• RT @ProFootballTalk Shawne Merriman busted for battery, false imprisonment http://tinyurl.com/n7nwzw Who did he beat? His gf, Tila Tequila. #
• Don't see what all the hype about district 9 is about. Movie was ok, but not blockbuster, amazing for me. Sadly felt Harry Potter was better #
• Woke up early this morning after sleeping at 4am. I guess I should be productive and clean the garage…or eat the cookies made yesterday. #
• garage cleaning activities have been suspended for the week due to lack of space in the recycling and garbage bins. #
• Just saw a shirt that read: abcdefgHI. I think this shirt can only be pulled off if you are cute. #
• Yahoo fantasy football app for iPhone is beautiful AND free in the app store. Pretty basic featureset but great for simple management. #
• kitchen garbage disposal motor burned out today. had to make two trips to lowe's to replace it, but it's all done now! now we can dispose! #
• The park sign says if attacked by mountain lion, fight back. Yeah, that's, uhhh, reassuring. http://twitpic.com/ha96a #
• http://twitpic.com/hcd7x – what?? photos on facebook are unavailable right now? oh, not all photos, just some people's photos… #
• PSA: replace your air filter regularly. http://twitpic.com/hcm25 #
• RT @SebastienPage No, There Is No iPhone 3.1 Jailbreak Yet http://bit.ly/3brWMR *sigh* #
• Weird bathroo mirror http://twitpic.com/hd4h2 #
• When your mouth is on fire from spicy food, diet coke will not sooth the fire. It angers it. #
• Ah Sunday football in HD. The antenna is very sensitive about where it is pointing. http://twitpic.com/hmr28 #
• 49ers beat Arizona! 20-16! #
• video will probably be pulled down, but classy move by beyonce after Kayne outburst http://bit.ly/sPiql
  #teamTaylor #

i had heard all the hype. i’ve seen the billboards with mike singletary saying “i’m not a moral victory kind of guy”. a new offensive coach, the players training through a particularly tough training camp, a new starting quarterback, and all the talk that the niners are on their way up have been heard.

AND i’m a 49ers fan. i started being a fan in the 80s while watching football games with my dad. i suffered through the last decade or so watching them decline with more quarterbacks and game plans than i can remember. yes, last season came with a lot of change. yes, it looked like things were looking up.

but, come on, now, their first game was against arizona. the same team who last year, despite all odds, went to the super bowl. the super bowl! and there’s kurt warner that they are playing against. and their big top pick crabtree is nowhere to be found. i mean, i wanted the niners to win, but my hopes were not high.

and then i started to watch the game. the defense kept the cards in check. they scored first (albeit a field goal, but still, a score is a score). they kept a lead. it seemed like everything that singletary had been trying to sell the team to believe in themselves and they could accomplish more than they thought they were capable of was all coming true.

i wanted to BELIEVE, but i watched the game in disbelief. the 4th quarter came and then the niners started to unravel. i was started to feel deflated. kurt warner looked like he was hitting his stride. plays were starting to look effortless. the defense against him and his team started to look defeated.

and then there was a turning point late in the game. coach singletary saw what was happening. he saw that the team started to look their belief and he called a timeout. he called a timeout and reminded the team who they were, what they had set out to do, and what they have done so far. he reminded them all that they need to believe, they need to accomplish what they had set out to do.

was the running game pathetic for the niners? you betcha. was the play calling for the niners run offense unoriginal, uninspired, and unwavering? yup. was it the defense that carried the team to this victory? yeah, save for a great 50 yard catch by isaac bruce. you have to give props to nedney too, for that 50 yard field goal. but, come on, this was no offensive rout. nothing like what new orleans’ drew brees with 6 TD passes. no, this was a close game with a few good plays, few mistakes for the niners, and some strong defense.

but all things aside, the niners managed to get the win. AT arizona. i remember what this feeling is like. this is the feeling of being a fan of a team that you believe in.

though i think it’s odd that a coach is the face of a franchise, let me just say this, coach singletary: i believe.

i spent the weekend cleaning out the garage. it’s been a multi-day effort and finally, i am starting to see the fruits of my labor. i still have another two or three recycling bin’s worth of crap to take care of, but that’s just stuff that is going to be waiting to be thrown out.

i bought bicycle hooks a few months after i bought the house and JUST NOW am i putting them up. we have three bikes between the two of us and two of the bikes are being hung from the garage. the other bike is currently being lent out to a friend, so i’ll deal with figuring out where to put it later.

tools have been properly stowed away in a tool chest, puppy fostering supplies have been stored away in a couple of boxes, and a ton of memories have been boxed up and stacked away waiting to be remembered again one day.

garbage was just taken out and i’ve broken down almost all of the rest of the boxes that have been sitting around gathering dust. our recycling bin is full yet again, but the garage is really starting to look much better.

i don’t think that i watched the old melrose place, but i caught the pilot of the new melrose place and it looks like it has all the potential of having all the drama as the old series.

this show is chock full of pretty people. i’m very excited to see stephanie jacobsen in another series. the pilot episode was decent and it’s definitely shown enough for me to want to watch the next episode.

