My 41st Birthday

It was a great weekend!
My birthday was Saturday June 13th. I had a super day, or I should say, Weekend.

Last year was my big 4-0. My wife took it upon herself to plan an extravagant party at Westhawk Lake. She invited friends to come out to camp or just to party for the day and head home. So many of my friends were there and I had an awesome time. From flying the plane in Kenora, to losing most of my frontal body hair to the Jengafire on both evenings.

This year however, I gave strict instructions. No big parties. As a matter of fact, no parties that involved people outside of my immediate family. I was intent on taking it easy this year and have a nice relaxing day with my family. No frenzied activity. No entertaining. No stress. I love to have a party. And my friends are fantastic people that I rarely get to see. But this year was going to be a quiet one. I have spoken.

As far as a gift was concerned, I asked for nothing other than a day of my family's time on my birthday and as a special gift from my wife; a day of her time so we could take a geocaching road trip together. And, she agreed. Cool. Not like she had much choice. As I said before...I had spoken.

The day began the way most household birthdays do. Breakfast in bed with all of us crowding into our bed and trying not to spill anything. Then the kids presented me with their fantastic hand made projects. The pride and appreciation I feel when I recieve the artistic results of the solitary labor of one of my children is immeasurable. As I pour over the detail of their gifts I try to imagine what they might have been thinking while drawing/painting/stapling/glueing this particular object. I imagine them sitting their desks, faces barely an inch from the paper as they fastidiously colour with crayons and markers. Their bodies shaking in time with the fervent pistoning of their little arm. These are the gifts that matter. I definitely am not looking forward to the day when they discover the convenience of exchanging money for a pre-printed Hallmark sentiment that is shared among a few dozen recipinents, who, other than the card, have absolutely nothing in common. Of course I'll appreciate them. But I'll miss the other. Alot.

So after the cards come the gifts. I truly was expecting, and hoping for nothing. But as it turned out, I got some shower products from my kids, and a surprise from my wife.

I have never owned a leather jacket. I have never found a jacket that fits and was at a price that I could justify paying. I have periodically mused aloud at how I would like to have a nice leather coat. And I have shopped in the past, but I needed the eye of my wife for final approval. I mean, lets face it, I look amazing in any coat, but she's the one that will be looking at me. I want her to swoon just right.

Well it turns out that this is the birthday I got a leather jacket. And she shopped for it on her own. And it fit me. And it was perfect. The perfect gift for a guy who wanted nothing. Get him something he didn't know he wanted. Awesome.

After that, we just hung around for a bit at the house. Later we decided to go on a picnic. So we grabbed some sandwiches at Subway and headed to Whittier Park to have a picnic and replace a geocache that I had removed while the water was high. After we did those things, we went for a 3 km walk around the Whittier and Lagimodiere Gaboury parks and walked back to the car through the streets of St Boniface. All in all, a pretty happy day.

Then we dropped off the kids at Grandma and Grampas and went to The Line Up for a yummy dinner. We had planned to go out for drinks later, but somehow that never happened. I had a great day.

Nice Hand Cream

Double standards.

The world is full of them.  I try not to get too excited about it.  For the most part, I find them amusing.  This one especially.

Today I found myself in another coworkers office sitting at their desk.  This is not an uncommon occurrence as I am the IT guy.  I spend WAY more time at other peoples desks than I do my own.  I also spend alot of time watching a computer screen.  Usually the prominent visual on that screen is the scrolling percentage counter of an installing application or ongoing process.  That is, you see, my raison d'etre.  I install and reconfigure stuff to make it work better.

In the cases where the caravan of pixels takes a longer time to populate than usual, I sometimes look around at the various items of personality that satisfies the users need of identity in the workplace.  Where a lesser being would take the time to urinate in the corners and at various key locations within the space, we bring in pictures, juvenile artwork, Dilbert calendars, vases, etc.  I particularly enjoy the pictures.  Some are fairly benign.  Simple poses at a favorite locale.  All smiles, and no worries.  While others are goofy or whimsical.  There are also some people who don't take the time to scan the background of a picture to make sure the setting is appropriate.  Exhibit 1- Four people sitting in a living room on a sofa. Sodas and beer on the coffee table in front of them.  Everyone sporting exuberant grins and mild sunburns.  However, if you looked in the corner of the picture, way up at the top, you would see the arched back of the owners dog, and his furry pucker dropping a "cigar" on the hallway carpet.  Exhibit 2- A vacation photo.  Based on the decor in the room, somewhere Mexican...perhaps Dominican.  This is a boudoir photo.  A picture of the boyfriend (thankfully fully clothed) laying on the King sized bed in the hotel room.  All smiles, and no worries.  Again, if you look in the background, on the nightstand, you can clearly see the telltale accordion-fold of a sizeable bandolier of condoms.  And right next to the condoms?  A vibrator.

