My wife’s pep talk.

So, I’m going to lose my job in the future. I don’t know exactly when, but I’ve already met the people who will be taking over for me. Suffice it to say, I’m not super happy about that. It’s been a rough ride, and this morning was particularly difficult, right from getting out of bed.

I didn’t go to the gym, which probably would have been a good idea. I didn’t talk to my wife either, which would have been a good idea also. I finally spoke as we were eating “breakfast”. She gave me a little pep talk, and we made some egregious jokes about getting calls and hoping for jobs and I felt better. I just wanted to take some time to write down how I felt, and let anyone who actually follows my life on this blog know that my wife loves and supports me, even when I don’t have my attitude adjusted correctly.

Thanks Holly, I love you!

Media Center with Windows 7 and Xbox 360 extenders

I’ve settled on using Windows 7 Media Center with Xbox 360 machines as extenders for our TV/Movie platform at home. We’re using basic cable (which makes our Internet from Comcast cheaper) and over-the-air broadcast programming. I have a Pentium 4 3.0 GHz machine in an Antec Minuet 350 case with 1 GB of RAM, a 750 GB hard drive and an ViXS PureTV-U TV Tuner which apparently was a great deal that I picked up from a local computer store, because of it’s low profile bracket and low price ($30).

I should get another tuner, but it’s working reasonably well now, and I really shouldn’t mess with it. I am using the wireless adapters for Xbox 360, but the signal just isn’t reliable enough, so I ran a wire out the window, down the side of the house, and down to the system in the living room, and it improved the Media Center extender experience considerably. Looks like I’m going to have to wire the house up. Wireless-G just isn’t going to cut it. My kids are pretty sensitive to the movie or show stopping or stuttering.

I have two Hauppauge HVR-1250 tuners that are PCIe, work in Linux, and have low profile brackets, but they acted funny (meaning they weren’t detected) in Windows when I used them in the PCIe slots on my BIOSTAR P4M900-M4 motherboard. I’m a little sore over that, especially since I got a motherboard to work with my old Athlon 3000+ socket 939 board that had two PCIe slots. Oh well, the Myth TV linux box may yet live. I always need a “development environment” to use, and not mess with the stuff that works.

I’m currently not using the “production” box with a TV at all, and letting the extenders do all the display work. Ideally, I’d just buy more extenders when I need a TV somewhere else, that’s cheaper than a PC with enough oomph to do HDTV and stuff, and the box does a great job of storing movies ripped from DVD, and recording TV. I suppose finding a low-profile PCIe video card and hooking up a monitor wouldn’t be a bad idea.

As far as ripping movies goes. AnyDVD seems to be the only real solution that works for decrypting on “everything”. Handbrake does a reasonably great job of smashing movies into h.264 encoded files to be served up. I really wish there were something on Linux that could compare for decrypting and ripping, but I guess if I’m going to pay for the software, I should expect the operating system to cost me something too. I’m content to run Windows on my main box for games, and I can just do the ripping and encoding there too, and them move them to the Media Center box over the network. The Media Center box does have an eSATA port though… very nice. I guess getting that Antec Minuet 350 wasn’t such a bad move after all.

So, that leaves me with a few Athlon XP machines, and an Athlon 64 machine, with Geforce 4 MX video cards, and not too many storage devices. I think that will have to be the Myth TV project that I’ll work on in my spare time. I can’t imagine it working any better than what I’ve got with Windows 7, other than being a bit more flexible, I guess, and “Free”. “Working” is better than free though.

Blog posts don’t have to be long.

I’ve struggeled with blogging lately, mostly because I figured I needed something significant to say, and that my usual, off-the-cuff comments just aren’t appropriate.

I recently read a post from on of my college associates about “EGR” If you don’t know what that means, feel free to ask me. The point is that her post was short, and I really felt it was significant. It kind of hit me in that moment. I’m kind of in the middle of 5 things right now, and her comes my son. So, that’s all. Thanks for listening.

Running is good. Treadmill is good. MP3 player is good.

I figured it was time to post something other than “I’m a racist” on my blog, since I’m friending up lots of people on my Facebook page. I’m pretty sure that is where most of the traffic on my blog comes from.

I’ve been keeping up with the 4-day-a week routine at the gym pretty well. I’m starting to at least look forward to completing the run, if not enjoy it. I think I like it more than lifting weights, so I guess that’s something. I’m going to have to stop eating so much if I really want to lose weight, but I guess that hasn’t really been a primary goal.

