Adam & Amber’s Blog

It has been exciting times this past week in Rochester, MN with the week-long Rochesterfest in town. Rochesterfest celebrated its 25th year this year and brought back many of my favorite events including The Midwestern Lumberjack Championships, The Grand Parade, and Mayor’s Cup Balloon Race. I realize that we aren’t talking Football, Fireworks, and Ice Cream here but the Rochesterfest events have a certain small city festival feeling that is pretty cool.

The week started with the Lumberjack championships, now I know that it sounds kinda Wisconsiny to goto a Lumberjack Competition, but it is cheap, entertaining, and in an awesome setting at one of the only Lake’s in Rochester. Plus, where else can you see One-Man Bucking? I would explain the events but it would be much more boring then just checking out the photos (you can also check out pics from the 2005 competition here).

As I said, Rochesterfest is a week long event. However, other then lunch on Thursday at the street vendor’s downtown there isn’t much that we goto during the week. Plus, this year the week was much busier for me because I was working with the Marching Band Monday, Wednesday, Friday as they prepared for the Parade.

Speaking of the Parade it took place on Friday night and both Amber and I were in it walking along with the Rochester Lourdes Marching Band (which we help out with). The Rochesterfest Parade is a very interesting experience, it lasts for about 2 hours and there are HUGE gaps between many of the entries. This year I learned one of the reasons why this happens. For many of the bands that march the parade, it is a judged parade competition (I am sure I will be writing much more about Marching Competitions once the field season starts next fall). For those of you unfamiliar (as I was), parade competition bands learn and march drill just like field show bands, the difference is they travel around to parades all summer competing instead of competing at shows in the fall. Here is where we get to the gaps, the band’s shows are designed to be performed in front of a judging station, this means every time they stop to perform it consumes about 5 minutes. The bands try to catch up as best they can, however I heard that this year one band had an 11 minute gap in front of it by the end of the parade.

Here is some video from the parade of the Lourdes Marching Band, they did well. Keep in mind that we just recently started rehearsals and will keep going through the entire summer, so this is just the beginning.

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Today we did our final Rochesterfest events, the Mayor’s Cup Balloon Race (no, they don’t actually race) and Breakfast on the Farm. We were up at 5AM to get out to the Balloon launch (which didn’t end up happening until 6AM). Why do we get up so early to watch hot air balloons? Because we are idiots Plus, it is a fun time and having to get up early just adds to the fun. As always the photo ops are a-plenty.

Seeing as how we were already up, we went to the Breakfast on the Farm. This was the first time we went to this event (it was the first year we were up early enough) and I have to say it was really impressive. It is your standard pancake breakfast, but they feed over 3,000 people. It was interesting to learn from Amber that they have never had this event at the same area farm twice in over 20 years. Kinda gives you an idea of the vast nothingness that surrounds Rochester.

“There is a truck in our yard”, That is what Amber said when she called me at work this afternoon.

At first I thought she meant that someone had parked over the curb a bit and onto our lawn. Then she started talking about the recycling bin being crushed and I thought to myself, “Why would someone run-over our recycling bin?”. At this point she told me that the truck hit one of the trees in front of our house, I finally understood the scope of what she was talking about. Sometimes my slowness is astounding.

While Amber checked the car for passengers (there were none) and called the Police (because we figured that is what you do when someone parks their truck in your tree), I headed home from work to help her sort it out.

Driving home I had plenty of theories about why there was a truck in our yard. I figured that it couldn’t have been a sober adult because if you accidentally drove your truck into my tree you would either knock on the door ad fess up (which I would prefer), or you would immediately drive away (dragging away my recycling bin). I thought about an intoxicated adult, but then why would you run? And if you were drunk enough to park your truck in my tree, I would imagine you couldn’t run very far before ending up on your face. The most obvious choice to me was that a neighborhood kid, of which there are plenty, went on a joy ride that ended with an amateur parking job in my tree.

