Okay, just one more bit of Christmas stuff to share with you guys.
This is a short little video I made of our dog Chloe and all her goofy antics on Christmas morning. Most notably, that she saw our daughter get a stocking, remembered that she had her own stocking, found her stocking hanging up, and proceeded to beg until we gave her what Santa brought for her.
She is so smart... and such a stickler for tradition.
Here's a special holiday treat. It's a Christmas tune I recorded back in '97 (I think) when I used to noodle around with keyboards and musical equipment. My musical project (not really a band per se) was called Cygnus and focused on electronic music, usually with some kind of space or sci-fi vibe.
I'm not going to win a Grammy for this, but I think it came out pretty cool, and made a nice little Christmas day blog post.
It was taken from a casette tape, so the sound quality isn't the greatest at times, but it's all I've got. I'm not even sure I could recreate it if I tried. I think I've forgotten how to hook up all that stuff, much less operate it and play chords and notes and things.
(This is also my first YouTube video. Woo hoo!)
Hope you guys all had a wonderful holiday.
MERRY CHRISTMAS!
It's been over a year since I built my man cave , and I've been getting anxious to put the finishing touches on it. After a year and a half of weekends spent cutting, drilling and nailing, I felt like I'd dropped the ball on the 5 yard line.
You see, the home theater is the centerpiece of any self respecting man cave, but cashflow issues meant that I had to settle for a dinky 27" flatscreen and an old Sony surround sound system... and it was a little underwhelming to say the least.
Now, at long last, I've picked that ball back up again... and here's the result:
My home theater is now fully realized, thanks in part to my 2009 income tax refund that I am taking an advance on (courtesy of my savings account).
Here's a little run down on what I used, why I used it, and some of the details that guys who build stuff might dig.
COMPONENTS:
I got the projector, ceiling mount and screen from Projector People.com. They were very helpful, shipped fast and the prices were all rock bottom.
The Sanyo projector has vivid color, excellent contrast and the versatile lens shift feature allowed me to mount it nearly flush with the drop ceiling, and choosing 720p instead of 1080p cut the cost in half!
My initial design for the space called for a 92" screen, but when I was placing the order I decided on 100" just because I liked the sound of it. "One hundred inch screen"... see, it has a nice ring to it don't you think? I chose a fixed frame design from Elite Screens called EZ Frame. It was very easy to assemble and looks like it cost three times what I paid for it. Some people suggested just projecting onto the wall, but a real screen is a big part of what makes it feel like a theater in my opinion.
I knew sound would play a crucial role in bringing home that movie theater experience, and the Yamaha RX-V465 does the job admirably. It features a host of excellent sound and video processing features and was the least expensive reciever I could find that featured both HDMI througput and automatic speaker calibration.
The Bose Acoustimass 10 speaker system is the real star of the show here. I went with a refurbished "factory-renewed" model and saved $100, but you'd never know it. The bass is incredibly low and the mids and highs are all very crisp and clear, and Bose's direct/reflectiing speaker technology combined with my reciever's speaker calibration system have virtually eliminated any sweet spot in my room. You can experience an excellent and well balanced surround effect from just about anywhere in the seating area.
The Dell PC providing all the content is an old Inspiron mini desktop that I'm running the Windows Vista Media Center app on. It plays DVDs, records TV, plays our MP3 collection, displays family photos and I can even use it to surf the web. In fact, I watched an episode of South Park the other day from the Comedy Central website on my 100" screen. How cool is that?
WIRING:
The left wall of my theater is built under a large steel beam that runs the length of the house. This posed an issue for wiring the left rear surround speaker.
After flirting with drilling up through the beam I took the easy way out and ran ½" PVC pipe all the way down the wall, around the corner, and up over the ceiling of the end wall.
As I connected each section of pipe I threaded some speaker wire through it so I could use that to pull the new wire back through when the time came. That sounds good in principle, but when your pipe has 4 90˚turns and two joints in it there's a good chance you could get hung up somewhere and that's exactly what happened. Imagine my frustration at the end of putting this all together when the new wire came loose from the pull wire HALFWAY THROUGH THE DAMNED PIPE! Now what do I do!? Cut open the wall? Run the cable along the ceiling? Uuuugh!
I was pulling my hair out / contemplating hiring an electrician when I came across this brilliant idea on the web: tie a cottonball to a piece of string and suck it through the conduit with a Shop-Vac. Worked like a charm!
