Monday, July 25, 2005

Now, this is something. A meteorite crashed through the ceiling and landed next to a guy working on his computer in his house. The closest to this I've experienced is a piece of ice falling from the "El" in Chicago and hitting me in the head. It really hurt.

Sunday, July 24, 2005

Just when I thought I got it all figured out ...

I watched Coach Carter tonight from the Xbox in DivX format. The video looks great when viewing it on the computer monitor, but I certainly can tell the difference from DVD on the 55" RPTV. It's almost as bad as a standard definition signal from DirecTV. I didn't notice it this bad on other movies, so maybe it's an anomaly.

On an unrelated note, I finally broke my cell phone clip. It actually held up for over 3 months, pretty good for how many times I've dropped it.

Saturday, July 23, 2005

Finally, I finished a project that I've been wanting to get done for a long time. I set up Xbox Media Center as my default dashboard. This will help accessing pictures and video easier for the household. I just have a couple more tweaks to get it exactly how I want it. I'm still looking around for broken boxes to put one at every TV. I say broken because I won't be using the DVD-ROM or hard drive. Really all I need is the motherboard and power supply, and I can put it in a black shoe box with an "X" made out of masking tape on the top.

Friday, July 22, 2005

I figured I was going to be at work late tonight, but it turned out I had less work than I thought. Naturally, I used the evening for no benefit other than taking it easy.

Thursday, July 21, 2005

I read that November 4th is when the Xbox 360 will be released. It's going to be an exciting day when Karl gets his. I, on the other hand, will wait until the mods start popping up. When the games are $60 each, it would be hard to not rip them. But we'll see.

Wednesday, July 20, 2005

My order arrived today from Combo Clothing. I like getting stuff I'm into. They're just a bunch of gamers that are making some shirts and selling them. Now, as we all know, I don't have time to set up a shop to do this. But, if you send Combo Clothing a design and they use it, you'll get $100 plus $1 for every shirt they sell with your design. Surely, I can come up with something. Hmmm...

Tuesday, July 19, 2005

All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy ...

Monday, July 18, 2005

I spent the better part of the night over at Karl's wiring his home network. The fishing and wiring inside the house was relatively easy. Then we had to hook up the DSL to the demarc. It seemed logical, but we tried to copy how the current DSL line was installed. Wrong idea, especially when the previous installer was going against standards. After many trials and errors, we didn't get it figured out. In fact, I'm surprised we even got the DSL back up and running on the old line.

Sunday, July 17, 2005

I watched Elektra tonight. A lot of people didn't like it. As far as comic book movies go, I thought it was acceptable ... much better than Catwoman, but nowhere near Batman Begins.

Saturday, July 16, 2005

I've been having troubles with my Vonage account. It seems I can't receive incoming calls. After a total of an hour on the phone with customer service, it turns out that the process of keeping my same number was never complete. So when the service from Qwest, my local carrier, ended, my phone number is now "disconnected", even though I can still make outgoing calls.

Luckily, only telemarketers ever call my home, so maybe I'm now off some call lists.

Friday, July 15, 2005

Of course I received all three DVD's today from Blockbuster. And I forgot to use my two free in-store rentals before they expired. I wonder what it will take to make me finally switch to Netflix?

Thursday, July 14, 2005

I haven't received a DVD from Blockbuster in over a week. I'm to the breaking point. After complaining about not receiving any of the shipments I was supposed to, they shipped some more with an estimated arrival date of today. Nothing. So this is it: if I don't get anything tomorrow, I'm switching to Netflix. Mark my words...

Wednesday, July 13, 2005

I saw this server project over on Slashdot. It's these kinds of projects that make me want to build stuff, and I'm not talking no paper cup projects. It is nice to have the laptop up and running to do some internet research. Now to only stop time...

Tuesday, July 12, 2005

I think all of my personal learning of Nucleus, PHP, and other random research has finally taken its toll on my work schedule. I've been increasing my "fun" time at work while decreasing my "work" time. I might have to cut myself off in order to clear some mounting pressures to get things done.

Or work twice as fast so I still have some play time.

Monday, July 11, 2005

I've put a link under Notables to the family website, or my first stab at using Nucleus. It will shed some light on my "other" life, as opposed to my battle royale with technology described here.

As my PHP knowledge expands, I get closer to porting this site from Blogger.

Sunday, July 10, 2005

I took the time tonight to install Mandrake Linux 10.1 (now Mandriva) on my laptop. I had 8.0 on it before I messed it up. I thought I was ready for a more serious distro, but I guess not. Anyway, in about an hour, I had the laptop up and running, connected wirelessly to the network, and surfing the web. Quite incredible actually since I did the network setup manually.

Saturday, July 9, 2005

I ran around like a decapitated chicken today doing errands, resulting in additional projects for the house.

There are two inventions for the home that seem incredible, but they are a nuisance: vacuum cleaners and ceiling fans. Vacuum cleaners always get clogged, they're dirty, and never seem to work consistently for a year. So I bought some parts to fix it, but we all know how this will turn out. For ceiling fans, you're suppose to make sure they are installed into support beams. If they're installed incorrectly, they may fall and kill you. Now, I've never known anyone to install one correctly, and I've never known anyone getting killed by one. I started out with good intentions to install one correctly, but after the curses came, I think I'm going to resort to just slapping it up and dealing with the injuries later.

Friday, July 8, 2005

I finally got around to setting up the family blog idea. This idea was to set up a system so that individual "households" could set up blogs; we could set up family reunions, calendar functions, contact information, etc. I choose to use Godaddy as the hosting company, and Nucleus as the content manager. It'll probably start out as another personal site and allow other households to become members as I become more familiar with it.

As Nucleus was built around PHP and MySQL, I finally get to get my hands dirty with some old fashion coding.

Thursday, July 7, 2005

After grueling testing, I think my official DVD backup system is to use StreamRipper to rip the DVD to the hard drive, then use DivX Converter to store them as divx files, and watch via the DivX Player on PC or XBMC on Xbox. I haven't come across a DVD I couldn't backup, and I think the $20 is worth it.

Happy Anniversary, Pea.

Wednesday, July 6, 2005

Whoa, what happened here? Over a week without a post. Am I too busy to take 5 minutes to post something everyday? I think I need an entire month of no work to get caught up with my projects.

Ahh, who am I kidding? I'd spend it all playing Xbox.