I have temporarily taken down the meedio setup. Unfortunately it doubled my monthly bandwidth usage in one week, I hit about 80% for the month, and am not currently willing to pay for more bandwidth, as keeping my blog online is more important.
I don't have a problem keeping it online, but will have to search for some other solutions. I may mirror it at a couple of different places, and then re-link to it.
I went ahead and installed it on my bedroom pc and started in. I was able to get the meedio configure application to recognize yahoo as the default app thanks to some directions posted on the meedio forums. I pulled one of my three tv tuners out of the living room and installed it. No go. Yahoo's TV Tuner wizard says that it is an unsupported tuner, even though the WinTV PVR-USB 2 is in the list of only five tuners that it supports. Damn.
For the time being I am using BeyondTV again. Natively supports my tuner, AND the remote. Unfortunately, BTV and Meedio (or Yahoo GO) won't use the IR Remote at the same time, Meedio uses a plugin and needs the IR program closed, and BTV uses the Hauppauge IR program.
I may swap out remotes later in the week. I have other shit that I need to do though, so it may be a few days before I get around to that.
GB
posted a little blurb about the ever-evolving english language. From what it says, the average vocabulary of an educated english speaker is about 24000-30000 words, but that you can get by on about 3000. Working with the folks that I do, I can probably cut that down to a couple hundred, most of which are listed here
What the hell is a Cleveland Steamer anyway?
I can think of easier ways to get laid, but what the hell. Looks like he is currently at 1,653,269 hits. Not too much longer to go. Hehe, his girlfriend is going to be pissed.
Thanks to Acidman for the link
UPDATE
Three hours, 12 minutes later, and the guy is up to 2,276,462.
Have fun dude.
Yahoo! Go for TV was released in the last 24 hours, so I went ahead and downloaded it to check it out. It is definately Meedio in disguise, with a bunch of missing stuff.
I am fairly biased towards my review, as I paid for Meedio, and then paid for the "pro" version later, with the hopes that the TV portion would eventually be improved to where I could replace BTV with it. No such luck. BeyondTV always kicked Meedio's ass as far as PVR capabilities, and supported hardware. Yahoo! Go is free, so that is a bonus, but as a paying user of Meedio, it ticks me off. Not that I regret it. I got what I paid for, a fully functional front-end that my family could use with a single remote. It is great for watching movies, viewing pictures, and listening to music.
Anyway, on to Yahoo! Go.
It was a fairly small download compared to some others I have checked out at 9mb. Quick and easy install, then runs the setup wizard. You enter your yahoo username if you have one. I don't know what happens if you don't, so can't say much there, as I do. It prompts you the locations of your pictures, music, and videos. Since I don't have any TV tuners in my test system (my desktop), there was nothing for me to set up there.
Once the install was finished, I eagerly started the app. It comes up with a nice clean theme, purple in color. Nice, my favorite. There are seven menu options. I will go through each in turn.
First there is movies. Once you have selected a menu option, the right hand side brings up several more. Under movies, there are Top Box Office, Today's Features, My Theaters, Local Theaters, and DVD Player. Top Box Office is a detailed listing of what is currently out in the theaters with synopsis, trailers, and cast listings. This is kind of a nice feature. Today's features looks to be a listing of upcoming theater releases, with the same kind of stuff as Top Box Office. My theaters probably gives you a list of your favorite theaters IF you have set them up on your yahoo account. Since I use Fandango anyway, this was pretty much useless to me. Local theaters predictably gives a listing of...Local Theaters!!. Damn. It also gives you a list of movies that are currently playing there, and you can get to the same Deatailed listing that is in Top Box Office. DVD player takes you into what I guess is the stock Meedio internal DVD player. Since I use an external program for this (Theatertek), this option was pretty useless. All in all, the entire movies menu section was pretty useless to me. No way to set up my DVD software, no way to add in my own movies (I have about 250 ripped to my hard drive, or recorded from BeyondTV).
