there’s been something about castle that has been bothering me for a while and i couldn’t quite figure it out until now. the thing that bothers me is that detective kate beckett is too well dressed to be a detective on tv. it’s not that she is too attractive for the role, there are plenty of hot female detectives on tv. the one that immediately comes to mind is sarah shahi in life. i think that female detectives on tv usually just end up wearing very masculine clothes, but i think the wardrobe choices for kate beckett is much softer than her character is. i’m not sure if that bothers me, but it certainly has been something that has been in the back of my mind.

now that i’ve made the HTPC, i have been using pretty exclusively and it has been working out well. the big issue that i have come across is that the NAS is pretty slow when it is trying to navigate the list of content that i have.

it seems that many people are using a media center plugin called media browser which doesn’t have the latency that media center has. i think that media center is trying to make thumbnails and read other metadata that just takes forever over the network connection. i don’t know why, the NAS and the HTPC is connected over a gigabit connection, but oh well, media browser works quite well.

i have also looked at the iphone app, mediamote. it looks like it is a network based remote control for media center which seems to look pretty cool, but i have some issues with it running stably. the server component appears to keep crashing after a couple of hours or the client fails to connect to the server. not really sure what is going on there…

but the biggest problem for me is HD content. i like HD content but it is just SO big and takes up so much hard drive space. i can’t really tell the difference between the 720p vs HDTV encodings on the 46″ DLP TV, but it makes a huge difference on the projector. i would just suck it up, but streaming to the xbox upstairs is a problem as the xbox isn’t fast enough to decode HD streams.

i might install tveristy or something and have the media center act as a dlna server as well. that should solve that problem…

all in all, it’s starting to come together, though.

• Sprinkled a little this morning. It’s not April anymore, bring on the May flowers. #
• Oh wait. Need rain so the lawn I stopped watering gets some. #
• It’s what we can definite call raining now. No more sprinkles. Rain, go land on my lawn. #

• Someone brought krispy kreme and strawberries. I ate a strawberry for health reasons, krispy kreme for the sheer joy it brings. #

• Tried to go to sleep after waking up early but couldn’t. Gonna be tired today… #

i’ve been so busy that i haven’t had the chance to really do much else but work and a little bit of volleyball. what has been almost criminal is that i’ve left depeche mode’s latest album sounds of the universe unheard for about a week now. so i’m finally getting around to giving it a listen.

there aren’t very many concerts that i would go out and watch these days, but i think that depeche mode might still be one of the few that i would like to go see. i went to the playing the angel concert and absolutely loved it. it could have been one of my favorite concerts ever. i guess it’s largely nostalgia when i listen to these guys, but i think going to the last concert also righted a past wrong.

back in high school, i had tickets to go see depeche mode during the songs of faith and devotion tour with some friends. i had been pretty excited about it and looking forward to it for a long time. back then, concert tickets weren’t as expensive as they are now, but it was still a lot of money for me back then.

i had the tickets in my room, but i was visiting my girlfriend at the time in berkeley. we were having a fight and i was going to leave to go see the concert when she gave me an ultimatum: it was either her or the concert. i was livid, but young and immature. i just didn’t know better and i picked her and missed the concert. things didn’t work out with her, as you can imagine, and i missed the concert. i did learn a life lesson though about the kind of person that i would want to be with and what was important to me, so it wasn’t all bad now that i look back at it.

• Played 6 games of vball at league and just got off a conference call tonight. Time to relax. #
• Just heard that a local school has shut down until thursday for fear of #swineflu People are getting hysteric. It is all i hear in radio. #

• The dog woke me up at 7:30. It is about 5 hours tooveatly to be up. #

while the weather was warm, christi suggested that we go to santana row with koda and eat dinner outside. it sounded like a great idea, but it turned out that i had to work that night. we went the next day when the heat wave had broken. it was still fun to get out and koda was mostly good even though i think he was overstimulated. he’s still a hyper puppy and so i knew it was going to be trouble when we saw that there were other dogs around.

overall though it was fun and nice to get out to have dinner, even if it was for a short little while.

• For take our daughters and sonsto work day, I brought koda in the office. http://twitpic.com/3u9cb #