What is your WAF?

[Beefcake550]

Sorry about that....final word here and I won't say any more and then getback on topic...

it's a little bit of both.

At home, the WAF has been pretty high lately. I always save any kind of maintenance for the weekend mornings and/or when no one is watching anything on the weekend. It is true that the secret to a high WAF to is not ever touch anything . If it works, leave it alone......resist the urge or get your own machine to futz with.

-Brian

[sam99]

Originally Posted by stevech

Old Fart says: Distracting the kids... what happened to "go outside and play and don't come back 'til dinner time" ? Or was that just a warm-climate thing?

heh, they are almost 2 and 4, they do not go outside without me or my wife, snow or not Bringing up the menu and clicking on one of their shows will keep the 4 year old focused, but the 2 year is not into tv at all. At least they are not fighting. Compare that to right before I had sage and my 4 year old was 2 and the only thing on was Zach and Cody or one of those obnoxious things that pass for cartoons these days, ugh. I like the shows I mentioned, they show use of imagination, singing and dancing, all of which actually has my son singing and dancing along or pretending to act out a backyardigans or little einsteins show.

even my K(id)AF is high, he can navigate through the menus to his shows by telling me which selections to make. His shows are a reward, not an entitlement or cheap babysitter.

[Eckwell]

WAF in my house is pretty high, and SageTV has kept my now 3 and 7 year olds from even learning what "Live" TV is, or even commericials. My 7 year old hates commercials!

The only really problem that I have is Close Caption support. The excellent CC Plugin and the work done on CCExtractor keep things in check, but when it doesn't work, it's trouble... I can never really get into the top teir of WAF beause of this.

For instance, last night, watching American Idol, the CC was dead on! until half way through when it started rendering the CC nonstop in rapid fire and I had to shut it off. I know there are most likely things I can "Try" to fix it, but bringing it down requires that I stay up until 2am!

She said to our friends the other day... "He is never satisfied and is constantly changing it"... true, in order to make it BETTER!!!

[pknowles]

My WAF took a hit last night. Wife wants Netflix on the HTPC, which requires Silverlight, which requires SSE instructions. However, we have an old AMD Thunderbird that doesn't have SSE instructions.

I'm now looking on freecycle for someones through away P4.

[ghostlobster]

Regarding explaining maintenence to the Mrs., that's pretty easy...it's the cost of the convenience and features. If you want the functionality of this setup, it needs to be paid for in a few hours (maximum) per month. Generally, when I puoll the system down for maintenence, I also slap another add-in in place. something that I can show her to get a small wow out of it and make the maintenence worth while when looking at it from the outside-in. Last time I put the latest version of Sage in place, I also installed Fan Art for movies and TV. She loved that! The time before, I put the caller-id YAC client in, again, another huge WOW.

[paulbeers]

I find the easiest way to keep my wife "distracted" when doing maintenance is to drop the HD200 into standalone mode, pull up my playon server (which is running on another desktop), and let her watch old tv shows from Hulu.....This will usually keep her busy for an hour or two...

[webwalker]

Now that my wife is starting to break in to the idea of the client/server nature of sage, she's starting to see how she can enjoy some of her programming in the evening without being underfoot when I need to perform maintenance.

If there is a maintenance item on the core server, I give her 24 hours notice. That means that she decides what she wants to watch that night and then pulls it over to local storage on her laptop during the day. This way we can be in the same room while I'm working and she watches her programming on the laptop.

The only thing that has become a headache is that the server is booked 4 out of 7 evenings recording broadcasts of first run material. This really puts a dent in my ability to set aside a few hours of solid work on the core server.

She is also fascinated and horrified by the amount of storage that programming is sopping up. As soon as I get SageMC to acknowledge EDL files against for non-mpg video, we'll start more aggressive compression on the kid's programming and start the squash. But at the rate we're going, I don't expect we're going to put off our storage upgrade until August, which was my planned schedule.

The longer Sage stays up at a shot, the higher the WAF gets.

M

[webwalker]

I just thought of another thing that jumped the WAF here.

Friday last, one of the networks changed NUMB3RS from a new episode to a rerun on less than 36 hours notice. NUMB3RS is a 'first run only' event. So my wife was quite alarmed when she finished a program halfway through the normal run time of NUMB3RS and noticed that it wasn't recording. She pulled up the EPG for the episode and was surprised to see that it was a repeat; the day before it had shown as a new episode.

Her estimation of SAGE smarts (despite having had a Tivo since 2001) went way up. She still misses her Wishlist, though.

M