Seattle Weather sucks like a bad ATSC USB Tuner

I'm in Seattle this week for a conference and boy does Seattle weather suck. I don't know how Seattle people deal. These are some stout minded people here, when the weather is even marginally ok, they treat it like it's a beautiful sunny freaking day. Hey, it's a great city. Lots to do and see, great people, and all of that, but really, this is June weather? Having a conference in someplace like Alcatraz might be more uplifting. It's no wonder all those great grunge bands and Jimi Hendrix came from here. Weather like this must make you want to explode when you get a chance. I hope that if we ever learn to control the weather to some extent we try it out here first. Imagine this place with, like, sunshine? Whoah! Frickin San Diego would be jealous.
What else sucks? Trying to use a non hardware encoding ATSC HDTV card to try to watch HDTV on your laptop if it's a bit old or lacking in the video card department. I got a "big name" brand USB ATSC tuner at the local BB with my "rebate" (and a few more bucks) for getting my HD DVD player there. What a waste. I thought I'd be able to watch some shows in HD on my laptop here in the middle of town if the weather sucked. Well, to make a long story short, I could tune a bunch of local channels with decent signal strength but without hardware encoding I could not watch anything. Sure, my laptops a bit old, but not that old, it's still fine for watching DVD's, and I thought I might get it to work ok at lowered resolutions. Bah! No such luck. Couldn't watch HD or standard Def even with good signal strength. I should have got a hardware encoding tuner that offloads cpu intensive processing to the adapter - not the cpu, and I should have already known that.
We do sell them, but as often happens, I wasted money to try to save a few bucks. I should have sunk that BB gift card into some new Blu Ray disks like I did with the rebate for the other frigging HD DVD player I bought.
Shoulda got: AutumnWave OnAir USB HDTV GT