But I digress.

The reason I thought to post today was the picture here.  Comparatively this is a far more dressed down work space than usual.  Nary a photo in sight.  Although, the freaky, whimsical pencil is rather interesting.

Hand Cream.  Swift and broad would be the judgement assessed on me for having hand cream figure so prominently at my desk.  I mean, seriously, the mouse is less available than the hand cream.  But girls don't have this issue.  Had it been a whole cucumber, perhaps.  But thankfully it wasn't.   

Car Shopping

Increasingly over the past few weeks it has become evident that it is time to retire my trusty companion, the Ford Taurus SE that I have been driving for the past 10 years or so. It was around December that I started to notice a shimmy in the steering that told me that the mechanic at Fountain Tire was not just pulling my leg when he said that I needed to replace my ball joints and tie rods. Being that I had just spent some 800 dollars fixing a far more critical issue, I couldn't bring myself to spend another thousand dollars replacing the front end of the car as well as all four tires.

So the shimmy has graduated to more of a shake. Like most other unfortunate palsy victims, some days are worse than others. On a particularly bad day, Tannis decided to take the car for a quick errand. Upon her return, she didn't even have both feet in the house before she announced, no DEMANDED, that we buy me a new car. And so it begins, the confusing, tiring and expensive (albeit exciting) search for a new vehicle.

I have enjoyed my relationship with Ford so far. We have had a Mercury Tracer, A 1994 Ford Probe, A 1996 Mustang GT, and a 1998 Ford Taurus. All good cars. Aside from a mishancled incident with the Probe, for which we were generously compensated with a fantastic deal on the lease of the Mustang. So I decided to first look over the Ford product line to see if they had any offerings that I would like. The first thing that jumped out at me was the Ford Escape.

I have been looking to get a slightly larger vehicle with more versatile cargo space. The security of the trunk on the Taurus is fine, but it has just become an overstocked catch-all.

MythTV is Awesome

My TV recorder has nothing to do with Bill Gates. I am using a package called Mythbuntu. It combines MythTV, a TiVo-like software package, with Ubuntu, a non-geek friendly version of Linux.

Before that, I started with a Toshiba DVD PVR a few years back. It has an 80 gig hard drive and is pretty user friendly. Problem was, the DVD drive died so I was unable to archive anything I wanted to save. And with an 80 gig drive, that filled up pretty fast. Now they come with much larger drives, but the market is drying up because all of the service providers (Shaw, MTS, etc) offer their own devices. But you will never get content off of those things to a DVD due to the Digital Rights Management bull****.

So that’s why I settled on this MythTV solution. Being based in Linux, it’s free. But for the same reason, it is not for the technically faint-of-heart. Mr. Gates does offer his own solution that gets bundled with most (or all?) versions of Vista called Media Centre. I have seen a demo of it and it looks kind of cool. It seems to have many of the features of the MythTV solution.

Here is a YouTube video that explains it pretty well: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-yNCqj_MXs

Most of the videos on YouTube have the user demonstrating it on their computer. What I did was put the computer beside my TV. My PC has S-video out so I ran a cable from the PC to the TV. Then I connected the audio out from the PC as well. Similar to what you would do with a DVD player.

To use MythTV or Microsoft’s Media Centre, you need to have a TV capture card in your PC. Either HD or Standard, whatever your signal is. That card actually comes with a universal remote control. So now my kids can operate this thing pretty well. They have their shows recording and are able to watch and delete the stuff in their “category”.

Because this thing is a PC on a network, I can access the shows from anywhere in my house on my notebook. And I can also see the system from outside the house via the web.

The system can be run on an older computer, but I added a couple of HD’s to bring my storage up to 1 Terabyte. The only thing I need to pay for is a subscription to the listings service that gives me 2 weeks of program guide information over the web. But at 20 bucks a year, it’s worth it.

****Edit****
I have had people ask me for a cost breakdown/materials list.  Although this will vary from person to person, here is mine:

• 1 Computer (~$200).  Or at least a VM.  