The next option is Music. Ok, here are the guts to my HTPC system. If it weren't for music (I have about 9000 mp3's) I would just run BeyondTV and be done with it. In the music menu, we have several options. First is LAUNCHkast. This is an extremely well done module. I have used shoutcast with Meedio, and set up internet radio through it, but this kicks ass. Next is Music Videos. Just the crap that is online at Yahoo though. No way to set it up for local music videos that I may have downloaded from itunes, or from bands websites. If I want to see crappy music videos, I can tune to MTV or VH1. Next is "On your PC". This gives an explorer-like view of your music directory. I have all of my music arranged in \Artist\Album directories, so it makes it easy to traverse. Once you select "On your PC", it brings up the artist listing, and there is a menu option to "play all". It does not work. You actually have to drill down into the Album directory so that the actual music files show up on the screen in order to select tracks, at which point you are thrown into the Now Playing screen (also a default Meedio behavior). The music player is ok, but there are no options to play protected itunes music, I was not able to find any way to add multiple albums or artists to my playlist, and I hate the way that you have to traverse it. If I want to fool around with explorer, I will open explorer and increase the fucking font size. The next two options are CD player (pretty obvious what this does) and Now Playing. No options in now playing to launch any kind of eye candy, or to look at lyrics.
Next is Photos. There are four options in this menu. First is My Yahoo! Photos. Fine if you have your stuff uploaded to Yahoo Photos. I don't. I use flickr, or my own web site. Next is Shared Yahoo Photos. It prompts you to enter the Yahoo ID of a friend, then you get to see the photos. Next is pretty cool. Flickr. The last things I want to look at is 500,000 flickr photos. No way to search for a particular flickr account, or even set up my own (which oh, by the way, yahoo DOES own, and my yahoo account is LINKED to). Good idea, shitty result. Last option is "On my PC". Decent photo viewer to show off your My Pictures stuff to company. From past experience, just make sure that you only keep your final edited pics here. Keep the crap somewhere else, otherwise you end up showing off your upside-down sideways, shitty pictures of body parts that you don't want your mom to see. Oh, wait, that was a different day.
Next is the TV option. Since I don't have a TV tuner in my box, this shouldn't even show up in the fucking menu. Since it does, I checked it out. Each screen under this menu just tells you that TV is not currently configured. No shit. If I wanted to see this, I would have configured it.
Next is Videos (as opposed to movies?). Why not just keep this under the movies menu, or combine the two of them. First option is Featured videos. Short trailers and clips of TV shows. Watch the damn commercial instead. Next is Top Web Searches (The Most Sought after Videos). Need I say that this is crap. Actually it's not all that bad. User uploaded videos to yahoo. Next is Search. Search for videos on Yahoo. Ok, pretty self-explanatory. Last is On My PC. During setup, you are given the option to specify the default video directory. Since I have over a TB in about eight different drives and directories across my network, this just pissed me off. It played the wmv's fine, but since half of my stuff is ripped DVDs that have been compressed, it wouldn't do anything at all with these. Damn, that sucked.
Next option is settings. No way to change ANY of the settings in Yahoo! Go TV.
Bottom of the list is Exit, which I did, right after going through everything.
Pretty much what I expected from a beta version. It's nicely put together, with most of the work leaning heavily towards the online experience, which I expected considering that it is yahoo. It shows a lot of promise. Enough that I will keep it on here, and upgrade to the next beta. Since I have a running version of Meedio on here too, I was able to hack it somewhat, and try out the yahoo modules in it. No go with that. There is also no weather module, which sucks. The stuff that is good really rocks, but for the most part, I found it pretty much useless. On one hand, it is free, which is nice, AND it may prompt snapstream to fix the problems that it has with the crappy Beyond Media so that it doesn't lose any customers. Yahoo has enough pull, and money, to make this a pretty decent software if it wants to.