It just so happened that at almost the exact moment I arrived home, I also learned how wrong I my theories were. After meeting Amber in our front yard (that had a truck parked in it) and talking about a variety of topics mostly surrounding the fact that there was a truck parked in our tree. A neighbor from a few houses up the street comes running out her front door, very curious as to why the truck she parked on the street a few hours before was now parked in my tree. Apparently, she had borrowed the manual transmission truck and was given instructions not to set the parking break. An old transmission and gravity took care of the rest.

Luckily no one got hurt and the truck didn’t make it to the intersection at the end of our street. The tree held up like a champ with only minor bark damage and the remarkably springy recycling bin was, well, remarkably springy. So other then losing 15 minutes of work and wasting a few minutes of the Police’s time, no harm was done (Well except to the front of the truck, but come on everyone knows you set the parking break on manual transmission’s, especially on a hill).

For those of you who don’t know, Mr Wizard died yesterday morning at almost 90 years of age. For those of you that don’t know who Mr Wizard is (hopefully the graphic helps), think Bill Nye in a 1980’s setting, at least that is who he is to me. I can still remember watching Mr. Wizard’s World on Nickelodeon when I was a kid, the magical experiments, the corny animated transitions, and the even cornier futuristic 80’s music. Mr. Wizard is where I first learned about chemistry, physics, and probably the first place I saw anything resembling a computer or robot.

It wasn’t until today when I was reading up on Mr. Wizard that I learned about what a full career he had before the 1980’s. Mr. Wizard whose real name was Don Herbert was born in Waconia, MN (which is about 2 hours from Rochester, straight West of the Twin Cities) before moving to the Twin Cities and finally Lacrosse, WI. Mr. Wizard graduated from State Teachers College with a degree in English and General Science, but instead of going into teaching he decided to go pursue acting and moved to New York City in 1941. Being a young man in 1941, he did what a large number of young men did and volunteered for service, specifically he served as a pilot performing 55 bombing missions over Northern Italy before leaving the service in 1945. After his service, Mr Wizard went back to acting and various other jobs in the entertainment field before starting “Watch Mr. Wizard” in 1951 in Chicago. “Watch Mr. Wizard” continued with great success until 1965 when NBC canceled the series (that I never knew existed). For the remainder of the 60’s and 70’s Mr Wizard did a variety of things, writing books, making classroom videos, special appearances, and even a few other TV shows. In 1983 “Mr. Wizard’s World” was picked up by the new and fledgling Nickelodeon Channel and continued for 7 season ending in 1990, with reruns continuing until 2000. I can still remember getting up for zero-hour in high school at 6 AM and watching re-runs.

There have been plenty of educational shows for children, but Mr. Wizard was special because he never talked down to children. Something if you watch the educational programming on Nickelodeon today you know they do all the time. How they went from a man planting the seeds of interest in science, math, and technology to a talking television screen and a blue dog is probably something that should be examined. That alas, is not the point of this post. Today I say good-bye to a good friend from my childhood, Rest in Peace Mr. Wizard.

Check out Mr. Wizard’s Official site here, with all sorts of interesting information.

So I realize that it has been a few months since I started this thread of posts, and it is my goal to get them finished up soon.

The first hurdle we had to get over was life without digital cable, having been in that mode now for a few months I am here to tell you that digital cable is not all it is cracked up to be.  I am getting ahead of myself though, what did this change mean to us?

1. No Pay channels - We had them all, Showtime, HBO, Cinemax, even Starz, Encore, and TMC.  My original plan was that I would get Netflix to offset losing these channels and the hole it would undoubtedly leave in my life.  Honestly though, it hasn’t bothered me enough yet to warrant that.  The nice thing is, it is always an option once winter rolls around.
2. No HD - This was surprisingly easy for me to live without, I hit a few quality issues (that I will talk about later), but all-in-all tv is tv and none of it’s entertainment value comes from it’s quality.  The flip side here is that HD is always an option on the MythTV Box, so if I start to miss it I can always put it there.
3. No Upper Channels - This was really easy, didn’t change my life at all….good riddance.
4. No On-Screen Guide in Bedroom - The Moxi still attached in the living room, we didn’t have this problem, but in the bedroom were we went from a cable-box to nothing, this was an unexpected adjustment.  It kind of brought me back to being a kid and just organically memorizing channels and basic schedules.  The nice part is that because it is in the bedroom there are only a few thing we normally watch anyway.
5. Channel Surfing - The one absolute positive.  Digital cable is great, but God bless you if you have the patience to channel surf with the infuriating delay between channels.  Take away the Digital Cable, I get my channel surfing back

This simple change dropped a little over a third off our cable bill (cost of the MOXI went up when I dropped digital cable) and we survived just fine.  Now onto the fun stuff!

