Sparktoblog!

A thankful weekend

The long holiday weekend was certainly filled with great times and good memories. On Thanksgiving day Skype and I trekked up to Snohomish to spend the latter part of the day at the Henry household. After a long drive up through unfamiliar territory we arrived and joined in the merry fray. Tres's parents live out in the middle of nowhere on a couple of acres with animals and other outdoorsy stuff.

Skype had a blast running around with the other dogs and playing with the people. All in all there were almost 30 people there and they all adored him. We spent the afternoon injecting turkeys and prepping them for deep fat frying. They Henry household was abuzz with booze, cheer, and the occasional cat fight betwixt drunken mothers and this all contributed to the holiday good feelings.

Dinner came and we all gathered around a giant table to celebrate everything we are thankful for. The Turkey (even I eat meat when it comes to Thanksgiving) was moist and succulent, the stuffing was divine, the brussle sprouts were tasty, and the company was beyond reproach. We dined until we could not eat any more then took a walk to settle our tummies before the pie related madness.

After our repast we gathered in the living room for a talent show of sorts. The Henry household has a rule that anyone who does not help cook has to perform afterwards. There were some entertaining acts, and I managed to dodge the entertainment bullet by playing the lame gimp. Come the evening Skype got worn out and started to get bratty. Up until about 8:00 he was being a perfect angel, but once he hit his energy wall he started throwing a fit and having a few housebreaking accidents. I took him home and let him pass out in bed for a nice evening.

Friday was the big day for Skype - the neutering day. We woke up early and I got him to the vet at about 7:45. It was a plain farewell, but once I left I really started to worry about him. I spent most of the day fretting and worrying about Skype. Brien drug me downtown for a couple of hours but the whole time I was worrying about him. I did swing by Suncoast and picked up a copy of The Cell for the weekend. Come 5:30 I finally got to go pick him up. He was quiet enthusiastic to see me, and we got home without any incidence.

Skype was rather out of sorts Friday evening (quite understandably) and would have nothing to do with me for the first couple of hours after we got home. He retreated to the corner to chew on a bone and whimper. Whenever I would go over to him he would run away. I think he in some small way held me responsible for the pain he was in, or at the very least for abandoning him at the vet's in the morning. After a few hours he got over that and came over to curl up in my lap still whimpering away. It was nearly midnight before he finally passed out and got some sleep.

Saturday and Sunday were fairly calm and relaxing. I spent the two days on my couch with Skype watching movies and keeping him calm. For the most part nothing too exciting happened. I'm thinking that more of the same is in store for this week, particularly because I just got the Harry Potter boxed set and am looking forward to spending the next couple of days watching the first three movies.

Movie filled weekend

It was a long weekend, but fun it it's own way. I'm feeling kind of sick today which puts a damper on things, but it was still nice to relax and get to party with some good friends. Friday night brought Mike's birthday party. Cyn and I had planned a surprise party starting at the Palace Kitchen, and then moving to our friend Rando's for some old school madness. It was a fun evening and much drinking and debauchery ensued.

It was my first night away from Skype since I brought him home. Mili (his dog walker/babysitter) took him for the night so that I could stay out late with Mike. He seemed to deal with it better than me - when I got home from work and he wasn't there it was strange, somehow my place seemed empty. The worst part for me however was when I got home from the party ready for bed and he wasn't there to snuggle up to me.

After tossing and turning for the night I woke up and started nursing my hangover. By and by Skype came back home with Mili and gave me a *very* enthusiastic greeting. He apparently fared pretty well without me - he had lots of distractions though. Mili had 4 dogs there for the night, one of which was a puppy not much older than Skype so the two of them romped for the evening until Mili finally separated them for bedtime. Aside from that Skype was fairly disappointing - he's been doing very well on the housebreaking thing at my place for the past month, but he had several accidents over at Mili's. We were both disappointed in him, and hopefully it was just because of the excitement.

My new friend Chris came over during the afternoon on Saturday to watch some movies with me. It's been interesting getting to know him, and I was a little worried that I would give him a bad impression being as hung over and brain dead as I was. Things went well and we watched some Indiana Jones and Shrek 2 together before I took a nap in the late afternoon.

Sunday was much more of the same - I spent most of the day on the couch watching DVD's and content on my Media Center. I started to feel a little under the weather and am very glad that I took it easy and took care of myself. Brien came down in the evening so we could eat some Mexican food and watch I Robot before I went to bed for a toss and turn night.

