… is not to be found at Cox. My long awaited TiVo HD arrived last Friday and I quickly scheduled an appointment to have them come out to install the CableCARD necessary to get their encrypted HD channels. I was pleasantly surprised that they were extremely accommodating and friendly on the phone and they promised to send a technician out Saturday evening. Sure enough, the tech came out and installed the CableCARDs — two as they decided to give me two SingleStream cards instead of one MultiStream card… a bit odd but it seemed to work just fine.

My good fortune lasted until I tried to watch ESPNHD the next day. For some reason, only one of my tuners could capture HD video from the non-broadcast channels. Ah! The well-known issues of CableCARDs that I had hoped to avoid had decided to haunt me as well. I called Cox and they tried to diagnose over the phone, gave up, and promised to send another technician out Monday evening. I assumed he was coming out to “fix” the problem but I suppose I was a bit optimistic. The tech came out, confirmed I had a faulty CableCARD (um, yeah, I knew that — thanks!) and promised to send yes, another tech out to fix it. He couldn’t do anything because he didn’t have any CableCARDs.   Why a technician would schedule an appointment to come fix a CableCARD issue without a spare CableCARD is beyond me.

The tech promised another tech would come out from 7-9 Wednesday.  In addition, I got a call from Cox telling me they had to send a technician out for field line testing or some such, as mandated by the FCC.  Whatever.  That appointment was scheduled from 5-7 on Wednesday.  Needless to say, nothing happened until 8:50pm on Wednesday.  Finally, my technician arrived and I was relieved to know my CableCARD issue would soon be resolved.  However, it was not to be;  the tech that showed up was NOT the CableCARD tech, he was the field line test guy — running just a wee bit late.  At this point, I can honestly say I was not very surprised when the night passed without any CableCARD guy showing up.   

For what its worth, the phone service has been extremely helpful.  Once you get past the useless automated menus and speak to a representative, they’ve been pretty gracious and apologetic.  As nice as they have been, I simply wish I didn’t have to deal with them quite so often.  My fourth (and hopefully final) appointment is set for tomorrow.

I’m making even more progress on getting my media-related situation resolved.  I figure it’s been long enough for me to go without HD service so I finally ordered a TiVo HD.  The final selling point for me was the Netflix integration they added in — supposedly the nicest integration yet on a device.  Every device and software package out there seems to be adding Netflix integration at this point — TiVo, XBox 360, Roku, Boxee, PlayOn. Most important to me is Boxee though they haven’t quite figured it out on the AppleTV yet.  Oh well, the hacked AppleTV+Boxee is doing a great job as my movie and TV show watching media extender.  A new HDTV, an HD TiVo, AppleTV, and even a 360 when the others are insufficient.  It’s been a good few months for my media collection!

Thanksgiving has come and gone and my least favorite holiday is now behind me.  It’s not that I dislike Thanksgiving — I’m just not a big traditional meal kind of guy so a holiday devoted to just that isn’t really my thing.  A few days off work, on the hand — That is something I can get behind.  Regardless, on my new rotating holiday schedule (thank you Married Life!), this year was Turkey Day down in Richmond.  True to my family, it was a loud and boisterous affair with people coming and going and upwards of 25 some people tucked away in every nook of my grandmother’s house.  In a rather bizarre turn of event, I somehow ended up spending a good portion of the day watching Dallas with a bunch of Cowboys groupies…  Ack!  Ah well, I’m more of a college fan anyway.

Speaking of college football, due to the crazy parity (and mediocrity) of the ACC conference this season, VT is somehow going to the ACC Championship game this Saturday.  They will match up against BC - Sound familiar?  That’s right — all of the twists and turns, the unexpected upsets, the week-by-week changes in division leaders… at the end of the season, the exact same teams from last season are playing for the ACC conference championship.  Surprise!

Now that the college football season is winding down, I finally got a new TV for my basement.  My too generous mom dragged me out to Circuit City on Black Friday and coerced me into picking out a new TV for my downstairs “man cave.”  After moving into the townhouse a bit over a year ago, I had given up my nice HDTV for the living room upstairs and had made do with a 19″ monitor down in my basement that was also hooked up to one of my computers. No more — I’m back to the sweet goodness of a big HDTV.

There was a catch, of course.  My car, which is ideally sized for me, is not quite as ideally sized for an HDTV.  I had a few different options for transferring the TV back to my townhouse but in the end, I settled on my mom’s minivan.

