HD DVR

The DVR that we got in July 2007 has been returned to Dish. We’re now using a ViP-612: dual tuners, 30 hours of HD recording or 200 hours of SD recording, HD OTA tuner/recording.

I think, in the end, this will cost me an extra $10 month, but it may be more. And another 24 month contract extension. Oh well, we’ve had Dish since December of 1999, no need to switch now.

And, it’s got support for external USB storage, so if you are looking for a Christmas gift idea, NewEgg gift cards are gladly accepted! They will probably get applied to a WesternDigital 1TB My Book.

Lemming, again

I hadn’t done anything recently to keep the name of this blog accurate, so I decided to follow the crowd and get an iPhone. Or, maybe I just wanted a smartphone and, like Jim, didn’t want to wait for the HTC TouchPro.

So far, it’s been working well and I like the interface. Having good wireless coverage all over campus helps with battery life and data transfer rates. Battery life hasn’t been very good, but the 2.1 update released this weekend is supposed to help with that.

2008 Sweetcorn Festival

Another Labor Day weekend, another year of Free, Hot Buttered Sweetcorn. There were a couple of improvements and changes made this year that worked out pretty well: corn was on pallets in “totes” in a reefer trailer, we had a nice donated tent over the husker for shade and we sold water and soda (in addition to the aluminum pans). Not so good was the lower total tonnage of corn that required some to go out early Monday morning and hand pick (cornjerk, if you will) another 1.2 tons so we could make it until 4pm.

Corn on the Cob

And, I spent several hours at the school district Saturday night rolling the mail server over to new hardware. That’s a task I’m glad we only have to do every few years.

VMware ESX and SAN storage

Is it just me or can 2 ESX 3.5 boxes not have access to the same SAN LUN without VirtualCenter controlling things?

So far, I’m having fun with the SAN, ESX hosts and converting VMware Virtual Server VMs to ESX VMs with VMware Converter. And lots of misc tasks that slipped to the bottom of the list for far too long.