The Middle

As I get closer to moving into my new place, I've begun to plan and scheme on how best to integrate my media throughout my house. Currently, this all hinges on the speculated abilities of the Xbox 360.

Here's the scenario. I have a fancy Windows Media Center Edition PC that does a fantastic job of recording any TV I want, storing all my photos and music, and serving as a repository for my archived versions of DVD's (there's nothing like having instant access to the entire library of Babylon 5 episodes). Plus, it's got a nice interface and is dead simple to use. (That was my reason for switching from MythTV)

The problem is, I want to get this PC as far away as possible. It's loud, ugly, and annoying to have a keyboard around (even one designed just for it). Bill, being the smart guy that he is, has anticipated this desire, and introduced the concept of a Media Center Extender.

However, that Bill is something of a con man, since these extenders don't behave "exactly" like the MCE PC, just close. The difference being, they'll play WMV, DVR-MS, and MPEG-2, but not my archive of Divx files. The official party line states that is because the devices are all hardware, and the codec support isn't built into the video processing chips on the extenders.

I'm calling BS on that. I don't believe for a second that if Linksys or HP wanted to include these codecs the video processing chips couldn't be programmed with a firmware update to do it. Bill just wants the world to use his WMV format, and consequently, that's all the extenders allow.

So I then began to search for an alternative to a Media Center Extender. There are several devices out there that act as 'Network DVD Players', essentially a DVD player with an ethernet jack and the ability to play back all your favorite audio and video formats. The current front-runner in this category is the IO-Data AVeL Linkplayer2. All of these devices, however, require you to run a 'server' from your PC to stream the media. This is annoying, because in most cases, you're restricted to some weird Windows-only app for media sharing, rather than something simple and intuitive, like an SMB share.

Then I stumbled across the fact that these are almost all simple implementations of the emerging UPnP A/V standard for sharing media content across a LAN. That realization lead me to TwonkyVision, who sell an independent version of this standard that runs on Windows, Mac, Linux, and get this, the Linksys NSLU2! Score! Now we're talking. Nothing says home media like a little appliance for serving up files, all sans loud, obnoxious PC. This seems like a perfect fit.

So I've got this dream of a NSLU2 sitting in my house, serving up all my content via UPnP A/V goodness to any of the numerous devices that accept it, but still no ability nor simple interface to access captured MCE TV shows. Bummer. So I add a Media Center Extender to the mix for remote viewing of recorded TV. But, at this point I'm looking at a network DVD player for Divx and a Media Center Extender for TV. Two devices is certainly one too many.

But wait. The Xbox 360 has full support to act as a Media Center Extender right out of the box. In addition to that, it will also support the new "Windows Media Connect" standard. This is Bill's version of MCE for non-MCE versions of Windows. It'll allow all the PC's in your house to share music, photos, and video with a compatible 'Digital Media Receiver', including of course, the Xbox 360. Sound familiar? It should, because it's just Bill's implementation of UPnP A/V for Windows.

So, UPnP A/V supports a variety of formats, including Divx. Will the Xbox team surprise us all and include that? Will it work with any UPnP A/V server? Will this one box be the $299 answer to my multi-box home media viewing woes? If this does have all the support I need, I'll be screaming from the rooftops the beauty of the Bill's vision of the digital home.

If not, I'll continue to be annoyed by MSFT, and end up with some hodge-podge solution of MythTV, video transcoding, and 150' S-Video cables strewn throughout my house.

For now I'm going to sit and wait for the various MCE bigwigs to leak out the news that I'm totally insane for even dreaming of this, or that my vision of home media consolidation is coming to fruition sometime in November.

100,000 down, 200,000 to go.

Add another one to the list.

Item: Termite Inspection

Cost: $75

Why: Becase wood-destroying insects are very detrimental to the value of your home, and $75 is a small price to pay for the peace of mind that your house is not about to collapse.

This was actually a little overdue, but since I've gotten into a mode of thinking where I just assume there are three implied zeroes on the end of all dollar amounts, figured it was about time. And my ability to effectively halt my automobile had reached an all-time new low.

Item: New brake calipers, pads, rotors, and a flushing of brake lines

Cost: $600

Why: Because this is what happens the week after you commit to spend umpteen thousand dollars.

It turns out when you're playing with new google toys, and you add contacts, it sends them a bunch of spam describing how wonderful and fascinating I've found the service.

Sorry about that. The chances of me spending any serious amount of time on a public IM service are pretty low, even if it is from the wonder-gang at google.

From first glance, it seems like a reasonably nice IM client, but the big bonus for me is the Jabber/XMPP protocol, and how they're ranting and raving about interoperability and the like. That's really got to piss off AOL, Yahoo!, and MSN.

Just to keep up some geek cred and get off the real estate kick, here's a quick fix for Typo.

