Last weekend I had my car broken into for the second time in four months. Sometime between midnight and 1:30 AM, down on Alaskan Way by Unexpected Production’s theatre, someone smashed the driver’s window and ransacked every car along the row. I know better than to keep anything of value in my car… in fact, the only things they stole were an old computer and networking equipment that I had been meaning to take to the recycling centre for months.
That’s small comfort, though, when it’s 2 AM and you’re sitting on a pillow to keep the shards of glass from cutting into your rear, with the cold wind whipping at your face the entire time.
I called the same auto glass company as last time. The guy they sent did a much shoddier job than the previous one… I wound up having to spend about ten minutes with his vacuum picking up the shards of glass he plainly missed. Unlike the last time, though, a dent was left in the frame of my car door, which the auto-glass guy identified as being something that should be fixed or else it would cause trouble for the window. That’s going to set me back another $250, putting me well above my insurance deductible but not enough to make a claim for it worthwhile, unfortunately.
It hurts that this happens to me when I go to Theatresports, as that’s a hugely important and rewarding part of my life and I hate having such negative experiences associated with it.
In nerdier news, I’ve spent well over a year now exploring options for improving my household’s TV-watching options. Having a DVR in the living room is great but it’s inconvenient not being able to watch any of the programs in the bedroom. The cost of equipping the bedroom with a similar DVR and going HD with it would be quite expensive, but even if I went that route the two DVRs wouldn’t be able to share their content. I’ve explored some alternatives including TiVo and Moxi, but all of them are deficient in ways that makes it hard for me to justify the additional cost. So in the end what I’ve done is purchased the equipment to build my own Home Theatre PC, a custom computer that will both act as a DVR and be remotely accessible from the bedroom over the network, such that the bedroom will be able to watch both live TV and share the DVR with the living room without an actual cable connection being present.
All in all it’s an expensive project costing me upwards of $1,000 in equipment, but as a result I will be able to significantly lower the monthly cost of my cable bill since there will be only one incoming connection that the entire condo feeds off of. And the best part of this home-brewn solution is that I will get the best customization options available to me, with a state-of-the-art interface that doesn’t do things like spit ads from Comcast at me when I do things like use the onscreen guide.
At least, that’s what I hope. It’s all based on Microsoft’s Windows Media Center software, and it’s been extremely difficult to dredge any solid reviews of it up from the Internet that cover the entire span of use cases I intend to put it through. I’ve asked on Internet forums and received some helpful responses, but not a lot that really answers all of my usability questions. I don’t know anyone with a similar system that I can examine for myself, and even the brand new Microsoft Store that just opened up in Bellevue Square doesn’t have a demo of it running. So I’ve been spending months and months hemming and hawing, not wanting to commit to the investment without some way of knowing it will do what I want it to. But I ultimately realized that evidence was never going to present itself and I would need to take a leap of faith if I wanted to make it happen… so I did so, and ordered all the parts this past week. It will be the first computer I’ve ever assembled, although I have done plenty of upgrades in the past that required similar mucking about in the internal hardware. I intend to document the process and the result, and it should be interesting.
Dan.
