…at least for today. Luke got a fever on Friday, and it didn’t start to go away until last night. He’s also got a throat infection, so he’s on antibiotics, and lucky dad gets to stay home with him today. I think he’ll be ready to go back to daycare tomorrow, and daddy back to work.

I’m about halfway done with my final read through of Terra Nova. I’m still finding little things to fix and change, but I’m confident when it’s done it will be the best it can be. After I’m done Stacie will read through it, and we’re good to go. I need to finish it, because we can’t both read it at the same time.

I finished Metal Gear Solid 4 on Friday. It was cool, but I don’t know if I’d ever want to play through it again. It’s certainly a pretty game, though the story is a little ridiculous. The story goes on and on and just gets more ludicrous. Unfortunately it doesn’t haven’t trophies, but Fallout 3 does!

Over the weekend we got satellite tv. I didn’t really WANT to…but I was tired of fixing the DVR I had built. I’m sure once the Dodgers start playing I will appreciate it, and even right now I can actually find something to watch besides news, judge shows, and soaps. We went with Dish, and the DVR we got can record up to 2 satellite channels, and 1 ota channel at a time. It’s even connected to the TV upstairs, so you can watch recorded shows and access the guide on a second TV, something we couldn’t do with the htpc. I’ve got an order placed for a Popcorn Hour A-110 to replace the media capabilities of the htpc.

We have the TurboHD Silver package…so what should we be watching?

Not a ton going on here, just getting ready to enjoy a three day weekend!

The hard drive in my HTPC died. Arg! I seriously considered getting satellite, but I didn’t. This is the second time the hard drive has died in the last year. I think the first time might have just been normal hard drive failure, but when Western Digital sent me a replacement it was a refurb, so that’s why I think this one didn’t last long. I ordered a NEW drive made specifically for DVRs, and at 1 terabyte it should hold close to 100 hours of HD video. As much as I hate opening it up and setting it up, when the thing works it does a darn good job. I just couldn’t justify spending $50-60 a month for a DVR with limited space, no ability to edit or save shows, and a channel I really want (Dodgers!) and a few channels we enjoy on vacation.

My proof copy of Terra Nova is still on its way. Should be here Monday along with the new hard drive. I think next time I might pay extra for faster shipping. Here’s what shows on my UPS tracking info so far:

SUMMERVILLE, SC
WEST COLUMBIA, SC
GREENSBORO, NC
COLUMBUS, OH
MAUMEE, OH
HODGKINS, IN

I’m guessing it was on a truck…a very slow one that liked to stop in every city it passed. It left that last stop 2 days ago, so I’m guessing it’s now on an airplane.

I’ve been playing Metal Gear Solid 4 the last few days. I really wish it had trophies, but I already had it, and it’s pretty fun. I have Fallout 3 coming to me from ebay for cheap. My new philosophy is to buy games used, play them, and then sell them and recoup some of the cost. Few games are worth having for a long time anyways.

Pictures of baby soon, I promise!

Recently we’ve had tons of stuff break! It all started the day before Luke was born.

1. The arcade monitor broke. I had it connected to a “smart” powerstrip that would only turn things on when the computer was turned on. However one day it got dumb and decided to turn the arcade monitor on and off continuously for hours. The result was a broken arcade monitor. Only took two months to get it repaired!
2. Stacie took the new car to a doctors appointment, and someone decided to scrape their car against the rear-left wheel. Had to take it to the body shop, and a week and a half later had it back.
3. The hard drive in the HTPC died, so I had to get a replacement drive and then reinstall everything. Luckily this time I used Norton Ghost to create an image of the drive. Now if anything like this happens, getting it set back up should be easy.
4. I noticed my quad core cpu was running a bit hotter than it should be, so I decided to try and re-seat the heatsink. In the process I broke the clips that hold it down, so then I had to order a new one. Luckily after putting on the new  fan/heatsink the processor runs a good 20 degrees Celsius cooler.

But now everything is fixed and working again. Stacie just reminded me that one of the lights in the kitchen isn’t working, but I need a new ballast to make that work. After that I think everything will be working again.

The Blarg’s hosting service crashed sometime last night and was down about 12 hours. The hosting service went to a backup from the 21st, so my last post was lost.

The htpc is back up and running with the replacement hard drive. It’s getting a super clean reinstall of Windows and I just installed Norton Ghost to make a nice backup in case this ever happens again. I’ve gone to great lengths to set things up, so once I have a backup of the whole thing, I won’t have to go through all the hassle of setup (which really wasn’t that bad a second time around). I bought a neat little cooler that attaches to the bottom of the hard drive and helps to pull some hot air off of it. In my case the hard drive is sort of isolated and no air passes over it, so this is a really easy and quiet way to circulate the air. I’ve even seen a five degree drop in my video card temps.

I started to play Final Fantasy 7 from the original playstation the other night. I remember when Andrew and I got that game back in the 90′s. I think he beat it, but I never did, so I figure why not throw it in and see what I can do. It’s an easy game to play when the baby is lying on your chest. I know the game takes a long time to beat, and I’ve got plenty of other things to do, so we’ll see how long my interest lasts.

