June 3, 2010
Wow - that race was a lot harder than I had expected. Erica and I went to Stillwater on Saturday to pick up our race packets and decided to drive the course. Unfortunately it turned out to be alot more uphill than we bargained for.
Overall I finished the race…at a better time than I had anticipated. My overall time was 1:10:18, and put me in 229th place out of 591 runners. My overall pace was about 9:35 per mile, which was about what I was running on the training runs. It would have been nice had it been a little cooler out. We did not have any breeze and it was pretty humid which made the run that much harder.
Don’t know that I will run any more races, but maybe if I do the place we do it at will have a better shuttle service after the race. Stillwater had 1 school bus running for the shuttle after the race. We waited in line for a little over an hour before we could get on the shuttle to go home. Kind of poor planning on Stillwater’s half. The only thing that was worse than that was that we had to stand in the sun the whole time. Yuck!!
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April 6, 2010
Erica is running a half marathon in Seattle at the end of June and in preparation she is going to run a 12k. I decided to sign up as well. Although I am not really worried about it I have officially started my training program and I will already be running 5 miles on Saturday. This might be a little harder than I had imagined.
I have always had that mental block at about 3-3.5 miles. So with running 4 and 5 miles this week it will be a stretch, but if I can make it to the 5 mile mark I think I can easily do the 7.5.
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July 29, 2009
Ok - so for those of you who I have talked to…I guess the HTPC isn’t really all that new….it is actually a few months old, and I have been meaning to write about this for awhile, but it just kept slipping my mind.
Anyway - I decided back in May that I was done with the Windows Media Center Extender, and my decision was made just in time to get the news that the model that I had was being discontinued. Funny how that works - or in the case of the extenders…..didn’t work. With giving up on the extenders though I had to come up with a way to get the home theater stuff working in the living room, so I set out on a task to build a home theater computer (HTPC).
The reason that I went with the extender at first was because I did not want a full computer in the living room, but I was so fed up with the extender that I guess I went to the dark side…..And then when I started looking at components I realized that this might not be that bad. So I will run down the components and give you links where I can to the items that I bought to make the system up with. Lets get started!
Case: Lian Li -$140
When I first started looking for a case I wanted something that would be quiet, and sleek looking….I did not want another tower in the house. Boy was I glad when I found this marvelous piece of equipment. It fit perfectly with what I wanted. Lian Li makes some of the best cases around and this one is in that category as well. The best thing about it - when put in our audio rack, it looks identical to other electronic equipment that we have.
Motherboard: Asus - $73
With the help of a co-worker I bought this motherboard for the computer. Really the only reason that I bought it was because it had HDMI out built into it. However - I wish I would have done more homework on this one - I am not very happy with this motherboard. It seems like everytime I do anything I have to jump through hoops to make it work. Not going to get into specifics, but I would recommend looking around before buying this one.
CPU: AMD Athlon - $66
AMD has always been my CPU of choice - you just cannot go wrong with them. Nothing special here - just something to handle the processing of the computer
RAM: OCZ - $40
RAM is so freaking cheap now adays that it just doesn’t make sense to go all out - I got 4 GB for $40 for this machine…..I could have gotten more but the PC did not really need it - I saved the extra money to get more RAM on my server when I rebuild that!
Hard Drive: Western Digital - $42
Before you get mad at me for getting a spinner instead of an SSD….Let me explain - you see the HTPC is not used 100% of the time….In fact it is sleep mode whenever it is not being used, so the SSD, although it would have been nice, it was not worth the extra money for something that was not going to be used all that much.
Blu-Ray Drive: LG - $95
Nice drive - although I am not yet in the world of Blu-Rays…I felt that I should at least have one, and I justified having the drive because if we rent a movie we do not then need to rip it to the server in order to watch it
Vista Remote Control: EData - $30
Although this item is no longer available any vista remote control should work….all I really wanted was the receiver anyway - I learned all of the codes into my main remote.
So I built the computer in one night and put one of the Windows 7 beta OS’ on there (Shameless Plug - if you have not tried Windows 7 - Try it….You will throw Vista out shortly thereafter). Anyway - I have since upgraded the OS to the RC, and I also have the full release on order.
I did need to do one case modification. The CPU fan was screaming loud which was just unnacceptable to me. So I pulled out the fan from the CPU and modded the case to have a large 120mm fan sitting over the top of the CPU. This turned out to be a good plan - not only does it work to keep the CPU cooler than the stock fan - it also has enough spread to cover the RAM and chipset and keep those cooler. I bought a fan that only had 9 DBa for sound….If you do the same thing, make sure you look for a quiet fan - otherwise you could end up with one that is just as loud as the stock CPU fans.
