- one friend hated his job so much here that he quit and moved to Seattle.
- two friends got hit by a drunk driver this weekend and one of them is having his leg amputated. He has no insurance and his wife is a teachers aid.
- someone called all of another friends family members up and told them that he was dead and hung up.
- a woman here at work plugged her computer VGA cable into a recently renovated VGA wall port that had 220a live power run to it by accident and it made her laptop explode right in front of her. She is pregnant.

How’s your monday shaping up?

I want to run away because I’m so unhappy with everything. Everything is crashing down at once, my mom, my dad, me. Kate is frustrated and wondering why I’m not myself and it angers me because she just doesn’t get it. And I understand, you’ve been putting up with me for damn near a year now but I’m doing my god damned best. And to think I was actually doing pretty well up until the shit storm all came down at once two weeks ago.

I wish I could run away for awhile. Anywhere but here. Anywhere from myself.

I’m trying to get a new project off the ground where I am attempting to put every single piece of my personal life online. I have 2000-present taken care of but now I’m trying to go back even further. My college years, although blurry, have been kept safe in a vault I like to call my dads house.

When I was in college, my dad was still in the area a few blocks from my moms house. I had my own room there which I had stopped sleeping in some time during highschool. Since then, it pretty much turned into a storage facility for all of my stuff. I’d come over to wash my cars and put whatever was in my car in a box and throw it in my room. When I moved out of college, my friends and I rented a U-Haul and drove back up north with all of our shit. I was the first stop and I remember literally taking a quarter of the trucks contents and throwing it in my room at my dads house.

So with that, all of that shit contains a lot of other shit and that shit is what I’m after. Projects, notes, photos, break-up letters, make up letters… everything I amassed through college.

To preface this story, I’d like to tell you a bit about my dad. He’s crazy. Not like challenge you to the occasional arm wrestling match crazy, he packed up his house and moved a state away on a whim without telling me crazy. He wanted a Jaguar so he bought four. Yeah. We haven’t really been the greatest of pals mostly because I think he just wasn’t ready or knew how to be a dad. It’s pretty much the classic case where I’ve always feared him and wanted his acceptance blah blah blah.

On to the story. I decided on a whim to drive up and make a visit and hopefully grab some of my history. My dad has always been hesitant of me rooting through his shit because he literally has a three car garage FILLED with stuff. Of course my stuff was buried in the back so I had to tread lightly and persuade him to let me go through all of it. To my surprise he obliged me and welcomed me up.

Away I went. And that’s when shit hit the fan. While driving up north, I called a best friend of mine up and 15 seconds into the call, she said she was getting divorced for the second time. WTF. So started my emotional rollercoaster. I get to dads house and after sitting down on the couch, he tells me that his minor heart attack he had 3 years ago called for a full-on bypass within the next year. Strike two. Then he tells me that there was an open house at the hospital that had a brand new robot surgeon demo and was going to blow it off. I told him to put on his coat and we were going right then.

We went to the demo, I got to operate a bazillion dollar robot, it was cool. We left and got some food so I could take my meds, he bought my some mcnuggets which was ironic because the last time he bought me mcdonalds, it was 20 years ago when he would get me for the weekend. We kind of laughed about that. While waiting to leave the parking lot, he struggled to get something out which related to the fact that he was sorry of being a bad dad and still thought about me every day and was proud of me… I didn’t reply.

I scarfed everything down and got to work in the garage. I was finding all sorts of shit and then it hit me. I started getting really dizzy, almost to the point where I couldn’t stand. My dad helped me out from behind the pile of boxes (as I was literally buried in) and had me sit outside. It kept getting worse and worse so he told me to come inside and lay down. I tried to stand up but was unable to walk due to vertigo and dizzyness so he had to hold me up the entire way to the bed. I laid down for 10 minutes or so and then ran to the bathroom to puke. I collapsed on the bathroom floor for about 90 minutes while my dad came in and checked on me avery so often. I finally got up and fell asleep in the bed while he called Kate to come pick me up.

