Today started off ok, but as it went on it got worse and worse. I hope this weekend goes better.. Nothing like coming home to find that the ReplayTV that was working the previous night is now dead, who knows why other than the power strip it was plugged in to was off. All it does now is display “please wait”, the fan doesn’t turn on. Not sure how to diagnose what is wrong with it. Then server was down because of 2 power outages at the hosting place and it took me about an hour to get the disks fixed in it. And to top it all off a hundred and one projects that are all high priority and need done asap, but not enough time in the day/week to get everything done.
Silly Elgato
It seems that Elgato has 2 different EyeTV Hybird USB Tuners for the Mac.. The one you can find in the stores is NOT the one advertised here. The one in the stores does NOT do Clear QAM. They decided to add Clear QAM support to the “2008” version but kept the name and model the same. So to those who want one that does QAM you need to buy it directly from Elgato and not from a local retailer. Only get it from a local retailer if it has on the box “Clear QAM” in green listed some place. The others will not do QAM at all, which means if you bought it to watch HDTV via Cable it won’t work. This information the last time I looked was not clearly visible and was buried deep in their support forums.
So to sum up, if you want a TV Tuner for your Mac and you want to watch the Digital Stations on Cable that are in the clear, you need the Tuner that does Clear QAM. The 2007 version will only do over the air HDTV, which in my area means 1 PBS station.
Tax Time again
I wish West Virginia would re-evaluate their Tax schedules. I just finished doing my taxes for the 2007 year, and once again I owe the state money… $856 to be exact… This really makes me mad as I even made a point to having extra money taken out of my pay check because of what happened last year. Looks like I will be visiting HR on Tuesday to have even more taken out of my pay check now. This really sucks!
Big but no Tall
The local JCPenney was having a sale this weekend with between 50 and 75% off some winter type clothes. I decided to go and see what they had this afternoon. Once again Retailers if you are going to advertise a “Big & Tall” section, make sure there is Tall stuff in it. Being 6’5″ there was only 1 pair of pants that were even 36″ inseam. Out of the whole section only one freaking pair, and I did not even like them. Why is it that there was more 52″x29″ than 3[46]”x36″? I think it has to do with the fattening of America. I pretty much hate going shopping for pants/jeans any more as you can never ever find a store that is local and that has anything in a 36″ inseam. 34″ inseams only work if you never sit down and you never wash the pants. After that you might as well throw them away as they would look like “carpi’s” on me.
So I beg to all you retailers out there keep stuff in stock for TALL people. I don’t like being told that “oh you can get that from the catalog, or our online store”. It is almost to the point of discrimination against tall people if you look at it that way. I want to be able to go in to a store and get something that fits at that moment. I don’t want to have to wait till it is shipped to me to find out that it doesn’t really fit right or doesn’t look like it did in the catalog/web site.
To all the other tall people out there, where do you find pants/jeans that are in stock in a local store?
Best Buy suckering people
I went to Best Buy today to walk around and get out of the house. While I was there I walked past their little Mac section of the store. There was a man there looking and playing with a MacBook Pro. A Best Buy person came over and asked him if he needed any help. So the man proceeded to ask the Best Buy person how he would transfer his files from his PC to the Mac if he bought it. What I heard next just made me mad… She told him that in order to transfer the files to the new Mac he would need some expensive software or he could bring the PC in to Best Buy and they would transfer all his files over for a charge. Why is it stores like this try to get any amount of money they can out of people who are computer un-savy?
People it is really easy to move stuff between PC and Mac. Apple even has a small 2:30 minute video on how to do it.. Don’t let the Big Box stores charge you for something that is easy and any one can do it.