Amen brother, Amen

Gizmodo writer Wilson Rothman bemoaned the degrading CE experience as we move toward the connected home lifestyle. I have to agree with him, I spend my whole day trying to explain why the complexity that Active Directory brings is worth the hassle. Valuable hours of the day are spent trying to untangle complex errors that could be behavior (i.e user error) or transient (something someone else was doing caused their error), keep in mind this is a skill set I make a living with, I don't necessarily feel the need to do this at home.

Vista Media Center, Xbox360, and various other smart devices, routers or wireless ap's running DD-wrt. Switches, unmanaged and some managed, some Gigabit other 10/100. The level of complication in my own household has risen dramatically. While my wife enjoys some benefits of the complexity, at some point it she just throws up her hands in frustration. Such as when she cannot convince the media center to play a DVD. (To her credit, she was the high master VCR programing Queen so it is not for lack of ability.)