I did pick up a 16 GB flash card for my phone, so I guess I’m trying to decide whether I want to use it or my mp3 player, which has a 30 GB hard drive… and a strap, and an investment… but no bluetooth. I guess I’ll have to test it when a get a chance to load it up, and see if I get drop-outs like I did with the Shadow. Wired headsets may just be the way to go. The Zune’s been good to me. I might not sell it. (But hey, if you’re interested in a 30 GB White Zune, with some accessories, LMK. LOL.)

I don’t run outside, and I don’t run with others. My treadmill routine is pretty erratic, and my wife doesn’t run with me. Sometimes I run “against” people at the gym who look like their doing something other than just running as fast as they can, for as long as they can. Sometimes I just put my player on shuffle, and keep clicking through crappy songs, rather than a playlist (note to self… get more playlists…) but I can tell you that I can certainly fit all the songs that are good for “Treadmill Running” in a smaller set than what I’ve got organized now.

I’m currently alternating 20 minutes running and weight lifting on odd days, with long distance running (currently at 3 miles/40 minutes) on even days. But, I’m not really very good at sticking to that. Sometimes it is the clock, sometimes it is me. I guess I’m actually going to have to start charting it. Sigh… this is becoming a habit. I can live with that.

I’m a racist too!

Gee whiz… anyone see that cartoon in the New York Post? I’m not going to bother describing it much further here, but Google can help you out. Briefly, a couple of police officers are portrayed in a cartoon having shot a chimpanzee, and saying that they’ll have to find someone else to author the stimulus bill.

Sigh.

Today, one of my colleagues approached me with a problem that I created. For those of you who don’t know, which is pretty much everyone, I made a trivial mistake at work. I support an electronic Lab Notebook and part of my job is to create “notebooks” for scientists to record their data. Requests come in, and I create the notebooks.

So, these notebooks have identification, and it’s based on two things… a number that describes its place in a series, and an alphanumeric sequence that identifies the scientist. We have a group of scientists that all use the same alphanumeric ID sequence. I’m not that into the contents of the notebooks, but I assume we just farm out chemistry assignments of some sort to this group. They’re in another country, and their names are somewhat recognizable, and could probably identify their ethnicity.

Here at “the company” each scientist has their own unique alphanumeric sequence that identifies them. However, some of them have names that might identify them as a member of this same ethnic group that we farm work out to.

I created a notebook for a person with the wrong identifier. I used the identifier that is common among the scientists we farm work out to, and their name probably would place them in that group, but their location is here at “the company”.

Honestly, it was a mistake, but it looks pretty bad. The error is fixable, and I don’t foresee any negative consequences, but I feel pretty bad, especially after seeing something that has so many people upset about groups of people being portrayed as ape-like.

Seriously, what kind of editor doesn’t say, “dude… this might not go over well…”? Probably all of them, but they’ve gotta sell papers. I’m not much for censorship, but “censure-ship” probably should have kept this out of the spotlight. Somebody, somewhere, should just said to themselves, “um… no.”

People are never eager to read any sort of high-level satire into something like this. We’re looking at the most base, opportunistic interpretation, so that we can say something about it. Perhaps it is time to look at why we say what we say, as much as we study what is said.

Microsoft SharePoint

In a previous job, I was a Project Manager, and one of my assignments was to try to implement Microsoft SharePoint… more specifically, to convince people to use it for things that they already had non-Sharepoint methods for. Needless to say, I learned a lot, but the job was kind of pointless because I didn’t have any authority or resources.

Fast-forward to the future, and I’m working in at a huge organization that has implemented SharePoint, but calls it something else. I made the mistake of demonstrating my knowledge, and now I get lots of random questions, sometimes from random people, that have questions like, “can I do this?” and “can you do this?”.

Today, I got a “can I do this?” question, and for some reason, I wanted to post about it. I like answering these questions. The person who asks is always pleasant. The “can you do this?” questions are usually masks for “do this because I don’t want to learn how, but I want credit for it.” and those kind of suck… a lot.

More to the point, SharePoint is something that Microsoft got right, at least after several iterations. The harder barrier seems to be to convince people that they should put their files in a “website” rather than a spreadsheet on a network drive, and that they can actually drive more functionality by utilizing SharePoint than maintaining 50 spreadsheets.

WWJD? Yea, verily, I say unto you, “Stop using Excel and the network drives.” Too bad that’s not in the Bible, or even that most of the people in this organizations wouldn’t care if it were. They cling to those spreadsheets and network drives like they mean something. I guess in a sense, they do. Lots of people’s jobs are based entirely on managing spreadsheets and updating them on shared network drives, and they aren’t exactly looking to do their jobs differently. More likely, they see a mandate like that as a threat to their jobs.

