How good can it be, if it isn’t HD?

I know, I know, it isn’t meant for consumer consumption, but I’d content that it isn’t ready for any consumption. I’ve been told by many beta testers that it is so buggy none of them use it, and now after about 90 days of it being in the wild, it seems that just about everyone at the The Green Button has also given up. Evidently I’m the only idiot still using it, but a day doesn’t go by when I don’t think about going back. Honestly if I didn’t love the hetero’ tuners feature so much I’d have gone back a long time ago. At this point I’m thinking Windows 7 pre-beta is more stable, so maybe I’ll try that. Either way, here is the list of problems I’m having.

1. It crashes all the time! How much you ask? Well, luckily Vista makes it easy to go and see how often an app crashes. All in all, in the past 60 days, I’ve experienced about 58 crashes. Of that, Media Center (ehshell.exe) has crashed 20 times, the host module 9 times, store update 27 times, and finally the receiver service twice.
2. I’ve have to unplug my extender in my one room about every other week because it is locked up.
3. My Extenders report network issues, but I have the same network as I did before I installed the TV Pack, yet it never had problems before. Not to mention the network test always says I have 100% of what I need to do HD.
4. I’ve missed a few recordings, to which the Media Center says were “canceled by another component.”
5. I’ve had to reconfigure the EPG four times, which takes over an hour to re-enter my 70+ series recordings, not to mention remap all my channels.
6. Experienced the mysterious blue bar, about 4 times.

And this doesn’t even take into account the weird bugs like the info and mini guide bug, the scrub bar and worst of all the Media center has to change the channel to record even though there is another tuner that is idle. There are more documented at The Green Button, but I personally havent’ seen them.

At this point I’m convinced that I’m the only one left using the TV Pack and that the Nievies and S1 Digitals of the world are smart enough to skip it until Windows 7.

Not sure how new this is, but with the first NFL pre-season game kicking off this weekend, I wanted to quickly check who was playing, and to my surprise the useful — but ugly — m.espn.go.com was replaced with a down right cool website. I wasn’t sure if this was iPhone specific, so I checked on a co-worker’s Blackberry and it didn’t look the same. This might work out better for checking scores than SportsTap, either way I’m happy to have another option.

It really amazes me that companies who manufacturer almost all the banking equipment in the US can’t design a auditable electronic voting machine. It almost makes me thing they don’t want to make one, which is going to lead to states going back to scanned ballots.

Here is a free solution, I take no credit and anyone can use it without any compensation.

Take the same machines you have now and add reciept printer to it — you know, like the ones attached to ATMs and every teller’s computer in the US — when I cast my vote, print out a receipt which will state who I voted for and have a bar code that is encoded with the same information. As I walk out of the poll, have me drop this receipt into a box — you know, like the old ballot boxes that are probably still in storage. Then we can have quick access to the results, thanks to the electroic systems and if someone demands a recount, it can be done manually or by just scanning all the bar codes.

Not real hard is it? Maybe Diebold and others will get a clue.

I received my email from Apple today letting me know about the delay, I guess they have to send these out for people who live under rocks, or don’t read Engadget– so yeah live under rocks.

Thanks Apple for the notice, but how about a discount of some kind to make up for the delay.

I am one of those people that feels like I have to have the fastest Internet access I can get and I have to have the every HD channel I can get my hand on. So last week I was very happy to see that Verizon was laying fiber optic cables in my neighborhood. While they have been laying fiber all over Tampa for the past 2 or 3 years, I didn’t expect them to come to my neighborhood so soon. You see I live in what some might call a “up and coming neighborhood”, others might call it the ghetto, you know the type and since my hood is 100 years old, I didn’t expect Verizon to pick it so soon. Sure they eventually would get around to us per an agreement with the City, so I guess they are through cherry picking the “nice” hoods.

Either way, I can’t wait to upgrade from 15Mbps to 30Mbps and pay $2 a CableCARD instead of $4, not to mention the extra HD channels. The guy laying the conduit said they would be done in a month or so, so I guess all I can do now is wait.

I never feel like I have enough hard drive space. My Mac Mini has a 100GB, my MCE has 160GB, (used to have another 250gb but it died) and my Mac Book Pro has 120GB. I also have a few external drives I am moving data around too.

The problem with my laptop hard drives is that they are too slow, man 5400rpm really feels like it is holding me back. Maybe it’s just in my head, but everytime there is a delay I can blame on my disc access speed, I do. I would love to buy a bigger/faster hard  drive for my MBP, but they don’t really make one. Every few months I look for say a 160gb 7200rpm 2.5 drive and no dice. Why is this? What does speed have to do with size, why can’t they make a 160gb 7200rpm laptop drive? You almost never see this in desktop drives, when the latest large capacity drive comes out it is almost always available in a 7200rpm variety. I guess the same can’t be said for 15000rpm, but still, I don’t get it.