MCE Parts and thoughts

Everying arrived yesterday, got built after a lovely poker game (4:30am completion...ugh), and is wowing the wife already.

Silverstone LC17 case
Seasonic S12-430 power supply
Gigabyte NForce4 Ultra MB (passive cooling on northbridge)
AMD64 3000+
Zalman CNPS7700-Cu CPU cooler (HUGE)
Gigabyte 6600GT with passive cooling
1 GB RAM
Seagate Barracuda 300GB SATA-2 hard drive
Plextor DVD-DL
Media Center IR and Remote

Coming later: NTSC tuner now that it appears I have a way to control a cable STB and receive HD content into Media Center. If that works out, bye-bye TiVo, and I'll be down to a single box for my entire home entertainment rack. All music, videos, pictures, DVD playing, PVR functions, etc. will be through this one PC. SWEET.

So far, this thing is looking good, is quiet, and Media Center went in without a single hitch. Either I've gotten good in my old age and 5 billionth PC build, or this stuff is just getting way easier. I'll post later on my software experiences, but for $1200, this is a hell of a parts list for a quiet and powerful HTPC (all from NewEgg.com).

Media Center PC on the way

Just ordered (Sunday night) my parts for my Home Theater PC running Windows Media Center Edition. Goals: silent computer, play DVDs and music to replace DVD player, display pictures/videos on big screen, browse/e-mail on big screen, game on big screen, internet/local radio with timeshifting. The big thing missing: TV. I am going to try an option for getting cable signals into Media Center over firewire, allowing MCE to seamlessly record even HD signals. The HD TiVo still rocks for TV, but I'd love to move to MCE eventually...

Pics and specs later.

Popo's Pants

My little dude is having his pants let out right now. His belly is too big for pants that fit him...like father, like son...

What will they make next?

This just totally rocks.

Life with Slovaks

Week 4 of the Slovak invasion has begun. Sona is a superhero, got a work ethic that just won't stop, and Igor is a man looking for a project (other than babies). He's a good pair of hands when you need him with them, but he really wants to build a house :).

Alica and I get up at 6am, as usual, but the babies are taken care of by Igor and Sona and then they go for a walk. If I'm going to work, I may be gone by the time they get back at 9am or so. Unreal. And then I get home at 6pm or so, play with the kids, give them a bath, and put them to bed. If bedtime is trouble, Sona is right there.

Makes this baby thing almost easy :).

Proving the concept

This is amazing. I've been on my current gig since May, and it's now August. I just found out I'm paid for through October. And all of this is just to develop the case to do a technology project, not to actually DO the project. I think this is somewhere around $200k by the time we're done, and we have another $500k budgeted to actually do the work.

It's fun for me, and I guess it's valuable for the customer, but it sure feels goofy.

Of course, we're telling them it'll save at least $2,000,000 per year in hard costs, so it's good to question it and do the analysis, it's just strange to have ME do that analysis... :)

Cashing out - I'm a dork

DAMN YOU ANALYSTS, DAMN YOU!

Finally, after the stock sits dormant for years, the analysts are going nuts about MSFT futures. Stock dividend increases are expected, and general company performance has people excited with a new desktop OS, office suite, and server coming soon. Meanwhile, 26.35 sale price isn't looking so good for me, with stock up at 27.25 and still going strong...

DOH!