If you are not into HA and HTPC's and have actually made it this far and still don't know what the fuck I am talking about, don't worry about it. Mainly I am just blowing off steam, and getting a post in :)
The guys at Meedio have made out pretty well. Yahoo has bought the technology, if not the actual Meedio product. Kind of cool for Pablo and the gang. Since the deal with Yahoo, Meedio is no longer available for download, althought he message forums are still up. I have made the most recent setup available here at least for awhile. I plan on sticking with it as my media front-end, at least until something better comes along.
UPDATE
I have taken the file offline because it was sucking up all of my bandwidth due to other sites leeching instead of putting it on their servers. Thanks.
...or what I am having next Easter! Watch as the dumbass blogger's baptist and catholic forebears rise from the dead and smite his agnostic ass!!
Not a very politically correct statement I suppose. Actually I am referring to the ones that work for me, rather than any mentally of physically deprived persons.
One of my first shift waitresses has been with our company for 20 years or so. I worked with her and her first ex-husband back in the mid '80s in Atlanta, and she was working in my restaurant when I took it three years ago. She is ok, other than constantly needing to work more, and needing more money, at the same time that she constantly wants to go home early, or not work at all.
Her current boyfriend is apparently very hot-tempered, and possibly free with his hands. He is also a grade-A scumbag. He also is going to have a child soon. Not by my waitress, but by the other lady that he has been banging for awhile. 1st class, huh?. Apparently he fell out of the back of a truck today and landed on his head. Hard enough that they life-flighted him all the way to Grady. Bleeding in the brain, and all that shit. Now, I don't want to wish ill of anyone, but it couldn't hae happened to a nicer person. How the fuck do you fall out of the back of a truck and land on your head unless you are doing something really stupid anyway. Possible entry to the Darwin Awards for this year. I will have to check it out and send it in.
I realize that this is probably pretty cold-hearted, and I would be mortified if it had happened to someone close to me, or my family, but that doesn't change the way that I think or feel.
Fucking retard.
Oh, by the way, Happy Easter.
I was never much for sports when I was a kid. I was a bookworm. Generally the one that got picked on until my mid-teens. By that time, I hung with the stoners, doing the fun things that stoners do. That combined with the fact that I was crazy as hell, nobody fucked with me after awhile. Once I was drunk, I didn't give a shit how big you were, I was more than happy to oblige if you wanted a fight, and I rarely lost.
Anyhow, back on track. My parents weren't much into sports either, so I just followed right along the path. I was still pretty young when my son was at the age to start getting into that stuff, so he is alot like us. He played soccer one year, and spent several years involved in the martial arts. Enough to become a 2nd degree black belt anyhow. The school he was involved with closed, and interest in that just sort of faded. Since he's been in High School, he has played several sports, but mostly so that he can hang with his friends.
Anna, however, is different. She has been into Gymnastics, and Cheerleading, and this year, she has just started to play Softball. She is having a pretty good time, most of the time, but she has never played before. I won't go so far to say that she sucks, and she is certainly NOT the worst player on her team. At the beginning of the season, she was hitting ok, but she has lost her timing. Hasn't hit a fucking ball in a couple of weeks. I picked up a practice T at Wally World the other day, but so far it doesn't seem to be doing any good. So today, after I got home from work, I took her up to the practice fields, figuring that it being Easter Sunday, nobody would be there.
I was correct. We had the place to ourselves. I think we were up there for about an hour or so, maybe longer. It was pretty cool. I think that I had more fun than she did. Should have been doing this shit years ago. She enjoyed it all, except for the part where we changed places, and I gave her a chance to rest her arms, and catch for awhile while I batted the balls out to her. It was ok until a grounder popped up and caught her on the shoulder and the cheek. After about ten minutes of crying, and me refusing to take her home, we swapped back out, and she had a great time. Actually hit a few balls too. Hell, if she can hit the shit that I throw, she should be able to hit the pitches that her coach throws. I think that today was probably more of a moral booster for her than any real practice. She has a game tommorow night, and I think that she is looking forward to it. Last week at this time, she was almost in tears and wanted to quit. I am a firm believer that once you start something, you FINISH the job, and I want my kids to learn this too.
