If there’s a single flaw in my HTPC setup, it would have to be that I can’t remotely access it while it’s sleeping (which is basically any time not within 30 minutes after it being used). Theoretically I should be able to have something from my desktop (or for additional bonus points, my WHS) that will let me wake it up over the network, but again, that falls into the realm of new and uncharted territory for me. I’d been thinking about going snowboarding this Saturday, but if that plan doesn’t happen, this weekend could conceivably be focused on improving my setup. My main motivation issue now is that the basic functionality is all there, so while there’s value to be added, I can technically be content with everything currently in existence.
If it weren’t for a PM All Hands tomorrow afternoon, Thursday would be this week’s Wednesday. In fact, if it weren’t for the snow last week, this meeting would have happened then, and my Wednesday meetings might have happened last week as well, so it’s possible I could have had two Wednesdays in a row. As it stands, I’ll at least be entertained for the second half of my day, and as for the first half, I’m sure that there are emails that need to be sent.
Personal - Seattle
One week from tomorrow marks the start of my next YotGotYGP game, and I feel pretty comfortable with my decision. Of course, my desire to pour my time into it will once again impact my other games, TV watching, and other aspects of my life (aside from work and hanging out with people, I know where to draw the line). Is it a bad thing that I’ve already imagined how to extend this into 2013? Maybe I should get through more than a single month successfully before I start getting too grand of visions in my head.
With one HTPC bug taken care of this morning (not automatically sleeping after it woke up for whatever reason), I now need to deal with an issue I’ve avoided dealing with before but really need to solve now should my whole “remote access” plan be fully realized. I’m pretty sure I’m making it out to be harder than it really is, but that’s just because I have no direct previous experience. Once I do it a couple times (not that I should ever need to do it more than once or twice), I’ll be able to breeze through it in the future just like all the rest of the computer-related stuff I’m awesome at.
Personal - Seattle
Of all the ways that today could have gone, it managed to be just about properly paced. Enough email to deal with but not too many to get buried under, an appropriately full slate of meetings, and other people responding in a timely manner. If I didn’t know any better, my takeaway from this would be that we always need to have a week of snow days and then one day at work, and everything would then be fine. Fortunately for me, I do know better.
I had to get my HTPC set up to record shows tonight (which I think it did), and I took the opportunity to take the next step of my grand plan for it. Now (if all goes as planned) I should be able to not only remotely schedule recordings, but even watch them remotely as well. No more being in Dallas (or say…Boston, Los Angeles, or San Diego) and have to go TV less if I miss the show whenever it airs at a local time. Hey, Kindle Fire, you up for a test of this functionality?
Personal - Seattle
After a full day of testing my new HTPC + tuner setup, I must say that it works quite well. Each component is part of the system to technically serve a different purpose; the tuner is there so that I can do more than only be able to watch/record one channel at a time, and the HTPC is in the mix so that when I’m on vacation (or otherwise not at my apartment), it can handle recording duties and not require my desktop to be on. There are still more pieces to the overall puzzle I need to fully bring into the mix (transferring the recorded shows onto the WHS for one, but I’d also like to experiment with automatic commercial removal and maybe even converting the files to not take up quite as much room), so I can totally see this being my pet project for a while.
There’s no more snow to keep me from work tomorrow, so it seems that this snowpocalypse truly is over. I have to say, I’m fine with a day or two of weather disruptions, but when it spans effectively an entire week, it can really do more harm than benefit. Contrary to how often it seems like I have nothing to do in a given morning or afternoon, work seems to magically manifest itself by having other people be around to communicate with. Take those same time periods and make everyone work from home, communication grinds to a halt and those “boring” work days actually end up being that way.
Personal - Seattle
There’s very little of a “which day of the week it is” concept left for me after being in my office all of about…3-4 hours this past week? Day starts, I stay around my apartment most of the day doing various tasks, I go to sleep. Repeat, repeat, repeat… I’m actually kinda looking forward to Monday not because of there being “work” (which I’m positive there will be plenty of) but more because it will just being something new to my daily schedule. This snow week would have been much more appreciated by me in March or so when I wouldn’t have been on a vacation for a while.
The one segment of the day during which I wasn’t at my apartment involved going to the Comcast service center and exchanging my Cablecard that I acquired last weekend for a different one. The setup of this card went flawlessly, and I now have triple tuners with which to record TV. I need to get the Xbox moved over to looking at the computer running Media Center that has those tuners added to it, and after that, I should be just about golden. If there’s ever an instance where there are four things on TV all at the same time that I want to record/see, I’m not sure whether I’ll need to congratulate or berate the network executives.
