Hours Wasted for Little Gain, And Do You Make These Mistakes When You Write?

- Quick thought: does it count as "found money" (you know, like when you find $20 in your jeans pocket right before doing the laundry) when you receive a rebate check for an item you purchased, but you completely forgot that you filed in the first place?

I think so. I just "found" a $10 rebate check today! W00t!

- Don't you hate it when you spend hours trying to get something to work, and then you realize that you're not going to get anywhere close to a full return on investment once the darn thing works?

Yeah, me too.

I've been trying to get this K-World PVR-TV2800U working on any of my four computers. I got this thing working before, about a year ago, but that was on a laptop that I no longer own.

(Tangent: Why am I doing this? To tell you the truth, I'm not sure. In fact, I forgot I had this thing until I dug it out of my junk computer part drawer. I guess I couldn't resist the challenge...)

To put it bluntly, getting this thing to work was an absolute nightmare. First of all, the K-World drivers are known to be awful; they crash a lot, and that's assuming you can even get the drivers properly installed. Even with the drivers installed, it seems that there's a good chance that the hardware won't even start up properly (which is exactly what happened to me).

I used four different versions of the driver for this piece of crap...er...hardware: the version included with the item (it took me a while just to locate the CD), and three others I found online. I tried all four versions, even uninstalling and rebooting before I installed a new version, and I got nowhere!

Several HOURS later (5,000 points to me for being stubborn enough to stick to the project), I ran into some trouble with an installation step; at this point, I had no idea which version of the driver I was using. I was forced to reboot, and somehow, someway, the darn thing worked!

(Of course, right?)

Several hours invested, and I'm not 100% sure why I wanted to install this piece of garbage in the first place. All I know for sure is that I'm never going to get enough utility out of the device to warrant investing as much time as I did trying to get it to work.

- (thanks Krunk) Here's a list of seven "nasty" grammatical errors that commonly befall bloggers.

(This is actually the second list; the first list can be found here.)

The errors:

- Loose v. Lose: I can't stand it when people screw this up!
- Me, Myself, and I (using I instead of me): Guilty. I've done this on occasion.
- Different than vs. Different from: Ditto.
- Improper Use of the Apostrophe: Jim Lampley, guest hosting on The Jim Rome Show, said it best, in regards to the misuse of apostrophes. Paraphrasing, he said that if the misuse of apostrophes might as well lead to anarchy and the total destruction of society.

(Yeah, a bit of a stretch there...)

- Parallelism (verb forms/tenses): Guilty. All the freaking time, at that.
- i.e. v e.g.: Guilty, though I try to minimize my errors using these terms simply by not using them whenever I can.
- Could of, would of, should of: I cannot believe people actually make this mistake! These errors rile me up more than the rest of the list combined!!!

In poker, when you go hand after hand without getting much, you're considered card-dead. I guess you can say I'm word-dead.

Until next time.