thelennards.com

For once, it isn’t really my fault that the the updates to the blog have been slow in coming. My hosting company was bought out and moved all of our websites to new servers. During the interim, I avoided making any posts in order to keep the two sites synchronized. The move is complete now, so I’m finally getting a chance to post the updates.

One of the changes that came along with the move to the new server was a switch back to using Blogger as my hosting service. I’d been using GreyMatter for quite a while. With the move to the new server, we were having difficulty getting the settings just right again. Blogger has really updated the service since I last used it, so it was an easy decision to make the switch back. You’ll still find all of the olds posts if you get hungry for history. Just check the archives. Ed’s Note: The RSS feed is down temporarily. I’ll get that fixed soon.

We’ve been spending tons of time playing with our new holiday gifts. Becky wanted a new digital camera small enough to fit in her purse so she would have one at the ready all the time with Rachel. Santa was kind enough to bring her a Canon SD-450. Needless to say, I’ve fallen behind on posting pictures as well. She has been snapping away, so I have literally hundreds to post. I promise to work on getting them up over the next few evenings.

My Christmas present occupied much of the time when I wasn’t able to work on the site. I’m the proud new owner of a NetGear MP-101. We originally tried one of the Media Center Extender’s for my PC running XP Media Center, but I could new get it to perform consistently. After a couple of weeks struggle, I decided to downgrade to a unit that only streamed music. That was my primary desire anyway. I wanted the ability to rip my CD’s to hard disk and then stream them to my home stereo wirelessly.

Nerd Alert!The following paragraphs may bore some of you to death. Only those of like-minded geekdom will care or possibly enjoy it. Danny and I ran ethernet cable to the desk downstairs in the living room where my laptop sits. It is the computer with XP Media center installed. We did this because when I was attempting to install the Media Center Extender from Linksys it stated the unit would not support two wireless hops. One of the devices – either the PC or the Media Center Extender – had to been connected to the router via cable. In my case, the PC seemed the logical choice. Or at least it seemed at the time…

Suffice it to say running the cable unnecessarily turned into a multi-hour fiasco which could have been easily avoided. I could see my old man shaking his head as I made amateur mistake one after another. I’ll spare you the gory details. If you’d need a laugh at my expense, ask me about it some day.

Back to the matter at hand, streaming wireless music to my stereo receiver. Hooked into my router via Ethernet, I have a Linksys Network Storage Link connected to a USB 2.0 Maxtor 300 gig drive. It supplied plenty of space to record my entire CD selection to the drive in .WMA format at 192 kbps.

It took endless hours sitting at the computer and ripping discs, but I finally managed to get them all to drive. I also took the time to catalog them using Catraxxx. It allowed me to move the CD’s out of their jewel cases and into CD books. I placed the CD booklet and CD itself in the books. It allows me to get for CD and booklets per page. I was able to chunk the ugly CD racks, store the jewel cases in the attic, and consolidate my collection down to two books. I setup custom fields in Catraxxx that tell me exactly where any CD is – Book, Page, and Slot on that page.

Now that everything is in place, I can use the remote on for the MP-101 to pick any song in my collection by Album Title, Artist, Genre, or custom Playlist that I create. You can listen to your favorite albums, randomize from your entire collection, or listen to a single genre. The playlist support will be lots of phone when we have friends and family over, too.

It supports .M3U playlists, so I am able to create them out of Catraxxx. Since you can create any custom filter you need in Catraxxx, it allowed me to create several playlists in just a few minutes. I created several genre playlists to replace default genre that Windows Media Player pulled down while ripping the CD. 95% of the time, Media Player’s choice was far too broad. Catraxxx uses GraceNote which seems to be much better in its categorization. Still not perfect, but far better than Media Player!

Well, enough geek talk for one evening. After all, I’ve got hours and hours of music to enjoy! More to come for the visitors seeking the pictures soon.

As I mentioned in my previous entry, I took advantage of the Cricket outing to test out my new toy, the Sony Handycam. Just as you would expect from home movie footage, I managed to get some pretty interesting shots. Unfortunately, in contrast, the majority of the clips were erratic blurs trying to capture a moving ball or boring vignettes of the fielders waiting on the next volley to come their way.

Rather than subject everyone to that, I did my best to try and reduce it down to a reasonable length and include just the highlights. As soon I as I brought the camera home, I installed the Sony supplied software. It was immediately apparent that the software was not sufficient to meet my editing requirements. Knowing I wanted something with lots of capabilities, I thought about Adobe Premiere. But, I can’t afford to drop that kind of coin on editing software. I learned, however, Adobe Premiere Elements is now available. It was much more suitable to my needs — and more importantly price range.

Click here to view my first attempt at video editing – Cricket: The Movie. I apologize up front for the titles, I ran out of time and didn’t get to design anything that looked better. I’ll try to improve next time.

Editor’s Update: Just realized that I needed to add a couple of more notes about the movie. First, the movie is approximately 7 megabytes. If you don’t have a broadband connection (DSL, Cable, LAN) this will take a while to download. You probably want to wait until it is completely downloaded before you try to play it. Currently, the file is in .WMV format. Since this needed to be shared with my friends offshore, this was the most logical format. In the future, I’ll probably use MPeg format for most things. Finally, I need to give credit where credit is due. The rendition of Bryan Adams’ Summer of 69 is begin performed by Bowling for Soup. I’m hoping since I went to high school with these guys, they won’t sue me for using their song from one of my CD’s.