Win7 Media Center bizarrenesseses

So.

For weeks now, for whatever reason, MC7 has opted to fuck up my HD signal feeds on the Guide. (That, for those not in the know, is the listing for channels and what is on when.) It had duplicates for SyFyHD, ComedyCentralHD and various other channels. No idea what happened; they just appeared. And apparently, when they appeared, they also entirely decoupled the feed for Comcast, Digital, West Coast for those stations. Meaning, whenever the Guide data did its update magicks, it didn't actually download the data for those stations any longer. Hooray for no recordings for those stations, since the system rightly interpreted 'No Data Available' as NOT being The Daily Show, The Colbert Report, etc.

Courtesy of http://www.hack7mc.com , a terrific website that gives all kinds of nifty tricks and add-ins and such for Media Center, I found the GuideTool. http://1geek1tool.com/guidetool This allows you to find all the relevant possible 'feeds' for each channel, as well as mark up the guide settings for which channels to show or not show. With it, I was able to relink the channels with the right info. Why Win7 doesn't have such a tool by itself, I'll never know. Anyway, if anyone else has a HTPC, and needs such info, I highly recommend both sites.

Windows Live Photo Gallery

So I've been amusing myself, in my spare moments, with tagging my tens of thousands of pictures. My collection has grown to the point where even the rigorous folder structure I use has become a detriment in many cases. So, I know that most photo formats support tagging, and Windows and other search tools support searching against the tags as well, so it makes sense. If I want to see some Brian Steele pics, I'd rather they were aggregated for me from the various suits I have pics of him in. ;)

However, one of the only handy ways I've found to tag multiple pics at once has been WLPG. And for a basic, free program, it's actually pretty good. It has some facial recognition built in, and so forth; pretty handy all around. Except when it's dealing with 10's of thousands of pics. It seems to be decidedly not-happy in that circumstance. And I'm quite sure I'm making it even less happy with things like my Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle pics. I've been doing facial recognition tagging on the various turtle heads. Yes, I'm doing it 'accurately', but I have to wonder if my antics are causing the gallery to break more often. After all, those suits look amazingly similar facially. Yes, yes, I know the suits were made individually and have slight variations and whatnot. But I somehow doubt that simplistic facial recognition tools will handle that correctly, and having 4 faces that look quite similar but are all tagged differently probably gives the software a minor stroke every time it gets to those directories. ;)

Underworld: Awakening

Rather fun. And the Lycans improved in this one too. No, not the CGI ones. They still can't do those for crap. I mean the guy in suit ones. Very intriguing and tasty. Too bad there weren't more of them. :) Overall an entertaining Underworld flick. Definitely without the plot of the first one, or the 'surprises' of the second one, but amusing nonetheless.