This is an interesting video from Liverpool. It is really quite an impressive piece of engineering considering it has no practical use at all. Although I have to say, if you are going to spend $900,000 on a piece of art, this beats a sculpture any day.

Our friends Andy & Darcy got married this past weekend (Congrats Guys!) and both of us were honored to be in the wedding party, Amber as a bridesmaid and myself as the best man. As an additional duty that I bestowed on myself I decided to organize a group gift among our Rochester friends.

Andy and Darcy have been together long enough that they have most of the things you need to run a household, which meant that they really only needed a few small things and couple big things. We of course decided to go big and bought them a Blue Ember Grill with just about every bell and whistle a person could ask for. However through the generosity of our group (and the large number of people that contributed) we had enough funds to buy the grill, every grilling implement known to man, a fire pit, and even a chefs hat for the cook. A large haul by anyones standard, but how to package it? Such a large gift deserves more then a simple card and bow, that is when genius struck.

I will now give a dramatic (and inaccurate) dialog on how Jon and I came up with the idea:

Adam: Hey Jon, I had an idea for how we should package the gift.
Jon: You’re an idiot
Adam: I was thinking that we build a box large enough to fit the grill and all the other gifts inside.
Jon: You’re an idiot
Adam: We would have to make it HUGE, like 7′x7′x7′ just to make sure we can fit the 6′ wide grill inside.
Jon: You’re an idiot
Adam: We can put it on their deck, wrap the entire thing and make some ribbon and a bow out of fabric to make it look like a gift.
Jon: You’re an idi……. Can we fill it with balloons?
Adam: YES!

And that has nothing to do with how the idea was born, other then that Jon and I talked about it and he thinks I’m an idiot

We had this crazy idea 4 days before the wedding, which meant that to pull it off we would need to find a group of people as crazy as us, people willing to put in long hours building something thats entire purpose was to be destroyed, people willing to work for pizza and laughs. Luckily, Rochester is just dull enough that we convinced a good chunk of our friends to help out.

After putting out a plea for cardboard, purchasing a crap-ton (it’s metric) of 1×2’s, finding silver table cloth rolls to use as wrapping paper, and getting strange looks by going alone into Jo-Ann’s (picture a large guy perusing the fabric section in the middle of the day) to get “ribbon”, we were set. We gathered 2 days before the wedding to pre-assemble as much of the box as possible. The plan was to frame nine 3.5′x7′ panels, cover them in cardboard, and individually wrap them. The tenth panel was the exception, it included a door so that the contents of the box could be accessed and would be wrapped on location after the box was assembled.

One of the best times when doing a project like this, is the moment when everyone buys into the idea (still realizing that it is completely absurd and insane). As I watched 11 people work for 2+ hours on this completely crazy idea I couldn’t help but think how hard it was going to be to convince them to help assemble it after the reception, being past 1 AM and having partied and drank for hours. But we had come to far, so this box was going up!

The wedding was of course beautiful, went off without a hitch, the women all beautiful and the men handsome. The reception was a blast, everyone danced more then they should have, ate more then they should have, and some even drank more then they should have. However, that is not the purpose of this post, all that is important is that everyone was well dressed, tired, sore, tipsy, and it was 1 AM.

It took another two hours but we got the box up (with the magic power of zip-ties), put in the gifts, filled it about half full of balloons (over 300), wrapped the visible surfaces one more time, slapped on the bow, and at around 3 AM called it good. Were we tired? Hell Yes, But we had accomplished something! We had build a completely useless, but impressive, 7′ gift box. Now all that was left to do was to go home, get my 5 hours of sleep and goto the gift opening in the morning.

