The Blog of G

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.

Yes, it’s one of those posts. A couple of links to stuff that I thought was funny today and not a lot else.

So without further ado, first up is a post over on Holy Schmoley! A great little video, takin the mickey out of those God awful ‘I’m a Mac’ ads. I love a mac user that’s prepared to poke fun at ‘The Almighty Steve’

My Sweetie poped this little gem in her Google reader shared items feed for me. Thank you sweetie! Maybe I should do the same?

And finally, The ever classic Penny Arcade produced a great new strip today. Takin a wild guess, I’d say they ain’t to keen on the PS3.

A long time ago in a IT retailer far, far, away… Well not really, it was Compustore on the longmile road. As some of you know I used to work there. It’s were I “did my time” as a retail sales person.

Some people slag me for it but when I started with Compustore there were 2 stores when I left there were 5 and about 10-12 franchises, so I like to think I played my part, and even if I didn’t I had a hell of a lot of fun and met some great people while working there.

And, if you’ll indulge me I’d like to tell you a story about one person I met there a little more than 8 years ago.

It was a Saturday afternoon and I’m pretty sure I was hung over, I was hung over a lot in those days, hell it was right in the eye of the storm that was the Celtic tiger. So life was a constant party, we liked to think we worked hard and played harder and there were times that was the only way you could stay sane

Anyway, I digress, I was prowling the shop floor doing my best to avoid the time wasters and be available to the people that were there to spend money, hey, a good months sales made the difference between getting the bus home after work or a drink after hours and a taxi later

Anyway, I see this group come wandering in what looked to be fairly good suits, on a Saturday afternoon, so I’m seeing a “cure” there’s 2 guys and a lady, different ages and very obviously serious business people. So I make my way across towards them doing my best to play deaf to the scumbag looking for help reading the system requirements of some piece of software and see the fantastic looking shoes the tall skinny guy is wearing.

Cha ching, I’m thinking:D

So I introduce myself and the tall guy takes the lead…

“You don’t sound terribly local?” I inquire as we start to wander toward the display of shiny new state of the art PC’s.

“naw, I’m from the U.S.” he says.

“ah ok” I say,” so your in town for business?”

“Yup, so why don’t you show us your best selling PC?”

“Ah nuts” I’m thinking cause I know our best seller is also the one I make the least commission on. So I start to nudge him a bit about what he wants the machine for etc. Trying to get a bit more info for the up sell I’m thinking of

Then without any prompting he starts talking plural and I’m all of a sudden thinking “give him exactly what he wants get the deal and if he’s looking for a few, sure that’ll make it worthwhile. Little did I know…

I’m settling into my patter now about our best seller it was a Compaq Presario If memory serves, it was definitely an AMD K6 2 powered model, a budget model with most of the bases covered.

All in all we talked for about 20 minutes a lot about business and how the different chips were sizing up against each other and so on and so forth, it was refreshing to speak to a middle aged man who actually new a fairly decent amount (As I thought) about computer technology, please don’t think I’m being patronising or ageist with that statement if you had worked there at the time you would understand what I mean, it wasn’t unheard of but it was rare.

Anyway, it was at this point, after I had pitched an AMD powered PC to him, discussed the virtues of the CPU over the Intel alternative at the time, that he introduced himself as Craig and handed me his card…

INTEL COO

And as I was apologising he asked me to stop and thanked me for being “straight and honest” with him explaining that it was rare that he got the chance to speak to people like me that new so much about “his” market.

At this point as we were saying our farewells, I’m thinking that’s a bit much “his” market, jaysus like you run one Intel factory in Ireland, get a grip mate. God I was so naive/dumb.

As soon as he had left the store our head technician, Rob, comes running out from behind the tech counter asking who the guy that I had just been talking too was. Keep in mind Rob, like myself, wasn’t the smallest lad in the world and I don’t ever remember seeing him move that fast before.

I said it was some bloke from Intel, to which Rob replied “yea he pulled up in a massive stretch limo.

Slowly the penny was starting to drop, I pulled his card out of my pocket and as Rob saw it he just looked gob smacked and goes “George you do know who he is?”

I reply “yea he’s some big cheese out in Lucan” and Rob starts shaking his head.

“no George, that’s THE big cheese in Intel”

Ker klunk finally, the penny drops. I can still hear Rob laughing when I told him that I ‘d tried to sell him an AMD PC.

I learned some very valuable lessons that day.

The value of honesty in all your dealings as you just never know exactly who you are dealing with.

The truly clever people will always listen to and value everyone else’s opinion, before forming their own.

Always remain humble, you will gain far more respect from people that way than telling them how fantastic you are

And the most important lesson?

Listen to your elders, chances are they have seen and done it before you or else they have a PHD

I wish

I saw this today and I had to blog it. Doug Engelbart is one of the great visionaries of our era. His idea’s and discoveries set the tone for decades of computer research. It is no understatement to say that without his inventions the world we live in today would be very different, for gods sake the man invented the mouse! that alone is worth a place in history but on top of that lets see hyperlinks were his invention & Arpanet (the precursor to the internet) never would have happened without his contributions.

I had heard of Doug in passing many times over my life but it wasn’t until I read Howard Rheingold’s “Tools for thought” that his contribution became clear. If you read even the first paragraph of the “tools” link above it becomes clear what he has already accomplished in his lifetime.

Today, Hyperscope was launched and in this modern age of beta releases to avoid support obligations its refreshing to see a version 1.0 This is an attempt to rebuild parts of Engelbarts NLS/Augment system on the Web, many of the new web 2.0 tools and languages have been used to accomplish this.

This NLS system is what Engelbart was demonstrating at what many people call “The mother of all demo’s” which thanks to modern technology you can watch most of here all be it in low quality. Keep in mind that this was 1968! He’s got a keyboard the worlds first mouse and a shortcut keypad and even the odd “demo demon” . This was a huge moment in the history of man as significant as the moon landings imho. (If you hadn’t worked it out he’s one of my hero’s)

Anyway, I’m looking forward to seeing where Hyperscope can take us and considering the human race has done with his discoveries already I can’t wait to see what happens next.