No wonder the job of that mandate gets pushed down so far… Nobody’s interested in putting themselves out of work these days. I wonder what’s up with my colleague who asks me questions, and seems at least eager to learn, or ask me if I have any tips on how to do something she’s been asked for.

Oh well, on to my work.

Long Time No Blog.

Lots of people ask “how was your weekend?” on Monday… this past weekend was Valentine’s Day, so usually the conversations are a bit more interesting.

Mine was pretty cool. We went to a baptism of a family friends young daughter, and attended a Saturday Church service right afterward. A few specific things about the sermon struck a chord with me, but that’s not unusual when you get to hear the Word. My wife and I went out for Mexican with no wait, and I watched my 5-month-old niece for a few hours on Sunday.

I ran this morning (it is Monday) and I officially started the “two mile” mark. I talked with my Dad and told him I could run two miles… I had only run 1.5 at the time, but hey… it isn’t like he reads my blog, or was gonna go to the gym with me. But it was nice to hear him say I was doing better than him, since he’s always asking about how I am (physically, emotionally, etc.). I skipped out on any kind of healthy power breakfast, and forgot several items in a morning rush that involved my kids waking up and being slow-risers. I really, really, need to figure out what I’m going to eat if I keep this running crap up, because I almost died. Scarfing down a few slices of left-over whatever isn’t going to cut it. Like, protein, energy stuff.

I’m going to go ahead and invest in a heart-rate monitor and some gloves. It seems we’re serious enough about the gym activity that I should allocate something to get as much as I can out of it, and quit cheating/abusing my body just to say I went.

Twitter is my friend today… I think I tweeted, like 10 times, about random crap that wasn’t really important, but mostly just stuff that popped into my head while listening to my mp3 player. Speaking of which, I like my Zune. I hate using Windows, but I tell you what… that stuff mostly works. I’m so, so, so, tired of messing with Linux crap. I don’t have the time like I used to… and since time and money are on some sort of exchangeable medium scale, I’m definitely going to have to cut back on the “oh, I can get this to work for free…” and “my Freedom has value” rants. I got too much crap to do.

Apple, sorry, I’m not paying for another “workstation” and I’m not really a Laptop guy. Value for my money is still a priority, and your stuff is cool, but I got a family to feed, and my clothes ain’t fittin’ anymore. Maybe I’ll decide that used stuff is cool and go iPod on myself, because I hate inconsistent interfaces… but “good enough” is going to have to get it.

What the heck? I’m rambling… and I’m at work…and I have a doctor’s appointment before I get home. I guess I had better finish this work. Peace out. Mo’ better blogging is coming… I promise.

Saturday Morning Poop

I’ve certainly grossed anyone out who doesn’t care, but maybe that was the point… A brief visit to the gym on Saturday netted me a quick round of weights and a 1-mile run, broken into half by a diaper change while my son was at the gym daycare.

I had to stop in time to shower up and grab the kids before the Kids Klub closed at noon. Holly stayed home and recuperated from her back procedure. Taking the kids was supposed to let her relax a bit, but I sent her to do the impossible — install Word 97 on her Mom’s computer…

That ended up with me rolling through to find that her copy of Word came from the Home Essentials disk that came with her old computer. She needed to write a letter, and apparently OpenOffice.org Writer wasn’t familiar enough. That’s kind of funny, because I don’t even think Word 97 would be any more familiar to me than anything else at this point.

I spent a lot of time installing Windows 7 on some machines, and spare parts that I arranged into “frankenboxes”. good times… good times… for some reason, I find that rearranging of old parts that are too slow to do anything other than, well, get rearranged. soothing. Seriously, who would have guessed Windows 7 would install on a AMD Athlon XP 1600+ with 512 MB of RAM? Adding the Geforce FX5200 AGP card just to get Aero is kind of silly, but I did it.

I also got the two 250 GB drives installed in a spare, ugly box, with the 2.30 Celeron, and called it good. 120 days until the Windows Home Server Trial is over, but I’m thinking I’ll commit. Streaming movies from it to Xbox 360s is working very well.

Zune-Zune

I picked up a 30 GB Microsoft Zune from Circuit City with some store credit I had from a return. It was on clearance, and I’ve had one before. Other than tying me down to Microsoft (which isn’t much of an issue, really) I’m pretty happy with it.

