You can find it here

I can’t believe I never posted about this man before. Stanley Marsh 3 is an artist who lives in Amarillo. His most famous piece of art would be The Cadillac Ranch

But I would have to say that my favorite of his pieces would be an ongoing project he’s been doing at least 20 years.  That would be his roadside signs.

Holds about 175 DVDs

TV Stand/Entertainment Center

Small Ikea Coffee Table

Great to put video game systems/DVD/BluRay Players on

This morning I made a leap.  Until today I’ve had my house setup with an old style xbox modded with xbmc running on it.  This has been great for watching tv shows on my 51 inch tv and 2 speakers.

About 2 weeks ago I finally made the leap to purchasing a real receiver and bought the additional speakers to bring me up to the age of 5.1 surround sound.

It’s wonderful, but with it comes a price.  I then came to realize that all of the TV shows I’ve been downloading over the years only have 2 channel sound.  I would just get higher quality versions of the shows, but they will not play on the old xbox.

Purchasing things as always, snowballs

I moved my Home Theater PC (HTPC) from my room to the living room so that I could connect it in to the receiver.  For the last 4 months I’ve been running the Beta of Windows 7 on my HTPC and after a little bit of tweaking I’ve had it running smoothly and LOVE Windows 7.  I love it enough that when it comes out in October, I will actually purchase it.  This will be my first time to purchase a Windows platform, but I digress.

I decided to go ahead and install the newest version of Windows 7 (The Release Cantidate) on the PC before setting it all up.

The install took about 30 minutes with no propmts to me except “What’s your name, and what would you like to call your computer?”  Windows 7 booted up for the first time, and here’s the list of things that blew me away

• My Wireless and Wired network cards both worked without me having to tweak a single thing (unlike Vista and the Beta of 7)
• The HDMI audio worked without any tweaking (also unlike Vista and Beta of 7)
• Every single video format I threw at Windows Media Center played without having to install a single codec. Dolby Digital worked without having to do anything.
• EVERYTHING JUST WORKED, which I’ve never had a computer (Mac or PC) do before.

I’ve set my little HTPC to be a media extender, which means if I hop on my xbox360 from anywhere in the house, I’ll have access to all the media that is on the computer, in the exact same interface as if I were on the computer.

Apparently Netflix streaming support has been added to Windows Media Center, and there’s already plugins to have it work sending out to the 360, which means it bypasses the problem of having to get an xbox live account (and pay roughly and extra $5 a month on top of your netflix subscription just so you can stream movies.  This is all fairly amazing to me.  We are on the cusp of the whole entertainment industry completely having to change to cater to a new market.  A market that doesn’t want to put up with 1/3rd of their viewing time being taken up by commercials (yes, if you watch a 30 minute show with the commercials taken out of the show, you are left with roughly 20 minutes of programming).My next course of action is to setup a super low power media server with ~5 Terabytes of space so I don’t have to have on my main (power hog) computer 24/7.

I had a birthday party back on April 25th to celebrate my birth. Lots of my friends came, and during the day while I was straightening up the house getting the house prepared for the party, Jarad and LeAnne had a moment of baking genius. This was the fruits of their labor:

Burger Cupcakes!

Burger Cupcakes!

Burger Cupcakes!

My bill that was $5,500 had been discounted down to $2,200 according to the letter.

$3,300 birthday present, and about two years worth of paying monthly for this injury.

Yesterday I got my monthly bill, and it says that my balance is $1,648. NEARLY ANOTHER $600 off!

Someone likes me at the hospital I think.

Woohoo

Then I checked my credit card because I forgot that I had signed up for cash back rewards… I spent right around $32,000 on my personal credit card last year (which was then reimbursed and the card paid off). This translates to about $300 cash back. Of course I don’t get to have that money thanks to the knee injury mentioned in the last email. But it’s cool. I’ve got my finances under control for the moment and all is going smooth.

I might even buy a video game for the first time since…. Grand Theft Auto 4 came out. Wow it’s been a while.

I also haven’t bought a DVD in a very long time. I bought The Jerk on HD-DVD while I was in Anaheim CA last October and it was only $4.

Are you bored with hearing about my life yet?

I can’t still my excitement for his new album in May. I think I am going to actively try and avoid the album until I have the vinyl in my hands.

M Ward – To Save Me (ft Jason Lytle)