The Blog of G

Back in the eighties, when I was growing up, there were lots of TV documentaries which were basically futurists telling us all about how the world could be, my favourite sub-genre was ‘the home of the future’ type shows and there were lots of them. Oh sure, I was a fanatical ‘Tomorrows World‘ fan as well, but I was and still am a bit of a dreamer, which I guess is why I was drawn to these types of TV.

Fast forward twenty years and I now live in a home where I’m connected to the ‘information super-highway‘ in every room, my home entertainment system allows me to watch the TV I want to watch, whenever I want to watch it and even allows me to pause it (when the doorbell/phone ring) or rewind when I miss a bit and we have our own house-bot.

All these thing’s were simply thoughts and idea’s to that 80’s kid (vinyl and cassette were the norm) but now they’re a reality and nowhere near as expensive or difficult to put together as you might think. You may even be surprised to find that a lot of this technology is already in your home and just needs to be enabled.

I’m going to put together a few posts about the technology that Elly and myself use on a daily basis and how it impacts our lives, both the positive and negative aspects, as well as some futurism of my own.

So stay tuned for updates and in the meantime why not leave a comment letting me know what crazy idea’s from your own childhood/teenage years have made it (or not) into mainstream technology and the kind of things that you would like to see make it in the next few years.

Hindsight

If you are a fan of the loudness that is “System of a Down” you should be familiar with this song, but possibly not the musicians, a fantastic cover version and a lot *ahem* easier on the eye

Hands up if your surprised by how much Violins can rock, I was.

Getting married? Looking for idea’s for a wedding cake? take a look at this…

I’ve been getting myself back up to speed with wordpress a lot in the last few month’s and while I’m not using all these plugins, I’m definitely going to be testing them, thanks for the post Conor

And finally as the F1 testing season kicked off last week and the anticipation is building for the new season, I stumbled across this video of Bruno Senna training and being the king of all multi-taskers

Aerobic training, Core muscle & balance training, concentration, Focus, as as well as eye hand coordination training, inspired!

Wise words

Work continues apace behind the scenes here getting the house in order. It’s slower progress than I expected though.

I’ve now spent 2 days sorting and tidying up the ‘Categories’ for my posts. I’m down from almost 400 to exactly 200 as I type and I’d like to get that number a lot lower, as I still have more categories than posts on here.

Why? I hear you ask, well it goes back to when I first started blogging and my lack of understanding of categories and tags, I thought they were the same thing and as I wanted to make sure that my ramblings could be found on search engines I was very liberal with the application of categories and as tags were less accessible to me, in wordpress at that time, I ignored them.

This was a monumental mistake of epic proportions. Essentially, categories help organise the posts on your blog where as tags are what search engines look for to help them organise the massive amount of data that they contain.

So once, I have sorted out the categories to my satisfaction, I have to apply tags to all my old posts. Thankfully, one of the many new features that Wordpress now includes is a “category to tag converter” so once all the categories are sorted out, I’ll be looking into that a bit further to see if it will help me out in my quest to sort this mess out.

Wow, my last post here was almost 2 years ago and seeing as how the main page sports posts going back to August 2007, you would be forgiven for thinking that I had abandoned the place, that’s not the case, I just haven’t felt like bloging.

There are a number of reasons/excuses for this

Not enough time
Nothing that I wanted to write about
General disillusionment with the world
Tired of all the work required to keep Wordpress up-to date
Tired of dealing with the random curve-balls that Wordpress used to throw my way

I could go on. Long story, short I now have more time on my hands, there are thing’s I want to write about, the world ain’t so bad and Wordpress has moved on so it’s now a lot easier to update.

I know this because I’ve spent the last while building a new site around Wordpress which launched recently and now that I’ve smacked all the curve-balls out of the park why don’t you pop over to Not Junk Food and see what it’s all about. I’ll be keeping that site focused on my favourite topic, food and the rest of my posting will happen here.

So will I get back to regular posting here, who knows, but I’m going to give this place a bit of a makeover and a tidy up, so expect to see changes shortly.

Also, it came to my attention a while back that Paris Hilton has borrowed my blog title for a perfume so I’ll be changing that as part of the makeover.

Now I’m off to look at new theme’s and plugins.

It’s a question people ask, often with an air of disbelief, like why would you want to have a pc in your living room?

There are a lot of plus sides to it, not least of which is a 32″ widescreen monitor to surf the web with. But that’s only a small plus, first off what does a HTPC do for you?

Well a home theatre personal computer is exactly that it’s a computer for your home theatre, or in my case, living room. How does this add to your home theatre? for a start it’s 1 box for your DVD player, all your music, digital photo’s, TV recording’s and Home Movies. That’s what Windows Media Centre 2005 will do out of the box. Is it difficult to setup? not really, you can do it all from the remote once the operating system is installed.

For me there are 3 killer features…

1. My Photos – allows basic photo editing and slideshowing your photo albums
2. My Music – The Music collection
3. My TV – schedule and watch TV recording’s

The last of these gets the most use in our house, although having a photo slide show as wallpaper means both myself and Elly get to see those precious moments plenty.

I love the Music portion of Media centre, it was a bit time consuming to get all the info and album art sorted out but once thats done, it makes it so easy to find your favourite artists’ or albums. I’ll post another time about my personal experiences tagging over 20 Gb or about 10,000 individual audio files, it’s actually not as time consuming as you might think.

Where Media centre comes into it’s own is working hand in hand with our set top box for TV. it means outside of Grand Prix, neither myself or Ellybabes watch TV “live” anymore. Instead we record all our favourite TV shows and we can watch whatever takes our fancy at that particular time. So much better than spending 20 minutes flicking through channels till you find something worth watching.

This is really easy to do, just search by keyword till you find the program you like and select “record series” you can even tell it to record all showings on all channels or just new episodes, but once you take those 2 minutes to decide that, media centre just does it. The NTL set top box is far less reliable, needing to be rebooted at least once a week.

What if 2 shows are on at the same time? first media centre tries to find an alternative showing of either show, if it can’t then, it decides what to record based on the recording priorities the user sets. So for instance, we’re huge “Bones” and “Boston legal” fans, to make sure we don’t miss an episode these are top of our priority list.

Whereas “The Simpsons” which is on so many channels and almost daily, it’s near the bottom of the priority list as there always being re-shown.

What all this means is that when we sit down to relax and watch some telly what we want to watch is always on.

So is that it? well not entirely, there is a lot more to it than that and in a future post, I’ll touch on the why I chose Microsoft Media Centre and the benefits that it will bring when we move into our new home.