First, a bit of backstory.  Last summer I upgraded my Dell OptiPlex GX260 to a Windows XP Media Center Edition PC.  I had a bunch of problems with it, but eventually everything got ironed out and it works, and I love it.

 

Back in December, I purchased an ATI eHome Wonder VE to use a second tuner.  Well, that ran into hardware compatibility issues with my Hauppauge PVR-250MCE, so I ordered an ATI eHome Wonder to replace it.  Finally, after 6 weeks, the new tuner arrived.  It installed fine and everything works.

 

So along comes Friday night, and I've got a bunch of free time; no work until tomorrow, hehe...  So I decide to watch some TV and try out the "Record and view" capabilities of my new dual tuner setup.

 

Hmm...not so good signal.  This is a problem.  Other people have the problem too.  Damn you Purdue Residence Halls!  You let the cable go out for the UMPTEENTH TIME.

 

Now, normally it isn't this bad...just poor signal quality, but if you're really patient it's bearable.  MCE just tried to start recording Battlestar Galactica.  Ooops....fatal error..."A signal could not be detected on 41 SCIFI".

 

GAH.  Thanks for ruining my night, Earhart Residence Hall.

My housing hunt is over!  I actually have a place to live next year.  Yay!

 

This is the first time I've ever rented an apartment, so it's been an exciting experience.  But surety is nice too...especially when there's so much else going on (like the CS project/lab due in 9 hours).

Sorry about not posting for a few weeks, but I've been really busy at work working on the Intranet stuff.  With the target deployment date approaching and the beginning of user testing against the site I've been refining a lot of things on it.  Thank goodness for VPN's!

 

On the downside, practically all my time actually spent on site during business hours is taken up by meetings.

 

This week I'm busy with a lot of midterms, and the week after that the Intranet goes live at work, so there probably wont be many posts for a bit.

I goofed up the blog post order two weeks ago when I went back and added categories to everything.  In a few weeks, as I make more posts, that should go away.

Note to self: don't configure Group Policies to apply in the opposite order from what you meant.  It just doesn't work, and causes problems for everyone.

 

Sorry about the site downtime/instability for the last 2 days.

I want one builtin to my Tablet!

 

Seriously, if it works as well as the reviewer says, and it cost a lot less, I might start regretting the $15 mini USB keyboard I bought for my tablet a couple of weeks ago.

 

I spent a lot of time working on the site this weekend.  Probably far too much.  But, COMMENTS WORK!  (with the caveats listed in the Site News tab).  Anyway, it might be a bit until I get the new right colum stuff written up and added to the site, so to access the RSS feeds right now you have to go to http://www.ntldr.net/RssFeeds/.

I'd put them all in this post, but the editor I hav working right now is stupid and wont let me paste (!?) anything into it.  So I may end up writing up a Blogger API wrapper for the SharePoint Web Services soon.

At home we have four cats, including "the two kittens".  If this (see bottom link) happens to me when I'm home for spring break / the summer, I think I'm going to move out to a cardboard box in the backyard with suitably long extension cord and network cable connections running back into the house ("the two kittens" are indoors only).

 

☺

I went to work again, since I'm now on my semesterly schedule.  Not much happened.  Feel free to stop reading after the title above.

Basically, I talked to one of the other IT guys, then I talked to my boss, then I talked with another IT guy, then I started reinstalling a PC (it got reassigned to a new user).  So, not much happened.

The most interesting part of the day was that we wont be using Gateway as a vendor anymore, after the shitty support we got for the NAS box (I should write a few follow-up posts to the one I wrote here about that), and now it turns out that Gateway hasn't been filling our orders correctly for the last few months.  So no more Gateway.  Yay.