Presented in glorious surround sound
My wife and I have been without surround sound since we got our HDTV last year. When I first got into home theater sound systems I got a "home theater in a box" kit with a receiver that was also a 5-disc DVD changer. Because we now had a HDTV, I wanted to have the best visual appearance for our DVDs and got an upconverting DVD player. The problem was that the DVD player wouldn't connect to the receiver, which makes sense...why would you have a standalone DVD player when you have 5 built-in? Another problem was the audio from our TivoHD. The old receiver had no HDMI inputs. Because of this, we pretty much only used the receiver for listening to radio. Around the time we moved the DVD player in the unit completely died, so it didn't make the move with us. We have been using just the speakers in the TV since, and it's been a good experience. I really wanted a new receiver though. Not only for the audio, but I wanted a good HDMI switcher and upconverter for my non-HD stuff. Thanks to my newly employed status and our tax refund I'm now the owner of a Onkyo TX-SR806 Receiver.
Drobo Resolution
It's been about a week now since I've had my replacement DroboShare, and it's working perfectly. I have to say that once I got to the escalated support the experience was much better. The tech sent me the DroboShare, it arrived quickly, and just worked. One thing I've noticed is that it shows up as "Droboshare" on my network, while the old one showed up as "Drobo." I don't know if this is a different hardware revision, but they were labeled the same and also have the same firmware versions.
It's pretty clear that my problems started when I was playing with Drobo Apps and the Droboshare got bricked. I haven't yet re-installed any of the apps, and will be very careful when I do.
Drobo Support update
A follow up to my post on the Drobo problems I'm having. Last week I was contacted via e-mail from a level-3 tech at Drobo letting me know that they'd be replacing my Drobo Share. I only needed to call and give them a credit card in case I didn't return the bricked one. I called today and spoke with the rep, gave him the number, and will probably get it next week due to the Thanksgiving holiday. It doesn't excuse the problems I had with the first level techs, but once it got escalated, things started moving. I'll post about it again once I get the replacement.
iPhone 2.2 Firmware
Apple released iPhone firmware version 2.2 today along with iTunes 8.0.2. The iPhone firmware brings a lot of anticipated updates and features, including Google Street View, public transit and walking directions to the Google Maps application, downloadable podcasts, and the ability to disable auto-correction when typing. A lot will be made about the continued lack of copy and paste, which Apple continues to ignore. I chose to focus on what is in there, and the additions to Google Maps and the podcast downloading make my life a lot easier.
Entourage 2008, I gave you a week…
Since switching to a Mac full time last spring I have tried to use native Mac apps wherever I could. I need Windows to do parts of my job, but there is a lot I can do without bringing up Parallels. It has its detractors, but Outlook 2007 on Windows has been very good to me. Granted, if we didn't have Exchange at work, I would still be using Thunderbird, but since we do (and I have to support it), I'm glad it works so well. It's a great improvement over Outlook 2003, and has been my primary e-mail client even after moving to the Mac.