My mom will tell all who listen that the minivan she has, a Mazda MPV, is the only minivan that drives like a car.  She may be right but whichever car it is that it drives similarly to… well, it is definitely not a Toyota Celica.  While it’s a very nice vehicle in it’s own right, I just can’t get past the notion that I’m driving around in a minivan.  On the other hand, my mom can’t stand driving around “an inch from the ground” in my car either so I guess it’s good that we’re supposed to be swapping back next weekend.  I’m just glad I hadn’t chosen to borrow my uncles truck.

I’ve finally started to make progress on building a media center along the lines of what I want. My ideal solution always revolved around a media center that could handle Live TV and DVR duties as well as play music and video from a variety of sources on my home network but I finally decided to take a first step and ignore the Live TV/DVR aspect for now. I do have a TiVo after all. Plus, the solution I found can be updated later on when I do take that next step.

Apple released the AppleTV awhile back and while the interface and ease of use make it a great little device, the limited scope of functions that Apple provides greatly hampers its usefulness. It essentially has to sync to an iTunes library for video and music while integration with online video is essentially limited to just YouTube. Boring… especially for $200-$300. However, one interesting observation was the ease with which the AppleTV could be hacked and modified.

In the meantime, XMBC came along and decided to shift their development from the (original) XBox only to a general solution that can run on any platform including Linux and OS X. That instantly converted them from pointless to intriguing and I’ve been following them as they’ve developed the software. I also started watching for updates to Boxee, a platform built on top of XBMC specifically for OS X. There is also a working MythTV “front-end” solution for down the road when I start incorporating LiveTV & DVR functionality into the mix.

Recently a convergence occurred that sparked my first real step to getting the media center I want. XMBC and Boxee were ported to run on a hacked AppleTV (it runs OSX after all) and someone created an all-in one AppleTV hack + XBMC/Boxee installer. After some research, I took the plunge and picked up an AppleTV shortly before I left for Vegas last week. A couple of incompatible USB thumbdrives later and I had a hacked AppleTV ready to go.

After messing with it for a couple of days, the hacked AppleTV has lived up to its billing. Despite it’s alpha status, Boxee has really impressed. All of my media sources are brought in over the network and it uses IMDB to generate a pretty slick presentation of my video collection. I can still stream via iTunes as it doesn’t replace the AppleTV interface, just adds on to it. I can now pull media from any number of sources around the internet, not just YouTube. I also tried out PlayOn to stream my Netflix queue to my AppleTV over UPnP with some promising success. Forthcoming Hulu integration in XBMC and working Netflix and I’ll be set!

Christina and I are back to work today after our Vegas trip. Jason & Adrianne joined us in Vegas for the last 2 days and we mostly wandered the strip, stopping for drinks and the occasional craps session. Jason was a big proponent of playing craps while we were out there and it worked out pretty well for us. Christina was “rolling bullets” and we walked away a solid winner — enough to cover the poker tournament buy-in from the first day out.

You would have no idea the economy was in the dumps by the amount of construction out in Vegas. CityCenter, in particular, was ridiculous. The Venetian is still my favorite casino — I’m sure the excellent poker room there has nothing to do with it. They expanded the Venetian to add the Palazzo and the Wynn had added the Encore since I had visited last. I guess there are always people willing to go out and gamble though I don’t know how people can afford to stay at some of these casinos.

The last time Christina and I were in Vegas, we did a television screening where we rated tv shows using a little dial. You don’t know what show(s) you’re going to see until you’re in there but we ended up watching clips from 3 primetime comedy shows. The only one I remember was “How I Met Your Mother” with Doogie Howser but overall, it was actually kind of fun and interesting. Anyway, as we walked through MGM on Saturday, we talked it up a bit and so the 5 of us decided to do it again. As luck would have it, we ended up screening “Wellington” — some reality show Animal Planet is developing. I thought for sure it was another reality show MTV was creating and was a bit stunned that Animal Planet was the channel behind it. Imagine The Hills or Laguna Beach merged with horse shows… if you can imagine such an abomination. I dialed up “0″ from the get-go and rode it until the very end of the 40 minutes of my life that I will never get back.

Our overnight flight back was fairly uneventful and we got in about 5am on Sunday morning. After a nap, the rest of the day was spent doing yard work and watching football. Early to bed last night and now I’m back to the daily grind.

Thanks to Hurricane Hanna, my trip to North Carolina fell through and I missed hanging out with all of my friends down in RTP to celebrate Chris’s birthday.  Oh well, my two moms were quite relieved I stayed home, especially after hearing of all the cars that apparently were hydroplaning into walls around DC.