Luckily there is video of the remainder of this story, so I can stop typing and you can stop reading. The reaction was completely worth the effort and I would do it again in a heartbeat. Congratulations Andy and Darcy!

Enjoy the video.

We here in Minnesota are in the midst of a freak snowstorm. This isn’t unheard of, and in fact Rochester usually registers a few inches of snow in April. Getting an April snowstorm is, however, big news. So big that we made the national news Check out the link below to see our humble little city on msnbc.

Link to msnbc video

Note: The msn video player is funky and I just kinda guessed at a good way to link to it, so if this doesn’t work let me know.

After this weekend I am complete with Step 1 of my MythTV Project. On Saturday Jon, Andy, and Jim came over and helped me get the upstairs wired up for ethernet. This is not a glamorous part of the process but it allowed me to add a very small amount of value to the house and make it much easier to hook everything up later. I also took this opportunity to upgrade our wireless router to hopefully help our connection issues.

The Supplies

Linksys WRT54GL Wireless Router
SMC SMCGS8 Gigabit Switch
cat5e Cable
Faceplates with two ethernet and one coax ports

The Work

There are a few goals for this project:

1. Wire the living room and two bedrooms each with 2 ethernet ports.
2. Move the Cable Modem and Router up to the living room to help signal strength and resetability
3. Install a switch to serve internet and provide a high speed network to the living room and bedrooms

The original thought was that we could easily replace all of the coax jacks by attaching a string to the coax cable, pulling them down, attaching the two cat5 cables and pulling them back up. A perfect plan, unfortunately I failed to study my basement well enough to realize that all the coax cable is routed up through one location and run around the house on the main floor. This meant that we would instead have to do it the hard way, by drilling a hole in the floor and using a couple hangers to pull up the cables. Keep in mind that there are all external walls and so we had to do all of this through the wall insulation. On top of all this we had to route all the cables through the floor which involved lots of drilling and grumbling by Andy.

In the end it took us about 3 hours to get it all done and more importantly gave me my invented reason to put in the order for the MythTV Components which I will spend much more time on soon.

The Reason

I was looking at our cable bill last week (something I rarely do thanks to autopay) and I noticed that it was really high. Now granted we get everything, we have basic, expanded basic, digital, the sports tier, the family tier, Showtime, HBO, Cinemax, Stars, Encore, TMC, HD channels, a digital cable-box, and a DVR. As I said, we get everything and we pay ~$130 a month for it (which is about $30 more then when we originally signed up). The thought I had that made me realize that we need to change is that expanded basic costs ~$50 a month which means that we pay $80 a month for what? Digital, Sports Tier, and Family Tier have a bunch of stuff that we never watch (minus Nogin, Amber loves Degrassi). The premium stations are great, but we watch them for maybe 5 hours a month, hard to justify the cost for that when Netflix could serve the same purpose. The HD Channels are a little tougher, I really enjoy HDTV but our TV doesn’t do a great job with it (switching between 16:9 and 4:3 is not the best). We have started keeping it in 4:3 mode and noticed that the difference is tolerable, besides there is always over-the-air if we miss it. The digital cable-box is useless without digital cable so that is an easy thing to let go of. That just leaves the DVR, we got the DVR a couple years back and it is a very important part of our TV experience.

Our cable company uses the MOXI DVR which isn’t the greatest but works well. It is Dual HD-tuner, an 80 Gig Hard Drive, an OK menu interface, and that is pretty much it, nothing really to get excited about. It is very sad to say but we actually have issues with the Dual Tuner setup, there are times when we have 3 programs that we want to record at the same time, or a sporting event we want to watch live when two other programs want to record. Also, we have issues with things getting deleted before we can watch them, not all the time but we also have been trained to watch/delete fast. Even with those imperfections it is still the greatest component in our entertainment center, but at ~$20 a month it is kinda expensive ($240 a year!) and doesn’t fit into our move to free ourselves from monthly entertainment costs so it must go.

