Back in February, I blogged about the snow we had on Valentine's Day.  In that post, I misspelled the word ugly.  About a week later, I started getting search engine traffic for the phrase “ungly people”.  I fixed my spelling, but search engines are lazy and I still get alot of traffic for people looking for “ungly people”.  Not that I mind getting more traffic, as is evident by my prolific use of the word “ungly” in this post.  I'm hoping someone can tell me if there is some meaning for that word that I am unaware of.  None of my dictionary resources show it as a word.  Are other people simply making the same spelling mistake I did?  And if so, why are they so interested in seeing ugly people?  Are they themselves not attractive, and they seek to boost their self esteem by viewing others who are less attractive?  Believe me, you will not find them here!

Can anyone shed some light on this? Or give me your theories of what's going on?

I woke up this morning feeling really crappy.  Our weird weather and allergies have combined to form some kind of health void for me.  Hope to be over this soon.

Some friends of mine were kind enough to send me an invitation to join GMail!  Needless to say, I jumped on the chance to register marklio immediately.  Thanks guys!

My first request of GMail is to let me change the reply-to address so I can hide it behind another address using forwarding, the way I currently do with my mail.com address and my RoadRunner account.  I'd really like to use a marklio.com address (don't send email there, it doesn't exist) as my email address because I feel like I own it.

If anyone has thoughts on what I should do with my email address, let me know.

P.S.  You've gotta love this:

You are currently using 0 MB (0%) of your 1000 MB

Update: I'm now set up to use my old method in parallel with gmail!  The only issue now is consolidating my sent mail.

I finished shooting and editing our Youth Camp promo video yesterday.  It was the first time I have done a video without any part of it hitting my desktop PC (Well, at least since we started doing them that way).  Doing it on the laptop added a great amount of flexibility to the schedule since we could edit on location while we were taking a break or waiting for someone to get back so we could film.

As I've mentioned before, my laptop is skewed toward portability rather than performance, so I wasn't sure if it was up to the task, but I never dropped a frame in or out.  It also gave me an opportunity to edit with some of the kids that were interested in doing that kind of thing on their own. We had a great time, and I felt alot more at ease making editing decisions that would impact the screen time of an actor when I had a couple of the kids around to ratify them.  It came out pretty good.  As usual, I didn't have time to do all the stuff I wanted to do with it.

I need to get back on my shotgun mic project, though.  We ended up shooting in a couple of places with horrible acoustics that plagued us when mixing audio.  I also wasn't able to get the kind of shots I wanted to because I had to keep the camera so close to the subjects to hear them.

I can't wait for some sunny weekend weather.  Lately, we've had beautiful weeks and it's just overcast and rainy on the weekends.

OK, I'm hooked.  After recording several HD broadcasts with my HD DVR, I can't see going back to an SD-only existence.  I admit that I long for 720p rather than my TV's limit of 1080i, and the DVR has MANY shortcomings, but I've found a few workarounds for my complaints.  For instance:

• I fast-forward at triple-arrow rather than double arrow on Tivo.  This gets me through commercials only slightly faster than Tivo.  Double-arrow is too slow.
• After ffwd, I hit the instant replay button instead of play, wihch will approximate Tivo's automatic jump back, and even though it jumps back further, my receiver takes a second or two to kick in with the optical input, so it works out.
• I'm getting used to hitting stop to get to a screen where I can do something with a recorded show.  I've grown to appreciate more and more Tivo's elegantly simple remote design where you can do everything with the 4-way cursor buttons, select, a couple of main menu buttons, ffwd, pause, and rewind.

Seeing The Mummy II in full HD goodness, I'm even starting to question the validity of trying to grow my DVD collection any more.

Peter and Jamie came into town yesterday.  We ate at the Shady Grove with the B-Dubs, and it was really nice out on the patio.

Peter and Jamie stayed at our place last night.  Peter and I stayed up way too late talking and stuff.  While we were doing some things with my computer, it died.  It started getting “disk read error, press ctrl-alt-del to restart” right after the POST.  That sent a chill down the old spine.  It was already late, so I didn't attempt to troubleshoot much past restarting it a few times.  Since my Tivo died within the past week, I wasn't feeling too good about it.

