so tomorrow night I will be flying out to Colorado to begin my 2008/2009 ski season. I am heading out there with Richard to meet up with our Buddy Dave who now lives out there full time. I can’t wait. I woke up this morning with a nice dusting of snow on the ground and all I could think about was getting back on the slopes.

Last year was pretty weak in terms of my skiing. I only got out 3 times and never went out west. Last year I bought a new snowmobile and that pretty much took up my entire life last winter. whenever it snowed I was chasing it down and putting on the miles. I bought the sled with 1900 miles on it, and I put over 1000 miles myself last winter. Looking forward to putting on another 1000 miles this winter season.

Since it is still early and we don’t have any accumulating snow, my focus today is skiing. I started to pack up my gear, charge my boot warmers, wore my boots around the house to get them broken in, and just getting ready to head out west to get some turns in. I could have started my ski season weeks ago when wild mountain was open but I knew I would be heading out west so I want to pick this year to say my first turns of the season was out west instead of the mid-west.

Hopefully the flight loads will hold up and Richard and I can fly out tomorrow night instead of Friday morning. Either way we’ll get out there, get our turns and and drink our selves silly talking about skiing, and enjoying the mountains.

until next time…

- Josh

So a friend of mine recently linked me to a video that was posted on the snowbird youtube channel and since then ALL I have been doing is watching these damn videos over and over and over again!!!! I just can’t stop!!!!!

This weekend Richard and I are planning on heading to Vail, CO to meet up with one of our buddies that moved out there over the summer. However after watching those damn addicting videos from youtube I kind of want to hit up Utah instead.

So what do to? Go to Colorado? have a free place to stay? Hang out with our buddy Dave? or hit up gods country and get in on some of that powder action in Utah? oh the choices…

So now that Comcast has implemented the 250gig a month limit I have been trying to come up with a solution to monitor my bandwidth usage and track it from month to month. Currently I am running a Buffalo WHR-HP-G54 router with third party firmware from DD-WRT.

Because I am running DD-WRT it now allows me to capture SNMP packets and use that to monitor my traffic. In the past I’ve used simple tools like SNMP Traffic Grapher (STG). I soon found out that STG wouldn’t cut it for what I needed and started looking around for something more robust and something that would save my data month to month.

I started looking around and found Cacti as well as MRTG, both were great options but a little hard to get up and running for a Windows Zealot like myself. After digging around some more I found a .exe self installer that someone put together on the Cacti forums and from there it was simple as double clicking, following a few instructions and I was up and running with Cacti on my WHS box.

Here is the Windows stand alone installer for Cacti: http://forums.cacti.net/about14946.html

The installer does everything you need to get it up and running, all you need to do, is download it, transfer it to your WHS box, then RDP into your WHS box and double click and install. The installer finds out that you already have IIS installed and up and running on your WHS box, so its a really easy, straight forward install.

Right now I have it installed, configured and pointed to my DD-WRT router with SNMP enabled, and monitoring my internet traffic that is going through my router, I now just wish I had a way to send me a notification if I were getting close to the 250gig a month cap. Like have it alert me via email if I were to get within 90% of the 250gig cap, but for now I have at least got it monitoring my traffic and logging it, which was half the battle.

- Josh

So my Buddy Ben Drawbaugh over at his site posted up a little topic about the state of the economy and housing market and mortgage deal and brought up some interesting points. You can read some of the comments I left and his responses makes for some good reading and good debate material.

Anyways some points I raised was that if the banks/mortgage brokers weren’t so eager to give out “risky” loans as Ben describes them we wouldn’t be in the situation we are now, and having to bail out the companies at fault. However Ben states that if people weren’t so eager to accept those loans we wouldn’t be here either, which is a valid argument as well. I think thought that a bank who is approving these loans should be more fiscally responsible and do further checks on who they are giving these loans out to.

I will be the first to say that I am a recipient of an 80/20 ARM mortgage, but for me it was the only way to stay under the payments that at the time, my wife and I could afford. We both were fresh out of college, just starting out our careers, and just getting our feet wet in our marriage as well. We did the 80/20 ARM to avoid paying PMI as we weren’t able to come up with a 20% down payment on our new home, and if we would have gone with a conventional 30 year fixed we would have had to pay nearly $400 more a month with the PMI and at that time it just wasn’t possible, it would have put us up in the uncomfortable zone where we didn’t want to be, hell that $400 could have been a car payment or two for us.