Keeping busy

The last 5 days have been pretty decent on all counts! I spent the weekend relaxing and hanging out with friends. On Saturday I went out to the breeders house where I adopted Skype so I could hang out with them and Skype could romp with his family. He had a blast (I can imagine having 10 times your weight in pit bulls to play with would be fun from his perspective) and got quite worn out in the process. After that I went over to a co-workers house for a while for a pre-thanksgiving celebration. She announced her engagement and everyone seemed to have a good time. After that I ended up going over to my friend Scott's house. He's had a couple of bad things happen to him recently and I wanted to just go hang out and be there for him. I'm hoping things start to look up for him as he really is a nice guy and deserves the best in life.

Sunday was a very lazy day for me. Skype and I chilled out most of the day and just watched movies. In the afternoon we took a long walk and got some of the kinks out of Skype's muscles. He's been growing fast and getting him enough exercise is becoming more and more important to his health. It's amazing how much he grows, every once in a while I come home from work and swear that he's grown while I was gone.

Monday brought some unexpected expenses. On Saturday while I was out at Q's house one of his friends noticed that my tires were very worn. One of them had about a quarter of an inch of the radial showing and as it was explained to me I am quite fortunate that I had not had it blow out already. During work on Monday I took my car to Discount Tires and got four new tires to replace my old ones. The guy there was amazed that I was still driving on that tire and surprised that I had been able to drive it to the shop. $300 later I had my new tires on the car and a renewed feeling of security. The new tires did help my handling a little bit, but it's still a sedan - god I want a sporty car. It's very frustrating to wait for a new one, but I'm going to make myself wait until I'm 25 so that my insurance will go down before I go running out to buy a new car.

Aside from that excitement this has been a fairly mundane week. I've made a couple of deals at work and am continuing to hack away at Star Ocean: Till the End of Time when I get a few moments. Tonight I might have my first date in a while - not sure on the timing, but we will see.

HP z545 Media Center review

Now that I've had my HP z545 Media Center set up and running for almost a week I've had some time to more fully explore more of the features and really get a feel for its capabilities. Overall I'm very impressed with it and quite happy with the purchase, however there are a few small annoyances that could have been fixed quite easily in the design/development process.

Case design:
My initial out of the box impressions were mainly based around the industrial design of the Media Center and it's setup process. Those were both very favorable and I'm still quite impressed by the forethought that was obviously put into the design for the hardware. Little things like the wireless keyboard antenna being included in the case (aside from the 802.11b/g antenna connector there are no external dongles to interfere with the clean lines of the z545) and the fold down covers for the media card slots really help maintain a sleek and professional look to the whole unit. Unlike previous Media Center PC's this is a unit you can feel proud to showcase as the center of your entertainment center, rather than an ugly tower that you want to hide in a closet with a RF receiver dongles snaking out to your entertainment center.

Video configuration:
Getting the DVI/HDMI connection working with my TV was probably the most difficult part of my setup process. Once I connected in via DVI I was getting horrible interlacing problems on screen. I had to experiment around with the advanced settings on the graphics card quite a bit to find a setting that corrected this problem. Unfortunately I could not get 1080i working with the ATI graphics card included in the z545 and my TV, but I was able to make it look fairly decent using the "force 720p display" option and setting my display to a 1280x720 resolution. Using these settings a good 50 pixels are cropped from the edges of my desktop on the TV due to an overscan error. This would be very easy to fix on a windows level by adding some sort of desktop scaling option, but for now I'm stuck with no viable solution. This is unfortunately because the taskbar and start menu are completely cropped and to do any sort of reasonable system administration or hacking I have to RDP into the media center from another machine so that I can view the entire desktop. When using the Media Center 10 foot user interface the controls are all positioned around the center of the interface which makes the cropping problem of almost no impact to the average Media Center user.

Media Center User Interface:
The user interface of Microsoft's Media Center 2005 is really one of the strong points of the entire Media Center product. Microsoft has done a great job of making a user interface that not only works well from the couch using a remote, but has put a lot of thought into making it easy to use with no previous experience. Within a couple of hours of use I had it configured to record the TV programs I care about, and had tweaked all of my Media Center preferences to my liking. I feel that even the most non-technical of users would be comfortable with the system almost immediately.