Baby is doing well. He’s sleeping longer chunks at night, and already he’s able to spend a lot of that time alone in his bassinet. Hopefully sometime in the next couple months we’ll get him moved to his own crib and a good nighttime routine will be established. Our friend Shannon who lives in Georgia was out here on vacation and stopped by today to see Luke. It’s amazing to see the little changes he’s going through already. You can tell his eyes are working better because he looks around. Stacie walked by him in his chair today and his eyes about rolled out of their sockets as he watched her go by. He does a little bit of smiling, but not a ton yet. I can’t wait until I can tickle him or give him a raspberry and he squeals in delight. Right now when I do it he just looks at me like “what the heck is that!”

The Dodgers beat the D’backs. Woot woot!

For whatever reason we have Monday off, so hallelujah for that.

The hard drive in my HTPC died tonight. It was during the Dodger game, and I’m sure the death of the hard drive and the Dodger loss were related. For all the geeks, it froze, I rebooted, and could never get into windows again. Chkdsk kept freezing (a good 12 times) trying to startup, and even gave me an “unknown error has occured.” Tried to repair vista, but when it tried it said it can’t (because of a bad disk). I took the drive out and put it in my external usb drive on the upstairs computer, and even that is terrible. It showed me the contents of the HTPC drive for a minute, but then I started to get all kinds of errors trying to access it. Not sure why it went down, but I think it could be because of heat, so I’ll take a few steps to deal with that. It could be a completely random thing too, so who knows. Luckily it’s still under warranty, so the new one should be here soon. Only sucky part is I have to set it back up. I never got around to making a norton ghost image of it for precisely this situation. Oh well.

Baby is crying. I go.

I’m not sure I can make this a completely non-baby post, but I might be able to go half and half.

Last month we drove up north to Turlock for my Grandmother’s 89th birthday. This was a place we went several times a year for my entire childhood, and I have very fond memories of those trips and the people we went to see. I bought my video camera just in time to take it on this trip, so I shot some video to help me remember the place. If you’d like to watch it then go here:

Turlock Almond Orchard

For the geeks out there, I’ve decided to render all my videos twice. The first is a super high quality 1080i AVC/264 that can be played back beautifully on the PS3 (or the htpc if I can get 264 material hardware accelerated), and the second is a smaller 720p version that can easily be played back on a modern computer using quicktime. That should give me the best of both worlds with just a little extra rendering time and storage space.

So this baby of ours is a fussy little booger. He likes to eat all the time, and rarely sleeps for big blocks of time. He also loves to be held, and 9 times out of 10 if you lie him down to sleep he’ll wake you up with his cries a few minutes later. The worst part is that it means very little sleep for mom because she is getting up constantly to feed him. She’s upstairs sleeping right now and I’ve got the baby entertained (and quiet!) downstairs.

I think God knew he had to make little babies cute so that people would put up with the lack of sleep and crying. Every time this little man poops it is fart city. It’s like he can’t poop without making massive amounts of noise, it’s great. And his little sneezes are the cutest thing in the world. How they go from cute little baby sneezes to obnoxious adult sneezes I have no idea. His mouth even made a smiling motion this morning, but I think it was more of an accident than anything. Shortly after though he sounded off with a loud fart, so maybe the two were connected.

I still have some more Turlock video to edit, but after that I’m on to some of the baby footage.

A guaranteed way to draw interest to your blog post is to include photos! Even if you have no idea what is going on here, you will ooooh and aaaaahhh at the pretty colors and shiny materials. Haha!

I made a previous post about how to setup a Home Theatre PC (HTPC) using Windows Media Center in Vista. Today I will show you pictures of my installation into a computer case that looks like it belongs under a TV.

Here is the finished project. The black box on the bottom is a computer! It makes a much better front page image than everything else will, so I will make you click after the jump to see the rest of the post. Enjoy!

continue reading…

We find out if we’re having a human baby today, and if we are, then hopefully the gender also. Because we don’t know yet, there has been little preparation needed. I’m sure once we find out things will kick into high gear. I’m kind of hoping for a girl just so I don’t have to paint the purple wall.

One baby prep I’ve been working on is getting the computer and PS3 off the living room floor and moved under the TV. I thought I had a solution by removing the shelf and stacking the computer and receiver on top of each other, but it only leaves a quarter inch of breathing room for the receiver, which isn’t good. I bought a smaller HTPC case that should be here soon. And frankly it won’t look as silly either.

Apparently I’m one of the few people that didn’t get Rockband yesterday. Two buddies at work got it and so did Angelo. I dunno…I played guitar hero 3 the other week, and it was fun, but not enough to devote hours of my life to it. I’d rather devote hours of my life to playing fictional baseball games. When Saito gets a strikeout in the 9th and we’re only up by 1 I pump my fist in the living room. It’s awesome.

OK, back to the doldrums of a 5 day weekend.