Overall, since I have been up three hours prior to the crack of dawn, I am pretty damn tired. It wouldn't be so bad but my wife kept me up until almost midnight. I know it is her fault, because she is the one with the boobs. In that respect, I guess I am still a teenager. Who the fuck needs fancy lingerie and lotions and candles and shit. Hell, just show me some boobs. So much for foreplay.
I'm tired as hell this morning. I didn't sleep worth a crap last night, tossed and turned. It's my own damn fault because I came home yesterday and took a nap for a couple of hours, then drank coffee when I had to go in for shift change last night. I finally got up at about 4am. Damn it's going to be a long day.
I didn't win the $189 million last night, so I guess I will be back at work on Friday. I did manage to only lose $8 after my winnings though. You gotta dream sometimes.
I am a pretty patient guy at work. It almost seems like and enigma. The older I get, the more patient I get. I am able to keep my cool most of the time and deal with a lot of bullshit. A continuous string oof phone calls involving settling petty disputes between people at work is the most irritating. It usually starts about five minutes after I walk out of the restaurant, and can continue as late as midnight, sometimes later. The flip side of that is that I seem to be losing my social skills. Once I have lost patience with someone at work, any damn old thing will just spring out of my mouth. One of my waitresses (the one whose boyfriend is currently in jail, also one of my employees) is having a very hard time paying her bills. I have been letting her work extra hours, some overtime so that she can catch up. She has asked me at least ten times this week to borrow money. Now, I have this deal with my bank. They don't make waffles, and I don't fucking lend money. I don't mind five or ten bucks if I can afford it out of my pocket, I can always take it from them before I hand them their money on payday, but nothing more than that, and damn sure not the money that doesn't belong to me. She came to me again yesterday trying to borrow $100 bucks and out of my mouth springs something like "You might not have to borrow money of you quit spending $40 day on fucking pain pills". That went over like a lead balloon.
I have two or three pill heads that work for me. Working in a restaurant is HARD work, and they are in constant pain, two from car accidents several years ago, one because she is a PSHMF (see previous entries for the definition). I understand that you have a fucking stell steel pin in your hip. I understand that you are in pain. It's just that I don't give a fcuk FUCK. Can't really say that and still have employees working. I really do empathize (sp?) with them, but goddam. Either they are just hooked on the shit and that's why they have to take so many pain killers (the case with a couple of them), or they are just fucking whiners (the case with the other).
Most of their money goes for pills, take-out food, ice, pot, meth, xboxes, and just general crap. Here's a simple fucking plan that will fix it for you:
1. Quit spending all your fucking money on illegal drugs to begin with.
2. Sign up for insurance. It is available for everyone from day one. One of the only restaurants in the industry where this is available. It ain't the greatest coverage, particularly in the first year, but it's better than nothing.
3. Pay your fucking bills.
4. Quit fucking whining and work harder
5. If that doesn't work and you still can't deal with the pain at work, do something else.
It's not that difficult, but does take a bit of work. It took me a couple of years to learn how to get responsible. When I started with my company almost 20 years ago, it was as a 2nd shift waiter. I was unemployeed, irresponsible, and although I wasn't into all of the drug shit that they are doing, pretty much had the same problems. The biggest difference is that I worked my ass off and took pride in the job that I did, no matter what it was. I am the best. 18 months after I started, I was managing the fucking place. There have been several ups and downs. I have quit several times and told them to fuckoff. I was so burned out on it in '99 that I quit and decided to do something else. Three months later I was back at work at the corporate office doing tech support. Here I am six years later running restaurants again. Pretty soon I will have several answering to me. I have pretty much decided that this is what I do, and do well, so I am going to spend another 20 years with them, work my ass off to get as high as I can with them, then fucking retire. Currently our stock (we are a privately held company) is earning around 9%, which is the lowest I have seen it in 20 fucking years. It's also available to EVERYBODY that works for us after six months. Shit, that's a no-brainer.
