Today I leave for parts of the country unknown (to me at least), I am headed to Washington DC. This swamp is home to our congress, president and many other crazy agencies that I’m sure are watching me type this blog post. We plan on checking out all the cool monuments that our tax dollars have purchased and maybe hassle our representative about some governmental issue that currently escapes me. In any case, I’m sure Jen and I will have a good time discovering the city and how to get around using their subway system. The one crown jewel for me on this trip I am looking forward to is the Smithsonian, it should be quite the experience at least that is what I am hoping for. The weather looks like it will be okay, we will have a few rainy days but there looks to be plenty of inside activities to do once we get there. We are technically staying across the river in Arlington, VA so we will get to commute in everyday as well. Here is wishing that all our luggage makes it and our flights are not delayed. Good Day.
Blog
Hacked Xboxs Galore
A half day for the Easter holiday left me with some spare time. With that I planned to help my friend rebuild his PC back to a functional state by reloading his OS. During this process, and playing some Resident Evil 5 we decided to me up with my girlfriend and a few other of my friends and eat at Cheddars. This is were it got weird. In talks over dinner, we realized that all the media machine issues could be solved by hacking a simple Xbox to XBMC using softmod.
After dinner we found the Xbox in a closet box and search frantically for a power cable, but there was none to be had, however after further investigation we noticed that a Playstation Power Cable was very close and after a few adjustments with a knife we were in business. We rushed to my house to gather the controller, memory card, and game needed to preform the hack and raced back over with an additional Xbox I had for another experiment. It was a hackfest 2 Xboxs were converted into lean mean media playing machines. This inspired our friend rebuilding the PC and decided to purchase one on Craigslist yesterday, which we promptly hacked over burgers and wine. So my total comes to 4 Xboxes loaded with XBMC. I will soon do a write up of a quick process to get it done.
The only limitation we have discovered is with MKVs and high bitrate video files, it seems to lag out. But honestly, it is a 733mhz PIII with an good video card, so the limitations of very manageable. Especially now that you can enjoy all that media that you have spend hours downloading on your large TV in the living room and control it all with the DVD remote that the Xbox has, and you give new life to a game console that would have just collected dust otherwise. ~waynezim
Good Saturday
I’m happy the weekend is here, this weekend in specific we are taking care of my parents dog Boomer. He already has had quite the weekend staying the weekend at my house rather than theirs. We also took him to University Park in College Station. He ran around and explored some and then played with the other dogs that showed up while we were there. He was very tried at the end of that. Jen and I came back and grabbed some lunch (Boston’s in Aggieland is half priced pizza, we saved 16.50 on 2 mediums) and watched part of the Nascar Nationwide Texas Race that my parents are attending. Unfortunately, we don’t have cable here at the house, and it wasn’t available on ESPN 360 like last year, so I don’t’ get to finish it.
Work this week went quite well. Made some real progress towards finish the EMS eCAD Web Interface. I hope it turns out as well as I ambition. We will go another few days on double labels as we found a few more on Friday. Crystal Reports has become my friend here in the last week as I created a few reports in it and have found that it is very friendly for database exploration. Anyways, Have a Good Weekend and Enjoy Chilifest.
~waynezim
Open For Business
Okay so it’s not really open for business exactly, however the server and website is up. You have to give me credit that’s a start in the right direction. And yes I am very aware that half of the links at the top don’t work, and I am still using the default graphics, but fear not in time it will become much more personalized. This site has been a long time coming. I have made several other websites along the way but nothing truly to call my own. Though this blog I plan to share with you code that I develop mostly related to my job but can probably be applied to most network environments. I will also share my profile of projects that I am either working on or have finished though out my career. Lastly, my life of pictures, tweets and random blog entries about life. So please stick around and take it in I hope you find it useful and not too offensive.
~waynezim