Blogging from the Blackberry. What will they think of next??

Fun weekend, fast cars, tough event. The winner finished on 3 wheels even! I should have stuck around to shoot it.

Gallery Here -(2009/06/05) Whoops, link fixed.

We should be painting about now, too bad life doesn’t stop when we have chores to do.

Off to Quebec for the Rallye Baie de Chaleurs. We won’t be painting there, either.

Slalom-y.

Congratulations to Daph for getting her Atlantic Region Motorsports Road Racing license!

We’ve been in the house for a few weeks now and its starting to feel like home… an empty, empty home. Currently we still have the old house on the market and it hasn’t moved as quickly as we would have liked. Some of this is our fault since we really should have done a bit more to it before the first-week viewing rush, but we listened to our agent that the aggressive pricing we put on the house would have people looking past things like ‘needs paint’ and ‘ugly carpet’. A busy weekend later and we’ve got the paint and carpet issues on the way to resolution, just have to get people in the door again.

We’ve spent some time getting minor things around the new house done, some minor plumbing issues corrected, stuff moved around wallpaper pulled down. We’re going to start painting this weekend and be on the road to making it our house properly. Unfortunately the one major thing we want to do, replacing the carpet with hardwood, has to wait until we’ve sold the old house. Good times.

Our lives have been pretty consumed by house stuff the last few weeks, which isn’t surprising. We have managed to squeeze out time for hobbies though. A couple weeks ago Daphne took the ARMS Road Racing School and participated in her first wheel to wheel race in the TRAC Tour series. Race #2 is this weekend. She now officially competes in motorsports a LOT more than I do. How did THAT happen?

Never have I wanted to play a puzzle game so badly. C’mon, you can conjure a crayon-animated Cthulhu and have him fight God on a skateboard!

Gratuitous artsy shot!

Lets see if its another month before I update again…

I really haven’t had time to sit down and write much here since we’ve done some pretty extreme re-arranging of our lives in the last month. Lets hit the hilights…

1) After 20 years I cut my hair off. No I don’t have any decent pictures yet.
2) Daph started her long march towards having her jaw problems corrected.
3) We bought a new house which means
4) We have to sell our current house

The order of importance in those items probably depends on your perspective. The hair thing is pretty shocking to a lot of people. I’ve had long hair since early highschool mostly out of frustration with it being thin and extremely hard to manage. Throwing it back into a pony tail was just easier, except more and more it wasn’t even that and I was just fed up with it. I actually went into the hairdresser asking for a buzz cut thinking that was the only alternative but thankfully she talked me into something more reasonable. I had terrible visions of being utterly fed up with it again in any sort of short/medium length because of remembering how much I hated it the last time I had it this short. The big difference now is that ‘bed head’ is fashionable. A spot of gel and a quick muss and you’ve got a socially acceptable hair style. I still have to swallow my perfectionist ‘its so messy!’ reaction some mornings but mostly its pretty easy and I’m a lot happier. I should have done this years ago.

I know, I know, this post is useless without pics. I’ll find something.

Daph has been long afflicted with temporomandibular joint problems (TMJ in the common parlance) and her change is that she’s started the corrective process. Its unfortunately long, painful and expensive, but the risks of leaving it unattended plus the general discomfort were just becoming too much. It’ll be a long haul of braces, oral surgery and general misery, but it’ll be worth it in the end… Of course thats easy for me to say.

So that leaves… the house. In typical Daph and Gord fashion we went from casually pondering looking for something that had a bit more space and was a bit more ‘us’ than our current starter home, to signing papers in about a week. We did the same thing when we bought our current place, it was one of the houses we looked at on our very first night out with the Real Estate agent and the whole process just tumbled into place. I don’t think its that we’re that easy to please, we just know what we want when we find it. Unfortunately the timing was pretty bad, as the day after we signed the letter of offer I had to go on a business trip to Indianapolis, leaving Daph to handle all the back and forth. She was still here when I got home, though. She couldn’t have been TOO upset.

The house is a bit further out of town on the Bedford side of Middle Sackville but thats really not a big deal. Currently it will add about 10 minutes to our commute time and probably a fair bit less than that once a new highway ramp opens in the fall. The payoff, however, is worth it. The property is off of Springfield lake, although its on the land side, not waterfrontage unfortunately. Its a heavily wooded property with just over an acre of space and the nearest neighbors couldn’t even be shouted to if you tried. Exactly what we wanted. Other things we were looking for were a garage (2 car attached), a good deck (8′ wraparound deck on two sides, lots of room/possibility to expand), an open concept kitchen (excellent layout for entertaining with a great dining room), and not much lawn (lawn in the back, a bit in the front other than that its trees!). This house has it all and then some, and boy do I mean then some. At 2600 square feet its quite a bit more house than we were looking for, and definitely more than we need, but the property was too perfect to pass up and we love the house, even if its too big. I just feel a little guilty that its just the two of us (and our gigantic cats) in such a big place.