So now the HTPC is built - I have windows installed, and I put the whole thing together with the glue that I am a part of - Open Media Library - which is an application that works with Windows Media Center to manage your movie database. I write the documentation for the application so of course I was going to use it. I also added Hulu to Windows Media Center so that we could watch TV that we may have missed.
The new HTPC runs pretty slick - with one touch of my remote, I turn on the HTPC, TV and the reciever….Get it to all of the settings needed and in less than 1 minute I am in my movie library and ready to watch any movie in my collection. With the movies stored on the server all I have to do is browse to the cover art for the movie that I want to watch and hit play movie - within 5 seconds the movie is playing…..no more fumbling with discs - it is a great thing!
And now with the HTPC being in use over the extender I no longer have to worry about rediculously long start up times (40 seconds just to turn on the extender), and I no longer have to worry about codecs not being available to play the movies that I want to!
Hope that everyone finds this useful and inspires you to create an HTPC of your own. If you are interested in doing something similar to this use this guide to help you find the components you need - if you have any questions about my setup or need help with yours - let me know and I will answer to the best of my knowledge. This has been a really long journey, but I am glad that I finally got to the point that I am.
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June 11, 2009
We have a townhouse available in Eden Prairie that we are trying to sell. the house has wonderful views (the house overlooks a pond, so you do not have to look at your neighbors). The house is also only about 1 mile from the Lake Riley boat launch.
Here is the MLS Link in case you are interested. Please pass it along to anyone you might know that is looking as well.
http://www.edinarealty.com/Listing/ListingDetail.aspx?listing=41350422&Popup=1
Thanks
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April 20, 2009
This past week I found out that I had a virus on my machine….Ok, not a big deal I tell myself - I have had viruses before and been able to get rid of them. This was totally different, and caused me to spend the entire weekend to get it cleaned out. Here is a rundown of the events just in case you run into the same thing…Maybe it can save you some time.
I first noticed that something was not right on Wednesday night when I no longer had admin access to my machine, but I was still set up as an admin. A quick virus scan found a bunch of viruses, so I quarantined them and moved on but the virus came back soon after that. A quick discussion with my friend Brian, and he determined that I probably have malware on my machine. Brian gave me some utilities to try including malwarebytes and ccleaner. I went through the reigns and tried all this and was feeling pretty confident in myself. I went to bed and forgot about it. That was until the next morning (Thursday), when I all of the sudden was getting missing windows module messages.
Another chat with Brian and he thought that I had a Master Boot Record (MBR) Virus. What is a master boot record you ask. This is the part of the hard drive that tells the computer where the boot records are. The bad news is that a simple format does not just remove this sector. I found that out the hard way. I ended up doing 3 formats on Thursday night, and another 2 on Friday night. After formatting I would go into windows and almost instantly have pop ups showing up on my screen. This was before I even had the network card installed, so I knew it was something hiding somewhere.
Saturday morning comes and I am frustrated with this thing (thanks alot virus writers…..JERKS!!). I try to get rid of the master boot record on the hard drive. I first installed the XP CD and booted into Recovery mode so that I could get the command line interface. In here I tried to run the command fdisk /mbr. This is supposed to re-write the master boot record, but for some reason it was not a recognized command. A little more looking and I found a command called fixmbr….basically it is the same thing, just a different command. I then did another format. Virus is still there…..Have you ever seen that Seinfeld episode where George’s dad walks around screaming “Serenity now”? Yep…I was just about there.
So I go back to the web and do a search for MBR Virus Removal, and I come across a post where someone says that the best way is to just wipe the drive completely….This is probably a good time to mention that good backups are a must….good thing I had everything backed up! There is a program out there called DBAN (or Darik’s Boot and Nuke). Now this is my type of program….Just go right for the throat. DBAN is a utility that is free to use and it is also included with another utility called the Ultimate Boot CD. the Ultimate Boot CD is also a free utility - you should have it in your arsenal if you do not already.
I burned the ISO image to a CD and made a boot disk from the UBCD files and gave it a run. Using the tutorial I found here, I ran it. OK - so it takes a while to run (6 hours on my 200 GB drive), but it was totally worth it. Everything on that drive was gone. So I reinstall windows for probably the 10th time and I finally have a clean install. I did still find some viruses on my backup hard drive, but Antivirus programs picked those up right away and I was able to get rid of them quickly before they infected anything else.
So a whole weekend wasted and I am finally back up and running. I have since done 6 complete virus scans and it has all been clean (fingers crossed). After the computer was up and running I was able to do what I really was going to do for the weekend. Install my new wireless N router…..All I can say is that it is awesome.
Glad to finally be back online!
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