Journal Entry: February 5, 2009

Yesterday I had something of an epiphany concerning my posts to this blog, remembering that my original goal was to track my various projects through the idea, preparation, development, and distribution phases. That is to say, when I come up with a new idea for a story, I'd like to post it here, then chronicle the prewriting process, monitor my progress through writing it, and discuss both my reader reviews and the process of trying to get it published, as I go through that.

Same thing for programming projects, and any of the many other distractions I invest my time in.

Instead, I post daily about all the little things I'm doing, treating the ongoing projects more as assumed background information than actual highlights.

So I'm going to try to reverse that (or possibly just separate the two, making project reports separate from my journal entries). I didn't end up having time yesterday, though, and today's not looking great.

I'll do the journal real fast, though. Last night after work D-- brought dinner over so he could check out the work we'd done in the kitchen (which is nearly complete, after T-- put in a full afternoon painting). We were also watching my niece Sophy, and she and AB played pretty well together.

I also received a new computer case and a new remote, which works with XP. Actually...it came with software that allowed my old remote to work with XP, which is awesome because (1) it had a lot more buttons than the new one does, and (2) my Harmony remote is already programmed for those buttons. So I spent about an hour getting it set up, and now it works like a charm.

Well, an hour for the remote. D-- and I together spent almost two hours getting the computer transferred into the new case (a low-profile Home Theater PC shell). It was a lot of work, with not entirely satisfactory results in terms of the installation, but the finished product is a real beauty. It fits on a shelf in our entertainment center, and as I said I have the remote working for it again.

We're using XBMC as our media center -- a port of the old homebrew software for a modded XBox. One of the big advantages of that is that it has Python-based plugin and scripting support, and I actually have a bunch of experience not only with Python, but with Python for XBMC (actually, if you do a search for the phrase "Python for XBMC," my website is the number one Google result).

So I'm really excited that they have a Windows port of the code, and we're putting it to good use. I'm sure some of the plugins I work on will make it into my project reports.

That was pretty much my whole night, though. I kept logging into WoW, then timing out and getting kicked off the server because I was paying more attention to my new computer setup than to the game.

Other than that, it's just things and stuff.