The Solution

We are now hypothetically down to just the $50 a month expanded basic setup and a hypothetical savings of $80 a month (almost $1000 a year!) all without really losing anything, which is kinda sad. The one thing we have to find a replacement for is the MOXI DVR and that is where the MythTV Box comes in. MythTV is an open source PVR, meaning that the software is FREE you just need to have the hardware and patience to install it. MythTV does almost everything the MOXI does, multiple tuner support, VCR controls for live TV, scheduled recording, and even supports HDTV (over-the-air). On top of that it can support a much larger number of tuners, I can put whatever size Hard Drive(s) I want into it, will hold our MP3 collection, we can rip our DVD collection into it, it does automatic commercial detection/skipping, much smarter scheduling and conflict resolution, web interface for remote scheduling, ability to watch recordings on any PC, and it is a Linux computer so it can double as a file server to backup our photos (that can be shared with and displayed through MythTV) and print server to allow us to do wireless printing to our printer (yes, we have a printer in the living room). Not only is that a run on sentence, it is a lot of good reasons to build the box.

The Plan

I should start by saying what my experience level is. I have built 2 computers from scratch, personally I think most people can figure this part out if they are willing to do a little research, be fearless about trying things, and have some technical friends that can help them through it. I have a novice level of experience with Linux, I don’t currently have any Linux computers at home but I have installed/run it in the past, used it throughout college, and I program in a Linux like environment at work. As that point eludes to I am a programmer (or if you feel proper a Software Engineer) this gives me two advantages to the average builder. 1) I have a really good feel for technology and software. 2) I have access to many people who are equally as geeky and have built, are building, or plan to build a MythTV Box.

Enough about me, what is the plan?

1. Upgrade our home network. This means purchasing a cable modem (saves us $5 a month off our cable-internet bill, which is $60 a year, considering the one I got cost ~$45 this is a no-brainer), wiring our main level with CAT5 (this allows us to put extender boxes in the bedrooms when we get to that point), install a gigabit switch (allow fast wired connections between the rooms), and upgrade our wireless router (don’t even get me started on our current one). This will be the framework for the rest of the project.
2. Get rid of everything except the MOXI. This is the deprivation test, can we survive without the extra cable? (Oh the problems we face)
3. Build the MythTV box. This is the fun part, finding, purchasing, and assembling the hardware. If this part doesn’t excite you then MythTV might not be for you.
4. Install Linux/MythTV. This is the part that will take some time in order to get everything perfect.
5. Extend MythTV to other TV’s. This is one of the best parts about MythTV, multiple “frontends” can use the same “backend” this means that with a small box you can access all the features of the main box in any room. This also means that we can save ourselves some cable degradation by having all our TV’s work over the network. This will help with some reliability and signal issues we have had in the past.
6. Never touch it again. This is the end goal, I want this to be an appliance, a black-box that I forget is a computer. The other major test is Amber’s comfort level with it. Amber is very Tech savvy for a teacher but would have little patience for me having to SSH into the box to kill a runaway process. Point is, it needs to just work or we will have to look elsewhere.

That is the plan, I hope to write about each step along the way and let everyone know how it is going. The network supplies should be going in this week, so look for an update soon.

That is right, after the previous storm last weekend that dumped over a foot of snow on us we had only a couple days rest before round two came Thursday and Friday and dumped another 10+ inches. I would guess that at our house the undrifted and unshoveled total of both storms is about 2 1/2 feet of snow. We are starting to run out of places to put it. We have tried hiding some under the deck but now that is so full it is blocking the entrance. We have crested the neighbors fence next to the garage and have started throwing the snow over it. And don’t even get me started on our poor mailbox.

Where the plows have helped create snow banks they are easily topping out over 5 feet tall and where they have not helped we have piles nearing 4 feet. Each foot, mind you, shoveled by hand by Amber and myself.

The good news is that snow is out of the forecast for the next week and we might even start warming up! We just have to keep reminding ourselves that soon it will be spring and then we will just have to deal with all the flooding.

Checkout more pictures of the aftermath here.