• How is it poison free? Isn't it poisoness to the ants? How else do they die? Inquiring minds want to know! http://twitpic.com/g0ajf #
• An apple a day… http://twitpic.com/g1w0t #
• The Kitchen Table in Mountain View is a dairy-free restaurant. What do they have against cows?? http://twitpic.com/g4rzd #
• just upgraded to the new PS3 3.00 firmware. looks good so far and it looks like sony is pushing the PS3 towards being a media center. #
• http://twitpic.com/g8ces – "This disc could not be burned and should be repurposed." those wacky Disco devs have a sense of humor. #
• giving ingrid michaelson's latest album _everybody_ a listen. i can't quite place what her voice reminds me of… #
• Finally Friday! Long day of testing/debugging ahead and then it's the long weekend. #
• ordered a laptop battery from ebay on 8/25. it still hasn't come. checked tracking and it FINALLY has left NJ yesterday. not speedy delivery #
• Fell asleep watching tv, but now can't sleep after moving to bed. Why does this always happen? #
• does facebook look weird to anyone else? #
• At Chow in Danville. http://twitpic.com/gnlq2 #
• Chow in Danville charges $2.75 for a can of diet coke, $4.95 for a glass of orange juice. http://twitpic.com/gnn05 #
• Fish tacos at Chow in Danville. http://twitpic.com/gofat #
• Costco run sucked today. Got run over by an impatient shopper who couldn't wait for the aisle to clear. It's a zoo in there. #

one of my biggest pet peeve’s at a restaurant is when they charge $3 for soda and the soda that you get is either a can of soda or doesn’t have complimentary refills.

i spent a few hours today cleaning up the garage which looks like it is just overflowing with all sorts of boxes and baby stuff. all of this clutter is starting to bother me so, i finally started to clean up the mess. our recycling and garbage bins are full, it’s a good thing that garbage day is coming up soon.

i would say that we’ve got another 3 or 4 week’s worth of recycling stuff that needs to go. i’ve been pretty bad about efficiently breaking down cardboard boxes. instead, i’ve been smashing them to flatten them. not the most effective way to do it, but far easier.

while cleaning today, i found a little treasure that i haven’t seen in a long time. i’m not sure why it never got much use, but i found the slingbox that i had purchased years ago. not sure if it still worked, i decided to plug it in and see.

the slingbox worked great out of the box. there is now a mac client of SlingPlayer which installed and setup my slingbox, now known as the slingbox classic. it upgraded the firmware of the slingbox and after some router port forwarding, i was all set to start slinging.

the slingbox actually works pretty well and i was impressed by just how easy it is to use. i already had a solution to stream all of my content on my media server to the iphone, but now i can stream live tv as well. the slingbox has a client for the iphone and though it says that it doesn’t support the slingbox classic, it appears to still be working just fine for people. the iphone app is expensive at a whopping $30, though, and you have to be on wifi to use it. are these crippling restrictions worth the $30 that allows you to stream live tv onto your iphone?

i don’t know if it really is worth it for me, that’s a lot of money to pay just to get my live tv on my phone. i guess if i was stuck somewhere where there wasn’t a tv, but there was wifi, it might be useful…but those times are far and few.

besides, if i had wifi, i could always just bust out my laptop and use the free mac slingplayer, right?

so it’s been a while since i’ve made the move back to the PS3 as my media center. the ps3 is connected to the tv and so far things have been pretty good. if i had to do it all over again, i’m convinced now that i would go one of two ways:

1) PS3 + transcoding/file server (current solution)
2) mac mini + file server

let’s first start with the ways that i just absolutely wouldn’t go with:
1) PS3 + file server (no transcoding server)
2) windows media center

PS3 + file server (no transcoding server)
this solved about 75% of all of my problems. the ps3 natively supports the divx codec (and also xvid), but just supporting the codec doesn’t mean that it will play all divx-encoded files. i don’t know what is going on with how some people encode video, but sometimes it just doesn’t work.