It was HORRIBLE. Here I was in a house I was already uncomfortable being in, being cared for by someone I was uncomfortable being with. I couldn’t move, I couldn’t drive home and I had to wait two hours for kate to come pick me up. I was exhausted. I was starving and dehydrated and stuck. I can’t describe it other than it was the worst experience I had gone through ever. I just wanted to go home.

I left with nothing. I left everything I had found behind and now I have to go back or give it all up and let it stay there.

Even to today, if I think about the experience, I get nauseous. One step forward, two steps back.

It’s no secret that I love me some movies. A lot of people watch television, I like to watch movies. I know a lot of people will scoff and tell me that it’s a waste of time but for someone who is a fairly creative guy, movies allow me to become inspired, be entertained and most importantly relax after a long day of work.

So what started this project? Honestly, it’s out of necessity to clean up my house because I simply have too many movies on shelves as well as I wanted to finally make the scary transition from disk media to electronic file media.

My Current Setup:
42″ Panasonic plasma television 1024×768 res. Model# TH-42PX60U
Panasonic 7:1 receiver Model# Pioneer VSX-815-K
Orb Audio 5:1 pod speakers
Velodyne 10″ subwoofer
HD Comcast Cable Box
PS3
XBox w/HD Player
Wii
Various iPods

My issues:
My current home theater pieces were purchased at a time when HD was just coming into the mainstream. HD and Blu were still battling it out and DVI was still the only HD cable connector out. That being said, as I purchased gaming systems that had HDMI connectors, it created a lot of problems when using my amp (which had no HDMI connectors at all) and only two optical inputs. This would mean getting up and manually switching out HDMI cables to the back of an XBox if I wanted to watch an HD movie or switching it out to the PS3 if I wanted to watch a Blu movie. You can see where this would get old really fast.

My Goals:
Clean up my messy stereo shelf
Move everything to an automated and computer-controlled system as well as back everything up on a redundant drive RAID array
Have any form of media I want readily available through a few mouse-clicks
Be able to switch between systems and not have to manually change inputs on the television
Most importantly, do it on a budget of $300 without upgrading my amp or television (for now *wink*)

Getting started:
What started this project was when I decided to buy a used Mac Mini on craigslist so I could have a computer controlled method of playing my music through my stereo. I bought it for $175 bucks which was a steal but after deciding I wanted more space with a RAID array (more on that later) I ran into issues. It only had a firewire 400 port and wouldn’t connect to the RAID with the speed I wanted to stream 1080p video. Back to craigslist I went and I sold it for $500 netting me a nice profit to get started.

Back to Apple I went to buy a refurbished Mini for the same price but this time, it would have a Firewire 800 port, larger CPU, HD and more RAM. Now I had my base.

I would be controlling this from the couch so I dug up some old parts I had a while ago but didn’t use because of comfortability issues and daily design use. This would be the best use for them in a wireless living room setting. Onto the RAID!

For those that aren’t familiar, a RAID system is pretty much a group of chained hard drives that are seen by a computer as one single drive writing data across all of the drives. If one drive failed, the others would still have all of the data between them to safely keep any information you had from being lost. A buddy of mine told me about a piece of hardware called Drobo. Essentially, it was the Apple of RAID systems and really is an incredibly awesome piece of kit.

It allows the use of ANY size and make hard drive, is hot swappable and even has a growing number of apps that will allow it to become a cloud RAID, call you if a drive fails etc etc. The list goes on and on…

It just so happened that Drobo runs a lot of sales and contests on it’s site so I entered to win one of their base models. You guessed it, three weeks later and I had a little black box show up on my doorstep. Score! It would need HD’s and after a trip to my IT dept, I had a pair of 1TB WD drives. Double score! (I guess it pays to pay off my IT guys with cookies and cupcakes every month.) Not a lot of space but 2000 gigs was just enough to start out =)

So now I had a really nice system and a lot of work to do.

