Great things coming...

Aside from the news of restaurant week Link New updates to this site are in the works!

Hang in there if you can!

North White Plains & Roads

While I know there are budget problems in White Plains, but I pay taxes. Why is almost every road in North White Plains a mess? Not a single flat paved road to be found...

Comments?

XBMC Progress

Even since installing XBMC, the process of transferring my collection of movies and TV shows has been a long one. First some history…

Throughout the years I have collected several DVDs, but only watched then once. In an effort to start watching them, I attempted to create a “schedule” of what the watch and when.

Sunday	Monday	Tuesday	Wednesday	Thursday	Friday	Saturday
---	Action	Voyager	TNG	---	Drama	Any

Example of such a schedule

This system would have worked, but I didn’t stick to it. I’m not sure why, maybe it was the time for each DVD to load up in my Blu-Ray player. Perhaps the difficulty of just seeing each movie and picking one that feels right. I don’t know, but it just didn’t work.

After a few months, I started to think about how I could reach my goal. My schedule theory didn’t work because of the hassles involved and laziness. I wanted a device that contained everything I owned, user friendly, and fast.

I considered a 300 disk DVD changer. This is an easy solution, minimal setup, all I need to do is add the disks. The downside?  Load time. I didn’t want to wait for the drive to find the disk. Also, there is a risk of drive failure or damage to my original media.

From there I determined a copy of my collection would be safer. I turned to computers to solve this issue, but wasn’t sure what to use. I considered WD TV. This is a fairly cheap device, has good reviews and can play almost any file format I chose to have my DVDs in.  At the time it was going to cost me to price of an external hard drive and the WD TV itself. I was looking at an over $200 investment. Still not too bad, but not what I wanted to spend.

The next option was my PC and write software to play the files. This worked out ok. I would rip the DVDs to my PC in ISO format and than create a small application to play the video. It worked, but the interface wasn’t anything to write home about. Development stopped for a while and after moving to my new apartment connection between my PC and the TV was lost.

After the purchase of a 20’ HDMI cable, I was back in business. I added some features to my program, media information and thumbnails. Still the time required for me to write the software vs. the benefit was not balanced.

I then ran across an article about XBMC and have not looked back. I first loaded up my Star Trek movie collection as a test…

SUCCESS! I able to load my all my movies to a device with an easy to use interface.

Now the long process of getting my entire collection on my hard drive. When I copy a movie I use a program called ImgBrun to make a 1:1 copy. I didn’t want to spend the time transcoding the moves to save space, so the purchase of a 2TB hard drive was required.

When I copy over TV shows XBMC prefers each episode as separate files. At first I wasn’t sure on how to do this, but found a way. Using a program called DVD Shrink, I generate ISO files that contain the only one episode. Great and the process takes only 3 minutes an episode. Not too bad, but still a time commitment is required. History over…

Back to today. All of my movies (except blu-rays) are loaded, just working on the TV shows. I really enjoy the media center, sure it’s only full of stuff I own and doesn’t connect to Netflix or hulu, but I don’t care about that. Just want to see my whole collection in one place and easily watch something.

OH! one really cool feature of XBMC, they let you know what you’ve watched with check marks.

Nice.

Windows Live Writer Test

Making some changes around here.  I’m going to start using Windows Live Writer to make entries to the blog. The software looks good, but I guess we’ll see if this is better than using what Google provides.  

 

More updates to follow…

Pots holes on North Broadway

If you haven't noticed, there are a lot of pot holes on North Broadway right now. They mostly live between the exit six off ramp and Barker Ave. (Towards Downtown). These holes, creases, bottomless pot, or whatever you call them are very annoying. They make it difficult to drive straight in a lane, while keeping you car in working condition.

Sure New York is broke, but that's not my fault. I pay taxes and expect, at the least, important roads to be kept flat.

North Broadway isn't the only road with issues in White Plains. The Lake Street area after South Kensico Ave, towards Harrison, is a disaster.

Someone please fix the roads!!!

Map of area in question...

Security at it’s best.

While driving to my parking garage in White Plains, I noticed a new security camera was installed. I then looked at it again and saw that it was pointing to the new signed that was just installed. This is more good use of money I put in to the Hamilton-Main Parking Garage.

It was pretty funny; I guess it’s better than looking for baddies in the area.


Wow, the camera on my phone is awesome.







I was also able to snap a picture of the sign at night, I guess it is bright enought. Funny I got the same ad, just without the temperature shown.

Cleaned Street?

As if someone read my blog, a part of Lake Street was cleaned last night. It was a shocker to me this morning. I wonder what caused this to happen.

Knowing that no one is reading this, I determined the following:

On my way home yesterday, I noticed that several limbs were chopped off a tree. This caused an amount of debris on the ground. After the men finished their job I suppose they put in a request, or it was already planed, to have the street cleaned. Last night the cleaner came and cleaned part of Lake Street. I noticed it was cleaned from the NAPPA to the CITGO Station. Crazy.