- Lots of things around the home front have been changing over the past few months. We've got a new deck, that my dad and a few of his friends put together, new hardwood floors, some great landscaping at the front of the house, and new paint on the walls. A very warm and cozy home is a happy home!
- CSI (the show) seems to be taking up most of our time these days. A few months back I setup a PC running XP Media Center Edition which lets you connect a PC to the TV and use a remote to view your pictures, listen to music and also (with the help of a TV Tuner) have PVR-like functionality. You can pause and rewind live tv, and also search through a program guide to setup shows that you want it record -- just like what more commonly known devices like TiVO did. It records the shows digitally to your hard drive so that you can browse through them later and watch them. XP MCE was nice, the interface is very friendly and easy to use, but after the last update, I couldn't get around the activation nags, and it complained that the TV tuner drivers weren't operational anymore. So, I decided to check out a few other programs that do similar things. At the moment, I'm checking out both SnapStream BeyondTV 3 and SageTV. BeyondTV has a nice interface, but only does TV, and does not currently do music and pictures. They have a new product in the works called BeyondMedia but no ship date has been announced yet. SageTV has music and picture functionality, but I don't like the interface as much as BeyondTV. I'm leaning towards BeyondTV and waiting until BeyondMedia comes out.
- So with this new PVR functionality, we record CSI about 4 times a week and CSI:Miami a couple times a week! Between that, and downloading previous seasons on DVD, it keeps us busy.