The most used feature of a DVR (Digital Video Recorder - the technology that allows you to pause live TV) system like a Media Center is the ability to automatically record television programs for you so that you can watch them at your convenience. The interface to specify programs to record is very user friendly, and offers a lot of options on how you want somthing recorded for power users. Unlike competing systems like TiVo and ReplayTV the Media Center offers you a lot of control in assigning priorities to various programs you can help to reduce the number of conflicts that occur on a limited number of tuners. The Media Center offers a fast TV guide for watching live TV - it's really responsive to page up and page down commands, and has a great search feature.

I'm very excited by the amount of data captured by the Media Center about the TV programs that it is recording. Drilling down through the media center UI lets you see a brief description of the recorded program along with information about the original air date and cast. Once you have a number of shows recorded in a particular series you are able to quickly browse through them and select the one you want to watch first quite easily. I think the only improvement that could be made to this area of the Media Centers user interface and functionality would be to have a clear icon or indicator to let the user know if the show details they are viewing are from a rerun, or the first time a program has aired.

Audio:
The z545 really excels when it comes to its audio capabilities. The speaker system I have hooked up at the moment is far from audiophile quality, but I have several excellent sets of headphones (Sennheisers, Etymotics, and Sony's) and I've tried them all out and been impressed. The z545 and clean and crisp sound, with excellent clarity overall. One of the main considerations of a stereo form factor unit like the z545 is the ambient noise that it will produce for the room you are using it in. One of the main problems people have had in the past with using a computer as a stereo component is the noise created by fans inside the case. The z545 is well designed and creates surprisingly little noise - the only time I am able to hear the whine of a fan is when I'm standing behind the unit. It does have a fan on the top of it's case, but it's on a good set of bearings and does not make an excessive amount of noise. The HDD's in the unit are very quiet and I can only hear them when I get right next to the unit, with no audio playing, and heavy hard drive activity. I seriously doubt if the average consumer will even notice any noise, particularly if they are watching a DVD or TV - bravo to HP for a quiet case design and good sound insulation on the HDD.

The Media Center audio interface is well done for the average users library. It's quick and easy to search for tracks and artists, and scrolling through artists and albums is easy. The one flaw with the user interface is that the music library is slow for large libraries. My 120+ gigabyte collection takes about 20 seconds to bring up every time "Music" is selected from the main Media Center menu. It's a great system for the average user, but anyone with a significant music collection will find it difficult to bring up the music they way, particularly if not all of your music files have good ID3 tags.

Remote Control:
The included HP remote control is very smart looking. It is a black that matches with the z545 case, and the green button really pops out. For the most part I've been very pleased with the responsiveness of the remote and the way it fits in my hand. The only real complaint I have about the remote is the lack of programmability - for spending as much money as I did on the z545 I would really like to see a remote that can be programmed to change the volume level on my TV or receiver rather than on the Media Center. I think that's a pretty basic feature request, and most people who are going to spend several thousand dollars on a home theater unit are going to want to run the audio through their receiver - having to have an extra remote is very annoying.

Included applications:
HP has bundled a large number of applications designed for the 10 foot UI with the z545. Among them of course are HP Tunes, HP ImageCenter, and a number of small games and utilities. I have not been that impressed with anything, but I guess that the extra applications are not really a focus for the Media Center market. A couple of the games (developed by Wild Tangent) are fairly neat, but the ergonomics of playing even a puzzle game with a candy bar form factor remote control makes my wrists hurt just thinking about it. Microsoft included a couple of neat apps (like an NPR streaming application to give remote control access to all NPR audio content streamed over the internet) but for most users none of them will be things used on a daily basis. A couple of people have hacked together various utilities (mail readers, RSS clients, and the link) but given that most people who will be buying a Media Center also have a desktop or laptop I think those devices are better suited to most peoples data access needs. A Media Center is so geared in the direction of multimedia and A/V processing with it's UI that trying to throw information access on top of it without significant development efforts seems somewhat futile.

Pros:

• Great A/V integration. The z545 looks like it belongs with other stereo equipment, and has the digital and analog connections to connect into any modern system.
• The z545 offers amazing picture quality for DVD's right out of the box. The progressive scan DVD capabilities combined with effective upscaling for my TV makes for crisp clear pictures.
• The Media Center 2005 rich GUI setup process is very through - they make it easy to set the Media Center up for your audio system, and have a great "video tweaking" tutorial that helps novice users adjust their TV picture to look it's best while using the z545.
• Overall (with the exception of browsing my large music collection) the UI is very fast and responsive. For most of my immediate needs (finding the piece of media that I want and playing it) no more than 4 button presses are necessary from the main menu. Nice little animations and bits of dynamic UI really lend to the high tech feel of the entire product.

