Catching Up!

Posted on by Jordan

Hi there, it still seems to be summer and I just don’t know where my time is going!

I have been meaning to post a quick summary of what Heather and I have been up to, and the longer I put it off the larger the summary needs to be.

First off, Heather and I volunteered to help with an MS support bike-ride. We thought it was going to involved more interaction with people actually riding bikes, but somehow we wound up wrangling chairs and counting votes for “best water stop.” It was a fun way to spend a few hours!

msbikeridethmb

I don’t have a picture for it, sadly, but Heather and I ran / walked in the Blair 5k run / walk. It was an interesting experience, as Heather and I do not actually run or walk at the same speed. I promised to stay with Heather the entire time, and to maintain a good attitude about the whole thing. I had a little trouble at the start when people were racing away, and I felt like if I *could* keep up with them then I should be, but in the end I am glad we kept the pace the way it was. We had a nice morning, and did something new!

Most recently, we went to a College World Series game. Heather’s vacation allotment has finally rolled over to a new year, so we have some time to work with again! We both took a Monday afternoon off, met for lunch then headed to the botanical gardens for a few hours. The weather was perfect, we dodged the hot humid conditions that have landed in Omaha by just a few days! After spending a really relaxing time wandering the mostly empty gardens we drove a few blocks, found a place to park and walked over to Rosenblatt Stadium. The turnout for the game was overwhelming. We felt a little silly, because we really didn’t even know who was playing, or for that matter care too much. Once we finally got inside, we found that they let in a lot more people than they have general admission seats for popular games. Lucky for us we found a place to sit before seats ran out.

cws2009thmb

Somewhere in the middle of all that, we found time to head to Kansas City for part of a weekend,  crash a graduation party, and keep our apartment somewhat clean! 🙂

-Jordan

Windows Media Center Movie Project

Posted on by Jordan

This is going to be kind of technical, but I have to document the process somewhere….

I have a Windows Media Center PC, hooked to our TV. We don’t have cable, so its not acting as a DVR. I have been planning to setup a plugin called “My Movies” that does a nice graphical browser of all movies stored on a Windows Home Server box, which I happen to have.

I actually had most of this setup months ago, but had run into some problems coping movies to the server. My motivation for all of this is the fact that Heather owns *hundreds* of DVDs. To save space we threw out the cases, and put all the disks into a book. The problem is, its hard to even remember what the movie is about sometimes if they have a generic printing on the disk. The My Movies plugin gives you a picture of the box, and a synopsis, as well as actor list, etc. All really cool, but it was being stubborn about working.

First let me outline the problem:

  • My Movies is a free* tool that will do everything I mentioned before, and auto-add any movie placed in a folder it is watching.
  • It also provides hooks to copy movies using AnyDVD.
  • AnyDVD is kind of expensive for a hobby project of questionable long-term value.
  • there are a number of other cheaper tools that do the same thing as AnyDVD, ranging all the way down to free
  • none of these tools seem to work with My Movies, in the sense that you can just hit the “copy” button
  • I am starting to suspect the My Movies people did this on purpose, as there is no discernible reason the other tools wouldn’t work the same way.
  • Trying to find a work-around was painful, as nobody wants to host the entire tool-set to go from factory DVD to playable files on your hard drive, lest the incur the wrath of the MPAA

After something like 12-18 hours of fussing with it, I finally found a system that’s working. I did have one DVD fail to read so far. I have some ideas for that, but I will come back to it after I have worked through the majority of our library.

The system that works:

  • have dvd43 running, this will allow other applications to read the disk
  • use dvd Shrink  “backup” option to re sample the disk, set the target folder as the movies folder on the server

I think that I may be able to use “superDVDRipper” to get a usable video out of the one disk DVDshrink failed to read, but its slow and kind of finicky… so I will deal with that later.

-Jordan

Our New Summer Hobby

Posted on by Jordan

House Hunting!!!

I think we are a ways from decided on when it comes to buying a house, but Heather and I decided to take a serious look at what is for sale in Omaha.

house_visit

What you can’t really see in that picture is an incredible view out over the Missouri River that house had. We went on our first house visit Wednesday May 27th, and I think we learned a lot. It was a neat house, but the repairs, updates and upkeep were a little more than we were expecting.

We continue to scour the online listings for the perfect house, and you can rest assured we will have news of other house visits throughout the summer.

-Jordan