In the end though I still don’t think it is right for our government to bail out these companies for the mistakes they made, and yet you still see the CEO’s and other higher ups of these companies walking away from the ordeal like nothing was wrong, and they didn’t do anything wrong. I feel if they didn’t give out such risky loans, to risky people without doing anything more than an income verification check, meaning they should actually look into their monthly expenditures as well, than we wouldn’t be in this precarious situation we are in now.

- Josh

As many of you may or may not know is that I am a huge HTPC nerd. Ever since I got into home theater I’ve also been hugely engrossed in the HTPC community especially AVS Forums and their HTPC sub forums.

Recently this article posted over at Arstechnica was posted asking if the HTPC was dead, and this article over at geektonic was written to counter the arstechnica post.

After closely reading both posts, I’ve come to the conclusion of has the HTPC market even started yet? The way I look at it, is that it is still in pre-alpha stage, maybe even earlier. Look how long it took for the average house hold to get a tv, and then look how long it took for the average house hold to get a pc, now your asking the average house hold to connect said pc to their tv, and calling it a Home Theater PC.

To me the HTPC is still a niche market, where enthusiast, the brave, and the adventurous dare to be different and don’t conform to the norm. For me I got into HTPC’s because it at the time, was the cheapest way of upscaling DVD’s, post processing the dvd’s, and getting the best absolute picture quality out of the DVD without spending tens of thousands of dollars on a high end video processor/scaler.

I soon learned that on top of dvd post processing/scaling that I could also catalog my dvd collection via third party plug-ins like My Movies or enabling the DVD Library cataloging inside of windows media center. I then went one step further and discovered that I could turn my dvd upscaling pc, into a DVR. Soon I was busy purchasing tuner cards, testing them out, adding additional storage space and by the end of the whole ordeal I am now running vista media center pc, with 1.5TB of hard drive storage for DVR purposes, to store all the recordings that I can make with the 6 tuners I have installed in said pc.

I recently even went a step further and picked up two Linksys media center extenders on sale for $125/each with free shipping though the dell affiliate program. I put one extender in my bedroom, the other in my office. On top of the new extenders I also have an xbox 360 that I use as a media center extender. So between the three extenders, I now can stream live TV, and recorded (DVR’d) tv shows on any tv in my home.

My eventual goal is to replace the comcast cable boxes with these extenders and my htpc setup so that I no longer have to pay the $15/month hardware rental fee’s. I currently am paying for 4 boxes with my comcast subscription, and paying a total of nearly $40/month in just hardware rental fee’s. If I could use the extenders and drop the comcast boxes after one year I’d have the extenders paid off. The main issue however is HDTV, and trying to get HDTV from cocmast into my HTPC.

Currently my only option is to buy a bran new PC, such as a dell XPS 420 with dual cable card tuners, as the only way to get cable card support is by purchasing a bran new pc from an "approved" OEM vendor such as dell. This requirement alone is one huge road block for making htpc’s main stream, but I also think that because HTPC’s are not main stream is the reason for cable card support to be so complicated and cumbersome.

Yes you can do things like Firewire into your pc, but then your still back paying hardware rental fee’s to comcast, which for me is the biggest proponent to using a HTPC is to get rid of the monthly hardware rental fee’s that I pay to comcast. There are also things like the Hauppauge HD-PVR which allows you to capture and record up to 1080i via component video, however it is mpeg4 only and currently doesn’t support Vista Media Center which again is a huge downer for me since I am a huge proponent of VMC.

HTPC’s also gain you access to a huge online video store, IE Hulu, Youtube, Joost, ect… I just got into using Hulu, and have been using my htpc for youtube and Joost for a while now. I love being able to load up Hulu and just start streaming tv shows and movies right from the website onto my tv. I truly believe that if more people found out about how easy it is, and how you can watch hulu on your tv instead of the small pc monitor more and more people would get into that in a heart beat.

Other added benefits to HTPC’s like big screen pc gaming, Pandora radio, and Last.FM radio, pictures, movie guides, Netflix streaming, Amazon Unbox, you name it, just adds to the benefits of what make a HTPC that great of a tool to use. Whether or not it will totally replace a stand alone STB remains to be seen but in my home the HTPC is more alive now than it has ever been.

In the end I think THPC’s still have a long way to go, and are just starting out, give it some time and you will see, till then keep on HTPCin!

- Josh