So now that I had the speaker wires run I had to actually mount the speakers to the wall... The Bose speaker brackets are really nice, but they would have set me back another $150, so I decided to go the DIY route. I got a local glass shop to cut me 4½" squares and I Guerilla glued them to some 3½" steel brackets from the hardware shop. Add a little black spraypaint to dress them up and viola!
That saved me about $120, and they actually allow the speakers to sit closer to the wall for a sleeker profile.
THE RESULT:
Last weekend my daughter, her friend and I watched Depeche Mode's "Devotional" concert film with the surround sound cranked WAY up. The bass was shaking the room and when I turned it off my ears were ringing like I'd been to a real concert! The girls absolutely LOVED it!
MISSION ACCOMPLISHED.
Next up? Some decent seating! The $100 futons from WalMart are not the most comfortable thing to sit on and they are too low to the ground for my older family members to get in and out of. Hmm... I'm out of cash at the moment though, so I guess I'll set the ball down here on the 1 yard line for now.
Oh well, that's life.
I got an e-mail offer from Dell today that I just could not pass up. Check out my new system:
Dell Inspiron 546 minitower
AMD Athlon II Triple Core 425 (2.7GHz, 1.5MB)
6GB DDR2 SDRAM at 800MHz
ATI Radeon HD3200
750GB Serial ATA
19 in 1 Media Reader
Window 7 Ultimate 64 BitDell ST2410 Full HD Widescreen Monitor
Dell AY410 2.1 Speaker System
Dell V305 Printer / Scanner
Microsoft Wireless Desktop 3000 keyboard & mouse set
$140 off the system + free shipping, 50% off the monitor, 50% off the printer, 40% off the speakers. Like I said, it was a pretty good deal.
I have been using the same PC since... gee, 2002 I think, so I'm really looking forward to this long overdue upgrade. I know this isn't cutting edge, but it's a big step up from the old P4.
So last night at 1:30AM my neighbor was sitting in her car (in her driveway, not her two car garage) with the stereo up so loud it probably woke up our whole street. I stomped over and knocked on the tinted window, and after about 45 seconds she rolled it down and I yelled at her. She apologized, saying "this da only place I got to kick it"...
Hasn't she ever heard of headphones? Or perhaps there's something more than music involved in "kicking it" that she didn't want her three kids (that she also woke up) to see?
I didn't smell any booze or pot, but she was definitely under the influence of something. She even apologized if she was "talkin funny" as I walked away. Do I have a damned crackhead living next door?!
About ten minutes later two sheriff's cars pulled up and after about ten minutes it looked like they loaded her in the back of one and took her away. She must be on probation for something else and they saw she was intoxicated. I'm sure she'll blame me for that... great.
This used to be a nice, quiet suburban neighborhood, but now I'm wishing I'd built out in the country somewhere instead. And it's only one or two families that ruin it, the rest are all fine folk. Sad to let the bad apples win, but that's the way things work I guess.
Anybody want to buy a ten year old three bedroom ranch with a cool basement game room, home theater and a free outdoor rap concert every Friday night?
The sun is shining, I don't have to go to work, I scored almost two million on my Sorcerer pinball machine, and it's the ninth anniversary of this lovely creature promising to stick by me for better or for worse.
Like I said, it's a good day.
Well... here I am stuck working nights and weekends while one of my employees takes some time off to be with his wife and new baby. At least I have a pretty nice office to sit in for hours and hours. Figured I'd take a picture while I had it all cleaned up and spiffy looking.
Man I'm bored to death... can you tell?
My bloggin' buddy(?) Cbullit from Soylent Green sent me this, and according to the meme I have to forward it to ten other bloggers and then share "10 Honest Things" about myself.
Hmm...
Figuring out who to send it to might actually be harder than thinking up some dirt to dish on myself. I don't have a very big blogroll, some there have already been tagged, and some of them don't really delve into the personal, their blogs are 100% politics and vitriol (talking to YOU Hank).
How about I do eight and we just call it fair?
Okay, now on to my 10 honest things:
And there you have it. Now, let's check out those other blogs and see what they have to share...
My wife throws a big (9 girls this year!) mystery party / sleepover for my daughter's girlfriends every summer and yesterday was it. They had a great time solving the "Mystery Of The Missing Archaeologist" seeking all the props and clues my wife planted all over the house and yard.
After the mystery was solved they gave my game room quite a workout. Who knew twelve year old girls were so into pinball and foosball?