I have a dedicated P4 2.66 GHz with 768MB RAM.  I installed two 500GB hard drives ($200) giving me the better part of a Terabyte of storage.  You can get a great one used from a place like Coreys computing.

• 1 Video Capture Card with tuner. (~$100.00)
  

I bought a Hauppage 150.  This seems to be the standard card that everyone uses.  There is a version of the same card that has 2 tuners.  This allows recording of two channels simultaneously, or recording of one channel while watching another.  If I had this to do over again, I would buy that one.  But for most peoples needs, the single tuner model is sufficient.  You need to ensure that you are using the right card for the service you are paying for (HD vs Standard Definition)

• 1 Video card with S-video Out (~125.00)

This is optional. You only need this if you are outputting your recordings to a TV for viewing. 

That covers the basics.  Other than this, you need:

• A subscription to Schedules Direct (20.00/annually).  This is a service that pushes the TV Guide schedule information to your MythTV PC via the Internets

• An internet connection wherever you are putting this thing.  I had to run a line from my switch to the TV.  This allows the system to automatically gather schedule information.  Also, you can get access to your system from other PC's in your house, or remotely.  You just need to configure your gateway properly.

• Although the Hauppage Capture card comes with a functional remote control, I found it limited in the way it controlled the other devices, so I had to purchase a Logitech Universal remote (~160.00).  This turned out to be the best thing by far.  This thing is fully programmable and you can even set up macros to make it even easier. 
  

"C"....NO...."A"

I have started to age.

I know. "We all age, you idiot". I get the regular aging. What I mean is the aging where you start to become your parents. Or at least you start to develop the habits of people the age of your parents.

I have begun to enjoy crossword puzzles, sudoku, and those cryptoquip things in the paper. I have become the dad who sits at the kitchen table on a Saturday and does the crossword puzzle. I'm OK with it. And the fact that I am aging has nothing to do with this particular post.

Often when I am doing one of these puzzles, I run across the clue "Mom's Sister", or "Grandma's Daughter". The answer is, of course, "aunt". But I have found that more often than not, I have already solved the last three letters using other clues.

"Honey, can you think of a four letter word for 'Mom's Sister' that ends in 'unt'?"

I'm just sayin'.

My Tribe

A number of years ago, before we had kids, Tannis and I got mildly addicted to Warcraft. Not World of Warcraft, the online epic. Just the original Warcraft. It was a simple little game you could play as a human or an orc. You would build homes, barracks, farms, etc and go about building your empire and conquering neighboring civilizations.

When I say mildly addicted, I may be selling it a little lightly. It had become the topic of conversation in every phone call during the day with each other. When I picked her up from work, we would talk strategy till we got home and could turn on the computer. It was stupid, really. There wan't much to the game. It was just so addictive. We eventually kicked the habit and stayed off the smack until Tannis started playing The Sims 2. But don't get me started on that.

Recently I was looking for puzzle type adventure games. My searches led me to http://grubbygames.com/. I downloaded a couple of trial games that were OK. Then I tried My Tribe. This dumb little game is even more simplistic than Warcraft was. Which seemingly makes it even more addictive. And if that wasn't enough, the game simulates operation while you are not playing it. So now, you can close the game, turn off the computer, go to bed, and wake up the next morning to find your Tribe members have starved to death.

There is no currency, but you need to gather wood, food and stone. These are your basic raw materials. You can also expect the odd piece of flotsam from your ship to show up while you are playing. It may contain food, or items to help you build or research new technologies. On that note, one of the structures you get to build is a science lab. Here you get to research things and conduct chemical experiments with the various elements you find on the island.

Producing offspring is as easy as picking up one of your tribe members and dropping them on a member of the opposite sex. They will then trundle off into an available hut, and emerge seconds later with an infant. You don't have to care for the children. As a matter of fact, you can't do anything with them till they become adults. They do nothing other than wander around.

I have not yet introduced Tannis to this game. I really want to, but if she gets addicted, she'll blame me. Perhaps soon.

Quote of the Day

iGoogle advises me that Matt Groening had this to say:

Love is a snowmobile racing across the tundra and then suddenly it flips over, pinning you underneath. At night, the ice weasels come.

I'm not saying I agree with this necessarily. But it is funny. And I just watched Ice Age 2 last night. So the image if that acorn-manic weasel-thing is fresh in my mind.