So how is it?
ANGRY SPOILERS INSIDE
Normally I'd be seeing the encoding still going on (a mere 6 hours later!) but my CPU is nice and idle.
The minus side is it looks like it filters it with nearest-neighbor, so things look a bit more pixelated than they did with Quicktime encoding. Also, from some other poking around, it seems that if there's ever any USB contention and packet loss, it just gives up - which is a bit aggravating as I have the Turbo on the same bus as the eyeTV itself, because I really don't have an infinite number of ports to plug things into, what with having so many devices which insist on being the only one on a bus (hello people it's a BUS not a PORT, and a MIDI controller shouldn't need the full bandwidth of one anyway! but I digress).
Anyway, I'll have to see if that's really a problem or if I just did something stupid. Theoretically, USB2 should have enough bandwidth to support both of them easily, seeing as how ATSC is only 30Mbps and USB2 is 480...
I called the number they provided, and the CSR (who mumbled and slurred his speech) insisted on looking up order status on the number I was calling from (my Seattle cellphone number) and of course didn't find anything. I explained that I just had an order number and could I please use that, and he said, no, I needed to give him the home phone number and my name and so on. So I gave him that, and he said that the name on the account was different than my name, and he wouldn't specify what that name was. So I asked him again if I could give him the order number, and he said no. So I read off the exact error message that I saw on the signup page, and he said, okay, give him the order number. So I gave him the order number, and he said it was the same order number he had in front of him.
Plus there's the usual fun issue of disposal of all the packing material. This building requires that all trash in the garbage chute be bagged, which adds an extra (and annoying) step to things, and of course the recycle bins are down in the parking garage and always full, so I'm only going to put the boxes in there (tsk) but still, hauling crap down there is a pain.
On the plus side, lack of storage space means I'll have no choice but to prevent this from happening again, right?
It used to be that if you called Speakeasy you'd get a CSR right away. I never even knew they had hold music. But I'm guessing that the Best Buy buyout has led to them having to scale up their operations fast without having a comparable scaling of resources and they're prioritizing business customers, and as I expected, the residential side of things has suffered.
AT&T makes it really easy to sign up for service online (and even easier from my apartment's services directory), and the total cost of AT&T voice service (which I guess I need since reception is a little spotty in my apartment) and 6.0/768 DSL is about the same price as 1.5/384 DSL alone with Speakeasy. And my sister has AT&T and it's Reliable Enough. I don't need to run servers anymore, and I don't need 5 9s. So I guess AT&T will have to do for now.
(Though it'd also be nice if the one-way signs were a bit better-illuminated around here. Christ. Though I'm not sure it'd have helped in this case since I was feeling so dang agitated.)
(I was originally considering FREDRIK, but when I actually saw it in person, it was clearly too short for my needs. There's not enough room for my 24" monitor on it, for example. Also, the available keyboard tray isn't wide enough for both the keyboard and mouse. Not very useful!)
The upgrade is only $200, which I will probably be purchasing as soon as I get my G5 back. (Unfortunately, Logic itself now requires a dual G5 or faster. So I'll have to keep using 7 on my laptop for those rare times that I record from it.)
I don't have a lot of dedicated office space in my new place for my studio. I'm probably going to have to either split the living room (ugh) or figure out a way to make my essentials fit into the office nook (ugh).
boost::any_cast and came across this old article by ucblockhead. The comments are pure gold, and not because of any sort of insight they bring.
HOWEVER, if the mail client (if any!) is still broken in the same ways as the iPhone client, then that doesn't make for a compelling reason to use it over my current not-so-smartphone. 10:56 Nope, no email client. I guess there's always webmail, but that sucks, and of course if it's hacked someone else could write a decent client. Or something.
11:03 Okay, aside from the new UI (which is shiny but still not really, you know, useful), the iPhone Touch is completely uncompelling. Apple's RDF has stopped really affecting me all that much anymore. (Though actually the 160GB iPod Classic is pretty interesting, in that it's finally an iPod which can hold my entire music library... that'd actually simplify a lot with my setup.)
As far as I can tell, one supplier of one kind of electronic content has decided that they don't like the terms of one online store, and they've entered into renegotiation of their contract, which said store isn't amenable to. Okay, so it's possible that Apple might soon be unable to sell episodes of The Office. So what? Why are my weblog aggregator and the sci/tech column of Google News clogged with every little development every time some analyst makes some speculation about who might get hurt more by the potential loss of a somewhat-significant slice of an insignificant market?