"A Man's Got to Know His Limitations"

A little nugget of wisdom from that great philosopher, Harry Callahan. Does this mean that I'm about to pump 44 Magnum rounds into somebody!?! No, not really, although the heat and the politicians are getting pretty tiresome.

No, what I'm talking about is my "to do list" of propellerhead things that need to be done. Although, many things have been taken care of and others are "in process", there are some that there's been NO PROGRESS! Which is where Dirty Harry comes into play.

What it comes down to is that there is still some install things that need to be done with my A/V system. Specifically, the 3 rear-channel in-ceiling speakers that need to be go into the living room, plus the connection of the triple-gang jack panel behind the A/V cabinet. The reality is that I could probably do it, but it would take me a ridiculous amount of time by myself. On top of that, I'm not getting any younger and several of hours crawling around in the attic would do me no good. So, I've turned to my friend Pat who actually does this kind of thing professionally, meaning that he'd not only be much faster, but far less likely to make mistakes as well. So, I've arranged to make a manual labor exchange with him. If he'll come down one weekend this fall (after Oct.) and help with this install, I'll go to Lubbock at some point in the future to help him with his house. Yes, I know that it's still manual labor, but hey, its manual labor that I already know how to do!

On another front, the AVPC is finally in! It's up and running, connected to the network where the bulk of my photos and some music has been moved on to the server. That took quite some time in and of itself since I was moving a lot of data. There was all of our family pictures from the digital era beginning around 2002/3 and a growing cache of "lossless" music. I spent some time listening to it the other day and I must say that with a digital connection from the computer to the receiver pulling lossless file, it sounded very nice indeed. There is still lots of "setup" and tuning needs to be done. I'm committed to using XBMC as the "front-end" to access the files, but so far, I haven't been able to get it to see the server. I also need to set up the Hauppauge dual tuner to handle DVR work. It's all in there though and connected to everything that its supposed to. Oh yeah, we found a bonus yesterday when the wife and kids were going to Skype with sister and cousins in Germany. Yep, I set up the webcam on the AVPC and was able to Skype via the big TV in the living room. That's absolutely the way to go on this!

We're getting there, so at some point in the next few months, the A/V system will finally be "finished"!