I wanted to keep all of this safe so I grabbed a nice line conditioner and surge protector for $50 bucks:

I was stuck with only two HDMI inputs on my TV so I have to work with a switch for now. Not the greatest solution but pretty much the only one.

Purchased some basic shielded cables:

While I was surfing Parts Express, I found some subwoofer spikes which I have heard a lot of great reviews about. My sub is on carpet so these wouldn’t be as beneficial as they could be but why not for ten bucks. I must say, Parts Express is an AWESOME little secret that sells parts dirt cheap.

I wanted to re-wire the speaker cable with something a little nicer so I got a few spools of 12 gauge wire. $10 bucks a spool is still my best deal so far.

Lastly I grabbed a pass-through outlet cover just to keep things tidy.

The before:
I snapped this off before I tore everything down but trust me, it was A LOT worse with a hundred or so video cases on the bottom shelf.

The Wii had it’s component video cables plugged into the aux. ports on the front of the TV, the motion bar was run behind the TV down the wall… it was just a mess.

The After:
Everything was run through the wall and the speaker jack was rewired.

Finally a clean TV

Clean speaker mounts (which will be painted black soon)

Next I laid out how I wanted my components to get a nice balance. The shelving unit was homemade and served it’s purpose but will be getting replaced as soon as money allows.

The Final Touches:
There was A LOT of wiring to hide. I didn’t want any of it to be visible this time so my wife and I came up with a plan to attach some black fabric to the bottom shelf so the wiring could be hidden behind it. The bottom of the fabric would adhere with velcro so wiring could be run through it without any light coming through.

I also found out that I now had a shelf of equipment with different colored LED’s shining towards me, namely one Philips unit that had LED’s brighter than the sun.

So I grabbed a hole punch and some transparent vinyl

Success!

Next on to the sub spikes:

Mark off the bottom of your sub

Try not to cry as you drill into it

Allen wrench the bases

Viola

So here’s the finished product:

So how do I control everything? Easy, and there actually are a lot of great options for Macs.

I have tried pretty much every HT software out there, I now prefer XBMC the most as it plays damn near any file I throw at it. It has a great scraping system and propagates a lot of images to make everything shiny and pretty. I have skinned it with something called AEON which has a GREAT UI system and even lets you customize the hell out of it.

Here are a few more as well:
http://www.boxee.tv/ <--- plays a lot of video files but has problems with a lot as well
http://www.videolan.org/vlc/ <--- is like XBMC without the UI

A great ripping tool is Ripit, which allows you to back your DVD's up without any loss of quality
http://thelittleappfactory.com/ripit/

Now for the fun part. Every piece of software I just about has an iPhone app which will let you control it from your phone! Too cool.

Last words:
The payoff for this project has yet to be entirely realized mainly because it was simply a lot of preventive maintenance and preparing for the future. That being said, it really is a treat to pick up my phone and with a few swipes, I can play any movie I own from the comfort of my sofa.

I live in a condo with 20′ tall cathedral ceilings. I know I can’t achieve aficionado sound but for me, I know I have the best system I can have at the moment and am leagues better than most people I know. I don’t have a lot of hobbies but when I find something that brings me comfort, relaxation and happiness, I don’t mind spending the time to make it easier to achieve. Even when it’s in my living room.

After multiple impromptu battles of foam flying melee, I had the brilliant idea of applying what I learned with my car project to the guns via various antiquing techniques. Even better, why not experiment on a gun for my buddies upcoming birthday.

The one issue (which was most important here), was that it was cold as shit outside. I learned my lesson in the past that spray painting in the bathroom was an extremely bad idea, I decided to make my storage space my makeshift paint booth. This was no easy task because it took a drive to the space in the wee hours of the night to escape the security guards while I painted but damned if I wouldn’t suffer for my art.

