Category: Tech

Faith, Hope and Parity

I’m in Remote Desktop, accessing a Windows 2003 server at work, using the “shadow 0” command to run as the console (having made the necessary gpedit.msc edit), and all of a sudden — BOOM! Session gone. Connection lost. So I jump on the digital KVM and start a session there to check the console, and whaddaya think I see? I see this!

It’s been a long time since I’ve seen a parity error on a machine with ECC memory. I’d just finished installing Windows Server 2003 and all of the updates, and was preparing to set up Clustering, with the quorum resource on the SAN, when the error hit. Annoying. The machine is running again, but for how long… ?

Now aren’t you glad I rarely mention work stuff?

The Good, The Bad, FiOS TV 2.0

FiOS TV 2.0 has added the ability to DVR the Music Choice channels like any other station. Yay! As I said yesterday, the functional enhancements are nice. Two more I would like to see are enabling the A/V inputs — I want to route my LD player through the DVR — and turning on the USB ports so users can add storage.

I continue to be down on the new user interface. I much prefer the old one. Especially annoying is the Favorites function. It always starts at the same spot in the channel list, instead of the station you’re on, and it no longer wraps around from the end to the beginning. Extremely annoying!

Fun Loving Video

I am using a new method to create FLV video for embedding. Side-by-side comparisons show that the results are better than the method I was using, but I honestly don’t think you’ll see the difference.

FiOS TV 2.0 Interactive Media Guide

A couple of weeks ago Verizon sent a flyer promoting the long-anticipated update to the FiOS TV 2.0 Interactive Media Guide. Sometime between last night and this evening the update was installed on my DVR.

I like having the ability to program the duration of the skip-ahead button on the DVR, and having a 60 minute playback buffer, but I prefer the old user interface. It was clear and bright with easy to read lettering. The characters are too small on the new display, with a color scheme that’s too gray, and a few layers deep into the menus the screen looks rather cluttered. Here’s a video sample of what it looks like.

[flv:http://www.dograt.com/Video/AUG07/NewFiOSGUI.flv 400 300]

(Note to my friend Sam: Watch this and you will see a bit of your crazy cousin making a guest appearance.)

Gas-Powered Movie

The power is back on, after 15 hours. And Internet access is working, too. Whew!

Yesterday afternoon we were hit by a sudden and violent thunderstorm with some of the heaviest rain I’ve ever seen, and hail to boot. Carol, Eric and I were watching the storm when we heard a thunderclap that was so loud it sounded as if it were next door. Well, it was. Lightning hit a large tree, the tree hit the utility wires, and out went the power on our street.

We ate out with friends from across the street, then we all watched a movie at our place. No, we didn’t gather around a portable DVD player. My portable generator came to the rescue.

Coleman Portable Generator

It has two household outlets, 110V/15A. I bought it over five years ago in case we ever need the sump pump running during a power outage. That situation hasn’t happened yet, but it did fine last night powering the 32-inch TV and DVD player.

Our neighbors brought over Bridge To Terabithia. It’s an enjoyable family movie, with a surprise plot twist. The gas tank on the generator isn’t very big, but it ran for two hours and the movie is only 90 minutes long.

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.