DVR for Dad

I helped my dad hook up a Dish 508 DVR system last night. It was an old one of mine that I didn't need since I left Dish for our local cable company this fall. I liked satellite TV, but they can't deliver local channels in High-Def yet, and I really wanted that. I had no idea what model numbers his Dish and switch were, and i was relieved to find that it just worked. He even points at the same satellites here as I did in Iowa, so after swapping out the boxes, all we had to do was call Dish and have them activate the new unit, reboot the box once, and we were in business. Now I just have to teach him how to use it. My dad is one of those people who actually reads instruction manuals, and I have no idea where the one for my 508 went, as I never read it...

R.I.P. Tony Randall

Just browsed over to CNN and I saw that Tony Randall died. I'm going to miss seeing him on Letterman, where he appeared more than 100 times, according to the article. I wonder what Dave will say about it tonight...

Idol racism?

This story speculates that the reason LaToya London received the fewest votes on American Idol this week was due to racsim. Umm, there were four contestants left, two of them were black, one was Asian/Polynesian, and one was white. Given that the white girl gave "the best performance of the night" in the words of the judges, one would naturally expect it would be a minority who got voted off. So, that leaves us with two black contestants, and one asian one. Granted, Hawiian native Jasmine did have the worst of the performances, and I thought she should have gone home, but just because she didn't it doesn't mean that the KKK was at work here, sheesh. In any case, I don't think that LaToya, Fantasia, or George Huff even need to be on Idol anymore, they're all going to get record contracts because they have great voices.

Sysprep or Systrash?

I spent much of yesterday and today readying a new disk image with Windows XP Pro on it for our faculty that have Dell Optiplex GX 150 machines.  I got it all done, and ran sysprep (Microsoft's tool that resets the PNP data, machine name, and SID) in preparation of making the disk image.  Tom, my co-worker, then asked me if I'd remembered to install the new OpenManage stuff we're going to deploy.  I hadn't, so I fired the machine back up, only to discover that Sysprep has wiped out about two days of work.  Well, back to square one.  This time, I'll make a preliminary disk image BEFORE I sysprep that thing...