This past week has been pretty stressful, and at times I thought I was going to explode, and wanted to quit every day. The really funny things is that I think most of it was my fucking sinuses and allergies. I took a claritin yesterday and was fine all day. Crap, I worked 16 hours, and even though I was pretty worn out last night, I still felt better than I have in a couple of weeks. Dumbass, you have to take care of yourself in order to feel decent. Need to go get a claritin and take my other medicine while I am thinking about it.
MISSION ACCOMPLISHED
I have taken my claritin, my protonix, and whatthefuckitis that I take for my cholesterol. There's a pot of Starbucks brewing and I had a smoke.
Last night I caught up on a couple of show from earlier this week. I watched the Sopranos with Stephanie, and she sacked out, so I watched 24. When that was over, I snuck outside for a smoke, and met Mr. Possum on the back porch. I don't know which one of us was more scraed. Shit, I almost jumped over the fucking porch rail, me in my undies and bathrobe. I am not particularly scared of wildlife, but going out on the back porch half-naked in the dark and meeting small shuffling animals was just not in the fucking plan. Chased him off the porch, had my smoke, and went back inside.
I think that I will surf the web for a little while longer, then I need to head to Walmart and get some potting soil. I need to work out in the garden a bit this morning.
Damn, had to edit a couple of typos. I hate typing mistakes. Need to start doing these in Word or something, have spell check. Occasionally I will use Sharp-MT to post, it incluses includes a spell checker, but I don't think that I have installed it since I rebuilt my computer.
...while having sex.
I have to poop.
Smile for the camera.
Get off me, I'll do it myself.
This is your first time...right?
You're almost as good as my ex.
When is this supposed to feel good?
I thought YOU had the keys to the handcuffs!
I was so horny tonight i would have brought a sheep home.
Keep it down, my mother is a light sleeper.
Hey! My friends were right! You ARE good.
I'm starting to sober up and you're getting ugly.
But everybody looks funny naked!
Do I have to pay for this?
No, you're too fat to be on top. You'd kill me!
Actually, your sister likes it like this.
What's your name again?
Hold on, let me change the channel.
It's nice being in bed with someone i don't have to inflate.
Uhhh...I think the condom broke 10 minutes ago.
Sitting here listening to Evanescence. She has a beautiful voice, the band reminds me a lot of Queensryche, just slightly more depressing. What I consider a very "operatic" voice. Geoff Tate, and Rob Halford also have singing voices like that. Just a bit more crunch and Evanescence would be a big hair metal band.
I have listened to Operation Mindcrime: II several times over the last 24 hours, and like most of Queensryche's albums, it grows on you. While not as good as the first, this album is definately the best work they have put out since 1988. I did enjoy their last album, Tribe, but it doesn't compare. Here is the track listing:
1 Freiheit Overtüre
2 Convict
3 I'm American
4 One Foot in Hell
5 Hostage
6 The Hands
7 Speed of Light
8 Signs Say Go
9 Re-Arrange You
10 The Chase
11 Murderer?
12 Circles
13 If I Could Change It All
14 An Intentional Confrontation
15 A Junkie's Blues
16 Fear City Slide
17 All the Promises
You can find samples at their home page, and it is also available on iTunes. I haven't seen them yet since I don't watch music videos all that much, but I believe that at least one of them is up on yahoo.
It's not often anymore that I get really excited about new music. I still enjoy it, I still buy it (mostly via itunes), and still listen to it. Quite often now, particularly since it is all available on my HTPC. I'm just not really into going to concerts and dealing with the stupid fucks anymore.
Queensryche released their new album yesterday, I downloaded it today, and the CD is on it's way. I then paid a visit to the web site and saw an Atlanta date in August. Bought the tickets, three of them actually. Since Chris has never been to a show with us, I thought that would be nice for him. I am very much looking forward to seeing them on August 29th at the Tabernacle in Atlanta. Now the trick is to make sure that I am off work on the 29th and 30th.
I hate time change. I love to sleep, although I don't get nearly enough of it. Daylight Savings Time just makes it worse. Those folks in Arizona know what the hell they are doing. Maybe I need to move there.
