Tue Dec 25 23:09:22 PST 2001

Yea! Christmas. Had a nice time with the parents and got some nifty stuff. New shaver, dremel rotary saw, and other less flashy, but not less usefull stuff :-)

I tried out the rotary saw, and while it might be nice for cutting drywall and other thin materials, it sucks for cutting 3/4in plywood, and it tops out at about 1 1/4in material. So I’ll take it back to Home Depot, apoligze profusely and trade it in for the nice saber saw and some killer carbide blades. It will work a lot better for plywood and medium weight material that needs a bit more precision than I can get with the big circular saw.

We then hung out and watched lots of DVDs: ‘O Brother Where Art Thou’, ‘Veggie Tales: Top 10 Silly Song Countdown’, ‘Labrinth’ and ‘The Hidden Fortress’. And we even snuck in a couple of games and a lot of food. Had the gumbo which was good, but I think I really miss having the sausage in it for extra flavor. Also, lots of cookies. Mom and Phebe cooked a lot of cookies this year, so we’ve got a lot of them left over. We’ll have to freeze many of them to prevent them from going stale. Anyway, nice Christmas, lots of fun presents given and gotten by all.

So in other news, I’m seriously considering buying a copy of Snapstream’s PVS software it’s a little spendy, but ATI’s included software "Guide Plus+" system isn’t well supported. For some weird reason, it takes hours (literally!) to update the weekly schedule. It also seems to have some recording/playback issues as well. While the Snapstream product currently lacks some of the nifty features (like searching for show names) and can’t seem to record at as high of bandwidths as the ATI product, it seems to be a bit more useable, and that’s what the game is about.

I am a bit disappointed that there only appears to be a single product out on the market to do PVR on a PC. Seems unusual, but hopefully the Snapstream stuff is really decent and they will fix the current issues that the product has.