When I got home from work, I decided to try some things, and, to make a long story short, it appears the RAID controller on my motherboard is going out.  It still passes internal diagnostics somehow, but nothing can access the drive.  I'm running off of the secondary controller now, and the drive appears to be fully intact, which is a relief.  I didn't really want to buy another one just yet.

Anyway, we had a blast with Peter and Jamie.  I wish they could stay here longer, but I know that they've got to make the rounds and see as many people as possible while they're here.  Thanks, guys.

P.S.  Jamie, sorry if we woke you up with the Roomba this morning.

I picked up Becky from DFW last night.  She made it back from Germany safely.  In all the hustle and the bustle, I left my phone in the car with a low battery.  This morning, it was dead and I didn't realize it until I got to work, where I have no charger.

I'm meeting the Coulters and B-Dub's for dinner tonight, and I don't have numbers to get ahold of either one of them!  I thought, “I'll just borrow a charger from one of my co-workers.  Surely here at Motorola, someone will have a charger that will work for my phone.”  No dice.

So if you're out there guys, I'll be there at 7:00?  Is that right?  Shady Grove, right?  Becky will not be able to join us.  She's got an important rehearsal to go to since she missed most of last week's rehearsals.

UPDATE: Connection established...disaster averted.

I'm assuming these would apply to the SD DVR as well.

Good:

• Multiple tuners - I can record two shows at once
• All digital pipeline - Digital channels are recorded directly.
• Digital sound - Lots more Dolby digital than I thought there would be.  Sounds great.
• HD - duh.  Seems like everything is being up-converted to 1080i.

Bad:

• Not very responsive - Tivo solved this by providing audio feedback of button clicks.  The picture didn't immediately respond, but you had almost immediate feedback of stuff.  Overall the interface is more sluggish.
• Transport controls suck - Tivo had a small jump backwards at the end of a fast-forward since you can't react fast enough.  It doesn't appear to have that feature.
• Tivo's interface was all about giving you access to your shows.  This interface is about cramming lots of information down your throat and making you weed through it with inadequate tools.  You have to wade through the guide to find shows, or attempt to browse by the first letter of the shows for a given day in a list that's not quite alphabetized correctly.  I never had to know what channel or showing time, or even the name of my shows with Tivo.  That is a necessity for this machine.
• Since everything is being converted to 1080i, my TV is locked in HD mode, which doesn't give me alot of control over the geometry of the picture. That's a shortcoming of my TV, but some of the HD channels are bizarrely stretched, and some channels seem to have the field order reversed, or the fields scaled oddly and it makes them unwatchable.  The Fox HD channel is that way when it's scaling SD content like the Simpsons.  They look much better on the SD station.
• Tools for managing your scheduled recordings are practically non-existent.
• The remote has no enter key, forcing you to wait for the entry to “take“ or by typing 0, 0, 0, 2 to get to channel two.
• In order to see what shows are recording, you have to scroll through the list of scheduled recordings to get the details and find the ones with the “rec“ indicator.  There's also no easy way to delete shows or manage recording priorities.

The list goes on.  I'm sure you're tired of hearing me complain, but I just thought it might aid some other people in their decisions, or help people who think Time Warner's hardware is good to see the light.  Maybe someone at Time Warner will come across this as well and take it as good feedback.

Well, I've spent my first evening with my Time Warner HD DVR.  Two things:

1. The HD is beautiful.  I had to calibrate my 1080i mode since I've never really used it.
2. The DVR...SUCKS.  Compared to Tivo, it is crap.  I would rather have standard definition and the wonderfully intuitive interface of Tivo than HD with this crap.

I'm going to make a stab at resurrecting the Tivo, using the Time Warner DVR as an interim solution.  If that doesn't work, I'll put my efforts into the HTPC where I have more control over the interface.

I'll post more on my findings as I use the DVR more.