Yep. Another ltnp post. I woke up a little over an hour ago and haven’t been able to get back to sleep. After laying in bed for 45 minutes I decided to get up and maybe figure some things out. First an update on life.
liz4jc4ever is now my housemate. I’m now getting not-so-subtle hints from a friend that I should make an “honest woman” out of her. She’s mostly settled in. There are 2 boxes I think that haven’t been unpacked yet. Of course, now she feels the need to add a woman’s touch to the house. I honestly don’t mind. The project for this weekend is making curtains for the bedroom. This has already involved taking me shopping to pick out fabric. We decided on some nice dark green stuff that has stripes alternating between glossy and matte fabric (and here you thought only paint came that way?). We will be venturing up to my parents place tomorrow and borrow sewing machines. Who knows, I might even see how much sewing I can remember. I haven’t done any of that since 8th grade I think … which would make that about 14 yrs ago. Which reminds me … she would have been 7 then. If you had told me then that I’d be dating someone 7 yrs yonger I would have laughed at you then. Funny how age changes things.
Anyway, back to house projects. I need to find a contractor to get some estimates on a remodeling project I want to do. Basically I have this “design opportunity” that juts out into the living room. My house has no heating/cooling vents on the 2nd floor … it relies on windows and the stairwell. This works reasonably well in the winter, but during the summer it gets very uncomfortable. This is especially true when I’m using one of my tower systems because I have a 19″ CRT that throws off a lot of heat (would like to change this … more later on that subject). Anyway, since this design opportunity sits directly above furnace/central air ducts, I would like to see if it is possible to put in a duct running to the upstairs. This is the plan for my tax refunds. If that route doesn’t work, I will probably be replacing windows.
Another more long-term project is fixing wiring issues. Most of the outlets in the house are not grounded. This does not make me happy considering I have a lot of electronic gadgetry which likes grounds. Computers among them. I think this is going to require more serious remodeling (i.e. tear apart walls) and will have to be done room-by-room. We’ll see if I have $$ and ambition to do this.
Yard projects will include redoing some flower beds. Two of my rose bushes died off over the winter. That bed is full of weeds anyway and needs to be redone. I think I’ll probably remove the shrub/tree thing at the end of it too since portions of that have died off and while I trimmed off the dead stuff, it is not shaped nicely anymore. There is another flower bed at the front of the house that has irises in it that needs some more topsoil or mulch or something. This could be interesting because it is under a part of the roof that doesn’t have rain gutters (hmm … another project … repainting rain gutters). I like the irises tho. They’re getting ready to bloom too. 
Computer projects! Yes, one of my favorite subjects. Last night new toys arrived. I bought a Hauppauge PVR-350 card and MVP. The first is a really snazzy tv tuner card for PCs that captures and decodes MPEG2. The MVP (music, video, photos) device is something you plug into your computer network and your TV and it will play back media that is stored on your computer. This is quite nifty. We tried out the scheduling feature of the PVR card to record Looney Toons this morning at hours that I should not be awake. It was really nifty to program … log onto titantv.com … find the show you want to record … use the popup menu in the program guide to program the scheduler software automagically. I haven’t been back downstairs to see if this worked, but I have no reason to doubt. When we were playing with it last night, we captured 5 minutes of Indiana Jones: Raiders of the Lost Ark. I think the playback quality was better from what was captured than it was live on the TV. I’m not sure why that is the case, but it bodes well for what we want to do. There are a number of different capture settings and right now it’s set to regular length DVD capture … about 8 Mbps data rate. The capture card supports up to 12 Mbps. I have yet to figure out a really nice way to edit out commercials and put the stuff onto DVD. I suspect I will have to break down and install the MPEG editing software on the PC because converting MPEG to a format I can edit in my other editing software on the Mac seems to be a pain. This brings me to my next little project … figuring out how to connect to my server from Liz’s computer. Last night we did backup her documents via FTP. She has Windows XP Home edition, so she can’t log into my domain. I dug around and found a tip this morning that seemed to indicate if I tweak Samba to not do domain logons, I might be able to connect. Again, since I’m writing this I haven’t had time to try it. If it works, I’ll be ecstatic. Otherwise I’ll have to get her upgrade to XP Pro (which might not be a bad idea anyway).
I recently rescued an HP LaserJet 5M from work that was headed to recycling after a hard life of printing for a computer lab. It’s got 400K pages on it, but I think it has plenty of life left in it for my needs. This means I can bump my Apple LW Pro 630 up to my parents place to replace their laser printer that died (and didn’t work all that well on their network anyway). That reminds me. I ‘m also setting up my old G4 for my parents. My mother will be getting introduced to Mac OS X. I plan on getting some sort of remote assistance software installed on it so that I can help them out with problems without having to drive an hour each way. We’ll see how well it works over their DSL connection.
As I hinted at earlier, I have a 19″ CRT connected to my G5. This throws off a lot of heat. I looked at the specs and power usage is 140 watts. Yikes. I have been admiring LCD screens lately, but I’m pretty picky about my screen. It needs to be sharp, bright and produce accurate color. The last bit has been a sticking point, but I was looking at LCDs at CompUSA earlier this week and ViewSonic appears to have a few screens that might fit the bill. I decided there wasn’t much point in going with a 19″ LCD because the resolution is the same as a 17″ and I don’t have a problem with things being a little smaller on screen. One other must-have feature is dual-inputs, because I connect both my server and my G5 to it. Another reason for going the LCD route is space in my computer room. I have too many desks up there because the CRT is so honkin’ huge I can’t have it sit on a desk and view it comfortably, so it’s actually on a shelf thingy behind my desk and the keyboards are on the desk itself. While this works, it seems like a big waste of space.
Recreation! Yes, I do plan on some. On the cultural side, we are going to go see Les Miserables at the Ordway on June 19th. She is really looking forward to it and so am I. On the “anti-cultural” side, we are planning on attending the NTPA SuperNational pull in Tomah, WI again this year. Liz kinda surprised me when she indicated she wanted to go back. I don’t have a problem with this. For those of you who’ve never been to a professional-grade tractor pull … ya gotta go to Tomah. 
It’s quite the experience. Rich … that means you!
I would like to do a trip somewhere I haven’t been before this summer. Current plans are to venture out to South Dakota and see sights there. Ideas anyone? I also need to get back up to Canada again. I really want to do some trail biking at the Sleeping Giant Provencial Park. I guess I should start getting in shape for that. Lastly, while not happening during what I traditionally think of summer, it is still technically during summer … we are going to see Norah Jones in conce
rt at Xcel Energy Center.
Well, I think that’s it for now. It’s taken nearly an hour to write this much and I don’t feel like talking about work right now.