what was great about this solution is that i can run a DNLA server (mediatomb) on a cheap NAS (DNS-323) and have a very cheap, large media store that consumes very little power. it seemed like the ideal solution until i found out that:
1) codec support for the PS3 is not as wide as i had hoped and i often have problems playing AVI files.
2) mkv files are not supported at all.
3) the NAS isn’t powerful enough to transcode on the fly.

windows media center
this seemed like the right way to go. not only do you have full access to your library, but codec support isn’t an issue. if it plays on your computer, it’ll play on the windows media center. additionally, i got a tv tuner for it so that i can record tv whenever i wanted.

my biggest gripes with this solution is that the interface is awful. not only is it awful, it’s SLOW. it’s hard to navigate large libraries of content because the display of the content is done by thumbnails, so it’s hard to see what episode of what show you are on.

sure, there are plugins that people have created to help alleviate UI issues. the best plugin ever is video browser which made media center usable again for me. in fact, i loved this interface. the only problem with it is that it sometimes just doesn’t work. in fact, it would lock up the media center and i’d end up with a blank screen. it was so bad that it made it unusable for me because the only way i could fix it was rebooting the media center.

so it’s true that this option does let you record tv shows, i don’t really record tv anyway, so it’s not a feature i miss. i actually still use the media center to watch OTA HDTV live, like sports.

and now on to what i would do:
PS3 + transcoding file server
this is my current solution for a media center. the transcoding file server is a windows box that handles all of the storage and transcoding needs. i use the fantastic ps3mediaserver for as the streaming server. it supports thumbnails for videos which is a nice touch. currently, there’s 3TB of storage on this machine and it seems like it is plenty of hard drive space for my needs. if i ever need to go with more, it’s pretty easy to upgrade.

what i like about this:
the PS3 interface is pretty slick, it’s clean, and easy to use. once you install the streaming server, codec support isn’t a problem because the streaming server will transcode video on the fly for you. that’s fantastic.

the PS3 is probably the best blu-ray player on the market and looks to be pretty future-proof.

what i don’t like about this:
all this transcoding requires that you have a semi-beefy machine that can handle the transcoding for you. this pretty much means another full-fledged computer and then you have to deal with what OS to run. i’ve been running windows, but linux is definitely a viable option here to cut costs.

the PS3 doesn’t natively support samba which just seems like such a glaring missing feature until you dig a little further and realize that sony is behind the whole DLNA movement. it’s intentionally not being supported and probably never will be.

the PS3 also consumes a lot of power. this solution basically requires 2 computers on all the time to work.

2) mac mini + file server
this is the other option that i really, really struggled with. it is certainly cheaper than the ps3/file server route. there are a couple pieces of software that look really good on the mac for your media center needs. plex is my current favorite. it just looks beautiful. it’s a derivative of XMBC, so codec support isn’t going to be an issue.

you still need a file server because the mac mini just doesn’t have a lot of storage space, but that can easily be handled with a cheap NAS, like the DNS-323.

no blu-ray abilities here, though, so you’ll need a dedicated blu-ray player to deal with this. since i already have the ps3, it seemed like having just one point of entry for all my media serving needs was the easiest way to go. there are very limited tv tuner options for the mac, as well. i haven’t looked too closely into it, i think it’s possible, but it’s not integrated into the media center software.

overall, though, this solution looks pretty promising. there are a couple of other media center apps out there that deserve a look:
boxee – another XBMC derivative, but boxee has a couple of things going for it that makes it unique. the first thing is that they have a social networking component to the app so you can see what your friends have recently seen. that’s kind of cool, kind of invasive. depends on what you watch, i guess.

the other cool thing about boxee is that they have a free iphone app that acts as a remote control. that is just so cool! =P

XBMC w/ aeon skin – i have to admit that i’m not very fond of the interface for the default XBMC compared to other offerings, but a friend had just recommended trying out the aeon skin and it looks very slick.

i just upgraded the ps3 to the new 3.00 firmware. the enhanced XMB is cute and the added media features are nice. it really starts to position the PS3 as a media center.

the upgrade went without issue and the new background with the sparklies is a nice little touch. one thing that i don’t like is that when you are hovering over an item in the XMB, the other options fade out. i prefer to see the context around my selection.

the text in the XMB also appears to have gotten bigger. i don’t think that i mind it, but it does take a little getting used to.