Behold the fruits of my labor:

The original product after a good sanding down

First coat of primer after a basecoat of flat black

Finally laying down some color: flat army green

Kate was intently busy supervising (and playing doodlejump)

Still more drying time

So after everything was painted, I brought the parts back home and took a fine brush of silver paint to the pieces to make it all look nice and used. I also wrapped the grips in tape and dyed them with black and brown shoe polish and engine grease

The final product

Then facebook let everyone in. Holy shit, it was like the world was brand new again. I was finally allowed into this awesome night club that was so exclusive and awesome and well, it was kind of like myspace. Minus the 12 year olds with horrible, browser-crashing css skins and sparkles and auto-playing P.O.D. songs.

Don’t get me wrong, Facebook is wonderful and clean and brilliantly coded. It has allowed me to find every single ex-girlfriend I’ve ever had back to junior high. I have found people I used to work with a decade ago. Hell, even my mom is on facebook.

Over a year or so, I accumulated a few hundred “friends” in my arsenal. You know how many I actually give a flying fuck about? 10. Maybe 11. Why do people have the need to add someone they sort of know and never even talk to them again. Is it some hunter gatherer thing? Are they afraid that if they don’t add them, then and there, that they will lose the chance to add them forever?

I’ve realized that a lot of the people I’ve added and sort of attempted to rekindle the past with and find out what they are up to now; I really could care less in the first place. Great, you got married and look just like you did in highschool, just… puffier and never left your hometown. Yes, yes I would love to continue being friends with you even though we barely spoke a word towards eachother 10 years ago.

Facebook is kind of cool to fuck around with your friends and call them faggots and homos when they post a photo of themselves passed out on the floor but other than that, if I want to interact with my friends, I will get in my car and go to their house, or see them at a show, or pick up my phone and give them a call. You know… real world interaction. Imagine that.

I bid thee farewell facebook. It’s already started to happen. The spammers and evil apps and 12 year olds have already infiltrated your ivory castle more and more. I’m giving it a year until we find a new cleaner and more exclusive nightclub.

Hell, maybe friendster will finally make a comeback.

(open in new window for larger pics)

I got together with my college mates and plotted what we’d do. We ended up deciding that we’d make a massive plate of spaghetti on a table, that we all get underneath and stick our heads through whilst wearing brown stockings on our heads full of scrumpled up brown paper. We were to be the meatballs. We thought it was an excellent idea.

We spent days building this thing in the college yard cos it was so big, made a table out of cardboard with legs, put a tablecloth over it and had a huge plate on top that we filled with “spaghetti” rolls of paper. It looked proper good but when we had a walk about and looked at what other people had made we had a real “oh my god what the fuck have we done” moment.

So it came to the night of the show and we were a bit embarrassed. We decided to go down into Peckham and get some booze from Crack-a-Jack, the big off-license. We bought two bottles of whiskey, a bottle of blue alchopop stuff and some beer. Bad idea. When it was time to go on stage we were pretty much legless. My friends and I put the stockings on our heads, filled them with brown paper and poked them through the holes in the plate we’d made and walked to the cargo lift. It was too small. There was no way we were going to be able to get it into the building.

We decided to run at it, ripping the sides of the table off and wedging ourselves in the lift. When we got to the floor we were supposed to be going to we fell out of the lift, barged past everyone queuing to go up the catwalk because we couldn’t see what was going on, went up the catwalk, hit the end of the stage and turned round to go back. We missed the catwalk on the way back and fell off the front of the stage and as we did one of my mates puked. Have you ever seen someone with a stocking over his head puke? It’s not a good scene. I crawled out of the hall, out of the door and never went back into college again. Funny thing is is that it turns out they loved it and used photos of us in the prospectus for the next year!

- my dog tore both ACL’s which will require two surgeries @ $4k a pop
- some dumb whore ran into my bumper at lunch today
- my hard drive with 140 gigs of music, literally every song I have amassed since 2000, just died
- my brand new blackberry is locked with a password I do not have

anything else you want to add dude?