Yet again another long period has passed between the last update and this one. With things
that I’ve been working on, and work, I just don’t have a lot of time to write stuff often. But I will try and fill in some stuff right now.

First the good stuff. Today was a good day because I got quite a bit accomplished. For a while, I have been looking at the area around my TV and being very upset at how the wiring was. Or, more importantly, my grandmother was really starting to get on my case about it - and rightfully so, it was terrible. I had the TV almost 2 years at this point, and didn’t

really do much in terms of cleaning the tv except for the occasional dusting. So I ripped everything apart, cleaned up all the cables, cleaned up all of the shelves, dusted the TV, put everything on a table to get it off of the floor, and then wired it all together again. The result is a nice and clean system, and much less clutter then before. I also moved the TiVo out (goes into the living room now), and moved in…

MythTV! (Pardon the age of their site - it is actually a VERY active project) MythTV allows me to do all of the TiVo items, and then some. I have a PC in place of the TiVo box that lets me pause live tv, record things, play music, go through picture slideshows, play other videos, play DVDs, create CDs and DVDs, Read news, Get the weather, and finally, surf the web. Wow, thats quite a bit of stuff. :-) It gets better - I can do this with HDTV! Which is my major source of frustration with TiVo is that I had to give up what I spent so much money for. This way, I get the best of both worlds. MythTV is also very flexible in that it supports multiple machines - I can have multiple machines that record, and I can have multiple machines to display it on, so it’s very flexible in how it’s configured.

And, now the bad. I was supposed to go on a ski trip the 27th, but I’m not going. It just doesn’t make sense. I’m not going to be skiing to begin with, and it was getting more expensive then I liked. Plus, I had unforseen car expenses, which certainly didn’t help.

Finally, tonight we gave away Gizmo. (One of the dogs) I was actually much more sad then I thought I would be, but I’m sure I’ll get over it soon. It’s unfortunate, but we need to get rid of both dogs at some point, because we just can’t take care of them as well as I’d like. It’s not fair to the dogs, and it’s not fair to us. We’re just not here enough. Sigh. Life moves on.