Picture gallery of the house here. Stay tuned for the housewarming(s)!

As I write this we’re in the midst of packing, packing, packing and purging, purging, purging. We’ve been in our current house for 8 years now and that leads to a lot of… stuff. So far I’ve done a purge of old computer equipment on Freecycle (Wow, I did NOT expect the response I got!) and today we get rid of a lot of the used car fluids and scrap metal that have been collecting over the years. Its still overwhelming, though. Lots of work yet to be done.

Also our RallyCross season has now ended, congrats to our partner Ian for taking the overall championship as well as tops in Prepared class. Now time to start getting ready for Rallysprint!

The long weekend just isn’t long enough. Especially with the week I have ahead. Yech!

Yesterday a bunch of Subaru nuts got together at a local tuners place for some burgers and boasting. It was a good time and I hope we have more of these over the summer. Its good to talk grease with like minded folks. Unfortunately it planted visions of Stage 2 tunes in my head. Especially when I started adding up how few parts I need to get there. Hmmmm. Stupid expensive hobbies!

Our last RallyCross of the year is coming up this Sunday. I’ll miss the series over the summer but there’s plenty of other things to keep us way too busy. Especially with the upcoming RallySprint events.

In photography news I ordered a pair of new generation Pocket Wizards last week and can’t wait for them to arrive. Truthfully though I have no idea what I’m doing with off-camera flash, but you can’t learn if you don’t try, right? I played around a bit with my Poverty Wizards this weekend but I can already tell I should have ordered another receiver and flash. Stupid expensive hobbies!

I’ll have to attempt this shot again soon, there’s definitely some things I would do differently to improve it. Fun experiement though.

Off to Indianapolis (For work, not motorsports, alas) next week!

RallyCross season is wrapping up with two more events to go. I admit I haven’t been particularly enthused about this season in general. The car was working relatively well (compared to last year, that is), but I just haven’t been feeling it. Half the time I showed up at the event and decided to take pictures rather than drive. Thankfully Sunday’s event reminded me why we do this madness in the first place.

T-Shirt weather, extremely fast course, fairly tight competition, this is what Rallying is supposed to be!

The only downside to the day was a newly exposed weakness in our jury-rigged fuel filter system. When you drive really quickly on loose surfaces the entire area gets pretty soundly pelted with all manner of rocks and mud. On my second run the rocks took out the hose clamps to the fuel line leaving me with a DNF. On my third run a rock went THROUGH the plastic filter though it didn’t impact the run. We have some modifications to make before this Sundays event, obviously.

In other Rally News, we had our monthly Bluenose AutoSport club meeting last night and finally put dates on the Rally Sprint events! July 20th and August 16th will see the return of performance rally to Nova Scotia, hopefully with an eventual eye to the return of full stage events! More details are coming as they get worked out.

Why is it whenever I’m sitting around the house itching to play photographer I shoot the cat? It shows a distinct lack of creativity. I have dozens of pics of this cat but almost none of the other one. Black cats are like the anti-model. Nearly impossible to take a decent picture of.

WTF?

Srsly, WTF?

Notice something different about the site?

My trusty old Xbox has been getting long in the tooth lately, but it doesn’t owe me anything. It has been the best $100 appliance I’ve ever bought, hands down. Hacking it to run Xbox Media Centre made it the ultimate media service appliance, playing every movie, TV show, MP3, Shoutcast stream or movie trailer I could throw at it from my PC to whatever TV I wanted around the house. Though I haven’t quite taken the leap yet, XBMC has made me seriously consider getting rid of cable. Who needs the ads, the static schedules, the crappy quality? Unfortunately after 5 years of heavy use the ‘ol ‘box has started complaining, its transplanted 120GB HD has started making odd noises lately and the fans sound like rutting sheep most of the time. So enter… Microsoft’s arch nemesis!

The AppleTV has been out for a few years now and people haven’t really known what to make of it. Essentially a media slinging appliance tied into Apple’s iTunes store it started off fairly pricy and never really found a home. Recently, though, people smarter than me have gotten their grubby little paws into its guts and started opening up new possibilities, chief among them Boxee and XBMC. There’s something twistedly satisfying in running XBOX Media Centre on an Apple Product.

