here we are again.

Can anyone spot this "trip hazard"? Bear in mind that my sidewalk is everything below where that stoop starts at the left side of the photo.  The questionable piece of sidewalk is on the lower right, immediately adjacent to the white painted curb cut up to the first vertical seam.   Here, let's zoom in on that section of sidewalk and see if we can spot that dangerous "trip hazard"...

Sunday morning, a neighbor down the block called the fire department for what was apparently a minor fire.  I saw FDNY parked down the street as I returned from walking the dogs.  One of the firefighters was flushing out the hydrant as another rolled up the hose.  They weren't there long.

The water pipes in the street here are very old and they also supply those hydrants.   Whenever one of those hydrants gets flushed the houses on the block get brown water for hours afterward.   I don't mean rusty looking water.   There are literally flakes of rust and (for lack of a better term) quasi-organic spooge floating in the water -- stuff you definitely don't want to swallow.  That's why most of the houses here have water filters.

It was a hot morning and the dogs were dehydrated so I used the sink's filtered water dispenser to fill their bowl.   But the sediment was so heavy that morning that the water was down to a trickle before the bowl was half full. I was way overdue for a filter change.

Back in 2000, I bought this dual cartridge water filter unit, an OmniFilter OT32, from Home Depot. The last time I stocked up on filters was probably 2005.   Bottom line, HD no longer carries OmniFilter.  Neither does Lowes nor the local plumbing supplier.  This market appears to be owned by GE and Whirlpool now. 

I bought a couple of filters that looked the same but when I installed them I got a Bellagio water show under the sink.

So I took the filters back and bought a pair of GE filters.  Same results: an in-cabinet water park.

I gave the gaskets a quick check and they looked okay.   Anyway, in my snorting and cursing efforts to finish this simple homeowner task, I caused a leak in the 'T' fitting that feeds the ice dispenser on my refrigerator.  Fortunately I had a replacement fitting for that -- and at last I managed to actually fix something.  But then it was back to the issue of the incompatible water filters. 

I couldn't see any alternative.  If I couldn't buy water filters for the unit I had, I would need to replace the unit itself.  So I bought a brand new water filtration unit, a GE, for $120.  Water definitely ain't free.

But right out of the box I knew I had problems.  First, the fitting for the water supply is designed to fit between the cold water supply and the fixture shut off valve.  In other words, there is no dedicated water shut-off for the filter.  How cheap 'n cheezy is that?  Every time I needed to change the filters I would have to shut off the house supply.  This is the kind of box store price cutting that annoys the hell out of me.  Someday I'll write about the bag of 100 BX connectors I got from a Home Depot which had set screws about 1/8" too short to get a decent bite on the cable.

Second, it was all Pex tubing.  Somehow, I would have to find a way to tap my refrigerator's copper water feed into it.  But NYC's plumbing code hasn't even caught up to the 1970s yet so finding a Pex->copper fitting was going to be a tedious quest.

Before ripping it out, I decided to take one last try at the old filter unit, beginning with a closer inspection of the containers for a possible crack.  Under bright light I saw what the problem was.  A thin, recessed gasket had rolled over on itself.   I fixed it, installed a new filter, snugged up the shell... presto.  No leaks.

I never thought I'd be doing a product review for an electronic cat litter pan.   A table saw or compressor, yes.  Well, until I get back into construction mode at BRH, I've got to fill the blog with something.

Seriously though, regulars to this blog know that I don't accept direct advertising and that I generally steer clear of product reviews.  I usually spotlight a product only when it really pleases me (like the Magic Trowel and Glasseye 2000) or it pissed me off (the ISY99-i Insteon controller, cheap CFL bulbs and stay tuned for an upcoming mega-smackdown on Mannington engineered flooring!)

You've probably seen late night TV ads for self-cleaning cat litter pans and assumed that there had to be major issues with them.  I did.  After all, how many people do you know who actually own one?   I never took them seriously until the Great Owls Head Cat TNR Roundup last summer.  Afterward, the feline population at Brooklyn Row House suddenly increased to four healthy, adult cats and the occasional drudgery of litter pan cleaning became a hateful morning ritual.   Anything that could reduce that aggravation has my permission to call itself a "tool".