The Treehouse Blog

After sitting on the todo list for a year, I have finally taken the plunge into the world of HDTV.  I purchased a Samsung LN40A550 which is an LCD 1080p display.  It arrived on my birthday, allowing me to watch the season premier of LOST that same evening (happy birthday to me!).  I’ve subsequently had to upgrade a few things – replacing my video card so that I have less tearing, and buying an HDhomerun for capturing QAM streams from my cable provider.  (Note to the internet: Kuhn Cable does have 6 channels of QAM!)  I still need to clean up the cabling to the HDhomerun, and fix an issue I have with not being able to seek recorded HD content, and assorted other Mythtv issues, and some playback stuttering, but I have a bigger, HD-er TV now.  Doug did a lot of this stuff just before me, so many thanks to him for being the trial run.

Update:  My seeking problem was due to a crashed “recordingseek” table.  I repaired it and then ran mythcommflag –rebuild to regenerate the information for the recordings that wouldn’t seek.

I’ve finally given in and switched my blog over to a third-party package.  It was probably 4 years ago when I converted from a few flat-file entries to a custom blog interface.  At that point the third-party options weren’t that great, but things have changed a lot since then.

So, at work today we received two boxes from Vendor C shipped via Vendor U that contained identical parts. It was immediately observed that the one box was far heavier than it should have been. Perhaps they shipped both of the items in the one box, and manuals and such in the other? Stranger things have happened. And, well, had. Both boxes contained what they were meant to. The heavier one had a plastic-wrapped white object in the bottom that looked like shrink-wrapped documentation – at least, until you tried to move it. It had a Vendor U shipping label indicating a weight of 37lbs and was about a foot square and an inch thick. Apparently this piece of solid steel encountered the Vendor C box and penetrated it during shipment (judging from the correctly sized hole in the side of the box, noticed afterwards). Vendor U is sending someone to pick up the stowaway package, and the Vendor C gear looks to be undamaged. Still. Weird.

My sister and I went down to Chincoteague, VA for a few days last week, staying with our grandparents, since they had rented a condo for the week. The weather was decent (only raining Tuesday evening), but the mosquitoes were oppressive on Wednesday morning while we were biking the trails on southern Assateague. There was good food, and a brief break from pace of work.

Unfortunately, it seems that anything requiring cooperation and coordination is hard to do. I spent the day investigating a likely impossible solution to a problem that doesn’t end up needing solved. While at the same time still not having the ability to work on the problem that really needs solved. And no documentation or plan has been given to me other than 3rd party verbal snippets to the overarching project responsible for the whole situation. Sigh.

Luckily, other than this blog, I’ve been pretty successful at not letting the day ruin my evening. I got to visit with Chris a bit, following his trip to Illinois.

And one more note… recent kernel upgrades for FC5 require a new firmware image for the ipw2200 wireless driver, so remember that.