Month: September 2012

Friday September 7th

by

Not a huge amount to report that I want to write about publicly on the Internet, so I wrote a private blog post. I work from home today because I needed to have some scheduling flexibility. Thankfully in the end I didn’t need it, but it’s good to know it’s available when needed.

I ordered takeout sushi for lunch today. I was also able to play a little bit with Cisco and jabber. One of the guys at work and I tested to make sure that it functions and I can receive chat messages when the app is closed on my iPhone and iPad. It will be pretty cool when we all start using it.

We do not have any specific plans yet for this weekend. We are hoping to be pretty low key, since the baby is due Tuesday. Depending on how MC feels we might get a dinner out one night. Other than that it’s vegging and making sure we get anything we need to do around the apartment done.

Desk Reconfiguration

by

At work I have had 5 monitors on my desk.  Let’s not argue the necessity of five monitors. It is a bit excessive. That is why I’ve been thinking about downsizing for a while.  At the time the setup made sense, and I had the equipment on hand so I figured why not.  Recently however my desk is been slightly cramped, and I found myself using my third computer significantly less.  This set up started when I got a new 27 inch display for my laptop.  It was a great needed addition since the extra real-estate is used and I blow text up a lot.  With that addition I had the two 19″ monitors I was using for my Macbook Air free to move to my Mac Mini that I use.  I have that machine mainly to sit on the guest wifi network to do Skype video chats with far flung staff.  I can use Skype on the internal network but it never seems the same.  The 15″ monitors (2 of them) I was using for the Min went towards a Dell desktop I have that I run a specific work app on.  I can run it in a VM but on my older Macbook Air the VM was starved for memory.  Now i may revisit the need for that machine but i like having a dedicated Windows machine around even if I dont use it often.

Since I wasn’t using the windows machine a lot I gave away the 15″ monitors and just have the Dell desktop plugged into one of the Mini’s 19″ monitors.  They take DVI & VGI so I created  poor mans switcher for the monitor.  Longer term i will probably just RDP to that machine.  Surprisingly 3 monitors is not uncommon at work.  Some people even have 4 but i was a bit out there with the 5.

Now I have space on my desk that you can actually see my wedding & engagement photos.  Now isn’t that whats important?

Brunch Out

by

Today we meet up with MC’s friend Mary Beth who was in town visiting family and friends. We dont get to see her much with her living out of town so it was nice to meet up.  We meet at the Tick Tok.  I dont recall having breakfast there ever but I have had lunch and dinner a lot when I worked at Redcats.  The food was really good diner food.  i was pleased with the real hash browns.  Most places dont have them and they are way better than the regular breakfast potato options.

After breakfast/brunch we headed over to Home Depot to get some wood for shelves and some other misc stuff.

At home we spent some time figuring out were we want to hang pictures and paintings and stuff.  We have been in the apartment for 9 months and we are finally getting around to that.  We hung some items but still need to find a home for other pieces.  Time is ticking till the baby arrives and we wont have time for stuff like that!

The rest of the day was nice and restful.  Exactly what you want before you go back to work after a 3 day weekend!

Waffles and Resting at Home

by

Last weekend while driving to pizza with my parents MC noticed the Waffle and Dinges truck that I love right off of Austin St.  I checked it out and they apparently have been showing up on Sunday’s.  Today I saw they were there again and I went out to pick up waffles for MC and I.  They were great as usual.

After breakfast we were living up our free weekend by continuing to chill out and do some light house work, and laundry.  MC found a new Italian place to try ordering from for dinner.  Turned out to not be so great.  Otherwise a low key day!

Plex On AppleTV

by

I have had an AppleTV since the first generation one came out years ago. When the second-generation one came out I pick that up and sold the original on eBay. I have loved the idea of an AppleTV for years. I have even made my own homegrown media center on several occasions. If you read this blog you’ll read about several of those iterations. The problem is in practice I really haven’t had huge luck with the AppleTVs. The second-generation AppleTV I currently have has been replaced with a Mac Mini running Plex media center. That has been my media center of choice for a while. I have tried the Boxer box, and the Roku. with both of those I was hoping to plug into my media centers the a library, and with the Roku to use it as a front end for Plex. neither of those options worked out very well. All along the AppleTV has been powered on but not plugged into my TV. I would plug it in to music, but not really using it for TV. I have been generally lazy and didn’t want to jailbreak it. The Mac Mini has functioned generally well so I was in no rush to try anything different again. since my move I have had some more buggy experiences with the Mac Mini then the previous two years or so I’ve had it. It wasn’t enough for me to go making drastic changes, that is until I read that the Plex team had made a front end for the jailbroken AppleTV. So I gave jailbreaking a shot. At first I thought I had bricked the AppleTV, but after about two days of leaving it plugged in and I forgot about it. I turned on my TV and it had worked. I got really lucky.

After the small drama in jailbreaking, it was trivial to get Plex installed. After it was installed I ran into some problems with choppiness of the video. I fixed that by tweaking some of the bit rate settings. Since then it has been working perfectly. I got even luckier when less than a week after I had configured Plex Apple announced that Hulu is now available on the device. I covered that in another blog post.

For right now the AppleTV is now my main media center. I still have my Mac Mini. It’s needed to run the Plex server, and host all the videos and music on my Drobo. it is just not plugged into my TV anymore. It has been an pre-smooth experience so far. MC likes it that she can stream music again directly to the AppleTV without me having to plug it in or read it up since it is now always attached to the television.

We still have a TiVo, and use it for a DVR. Longer-term I would love to find a way to use Hulu, the Internet, and my AppleTV to replace TiVo and and really expensive cable bill. We are not quite there yet in trying that out.

One of The Last Lazy Saturdays

by

Today we cooked breakfast like we have been dong a lot more since May.  MC made omelets.  I think today they were perfect.  It will probibly be the benchmark for all future home made omelets.  We also tried fo-sausage, aka soy sausage.  They weren’t so bad.  Still weirded out by eating soy but i will try those again.

The agenda for the day was relaxing.  We doubt we will have many free weekends when we can just relax so we were enjoying that and doing a little work around the house.

We went out to a Thai restaurant on Austin St.  It was pretty good.  My first time at a Thai place and MC loves it so it was a good night out.  We hit up Martha’s for some desert.  It was super busy at that place but thankfully we didn’t wait to sit, but did wait a while for service.  We had a great night out.