When adding a post, the categories box lists the categories in a random order (ie by their numerical id's, which means very little to a human). To sort them in alphabetical order, which is of course the proper way to do it, make the following change to app/controllers/admin/content_controller.rb:

Line # 30 will read:

@categories = Category.find_all

Change it to:

@categories = Category.find_all.sort {|a,b| a.name.capitalize <=> b.name.capitalize}

There, isn't that better?

Update: Do the same on line 12 to hit the "Quick Post" functionality

So at this point, I've got a house all lined up, some people willing to sell it to me, and I still haven't spent a penny. Tomorrow morning, the floodgates on the wallet open up, and I'll wake up sometime six months from now at a Home Depot Anonymous meeting.

Item: A Home Inspection

Cost: $250-$300 & up.

Why: You went out, armed with your trusty Buyer's Agent, and found the perfect abode to call your own. You even offered up some cash, and the sellers agreed to take it in exchange for what is currenlty their abode.

The very next thing you have to do is get a person who knows how a house works to tell you that the little piece of heaven you're trying to buy actually functions.

Sure, you looked all through the place, and the new carpet and countertops are just to die for, but you probably didn't notice that the supports in the attic are rotting from the leaks in the incorrectly installed shingles. That's probably because you didn't bother to get up under the roof and look, did you? You were too busy on your hands and knees in the crawlspace looking for problems with the HVAC system. Oh, you didn't do that either? A home inspector will, and that's what you pay them for.

This is essentially your one and only chance to make certain that the home you're purchasing is in top working condition, with no outstanding major problems, before you become stuck with it. For a few hundred bucks, you save yourself from getting stuck with a real estate lemon that can cost you tens of thousands of dollars to fix.

As far as I know, there's no "3 Day Lemon Law" in real estate. You close on that uninspected dream house, and that leaky roof and termite-infested basement is yours until you fnd another person to buy it, which will be at a vastly lower price than you just paid for it. Because they'll have it inspected first.

(As far as I know, the house I'm currently looking to purchase is in tip-top shape, but we'll see how it goes tomorrow morning)

Just so in the distant future, I can remind myself how abysmal I am at estimating expenses, I decided to capture all the random costs I incur through this little home purchase I'm trying to make.

Item: A Buyer's Agent

Cost: $0

Why: This one is a no brainer. You get at your disposal a person who deals in home purchases day in and day out. He or she knows more about the neighborhoods. More about what kind of siding is on you house. What kind of time on market and appreciation you can expect out of a house. Where all the cool kids live. Where the sought after school districts are located. How often the city cleans the streets. In short, this is a person that knows infinitely more than you do about real estate in your town.

Not to mention this person has a legal duty to represent your best interests, not those of any sellers.

So what does it cost you to have access to this well of knowledge, poised to defend you in all stages of the transaction?

Not a penny. Can't beat that.

For almost a year now, I've been bugging Bobby Wieland on an erractic basis with my strange and insane house wish-lists. From day one, he's been a tremendous asset, and taught me more about real estate than I ever thought I could pick up. He was never impatient, and talked me out of more than a few bad deals that I wouldn't have seen coming.

Hell, I'm going to miss hanging out with him on the weekends, driving around and talking about the market. I would recommend him to anyone in RaIeigh looking to buy or sell a place without hesitation. I just wish I would've spent a few hundred thousand more to help him out with that commission. Maybe next time.

The search has been long, but as of right now I have signed contracts that say, barring any horrible mishaps or suprising inspection disoveries, I'll be purchasing a house in just about a month.

For you visual types, a house looks like this:

MY house looks like this:

This 'home-owner' stuff is weird. Now I'm going to be all confused when I fill out forms & applications and can't check "rent". It was hard enough to transition away from "lives with parents".

And yes, it does match quite well with my increasingly stale default typo theme, doesn't it?

What's the appropriate verb for adding a site to your collection of del.icio.us bookmarks?

del.icio.us-ed?

del.icio.us-ified?

del.icio.us-ized?

tagged?

Periods or no?

The internet needs to form a conclusion here.

(And yes, I'm pretty sure there's a verb for making something else into a verb, and it's not verbization.)

IBM, in addition to an Investor RSS feed, now has an Investor podcast, and an RSS feed for it.

It even validates, so someone on that team must be paying attention to Sam Ruby.

Cool stuff, if you're into IBM Investor Relation type news.

So, where can I get a feed for software fixpacks and security patches? How about new hardware and software releases? Available job openings? A feed of blogging IBMers? Papers published by IBM research? Patents granted? Competitive wins over Microsoft? Stories about IBM embracing open standards? Funny things that happened today in the cafeteria? The investor stuff is nice, but this needs to be cranked up a notch and applied to many more areas of IBM.