Life on Snow Hill

Although I don’t know if that is a good thing or not, but I’m sufficiently impressed.  Recently we got new phones at work.  We, being the 3 person group I’m in.  We did have Motorola Q’s, which were cool phones.  At first, anyway.  They constantly had to be reset by taking the battery out, and lots of times we couldn’t place a call without resetting them.  The email worked about 1/4 of the time.

The new phones we got were the latest & greatest BlackBerry Pearl 8130’s.  We have all of the standard BlackBerry functionality – email, calendaring, address book…  But we also have GPS navigation, which works very well.  Forget the fact it’s being run on a phone – it works sufficiently well enough to be a GPS device all its own.  The functionality that prompted me to write this blog entry, however, is its modem.  My phone is currently tethered to my laptop while I sit here in a chiropractic clinic.

The speed is at least as fast as my DSL at home, which is 1.5 Mbps.  I’m very impressed with the service.  As long as I have a signal on my cellphone, I have internet access.  Do I *want* to be that connected?  Sure, when I have something I’d like to look up on the internet.  For work purposes?  No way.

Well, it’s been a while since I’ve posted anything, so I’ve got a lot to catch up on.

Last week, Becky and I took a trip to Gatlinburg to stay at the Bent Creek golf resort.  Neither of us play golf, but that’s ok – the resort itself was nice even without the golf course.

While we were there, we spent some time in downtown Gatlinburg walking around and visiting a few shops.  It was a little tiring, but it was a lot of fun.  To finish off the visit we went to the Dixie Stampede.  That’s always a fun dinner show – if you haven’t been, you should go!

When we got back, we came home to this little guy.  What is this thing, you ask?  Before we left, we planted seeds inside in this little greenhouse container.  We planted tomatoes, peppers, broccoli, carrots, watermelon, squash and zucchini.  I think I remembered all of it…  Anyway, we planted them on Saturday the 9th.  We got back home on the 13th, and we already had a couple of sprouts – the one you see here is a tiny broccoli sprout.

We’ve been excited for Spring to arrive so that we could get our garden started.  On our last trip to Walmart, we found that they already had their seeds out, so we brought home a bunch of them and started planting them so they would be ready when warm weather finally arrived for good.

Finally, meet Echo.  Echo is a Miniature Collie mix.  Becky convinced me that an inside dog would be a lot of fun to have, and since Mixer disappeared I actually started considering the possibility of having one inside.  She did all the legwork and found this freebie.

Echo is a laid back little pup, but he gets playful if you start playing with him.  He had his first vet trip today – they gave us some worm medicine and gave him his first set of shots.  Overall they gave a good report and said he was a healthy little guy.

Me?  I’ll be fine as long as he doesn’t destroy any of our property in the house.

Joy & Jamin made a trip down to Tennessee to visit for a week, so we took advantage of our little studio setup to get some photos of baby Jackson yesterday evening.  He’s about a month and a week old right now.

Overall the session went well – Jackson wasn’t in the mood to pose, but we still got some good shots.  I was afraid the flashes would make him angry, but they actually calmed him down.  He loved looking at them!

We were all surprised at how well he could hold his head up for some of the photos.  As much as he was crying, he was a real sport for the whole shoot.  Click on each of the photos for a larger version if you like.

Warning – this will be a geeky post.  If you are not a geek or are uninterested in geeky stuff, please do not proceed.

Vista is a great media center platform.  It’s nice & shiny and all that stuff.  It looks hi-tech, and it’s really easy to use.  The only problem is, it’s a real resource hog.

Becky and I tolerated it as long as we could.  If it happened to be recording a show when we turned on the media extender (Xbox 360), that show would start stuttering badly at that point in time, and it would never get caught up and calm down.

As I said, we tolerated it.  We finally had enough.  Plus, it was Superbowl Sunday.  I didn’t want to wait until the game had finished recording before I turned it on to watch it.  Not to mention all the other times we’ve turned it on and what we were trying to watch was nothing but broken audio with pixilated video.  So last Saturday I set out with the task of re-imaging the PC back to the way it came from the factory – Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005.

Once I unplugged the extra 300GB SATA drive that I added for recorded shows’ storage, the restore went very smoothly.  I only had to install the drivers for my analog tuner – the digital tuner was recognized automatically, which was nice, because I didn’t remember how I got it to work before.  Somehow it was a real pain the first time, but not this time.

After the PC had a new, clean build, I uninstalled all that ‘extra’ stuff the PC manufacturers put on there – AOL, stupid little games, etc.  I also stopped several services that weren’t completely necessary in hopes to streamline the system.  I then went through the Media Center setup, and went through the process to connect the Xbox 360 back to it.  Everything was going smooth – this was too easy this time for some reason.

Ok, everything is configured.  I’m testing out the TV functionality.  It works!  Wow, it was so easy.  Well, compared to last time anyway – you still have to know what you’re doing, but still!  I immediately went through the guide and found the big game on FOX and set it to record.

After church Sunday night (We had 2 really good services, by the way) Becky and I came home, got some food ready and changed into some more comfortable clothes.  The moment of truth was a little over an hour and a half away (Remember, the point where I power on the Xbox as a media center extender would cause the recorded show to begin its pixilating and cutting out from that point forward, and it was a little after 7:30).  We were enjoying the game, and I totally forgot to even look for trouble.  It never came.  And this was a large recording.

Finally, the system works like it’s supposed to, although on an older version of Windows.  That’s ok, lots of people are avoiding Vista for this reason alone.  Maybe if I can get enough money to get a workhorse of a computer I’ll transfer it all back over.  But until then, I’ll stick with my XP for my Media Center needs.

I saw this a while back and thought it was funny, then I heard it played on the radio today and it was still just as funny. It’s a song a mom made up to condense everything a mom would say in the average day into a 2 or 3 minute song. Enjoy!