First, the good. The AppleTV is a compact, fanless little pie-box that fits unobtrusively in any setup. It features HDMI and Component video and Optical/RCA audio outputs. No composites for you folks who haven’t joined the 90s though, sorry. Also present are ethernet and USB connections while an 802.11n wireless interface hides inside. There’s no buttons or direct interface on the unit itself, not even a reset button. In typical Apple fasion its form over function.

Once you hook up the unit you’re presented with some very basic setup menus and thats it, you’re ready for all your iTunes needs! The interface is very minimal but effective providing you access to your local iTunes libraries on machines visible via Ethernet/Wireless as well as online content from Apple. The movie content available from Apple is quite impressive and streams quickly, with trailers starting in under 10 seconds. HD (720p) content takes a bit longer but still well within the realm of reason. I haven’t done any movie renting yet but the prices are in-line (cheaper!) than blockbuster. I could definitely see using this service. TV shows are available as well at around $15-20 a season or $1.99 an episode. Considering the intended purpose I had in buying the ATV though, I can’t see these getting much use.

Also available within the Apple interface is a very diverse library of Video Podcasts. These were an unexpected perk and I spent an entire weekend watching lectures from the TED conference streamed quickly and in high quality straight to my TV. These podcasts aren’t anything you can’t find on their respective websites, but having them all in one place and on your TV makes them vastly more accessible. Video podcasts are available on all kinds of subject matter from travel, cooking, educational, sports and video games. The CBC has a pretty good selection too!

Installation of Boxee/XBMC was just about as dead simple as any operation could be. Using a USB stick an installer creates a bootable patch system that you load onto your ATV by turning it on with the stick inserted. Wait 5-10 minutes and it does all of its own work. Thats it! Now when you load the ATV interface you have new options for both Boxee and XBMC including functionality to update to the latest versions as they’re relased. The Xbox was easy, this is absolute childs play!

Boxee is an offshoot of XBMC geared more towards social sharing of media and streaming online content. I see where its going but it doesn’t really hold a lot of appeal for me. First off, I really don’t find any draw in the social interface. I don’t care what my friends are watching and if they want to recommend something to me they’ll just tell me. The streaming content would probably have more value except its 90% US-based content which is regionally filtered. Without jumping through VPN hoops most of it is not available.

XBMC is the same app we’ve come to know and love on the Xbox. The patch stick installer installs the latest ‘Atlantis’ Alpha build which has an extremely nice looking 720p geared skin that looks amazing on an HD TV. No more analog fuzziness! All the codec support is there and media is played over Windows shares without a hitch. There’s a couple of functionality bits that aren’t present but for the most part everything is great! It IS an Alpha build, anyway!

There’s always some bad, however. The biggest issue I have with the ATV (and by extension, anything running on it) is the remote. ALSO in Apple form-over-function style, the remote is a stick of gum affair with only 6 buttons. Four directions, play/pause and menu. The Xbox remote that I’m used to, by comparrison, has dozens of buttons allowing XBMC to be controlled in a number of ways. After living with the Apple remote for a few days I no longer actively hate it, but I’ll be very glad when the XBMC/Boxee folks figure out how to allow me to use my Harmony 550 Universal remote to add a bit more control to the package.

Another weak spot is 720p playback. Under XBMC the ATV can be picky about 720p HD content due to the fact the aftermarket software can’t make use of the nVidia 7300 GPU to help with the rendering duties. So while you can view high def video with no problem when downloaded from the iTunes store, XBMC can struggle a bit. Hopefully this is something the community will resolve as well, but at the end of the day I don’t really care about high def that much.

One final gripe is the fact that the unit never actually turns off. Since its designed to constantly be synching your media, downloading podcasts, updating catalogs from the iTunes store, its constantly talking over the network and occasionally spinning up/down its 40GB internal HD. I wish this weren’t the case but I hooked the ATV up to a Kill-a-Watt power meter which tells me its drawing 17W at idle (21W under load). Thats not the end of the world, I guess. Over the course of a 3 day weekend with plenty of use the ATV drew just over 1kWh. I’d still rather it just shut down completely, however.

For $209 from the Apple Refurbished Store I think this little unit will fill my media needs nicely for a while to come. Sure, there are more capable streamers out there, such as the Popcorn Hour or gaming consoles like the PS3 and its BluRay drive, but those options are easily twice the price and, much to my own surprise, the lack of access to the iTunes store would be a big loss in those units.

… when did this become a tech blog?