Another quiet-ish week. Spent most debugging time helping out family members:

• My dad received some data at work that was formatted, as he put it, as a "qz" file. I was fairly certain that this was not in fact, a "qz" file, but was in fact a "gz", i.e. gzip file. I based this on the assumption that a) I've never heard of qz, so unless it was highly specific to some particular application, that was probably wrong, b) gz is a very common format but not that well known among non-Unix people so it would make sense that he would have received one from a third party and c) "qz" and "gz" look very similar, especially in certain fonts. He reexamined the file and verified that it was indeed a "gz" file. The next question became how to open it. I was fairly certain that winzip would know what to do, which turned out to be the case. Misreading the extension sent him on a bit of a wild goose chase, so I'm glad I was able to help.
• My parents have a new HDTV, but with just the off-air HD signal, so I have spent some time directly working on and remotely advising them to get it set up so that they can use their DVD player, VCR, HD signal, etc. with everything routed correctly. They have this weird setup where their DVD player is also the amplifier for the sound system, which I've never encountered before, so it ended up requiring lots of back and forth wiring to get everything run through the DVD player, and then to the TV, and then to the VCR so that stuff can be recorded off of live TV, etc. I wasn't able to sell them on TiVo despite all the hassle.
• My wife had intended to use the hide column feature in Excel and instead accidentally selected "Hide Document". This is surprisingly easy to do and she was baffled/terrified as to what had happened to the document. I'm not totally sure what "Hide Document" is supposed to do when you only have a single document open. I can see the logic when you are trying to manage multiple documents but to hide the only document you have open with no warning, and no clear on-screen indication that you have something hidden seems like a recipe for disaster.