Cons:

• System stability could be better - in a day and age when my Windows XP desktops typically get a month or more of uptime, the z545 hangs, crashes, or otherwise has needed to be rebooted at least a couple of times a the week that I've had it.
• The alpha-numeric display on the front is useful but annoying. It scrolls one character at a time and is not configurable. I would at the very least like to see this display have a control panel somewhere so that I could set behaviors (scrolling, data displayed, etc). A far better solution would be to have a grayscale or color LCD panel providing far more UI options to the z545's users.
• I'm a little surprised that HP did not include an HDTV tuner into this unit. I understand that the Media Center 2005 operating system does not yet support Smartcard based HDTV (although it currently supports HDTV via ATSC tuners), but Microsoft has promised to have a software update available sometime in 2005 that will support this, and having to go out and buy an external FireWire HDTV tuner is a bit disappointing.

The final word:
I would highly recommend the HP z545 PC running Microsoft Media Center 2005. I think there are a few areas for improvement, and if HDTV is important to you it might be worth waiting for the next version, but this is the first living room form factor PC that has really pulled the job off well. Bravo HP and Microsoft for making a great hardware/software solution for managing all of my digital media and bringing TV to me on my terms.

Time warps around me

I sit at my desk in a bubble of stillness. Around me the office buzzes with activity, phones ringing, people working, sales happening - I sit in silence. I've lost the will to work for the day, and sit here trying to find ways to look busy, while battling off a massive headache and work related apathy. Apply chapstick and check slashdot. My headache gets worse - a slight pounding develops behind my temples. Apply more chapstick and check slashdot again - no new articles. The minutes tick by, one by one - watching the clock move. It's unusual to have me in a mood like this, normally I'm too busy to watch the minutes (and seconds) tick by. Once more with the chapstick - still nothing new on slashdot.

One of those evenings.

The week drags on already

It's only Wednesday and I'm already tired. I guess this is par for the course of late, so I had better just buck up and deal with it. Since getting my Media Center set up on Friday I have gotten a lot done and I'm quite pleased with most of my efforts. The weekend was spent mostly around the house working on a few things and starting to write my full review of the Media Center (coming soon!), and working on a few websites.

Saturday Skype went to the Vet and got his first rabies shot. He was pretty wiped out from it, and was in lethargic mode all day. I spent much of the day cuddling with him and playing KOTOR with Brien (boy is he hooked). Sunday was a pretty lazy day - I played with my media center, copied music to it, and tried to find things wrong with it. One of the big things that I'm liking is that with two tuners it's much better at getting everything I want and managing scheduling conflicts.

The last couple of days at work have been pretty mundane. I've spent a lot of time working on a few roles, and managed to make a deal which does help out in the end. On Monday my boxed set of the digitally remastered Star Wars DVD's came, and I've been watching them in the evenings, enjoying the beautiful job that they did restoring it. Last night Scot came over to eat and watch movies (YAY) and we got to geek out on technology and life for a couple of hours.

I'm just waiting for this week to be over. I have a fun weekend ahead, and the way I'm feeling just want to be able to sleep in a little bit on Saturday. More to come!

Media Center 2005 initial impressions

Update:
I have now written a full review of my Media Center. It is avalible here.

This has been a fairly long and laborious week, but now that it's over I'm not going to dwell on it. I have a nice relaxing weekend ahead of me, and I intend to enjoy it. As usual I've managed to snag myself a new toy, and I wanted to share some initial thoughts on it.

I finally broke down and got myself a Media Center. I have a good friend; Ian; who works for the Media Center team at Microsoft and he helped steer me in the right direction in terms of hardware. I ended up going for the HP z545 Digital Entertainment Center because it has a great form factor (it looks like a stereo component) and had all the output features that I wanted as well as Windows Media Center 2005 installed.

Ian came over to watch me set it up (he's been wanting to get a geeks setup opinions) and to help me move my entertainment center around. Right out of the box I was impressed with the actual unit. It's fairly large, but black with good looking LED's and a brushed finish on the front. The front has several fold down panels to hide the various ports and sockets (two USB 2.0, CF, SD, Memory Stick, RCA inputs, S-Video in, and a 1394 port) as well as the dual layer DVD-RW drive. The front also sports a small blue two line alpha-numeric florescent display. It's nice to have a clock and something that tells me what is playing, but they made the scrolling very jerky. It would have been much nicer to have a small color (or even gray scale) LCD display that would be capable of more than basic text. If HP offered a setting to disable scrolling on the display I would find that sufficient.

