NP: Real Salt Lake vs. DC United

I feel like the tide may be turning in my continuing struggle with technology. My car stereo will once again play CDs. I think that "resetting" the stereo when the power was cut for repairs while a CD was in the drive caused the problem, since a hard reset of the unit once I had taken the CD out seems to have fixed it.

Then there was today's all-day ordeal with installing a pair of CableCARDs in my new TiVo HD. The long and short of that one is that the installer didn't know squat, the people on the phone wouldn't do what I asked them to do once I had identified the issue via online forums, and the tech guys I waited another 5 hours for would. And that worked, just like everyone online said it would. Comcast treats CableCARDs like cable boxes, and reflexively sends the wrong signal to activate them. I don't have the authority to convince their phone support that they really need to send a "cold initiate" message, but the tech guys were able to do it from their freakin' cell phones, and we were off.

Since this all left me a lot of idle time today, I may have figured out a common thread in my PC instability. Both iTunes and Picasa use internal databases. It could be that both of those databases -- which I think are pretty big, certainly in the case of iTunes -- are corrupt, which is why both applications crash my system.

That doesn't explain why AVG exhibits the same behavior, although it might, because the virus database updates frequently. So maybe sometimes it's corrupt and sometimes it's not. Might be time to "recondition" the drive with a couple of disk repair/defrag cycles.

Whee.