Today, I ordered an arm band, a screen protector, and a rubberized case for it. I had some gift credit on Amazon.com, which I had forgotten about. It was a pleasant surprise, seeing as I had been waiting for pay day to get it, and found that I would get to spend $25 less than I thought. I still think $30 for an armband is a rip-off, it’s just elastic and plastic, but it does make that run a bit more enjoyable.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t make my legs hurt any less. Man, that first mile run was killer. It hurts when I walk. I guess if I keep doing it, it won’t hurt anymore, getting all that lactic acid out and whatnot. If I can sustain mile-plus runs on a regular basis, then I’ll just move it up to 30 minutes, and that’ll be good. I’m still working on the playlist though. My computer kind of fell over and it isn’t working, so I haven’t had a chance to sync up and make new playlists yet.

If my computer is broken, it is either the Motherboard, or the CPUs. I saw an upgraded version of my motherboard at like a 60% discount, so I’ll probably go with that, and hope the CPUs work, if they don’t, then I’ll just upgrade the CPUs, LOL. I guess I’m going to have to shake that money tree a little harder.

Ode to Jiffy

Any of you out there like Jiffy corn meal stuff? Man, it’s bad for me, but it tastes awesome. My kids like it too. I had mentioned wanting some during Thanksgiving, and my Mom-in-law saw me swoon so hard she bought me a multi-pack box and put it in my Christmas stocking. After my kids rejected leftovers last night, I pulled out a box and made some “pancakes”. Then I got some of this frikkin’ molases stuff from Alabama that my brother-in-law brought. I had to heat it up to get it out of the bottle. Good thing I’m not generous with the syrup… I could have gone comatose…

So, obviously, to make up for these my misdoings last night, I had to hit the gym extra hard this morning. 1.5 miles… 18 minutes… no walking. Amy Peters’ tip about “shagging” or whatever seems to have done me good. That, or I just didn’t want to look weak infront of the two ladies on either side of me. My legs really hurt, but I think I could have gone longer. I’ll wait for a weight skipping day to try and do a 30-minute run, or maybe a Saturday.

Our sitter is terrified of mice, and she came in through the garage this morning… I’m proud of her. I didn’t see our friend this morning, but I took a tip from our sitter, who heard it from someone, that you should actually tie the bait to the trap, so the mouse can’t just take the food without getting killed. I wonder how that little beastie didn’t freeze to death. It has warmed up though, so I definitely need to get him killed and gone. Maybe I can just leave a box of Jiffy out for him, and he’ll carry that out and leave… The traps I used with peanut butter didn’t work too well, I think I set them too tight, afraid to snap my fingers. This morning, I didn’t find any string, but I twistie-tied some bologna to the traps and set them hopefully, I come home to a dead mouse, or whatever that thing is. Yuck.

I did manage to wake up early and get a Windows Home Server set up. I had a 2.30 GHz Celeron Pentium 4 chip with 512 MB of RAM and 80 and 20 GB hard drives. I named it “SERVER”. That installation took “hours”. I didn’t really believe it would, but it said it might. Good thing I had something else to work on… my workstation is dead. It’s been flakey for the past few months, but it won’t boot-up now. I need to confirm that most of the parts are working, but I think the motherboard is dead. I suppose it could be one of the chips, or both of them, but there’s no real way to tell except doing the “remove and shuffle” game, and I didn’t have time for that, so I made a “new” machine with the P4 2.8 GHz HT chip and installed the Windows 7 Beta, which prompted me for Activation, almost made me curse Microsoft and whip out a Linux CD. But, I’ve committed to trying WHS, might as well have some machine running Windows so that I can use the Connector software…

I had the machine “built” already, but I hadn’t put in a video card. I used the onboard-video, and put in two tuner cards that I had pulled from the “Media Center” box. I had a bit of trouble, and had one of those “I wish i had just stuck with using Macs” moments. The tuner cards were detected, but couldn’t be installed, according to the device manager. Windows Media Center didn’t like the onboard graphics that I was unwilling to allocate 64 MB of video for, and the Xbox 360 wasn’t doing a good job as a WMC “frontend”. Jeez, all this stuff worked before when I tested it briefly in a different configuration, of course.

I got everything up and running. In this case, it meant putting the two tuner cards back in the media center, and adding a “real” video card, and pulled the two 250 GB drives out of my workstation to copy my videos, music, and pictures and various downloads to my temporary workstation. I started copying the Videos to the Home Server shared “Videos” folder, and set the WHS sharing so that the Xbox 360 could stream. I had to leave the copy running, because it was time to go, but I did start “Ratatouille” on the Xbox 360, streaming from the home server, before we left.

That is the power of Jiffy. Wake up early, make computer stuff happen, go to the gym, hit your goals, and then blog about it. Awesome.