We’ve moved from a 2 bedroom apartment with a decent sized balcony, to a 3 bedroom house with a yard, a big driveway and an essentially unfinished basement, for only a little more than we were paying per month for the apartment. The kids love having a yard to run around in, and playing with their friends next door. I love the fact that there’s more space in the house, so we can watch TV after the kids have gone to bed and not have to worry about waking everyone up, and having a “workshop” downstairs where I can do whatever I want and not make a mess through the rest of the house… and I’m sure my wife is very grateful for that too.

The previous people living here had done a few upgrades in the 4 years they were here (new windows upstairs, new siding), but some stuff was only half finished, leaving some work for us. When the windows were replaced, they were replaced with smaller windows, leaving some drywall to patch up inside, and aside from the ceramic tiles in the kitchen and bathroom the only other flooring was some beat up, mismatched hardwood in the living room that stopped about 2′ into the hallway. So, I’ve been busy tearing up the old hardwood and getting ready for the nice fresh laminate flooring we’re putting in the living room, dining room, hallway and all 3 bedrooms. Then it’s time for baseboards and trim. Once the warmer weather gets here (and stays here) we’ll be putting some steps on the front of the house, and fixing up the deck on the back of the house.

In addition to the big move, I got a new (to me) truck. I now have a 1999 Chevy Silverado. While it may not win any beauty pageants, it’s a decent truck that can easily haul whatever I feel like throwing in the back of it. It’s nothing fancy at the moment, and I have no real plans for it anytime soon, but there are a few things that I would like to do down the road.

And, what house is complete without the pitter-patter of little feet…. yes, that’s right… we got a dog. You thought I was going to say a baby, didn’t you? Her name is Penny, and she’s a black, 1 year old border collie/lab mix. The cats weren’t quite sure what to make of her for the first few days (in which they mostly hid under a bed), but they’re slowly getting used to her.

I’ll post some pictures of the house, truck and dog soon. The last few days of tearing up the hardwood and starting the laminate have taken their toll on me, and I think it’s time to go lay on the couch and go into zombie mode in front of the TV.

Last Man Standing

Man Up

Person of Interest

Alcatraz

The Finder

Napoleon Dynamite

SOFTWARE

Now my next goals are to upgrade my surround sound receiver to something a little newer/better. Right now I’m using a 6+ year old Kenwood VR-6070 receiver, which was $800 when I bought it and served me well until one day it decided to stop working so I’ve had it sitting in the closed for the last year and a half. I decided to pull it out today just to see if anything had changed and… it works now. I’m not sure how to explain it, but I’m not going to complain. The main reason I want to upgrade it is because I’d love to have something with some HDMI inputs/output on it to simplify the mess of cables behind the TV.

I have an Xbox 360 hooked to the TV via HDMI, which is my main source of entertainment. If it’s not being used to play games, I’m either using it for Netflix, or streaming movies/TV shows from my media server. I have PS3 Media Server on my media server, which is supposed to be able to stream HD content to the 360, but I can’t seem to get the settings tweaked to where they need to be and just end up with choppy, unwatchable video and unfortunately I don’t have a Blu-Ray player just yet, so my only source of HD content is from Netflix (which looks great, there’s just not a lot of selection of great movies to pick from yet).

And then there’s my media server. It’s an Intel P4 2.80GHz (running Windows XP SP3) with 1.5GB of RAM and a Radeon 9600 video card w/ DVI output with 2 SATA HDD in it (120GB for the OS and software, and 500GB for the movies, TV shows and music). As a server its worked great. I also have SABnzbd+ and Sick Beard installed on it for all of my movie and TV downloading purposes. In the future I plan on building a HTPC to replace the media server. The media server was originally set up to stream my media to my Xbox w/ XBMC in my bedroom, and the one in the living room, but with this new TV I don’t see us watching much of anything in the bedroom anymore.

And with that, I think it’s time to go stretch out on the couch and bask in the television’s warm glowing warming glow.

I shall try my best to update this blog at least semi-regularly. I know that I’ve told myself that in the past and usually ended up failing miserably, but this time is different somehow… but I guess that only time will tell.

After playing Battlefield Bad Company 2, which I picked up a few days ago (and will hopefully write a post about soon) I find myself finally breaking the 10k gamerscore mark. I am by no means a “gamerscore whore”. I’m not one of those people that plays games just to add to their gamerscore. Anyways, here I stand, with my gamerscore currently at 10,001, with nothing else to add to this post, except my gamercard.

Below is the announcement from CrackBerry.com –

Yesterday we noted that the Curve 8330 from Boost Mobile was shipping with OS 5.0.0.438, and now it looks like its officially available for download. 8330 users can jump over to the BlackBerry Software Downloads page and snag the latest update. If you’re not on Boost, just remember to delete the vendor.xml file before upgrading and you should be good to go. Glad to see that the 5.0 updates are floating in from various carriers, but as with most of you, yes I’m still wondering when we’ll see another official release for the Tour 

• Download OS 5.0.0.438 for the Blackberry Curve 8330 from Boost Mobile >>

Although it’s name suggests perhaps even grander capabilities, Windows enthusiasts are excited over the discovery of a hidden “GodMode” feature that lets users access all of the operating system’s control panels from within a single folder.

By creating a new folder in Windows 7 and renaming it with a certain text string at the end, users are able to have a single place to do everything from changing the look of the mouse pointer to making a new hard-drive partition.

The trick is also said to work in Windows Vista, although some are warning that although it works fine in 32-bit versions of Vista, it can cause 64-bit versions of that operating system to crash.

To enter “GodMode,” one need only create a new folder and then rename the folder to the following:

GodMode.{ED7BA470-8E54-465E-825C-99712043E01C}

Once that is done, the folder’s icon will change to resemble a control panel and will contain dozens of control options. I’m not sure it’s my idea of playing God, but it is a handy way to get to all kinds of controls.

I’ve asked Microsoft for more details on the feature and how it came to be. But so far, Redmond is silent on the topic.

Source: cnet

Okay, lets give this another shot. My blog is back. I’m not quite sure what happened to it. I came here a few days ago to write a post and saw a blank page where my blog should have been. I’m not sure if it was hacked, or if I changed/messed up something, but either way it’s back. I’m not going to promise that I will update every day (because I know that won’t happen), or even every week, but I will do my best to update more than once a month like I was doing before.

So, please ignore the mess. I’m still working on getting this place back to normal. I’m not sure if I’ll keep this theme or not… I like it… but we’ll see. how it works out.