Damn, now I am disappointed.
September 2005 Archives
I quit using Blockbuster quite awhile back after they treated me like they didn't give a shit if I was their customer or not (don't have the link, but I posted a couple times about them on the blog). I used a local place up the street from me just to check them out, but the prices are too high, and they don't have a whole lot of movies to choose from.
Broke down this week and decided to check out Netflix, as they are having a free two week trial. I figured I would be able to watch a movie or two, then decide if I want to pay the 19.99 a month for the service (or 9.99 if I go the route of one movie at a time). I signed up Wednesday night, and put a few movies in my queue. Received them today. So far I am pretty impressed. Very fast. We will either watch them tonight, or rip them to a temporary drive to watch at my leisure later before I get rid of them, and I will mail the DVDs back tommorow. I received A Series of Unfortunate Events, Million Dollar Baby, and National Treasure. Since I only go to the theaters about once a year, I haven't seen any of them yet. Time to sit back, have a beer and watch some TV tonight. I have someone else doing drawer change for me, so I will not be going back in until tommorow morning.
Since I am on the sunject of the boob tube, I was happy to see that Lost is back on. Also caught this show on called Invasion. It seemed pretty entertaining, I will watch it again once or twice and see if I like it or not. Some kind of alien invasion thing.
If you can't tell from the previous post, I am such a light-weight. Working on my 3rd Red Stripe and I am a toasty fucking critter.
Actor Bob Denver, well known for the role of Gilligan, has died at the age of 70. I don't watch much in the way of Television, but as a kid, of course, I loved Gilligans Island.
Saw this meme about songs from the year that I graduated (or should have graduated, in my case), and just felt like doing it.
The rules:
1) Go to musicoutfitters.com and, in the search box provided, enter the year you graduated high school.
2) From the search results, click the link for the top 100 songs of that year.
3) With the resulting list:
a) bold the songs you like,
b) strike through the ones you hate
c) underline your favorite
d) and ignore the ones you don’t remember/don’t care about.
Results are in the extended entry.
Continue reading Top 100 Songs from 1985.
Thursday was my day off, but I still had to drive to Oxford for a meeting/banquet anyway. That sort of sucked. Had a nice meal at this restaurant that we have been using for the last year or so. Received a couple of awards. Don't really have any place to put them, so they will join the multitude relegated to the basement stack. I prefer cash anyway, particularly when it means spending six hours on my fucking day off. I have another long meeting on monday, this time at the Galleria. Probably won't get home until 8pm or so on Monday night. At least I already have to work that day.
Listening to the Best of Joe Walsh as I sit here. I forgot how much I have always liked that album. I have to do something about dinner soon. Anna cheered at a game most of the afternoon, and now has gone to a birthday party for most of the evening, so she won't be joining us tonight. Too bad. T-Bones, potatoes, and maybe a salad, with Sam Adams and Red Stripe.
...when you are two minutes from the house :)
Just finished doing a Waffle Party for Anna's class, along with my Human Resources Manager. Had a good time, as did the kids. Definately attracted a lot of attention though. Now several of the teachers want us back. It will be much easier when I can finally open a store in this town, instead of having to haul all of my shit from Carrollton. Luckily the school is about a mile from the house, so I checked Anna out an hour early and hit the door. Earliest I have been home in quite some time.
After several years of fooling around with TV to PC and such, I have finally gotten a decent system up and running, that Stephanie and the kids can use. Some of the features I think that they actually prefer now.
I am running Homeseer 2.0 in the background. It is very rare to interacte with it now, except using the web interface. I have it controlling a shitload of X-10 devices, one Z-wave lamp interface, which I cannot decide if I like or not. I originally had the Z-Wave beginners kit, or something like that. Came with a Z-Wave handheld controller, a USB interface, and two lamp modules. One of the lamp modules went belly up after about a month and has been sitting in a drawer ever since. The Handheld controller works, and I have used it to program the devices, but as a remote it blows chunks. It is nowhere even close to being intuitive, hard to use, and a general pain in the ass. As far as the USB controller and remaining lamp module, they work, but there is an issue with either Homeseer 2.0, or the interface is going bad, because I have to restart Homeseer sometimes three or four times a day because it loses communication with the controller. All in all, I will probably ditch Z-Wave in the very near future. I have heard lots of good things about it, but in my experience it sucks. If the shit doesn't work out of the box for a dumbass, then noone will buy it or take it seriously down the road.
I use the ADI Ocelot as my X-10 controller, as well as (less often) IR control. The Ocelot kicks ass. I have had it for a year or two, and have never had a problem with it. No software for me to bungle up (except for the rare cases when I use CMAX to program events in it) and it works great with HS. I am using a 3rd party plugin for it, rather than the stock Ocelot plugin.