I think it'll be a few days before I can bring myself to call it a "Man Cave" again... Sheesh!
As soon as they've all gone home I'm going to lock myself in my office / subterranean lair and take a long nap.
My old PC had been running kind of slow, and my OneCare antivirus subscription had expired, and I still had $50 of birthday cash left, so I popped overto Best Buy and picked up their Norton Antivirus / Norton Utilities combo pack. Norton's always had a pretty good reputation as far as virus and malware protection, but what really caught my attention was the utilities suite.
The Norton registry cleaner removed a ton of errors, and their registry defragmenter tool cut the physical size of my registry file down by a whopping 25%. And that savings is just a few weeks after I'd run Microsoft's free Windows registry defrag tool!
The Norton disk cleaner and defragger work just as you'd expect, and the manage startup option allows you to manage what applications run at startup, and prioritizes them so your PC boots faster.
The most impressive feature, in my opinion,is the one that let's you manage the Windows Services that are running on your system. Let's say you are editing a movie and you need all the CPU horsepower you can get. The manage services tool allows you to temporarily shut down all the non-essential Windows services like Tablet PC input, Certificate Management, NetLogon, Themes, SmartCard, Telephony, Cryptographic Services and all the other junk you never need. Speed really picks up nicely when you run this, and when you're done with your work you can turn it all back on with one click.
If you need some antivirus and/or PC tuneup software I'd recommend you check this one out.
Today is my birthday. I think I'm officially middle aged now. 40 is middle aged right, and 50 is over the hill? Maybe I've got them reversed. Anyways I'm not a young sprite anymore. Even my chest hair is going gray.
I had a nice evening Sunday. Mom stopped over and had dinner with me and the girls. We had some wonderful lebanese food from a place around the corner. How lucky is my Mom to get HER favorite food, gyros, on MY birthday? I should have made her eat some Mexican instead, but I guess I'm getting mellow in my old age...
Got a few phone calls. Got some funny cards. Some of the cards contained moolah, so I went on Ebay tonight and bought 15 or 20 of the older Forgotten Realms paperbacks that were still missing from my collection. Thanks y'all! I've almost got the whole collection complete now.
My mother also gave me this fabulous gift:
It's an autographed copy of the Depeche Mode's "Violator" album cover!!! Wow! I was blown away. That's going to look frickin' awesome hanging up in the man cave!
To cap the evening off, my thirteen year old daughter joined me in the home theater to watch Depeche Mode's concert video "Devotional" with the surround sound cranked way up. It was almost like being right in the audience. It is incredibly cool that my kid enjoys my favorite band and we can share that kind of stuff together.
Anyways, forty's not so bad I guess. I mean, there IS only one alternative to getting older right?
Sunshine, smiles, my baby girl, and my wife the total hottie.
When I die this is what I'll be remembering.
Since today is Father's Day I'm posting one of my favorite pictures of my daughter and I. This is from '97, when she was two years old, having lot's of fun getting spun around in circles at the park.
Good times.
I took this photo of a butterfly in the field next to my grandfather's house in Tennessee.
It came out pretty nice I think.
Every once in awhile you have one of those funny moments in real life that seem to be right out of an old sitcom or episode of I Love Lucy.
This evening my lovely wife decided to make tacos for dinner and try out that recipe that I found on the web last week for Don Pablo's salsa (the BEST salsa IMHO). She'd just finished mincing the jalapenos and reached to pull the taco shells out of the oven. The cookie sheet was hot of course, so she says "ow ow ow" then proceeds to stick her burned finger in her mouth, whereupon the jalapeno juice on her finger makes it's presence known and she goes "OW OW OH CRAP OW" running for the sink.
All the while I'm sitting at the penninsula just laughing my ass off.
Good stuff.
P.S. Not sure if my wife skimped on the ingredients out of fear of it being "too spicy" (for her it means actually HAS flavor), or if the recipe is close, but no cigar. Next time I'll make it myself and use more jalapeno, onions and cilantro.
My favorite band is Depeche Mode, and during their heyday they released an album called "Music For The Masses". The cover art, designed by Martyn Atkins, featured orange loudspeakers broadcasting the band's music from various locales:
The art for the accompanying singles "Strangelove" and "Never Let Me Down Again" also featured the speakers, but with the catalog numbers (BONG13 and BONG14) stenciled along the rim of the speaker:
I'm not really sure what the BONG thing means, some inside joke I'm sure, but they've been using it on all their singles since the very beginning. These iconic loudspeakers were also present in all the music videos for this album and hanging from atop the stage during the tour that summer.
