Salad Is Slaughter

From DBSTalk.com

To put it bluntly, an unacceptable percentage of HDDVR installs/upgrades have needed multiple truck rolls due to signal level issues. Not equipment issues. The fault for these multiple truck rolls can only fall on one place. The tech. Either (s)he didn’t properly aim the dish, aimed it into trees, wrong switch, or old/bad cabling.

-snip-

Once activated, the box will run some internal self-tests on the signal levels. If the test fails, there will be an on screen display stating that the IV Test failed (IV = Installation Verification).

It failed, now what? Now the tech has a chance to tweak the dish, put in the proper switch, etc. Whatever needs to be done to get it to pass. Once it passes, life is good and everyone enjoys HD.

If true, this is a good first step but I don’t think it would have caught our problem (1 and 2) where the installation tech as well as the follow up guy did a half-ass job with the mounting and didn’t install all of the required hardware. I do applaud DirecTV for adding this feature because it should eliminate some of the installation problems I’ve read about.

We’ve had the DirecTV HD DVR for about six weeks now. After the installation debacle things have been going pretty good. I’ll be honest; after some of the horror stories I’ve heard about the software problems (admittedly from the early days of the unit’s deployment) I was worried. But I’d also heard that most of the software bugs had been squashed so I went with it. For those keeping score at home, we have the HR21-100. The 100 designation pertains to the manufacturer.

Overall I love the HR-21. I can record two shows while simultaneously watching a show that was recorded earlier. I can also record a show while watching another one live. The only time we’ve had to use a VCR in another room is if there are three shows on at the same time that we want to watch. It’s pretty rare, but it does happen since NBC has some of their best shows on the USA network.

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One of my jobs on my “off Friday” was to cut a hole in to the back of the new TV stand and move the DirecTV HD-DVR and the DVD/VHS player to the two center shelves, eliminating the table where the two had been sitting and opening up some space in the family room.

It didn’t take long to cut the hole I needed to unhook everything, route the cables through the new opening, and reconnect it all. I powered everything up, waited for what seemed like forever (but was in reality less than 10 minutes) for the DirecTV HD-DVR to reboot, and tried everything out. It looked good - I could watch TV and the signal strength on both receivers looked normal.

About that time Mrs. Salad Is Slaughter informed me that the DSL was out. Since she telecommutes this wasn’t a good thing. I did the usual troubleshooting; basically powering off then powering on the DSL modem with no results. We were cut off from the net. I called in to tech support and after going through their checklist got an appointment scheduled for today. I figured that the problem was outside the house so I left for work.

Turns out it wasn’t. After several phone calls from home requesting various information, I called and reminded them that I had done some work on the DirecTV receiver that involved unplugging and reconnecting the phone line. On that phone line is a line filter, the same kind that’s between every phone and outlet in the house. I was surprised to find out that when it goes, it can take DSL with it. From http://www.homephonewiring.com/dsl.html

Interference on any phone jack may impact DSL speeds or could cause DSL to stop functioning entirely. Because the filters are connected to the line cord for each device, their connections are subject to damage by someone just tugging on a phone line cord and a single damaged filter connection could result in problems with both your DSL and telephone services.

Oh well, it’s fixed now.

I like the USA network because they frequently have programs that are superior to what you’d find on the traditional broadcast networks. Psych for example, pokes fun at swindlers psychics and shows all their tricks while at the same time being an entertaining detective show. Burn Notice is a fantastic show containing both humor and action. It’s about a spy who’s been kicked out of his agency and doesn’t know why. With those two examples to guide us, we set up the DVR to record In Plain Sight.

We probably shouldn’t have bothered. Mary McCormack (Howard Stern’s Private Parts, Dicky Roberts: Former Child Star) is a U.S. Marshall who works with people in the witness protection program. In the opening episode the son of one of her witnesses is murdered and she helps find the killer.

Basically there’s nothing new or original about the show. The dialog was for the most part crappy, the plotting was plodding, the characters were one dimensional, and I kept looking at the clock to see how much more I’d have to sit through. Sure there were occasional lines that were pretty good, but overall the writing for In Plain Sight varied between crappy and ordinary. It was like someone took a generic cop script, replaced the character names and locations, then filmed the result.

We’ll probably give In Plain Sight one more look but if the second show isn’t a major leap forward in quality, it will be the last one we see.

I haven’t written any television comments lately, so here goes.

The new season of Reno 911 starts Thursday, and there was much rejoicing.

I missed the season finales of Numb3rs and Moonlight due to satellite antenna problems.  A news article last week indicated that CBS was going to cancel Moonlight.  Of course they’re going to cancel Moonlight.  It’s an original show with good writing, interesting characters, humor, and a fun look in to what Los Angeles would be like if vampires lived there.  Instead, CBS will keep a piece of shit like CSI: Miami on the air.

The Simpsons season finale was just plain awful, quite possibly the worst episode ever.  I guess it’s possible that there’s an underlying joke that I’m missing because I don’t watch Entertainment Tonight.

The How I Met Your Mother season ending was okay but not nearly as good as last season’s.  Neil Patrick Harris was amazingly funny as always, but the whole relationship between Ted and his girlfriend/doctor just seemed forced.

I wasn’t happy at all with Bones.  Making Zack the serial killer’s assistant was so out of character it was painful to watch.  There were no clues, no personality changes, nothing to indicate he was the one.  It was like the writers knew that they had to get rid of one character but they didn’t know which one until the network told them, then they tacked that ending on to the show.  I felt cheated.

We’ve got other shows in the queue but we haven’t gotten to them yet.  Maybe tonight.

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