Good News/Bad News

The good news is that Verizon came out this morning and hooked me up with a CableCARD, so now I can watch and record TV – including HD channels – on my computer.
The bad news is that now that I have less of a reason to get up and leave the computer, my ass is probably going to fuse to my chair.
The HD channels (and even the non-HD channels, now that Verizon has gone totally digital) look good, but honestly, I probably will still move my ass to the couch when I really want to watch something, as the 42” screen is better for TV viewing than my monitor.
I mostly wanted to be able to view HD content on my computer so that I could do high-res screen caps for reference images and that sort of thing, though being able to watch TV while I’m doing other stuff is a benefit, as is having the option of being able to record/watch something if the two tuners on my set top box are in use, though I don’t really foresee that happening too often.
It also gives me the option to archive recorded content without eating up space on my DVR’s drive.
What’s interesting is that if I’m watching an HD channel on my main (24”) monitor, everything is fine, but if I move the TV window over to the secondary monitor (20.1”), it stops working and tells me that my monitor might not be HDCP compliant.
I’d forgotten all about the whole HDCP thing, though it seems to me that my secondary monitor should be a compliant device. At first I was thinking that it was because that one is connected via VGA, but then I remembered that my graphics card has dual DVI-out, so it’s not connected via VGA.
I’m thinking it might be because I’m just using the generic Windows driver. I’ll have to download a driver from Dell and see if that makes a difference.
It’s not a huge deal, but it would be nice to be able to move the TV window over to the other monitor so that the main one is free for me to work on.
After the Verizon guy left I went out to do some grocery shopping. I’d forgotten how much I miss being able to do my shopping on Monday morning. So much nicer than trying to shop on weekends or weekday evenings.
(The bad news here is that while I was checking out Don’t Worry, Be Happy was playing. Screw you, too, Universe.)
For the record, it’s a gorgeous day. Sunny, but not hot, with a nice cool breeze, exactly the kind of day that you don’t want to spend cooped up in an office building, so I’m very glad I took today off, so that’s the good news.
Of course, the bad news is that having the day off just means being cooped up inside of my house, as I’m not really the outdoorsy type, though I did spend some time sitting outside, and I have all of the windows open, which is a nice change from always running the A/C.
A while ago my doorbell stopped working, and I’ve kept forgetting to do anything about it. As it’s a wireless doorbell, I assumed that it probably meant that the batteries were dead. The good news is that I remembered to check what kind of batteries it takes before I headed up into the world, and so in the course of my shopping I picked up some new ones.
The bad news is that it never occurred to me that the problem might be the battery in the button, and it turns out that’s what’s dead. Further, it’s some random kind of battery that I’ve never seen before, so now I have to find one of those somewhere along the line.
But the good news is that my doorbell hardly ever sees any use – frankly I’m not sure how the battery died in the first place; it’s certainly not from overuse – so there’s no rush on replacing the battery.
The bad news is that my doorbell hardly ever rings because I’m a reclusive hermit that no one ever comes to visit.
On another good news/bad news front, I don’t have the energy to whine – as I promised I would in response to a comment from Scott – about how I’m a talentless hack and I don’t know why I even bother trying in this entry.
The bad news, of course, is that I’m not canceling the whining, just postponing it.
And that pretty much brings us to the end of this entry. I’ll leave it up to you to decide if that’s good news or bad news.