Overall, it turned out to be pretty good weekend though.  Saturday was a rainy, lazy day that I filled with football, Mount & Blade, and movies.  Christina and I watched Breakfast at Tiffany’s, which I’d never seen, and actually thought it was pretty decent.  Not a bad movie to watch with a girl.

Sunday was an absolutely beautiful day.  Christina and I first went for a walk around Burke Lake.  We didn’t actually make it all of the way around the lake due to Christina’s adventurous nature leading us down many washed out paths.  We weren’t through with washed out lakes however as we later went on a dinner picnic with Katie out at Royal Lake (see pictures above).  Finally, the three of us watched the most ridiculous gameshow I’ve seen yet: Hole in the Wall.  Yet another crazy Japanese gameshow.

Update: Make that Royal Lake, not Front Royal — whoops!

Not to take anything away from Phelps, NBC-appointed hero of the Olympics, and as impressive as his 8 gold medals were, the most amazing athletic performance I’ve seen so far was Usain Bolt in the 100m dash.  In a race that last less than 10 seconds, he was so confident of a victory after only 6 seconds that he raised his arms up in victory.  His victory appeared so effortless that you have to wonder how fast he could have completed the his still-world-record-setting race.  But in a year where Phelps is the poster child, Bolt will be forgotten by tomorrow.  Until, perhaps, four years from now in the London games.

Last night, Christina and I had dinner with another couple, Andrew and Jen.  Andrew is best friends with Christina’s brother and is about to be deployed.  They had their wedding the weekend before ours and so it was, yes, yet another anniversary dinner!  It was great to see them though and I wish Andrew all the best when he goes overseas.

I already mentioned that I can’t believe two nations could fight a modern conflict using the incredibly powerful weapons in use today.  Just as amazing, and probably stupid, are the journalists who cover these conflicts.  They sit in the middle of a war zone and assume their journalist credentials will protect them from bullets and bombs.  While we are given an unprecedented view of battles on TV that is disturbingly captivating, I simply can’t imagine what makes these journalists go through what they do.

A few people came to town this weekend and on Saturday, I joined them at my friend Murf’s house for drinking and tv.  I caught a portion of Flight of the Conchords (whom I still can’t figure out) but then we watched the Redskins/Bills preseason game.  While VT is the recipient of most of my fanboy-ism, the Redskins have always been “my” team in the pros.  Always happy to see them come away with a win, even in a meaningless, money-grabbing preseason game.

The main event of the evening, as it were, was the UFC pay-per-view event that night in Minnesota.  I’d never seen UFC (and honestly, never really interested either) but having Paige spend a good hour teaching me the ins and outs of the sport along with all of the storylines for each of the contestants gave me much more appreciation for what we were watching.  I don’t know if I’ll make it a habit of watching but it was a good time.  I also feel pretty confident that there are very few other sports where “never bet against a guy sponsored by the Condom Depot” is solid advice.

Last night, we had a group over and (belatedly) watched the Survivor finale. It was overall quite a good season. I thought both Amber Amanda and Parvati played a pretty solid game and you could argue either way who should have won but I personally think Parvati was a smarter competitor than Amber Amanda and am glad she won. Amber Amanda always tries to portray herself as the victim which gets really old and I have to think that’s what cost her the votes.  The only disappointments in the show were the cheesy, drama that played out between Amanda and Ozzy (”I think I love you” … “You took away 14 days I could have spent with Amanda” — lost some respect for Ozzy there) and the bizarre questioning Natalie directed at Parvati.  Way to bring trashiness to one of the few reality shows that didn’t have any, Natalie.

I had a surprise waiting for me as Gamefly had shipped me Boomblox. It just came out and is almost certain to be overlooked by most gamers. That would be a shame as it’s a great little game. It’s hard to explain though I like the description I read somewhere: “throw stuff at blocks”. Other than maybe Wii Sports, it probably takes advantage of the unique nature of the Wii better than anything else out there. As a side note, WiiWare was also released. WiiWare is Nintendo’s downloadable game service for new and independent games. I’m looking forward to checking that out (particularly Lost Winds and Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: My Life as a King) but I’m not sure if I can get to them before Europe. Between BoomBlox, WiiWare, Mario Kart, and GTA IV (which I’ve yet to play), is this the best time for gaming ever?

Update: Make that Amanda, not Amber.