Oh what a weekend
Friday morning Danith left for a sewing weekend in Eau Claire and I had a Dad weekend with the kids. Once I picked them up from school and day care we pitched in to straighten up the house. Otherwise Friday was not too eventful.
Saturday morning started off bright and early, as Brandon got up at 6am, excited for the day. His Grandma Braun was coming to watch his pinewood derby race at 10am. As I prepared the kids breakfast I started to notice feeling more and more tired and my stomach more and more rocky.. Not a good way to start the busy day ahead.
Around 9am my Mother arrived and the kids were crazy with excitement. Brandon showed off his derby car, Aiden was trying to show her the books he liked and the most needy kid, Max, wanted all of her attention.
The derby went well. Brandon had a good time watching all the cars zoom down the track. The overall excitement level was pretty high. His car was not first and it was not last. It finished right in the middle of the pack. As Brandon likes to point out, his car came in first during it’s last run. 🙂
After the derby the kids were starving. My stomach was in bad shape so I knew I was not going to be eating much, so I let them decide where we ate. That was a bad mistake.. They choose Mc Donald’s. All in all not a bad place as they can run around, but the smells of the greasy food did me no favors. It was all I could do to give them 30 minutes to eat and play before I had to leave to get home.
My mother helped out a lot after we got back home. She took the kids on a walk to the park to play. I was able to lay down and rest for a few hours, everybody won. After a light nap I was in the middle of the fever but at least my stomach settled down some.
Grandma Braun left about 4pm for home, but I was not stuck with both kids long. Brandon’s friend Jack came home shortly after and he went over to play and was there until a bit after 6pm. Aiden was content to play in the playroom on his own and occasionally bug me for some juice or to help him go potty. I was very lucky to have such wonderful boys.
Sunday morning I had to get Brandon ready for church class. I was only feeling marginally better, but got him there anyways. While we was in class, Aiden and I got gas, some drinks and a car wash. That pretty much ate up the hour we had to kill while BG was in class.
Once we got back home the kids were up in the sewing and computer room playing. At some point someone stepped on Danith’s sewing machine acrylic table. When we were leaving the room I noticed it had a big crack in it. Uh Oh.
So Danith returned Sunday afternoon and took the boys to her parents house for dinner with the family. I stayed home to rest and to not infect the rest of the family. I felt bad about the table and Danith mentioned it cost $100. I figured it could not be more than $20 of materials in the table so went to Home Depot and picked up the supplies to duplicate the table. I was wrong about the costs.. It cost only $15 to replace the table. The picture shows my replication, not too bad, just a few minor imperfections.
The neverending computer update
A side hobby of mine is tinkering with computers, I know quite a shock to those that know me. I always have lots of computer equipment littered around collecting dust and what not. About a year ago I started to put together a computer to use as our home theater PC, HTPC. HTPCs are usually connected to a television and used to show videos, pictures, play music, etc.
For the past year this HTPC was not really fulfilling it’s true potential. I was only using it as a file server for our TiVo’s. Now that unto itself was beneficial as we could place all of our photos, music and videos on the HTPC and all of our TiVo’s play any of the content on it.
Last month I decided that it was time for the HTPC to become more than just a file server and get all the required components to output true HD to our big screen TV in the basement. I ordered a faster CPU, more memory and a couple of Terabyte hard drives.
I was a bit surprised when I went to hook up the drives that my old motherboard did not have the SATA ports that were advertised on the box (Collecting dust in my closet). This required me to purchase a new motherboard, and a new video card.
When the motherboard and video card arrived I knew it would be better to reinstall Windows from scratch than to try to jury rig it all together. So a few hours of installs, updates and patches later Windows was installed. But I still had an issue, the computer would lock up when it tried to shut down, probably due to a bad driver.
So after moving all my drivers to a separate folder I reinstalled Windows again. Another 3 hours down the drain, but success as Windows could start up and shut down properly. Now I could play with the system and see what it offered.
The new video card could support 1080p but my older HD TV proved this was too hard to read the text on the screen at 1080i, so I switched to 720P, much better. I installed all my software to convert videos, stream them to my TiVos and to play movies in the basement.
About this time my last component came in the mail, a Blu-Ray drive. The new drive would allow us to watch the newer format Blu-Ray discs on the big TV in the basement. A simple upgrade, so I thought.
After removing my old DVD drive and putting in the new drive I turned on the PC. As it hummed to life I flipped through the manual of the new drive, anticipating what extra software I would have to install to play the BR discs. When I looked up I saw that Windows locked up while booting up. An hour of tweaking start up settings did not get my any further. Nuts, I have never had a windows boot up issue with a new drive before.
Three more hours later I had Windows installed from scratch again and was installing my software again. At least I was getting good at this part. I pulled out a BR disc, Batman The Dark Knight. The new, albeit crappy, default player loaded it up. The picture looked great, but no sound. Oh no, what is wrong now.
Flipping through Windows settings and defaults I ran across the fact that my new Video card has it’s own sound device for the HDMI cable. This was the default, so no sound was coming out my other sound device. A simple setting fixed this and I was getting sound. Not HD Surround sound due to the crappy video player bundled with the Blu-Ray drive, but at least sound.
So the only things remaining are to reinstall my TV cards so I can timeshift ATSC, Clear QAM, and NTSC cable and the HTPC should be complete enough… For now.