I also have a Temp05 temperature interface. I have about 15 temperature sensors around the house, inside and out, as well as a humidity sensor. I have most of them disconnected pending a rewiring project that I have not gotten around to yet.
I have two RF sensors, the MR-26a, and the W800RF for my remote control. Works very well, and I can use Homeseer with a girder interface to translate commands to the rest of my programs.
For remotes, I have two. I would like to go down to only one, but have not had the time to fool with the needed configuration for that. The main one is the Snapstream Firefly. I use it to control just about EVERYTHING on the HTPC. Unfortunately it is strictly RF, so I have to use my programmable IR remote for everything else.
On the front end, I am using Meedio as my main interface. I really like the menuing system, and it is very extensible. I have a rudimentary plugin that uses Homeseer and Girder to control my lighting from Meedio, although my remote is faster and I normally use that. It uses libraries to catalogue all of my music, movies and pictures, in addition to information downloaded from the web. I am able to use it as a My Pictures slideshow (with music playing if I want it). DVD rips, in addition to movies record with my PVR software are also available. I don't use the internal music software, as there is NO support for music downloaded from iTunes, and not likely to be any time in the near future. I do use a plugin the runs winamp in the background, which works great. Near seamless, I never see winamp.
As far as TV, I own Meedio Pro, which includes a PVR interface, but support for TV tuner cards sucks, and overall, it is very inferior to Snapstreams product, BeyondTV. I have three TV tuners, one is USB, the other two PCI cards. One of the PCI cards is hooked to my cable box, the other two, just to regular cable. BeyondTV also offers me the capability to use a serial cable from my cable box to the PC, so it changes the channels when I need it to. In the past I used girder and the Oceleot, and if I ever have my cable box upgraded, will probably end up doing that again, but it is much slower than the serial hookup. The PVR is great. I can record two shows siultaneously while watching a 3rd. I schedule it to record stuff that I really want to watch, very rarely do I watch live TV anymore. When I do watch it live, I am able to pause, rewind, set it to record even though I am in the middle of the show. The Beta version that I was running earlier this summer also offers FM tuner support, I am very much looking forward to that being added back in.
In comparison to alot of systems that I have seen pictures of and described, I have a pretty damn basic system, but it works great for me. I would hate to have to go back to regular TV. I have about 30 gigs of music that I recorded from my CDs, LPs and Cassettes. Much better than taking up all of that damn room. I do still get the occasional CD, but I prefer to use iTunes, as it is cheaper, and I don't even have to leave the house for it.
I have noticed the last few days that various people all seem to be writing about their dreams. I am sure that I dream, everyone does, but it is extremely rare that I remember having dreamed. I sleep like the dead. When Hurricane Opal roared through West Georgia-Easter Alabama back in the 90's, I slept through the shit. The only reason I knew that it was happening was that one of my bosses called me and told me to get my ass to work :>. Hell, we even had a HUGE oak tree come down about 15-20 feet from the bedroom window.
Once I slept through a tornado that ripped up trees and various items right by the house. I guess oblivion does = happiness.
I decided to call it an early day today, as my second shift was in early. Changed shifts at 12:30, I've done my banking, filled the gas tank, and am sitting here in the sun waiting for the Montessori to let out so that I can pick up the baby.
I did not feel anything like working today. I did get a bunch of cleaning done today though. Also spoke with Officer Steed this morning about the drive off that I had last month. He spoke with the owner of the pickup, and apparently it was her teenage son and friends. I am not particularly interested in pressing charges, just want the damn money.
Just received my fourth hang-up of the day on my cell phone. Going to have to check Verizon's web site when I get home as it shows up as unavailable on my phone. It is probably a result of the dumbass troll that was lurking here awhile back. Comcast sent him (or her) a cease and desist last week, but as I am still receiving a ton of spam and phone calls, I will be calling them back tommorow. I also need to call the law and find out if they are going to Be doing anything.
I heard a lot of talk today about that hospital in NO where all the bodies werw found. Everyone is pretty much as horrified and pissed as the blogs that I have read. Someones head needs to fucking roll over this one.
I have two compressed vertabrae at the small of my back, caused by that special thing called Stupid Teenage Drunk Tricks. When I overdue it working, mainly on truck day, it hurts like a bitch. My pain tolerance is fairly high, but after several hours of dealing with it, it can become very irritating. This is worse. Not sure what I did, but I must have pulled a muscle or something. Just below the small of my back, my damn ass hurts. I haven't done anything particularly strenous this week, but damn, it hurts. Ended up taking a couple of Advil, two muscle relaxers, and a Sam Adams last night just to get rid of it so I could go to sleep. I was hoping that it would be gone bu now, but apparently I am supposed to have a third day of pain. Maes me want to go back to bed. No such luck.