The back of the unit is really the impressive part if you ask me. It's the first PC to offer the number of output options that the HP z545 Digital Entertainment Center offers. The z545 offers full 7.1 out (both RCA pre-amps as well as an optical port for hooking up to powered receivers), S/PDIF, composite video out, S-video out, Component video out, DVI video out, a VGA port, four USB 2.0 ports, and another FireWire port. I'm impressed with the level of thought that went into making this unit integrate seamlessly with modern audio/visual equipment. It's refreshing to see a product with so much industrial design put into it from the ground up.

One neat gimmick that HP added was the “Personal Media” drive. It's basically a USB 2.0 portable hard drive with a docking station inside the front of the z545. It lets me put 160gb of my data on a drive that's contained within the unit, but then take it out easily and bring it over to a friends house to show him my media. It's not the most innovative thing I've ever seen, but still a nice idea.

Once Ian helped me move my entertainment center out I got the thing hooked in. I set up my old sub woofer with it, and used DVI to connect to my HDTV. Eventually I'm going to be getting a 7.1 surround sound receiver and some good speakers but for now I am just using the speakers in my TV.

After hooking up all of the audio/video connections and my cable connection to the two tuners I hit the power button and proceeded through the initial setup. Luckily they have made the entire setup process TV friendly (known as the 10 foot UI) and I was able to do most of it with the included keyboard and remote control. Unfortunately until the setup process is completed the video quality is horrible. Luckily the text is big enough that even with severe interlacing problems and a very low resolution that I was able to make my way through. I think both HP and Microsoft made a grave error in not making the initial setup process more focused on showcasing the fantastic graphical qualities of the Media Center operating system. I fear that a lot of less experienced users would get quite turned off by the poor graphical quality during the initial setup and boot screens

Once the computer has gone through it's initial setup and boot sequences I was able to tweak the graphics card to take care of most of my display problems. The edges of the desktop are still slightly cropped by my TV, but unfortunately that is something I think I will have to live with until the Media Center team figures out a way to dynamically resize the desktop to fit within the display limits of a standard television. The Media Center 10 foot UI (what you use most of the time with the remote) is very slick. I like the updated look and found it quite easy to navigate around. Even though the remote that comes with the z545 has buttons to access most of your media I find it as easy to scroll through the short list of options and use the directional pad and select button to navigate around my media library.

Over all I'm quite impressed with my Media Center so far. I might be posting a more through review in a couple of weeks once I've really had a chance to play with it, but my initial impressions have been very positive.

A restful weekend

So this weekend was for the most part quite relaxing. Friday was a good day, I spent most of the day tying up loose ends from the week at work, then left early to go to an appointment. I got home kind of late, but my friend Steve had gone over to tend to Skype's needs.

After work Ian came over and the two of us had some fun getting quite inebriated and talking the night away. We ended up playing Star Ocean: Till the end of Time for a couple of hours and noticing the rampant homoeroticism present in almost all anime themed games. It made us wonder if any straight males are involved in the gaming industry over there.

On Saturday I had lunch with a co-worker Rebecca and her friend Mike. She was trying to set me up with Mike and it was a fairly good introduction. I felt kind of out of it and was rather quiet, but he seems like a nice enough guy. They have invited me to go out to a cabin with them next weekend, and I'm not sure if I'll take them up on it. Skype has a vet appointment, and I have a few things that I have to get taken care of.

It was good to meet Mike nonetheless - we all went to Blue C Sushi in Fremont - its a nice little place and I was quite pleased with the quality of their sushi. Afterwards we headed back to the hill to grab Skype and went over the B&O for some dessert. Bless sugar and it's many forms of oral delivery!

Aside from that lunch not much happened over the weekend. I spent the rest of the day on Saturday playing Star Ocean and cuddling with Skype. Sunday was pretty much washed out - I spent about 8 hours up at Brien's with Skype watching him play KOTOR. He got a new XBOX on Friday and I managed to get him hook line and sinker with that game. I'm betting he gets very little done aside from work for the next couple of weeks while he quests to become the dark lord of the universe!