Fast forward twenty years and now I'm a grown man converting my basement into a man cave and looking for some decorations to put in my game room.
Hey! Wouldn't it be cool to have one of those BONG PA speakers hanging up in here?
My uncle Jimbo just happens to be a fantastic artist, so once he agreed to help me I knew it was a done deal.
MAKING THE BONG:
First I found an old horn style loudpseaker on Ebay. It was a little dinged up, but that only made it look more authentic, like it had been on tour with the band or something.
At Jimbo's direction I sanded it smooth and primed it, then we spray-painted it orange. Jimbo's mad art skillz allowed him to created a stencil template in CorelDraw that was perfectly adjusted for the curvature of the horn.
Jimbo removed the stencil and touched up the lettering, then we applied a coat of satin clearcoat for protection.
Once the BONG was finished I designed a bracket to hang it in the corner up near the ceiling, and had a local hitch shop fabricate it for me. I mounted the bracket into the masonry with lag bolts, attached the speaker and viola, instant Depeche Mode shrine!
It's one of the coolest things I own. Thanks Jimbo!
The speaker is still functional and one of these days I'm going to rig up some sound effect or music clip to play from that thing when I press a little hidden button. Perhaps an air raid siren at high volume? A short clip from the BONG 13 single "Strangelove"? Maybe a really obscene fart sound? The possibilities are endless...
My dad, my grandpa and me on top of Black Mountain, just outside of Crossville Tennesee.
Pretty cool setting for a nice family photo.
So yesterday was my wife's birthday and she got the Wii Fit fitness game for Nintendo Wii. So I decide to give it whirl, just to see what it's about. After completing the "body test" Wii Fit tells me I am apparently too fat to live. I'm so large I need to call the fire department to come cut me out of my house since I can't fit through normal human-sized doorways. I'm so heavy I need to rent a U-Haul just to get around town. I'm so huge it's almost off the chart, literally. According to the Wii Fit character I have a 70" wasitline.
Now, I know I'm chubby. I could lose about 20-30 pounds for sure, but obese? Come on Nintendo. I think you left this game on the Japanese setting. Not all people are built to be little munchkins like you guys.
My wife seems to like it though, which is what counts. It was her birthday present, not mine. Don't expect to see me back on that thing anytime soon though. My pride just won't allow it.
While I'm on the subject, here is a picture of my wife's Wii Fit yoga trainer. I think her name is
Here's my daughter as we head into the "It's Tough To Be A Bug!" 3D movie inside the Tree Of Life at Disney's Animal Kingdom.
The funny 3D glasses combined with the "What?" look on her face is priceless to me.
I post photos of hot babes on the site every now and then, but I can't let Valentine's Day pass without posting my favorite babe of all time.
Pictured here is my wife on our wedding day. She's the love of my life and I never tire of her smile, her laughter or her companionship... or her good looks I suppose.
I'm a very lucky man.
This is one of those magic moments when everything comes together; good light, nice setting, and the personality of your subject coming through.
This is still one of my favorite photographs of my daughter ever. She's a cutie pie.
This is the first and last time my daughter ever let me take her sledding. I guess I should have started on a smaller hill...
I took this photo of my daughter at a birthday party a few years ago.
I love the squinty smile and how the bubbles caught the light.
I've always enjoyed photography, and I've managed to get some pretty good shots over the years, so I think I'll start posting them every now and then here on the blog. Just for the heck of it.
We'll begin with one of my favorites:
This was taken during the 2004 Presidential election when President Bush visited our area. The young girl was sitting on her father's shoulders trying to get a view of the President. I think it perfectly captures the excitement of an event like this, and the fact that President Bush is still in the picture but out of focus gives it a little artistic flair.
One more photo of the President looking right at me after the jump.
These are our two Welsh Pembroke Corgis, Seamus and Chloe. Chloe (darker face) is the high energy dog who always wants to play fetch... and I do mean always. Seamus is the mellow teddy bear who just wants to roll over and get his belly rubbed.
Dogs fill up all the empty space in daily life with love and laughs. These two especially.
My home was built in 2000 and had a large unfinished basement with decent ceiling height. In late 2007, after years of putting it off, my wife and I finally decided to turn it into finished living space. We did most of the work ourselves with the assistance of my father-in-law Bob and his huge colection of power tools.
