I apparently waited too long to take advantage of the DishNetwork DVR promotion. The current deal is to either: a) Lease the 510 DVR for $5/month AND pay the $4.98/month DishPlayer fee or b) Buy the 510 DVR for retail cost: $299 AND pay the $4.98/month fee. So, spend the money upfront or lease it hoping I don’t keep the same DVR for more than 60 months ($300/$5).
We’ve been here and using the same receiver for just about 60 months now. Hmm. I suppose I could jump ship to DirecTV+Tivo, but that just seems wrong. And they have no estimated date for local channels.
Anyone got any thoughts? Email me if you do. (Or maybe I’ll figure out how to turn comments on for this post).

Maybe I should invest some time trying to get Freevo going? Yeah, right, in my copious amounts of free time.

Update 7-07-2004: Well, I took the plunge and ordered a DishPlayer 510 for rental/lease. 7-10 business days before it gets here. After reading some at DBSTalk and SatelliteGuys, I’m starting to wonder what I’ve gotten myself into.

(The names have been changed to protect the innocent)

So, user A complains that they are unable to access Google, when they attempt to a spyware warning pops up. No other site is affected. User brings laptop to netadmins, user has never logged into laptop. Error can’t be happening here.

The next morning, user A complains to helpdesk that they still can’t get to Google on said laptop. Huh? We explained to the user yesterday that they couldn’t possibly be using the laptop, no one besides administrator had logged in. So, helpdesk person goes to look at the problem again. Finds out this isn’t on the laptop, but on the desktop. So, helpdesk person looks at it, sees spyware warning pop-up, calls netadmin.
Netadmin assumes that user must have been made local admin for some strange reason and all manner of spyware must be installed, starts looking around on the hard drive remotely, finds nothing out of the ordinary. Checks to make sure user is not a local admin, and user is not. So, using some remote control software, takes a look at the desktop. Sure enough, there’s a spyware warning window popped in the front. What the hell? How did site hijacking spyware get installed without being a local admin?
Looking at the address line solves the mystery: http://www.goggle.com/ (I wouldn’t recommend visiting that site).

Glad I got to use my 4 year degree today.

30 mile range without line of sight for broadband wireless? All I can say is Wow. Maybe there is hope that my parents will one day have something besides dialup in the social wasteland.

Kenya finds $1 billion stashed abroad
Sounds to me like the BBC or Kenya got suckered by a 419 scammer. Or maybe they’ve really been true all along, just send them your bank account details and find out.
And WordPress is starting to grow on me, even with the ‘/. told me to do it‘ guilt.

Well, I’m pretty much completly swapped over to wordpress. Since there might be someone out there reading my blog from a bookmark, I put some of the hints on the wordpress forums to use for redirecting from a .htaccess file (lines may wrap):
Redirect /~betka/blog/index.rdf http://12-221-71-116.client.insightbb.com/~betka/wordpress/wp-rss2.php
Redirect /~betka/blog/index.html http://12-221-71-116.client.insightbb.com/~betka/wordpress/

I’m not normally a stickler for free software, but MovableType seems like they are moving to a pay structure only because they have a corner on the market, so I figured I’d try WordPress. So far, I’m pretty impressed, the setup was stupid silly easy (once I figured out I didn’t have the php-mysql rpm installed) and the interface is much nicer.