Personal - Seattle
The melting didn’t begin quite early enough to facilitate a trip into work, so that makes 4 days staying at home on an entirely non-holiday week. Once the temperature rose above freezing and the rain began though, there was definitely no lack of liquid water anywhere in the Seattle area. There’s still definitely snow on the ground outside (you don’t get rid of all of it that fast), but there will be absolutely zero danger for a standard work day on Monday. Well, standard in the sense of going into the office anyway because I’m pretty sure with it being the first day back at work for the majority of the company, the contents of said day will be anything but standard.
Last night after I was in bed (and was still under the impression that I might be going into work today), I really wanted to watch Galaxy Quest. With nothing else to do tonight since Will was finally able to return back to Seattle, it made a great way to spend the evening on my couch. I even busted out the Blu-ray version of it since I hadn’t configured something right on my new WHS machine, and I figured that just using the disc was the path of least resistance at that point when all I really cared about doing was watching the movie.
Personal - Seattle
Today was supposed to be a day where the temperature got up into the upper 30s and began to melt all of the snow. In reality, it stayed relatively cold, rained/snowed some more, and there’s not noticeably less snow than there was when I woke up this morning. That whole thing yesterday about probably going into the office tomorrow is looking less and less likely as the night goes on and my browser is telling me that it’s currently just 30 degrees outside…
As a part of needing to go sit in a Microsoft office today to get portions of my work done, Will and I took the opportunity to go see a movie. Since we’d already seen everything high profile that was out, the second-tier one we decided on was Contraband. It wasn’t a bad movie, but it definitely felt like its length of two hours and isn’t a movie I’ll ever feel the need to go see again. My score: 5/10.
Personal - Seattle
Well, the snow finally came overnight, and today was most definitely a day to stay at home and work. So what did I do? I walked to City Center and worked from there to have a more reliable network connection. Granted, it was only uphill in the snow in one direction, but that still counts for some amount of dedication, right?
Tomorrow will probably be similar given how nothing has melted, but maybe there will be more staying at home involved. Depending on the reliability of accessing our bug database I may have to walk back over to City Center, but I can stay hopeful that the entire day can be spent in the warm confines of my apartment. By Friday though everything should be back to “normal”, and I’ll be hard presses for an excuse to not got into the office.
Personal - Seattle
So, today actually managed to be a fairly snow free day. Nothing happened overnight, and I actually went into work for half a day. Sleet started coming down (and sticking) right around lunch time, so I got scared and left to go home, but once that small storm passed, the remainder of the afternoon was pretty clear. Of course, at 2:00 AM (based on the current forecast which is ever-changing) the bottom is supposed to fall out, and I think everyone at Microsoft is planning on working from home tomorrow.
How will I entertain myself with this second working from home day this week? Well, Microsoft’s servers didn’t stand up too well during the previous snowpocalypse (alternatively: snowmageddon), so I may be limited to OWA or walking over to City Center should I want to get any meaningful work done. Benefit of living in Bellevue is that I can do the latter extremely easily whereas in Seattle, that’s not really an option since we don’t have any offices downtown anymore. So really, I’m more productive by living here, or at least I have the potential to be.
Personal - Seattle
Spending a day (potentially the first of many given the forecast) working from home today, I took some downtime in the afternoon to work through my gradually expiring Amazon movies. Hooking my Roku box up with an ethernet cable solved all of the problems it was having, so I was able to fully appreciate Super 8 on my TV rather than my computer monitor. When I say “appreciate”, I don’t mean it was an outstanding movie because it wasn’t. However, in the “alien movies with a title patter of Word Number”, it was leaps and bounds better than District 9. So much better that I at least finished this one. Completely appropriate for it to be in this rental pile instead of in my DVD collection though. My score: 6.5/10.
My other big non-work project for the day was to attempt to get my new Cablecard set up, but that didn’t really go as planned. Every time I called Comcast I get very competent and helpful people, but despite saying that everything looked fine on their end, my card would never activate properly. So, once it becomes safe to drive again, I’m going to try swapping out this card for a different one, and if that fails to solve the issue, then I’ll have one of their techs come out. However, that could easily be next week if the weather leans towards the more negative outcome of all the various predictions.
Personal - Seattle