Now, after a year and a half of weekends and evenings, it's about 90% finished. The bathroom is incomplete and there's much more decorating to be done, but it's close enough to be enjoyed and finally looks good enough for me to share some pics with my blog buddies, so here goes.
THE GAME ROOM - This is the main room you enter when coming down the steps. There's a foosball table, an arcade game, some pinball machines, a slot machine, a dartboard and a variety of fun and funky decorations.
We chose a commercial grade vinyl plank for the floor. It's very rustic looking, durable and waterproof. Together with the greenish color on the walls it gives the room a cozy Irish pub vibe that my wife really likes.
THE PINBALL COLLECTION - From left to right we have Black Hole, Haunted House, Sorcerer and Dungeons & Dragons.
THE ARCADE GAME - This is my MAME cabinet custom built for me by Dream Authentics. It's a full size arcade machine packed with over 70,000 roms (games). Yes, that's right 70,000! I have nearly every arcade game, every Nintendo game, every Super Nintendo game, every Nintendo 64 game, every Gamecube game, every Sega Genesis game, every Atari game etc. etc.
Never in my life will I play them all, but if you were over and remembered one from the old days we'd be able to play it within minutes. That's all kinds of awesome when you're having a party. My favorites right now are Joust, Gyruss, Tempest, and Galaga.
DEPECHE MODE "SHRINE" - I'm a huge Depeche Mode fan, so I decided to display some of my memorabilia and favorite albums in this 5'x5' corner spot. My uncle Jimbo even helped me replicate the BONG 13 loudspeaker from the band's Strangelove record cover. Thanks again Jimbo!
POSTERS, POSTERS, POSTERS - It's a cheap way to add some life to the room and show off some things that I enjoy. From a Dragon's Lair video game poster autographed by Don Bluth, to Led Zeppelin's iconic Stairway To Heaven door poster from the 70's, to Frank Sinatra and Ronald Reagan, I cover a lot of ground (and walls) with posters.
THE THEATER - The theater is set up and pre-wired for a 92" projection screen and wall mounted Bose surround sound speaker system, BUT... I ran out of cash. So for now we're making due with a little 27" flatscreen and an old Sony speaker set up I had laying around. The TV and DVD's are run from a Dell Media Center PC, which also makes this an excellent spot to enjoy my MP3 collection.
Movie posters adorn the walls and cover several decades and genres. We selected: The Matrix, Titanic, The Hitchiker's Guide To The Galaxy, The Godfather, Pirates Of The Carribean, Star Wars, Tombstone, The Lord Of The Rings, Ferris Buehler's Day Off and Herbie Fully Loaded. FYI: I found that Movie Posters USA had reasonable prices, great selection, and remarkable after sale service. I can't recommend them enough.
We used futons because they were inexpensive (out of cash), and also because they are versatile. You can make two rows of seating, or fold down the first row and make a huge chaise, or fold down both rows and make a huge bed for my daughter's sleepovers. It works out great for us.
The back of the room is dominated by a custom built media shelf to hold our CD and DVD collection along with various books, LP's and boardgames.
UPDATE: The theater is now complete! CLICK HERE for details.
THE OFFICE - My office subterranean lair features a nice desk setup, a Dell PC running Windows Vista, a bookshelf for my Dungeons & Dragons collection, a futon sleeper sofa, and my musical equipment.
We really enjoy the new basement! Everytime my daughter has a new friend over you can hear them freak out when they get to the bottom of the steps, and when she had a sleepover last fall, I overheard her friends telling one another that it was the best sleepover they'd ever been to.
That was a big part of the reason for doing this, so our daughter has a safe place to hang out with her friends as she enters her teen years. MISSION ACCOMPLISHED. (-:
I'll change out these pictures and/or add more to this post as things progress towards perfection.
UPDATE: Here's a picture I found of me and Bob amidst the forest of lumber we'd built.
Since the world's richest man, Warren Buffet is in the news of late, I figure I've got a good excuse to post this picture of he and I in Dallas from a few years ago.
Warren is so friendly and down to earth you would never believe he was anything more than somebody's loveable old Grandpa. Of course he's a loveable grandpa worth over $62,000,000,000.00...
P.S. Warren is a big Obama supporter, so maybe Barack can draft him to work on some big issue like fixing Social Security? If Warren gets frustated enough by Congress's dithering maybe he'll just write a check and be done with it.
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