Day: July 26, 2007

Pratt Porch Project – Day 2

Not a whole lot is different today, because our contractor could work only in the morning. He ripped out all of the wall board that was projecting into the porch. He called it a “70’s-style flare-out.” The building code requires that the exhaust vent from the over-stove microwave oven, to the left of the sliding glass door, be re-routed to the roof.

Pratt Porch Day 2 Pratt Porch Day 2

Click to enlarge

That’s fiberglass on the porch roof, by the way. We’ll be getting a proper roof, with a skylight on each side. See that other dated decoration, inside of the house? The geometric room divider? We’ll get rid of that in a future remodeling project.

Fight the URGE

FiOS TV has added URGE Radio, on the stations that follow Music Choice. As I mentioned in a post in early June — unfortunately lost in the Great Database Debacle — the sound quality of the Music Choice stations is uniformly excellent. The same cannot be said of URGE Radio. Played over a digital coaxial cable going from the Motorola DVR into my Kenwood THX receiver, what I’ve heard so far sounds, at best, like a 128 Kbps MP3 at 22050 Hz. The player has four minutes of URGE Radio. Don’t judge the sound quality by this, as it’s encoded here at only 64 Kbps/22050 Hz.

[flv:http://www.dograt.com/Video/JUL07/URGERadio.flv 400 300]

As you can see, there’s a progress bar, but it doesn’t appear on all of the screens within a track, which sort of limits its usefulness. I’m not complaining about the service being added. I continue to be impressed with everything that FiOS TV offers for the money, but URGE Radio’s audio quality relegates it to the TV speakers.