XBMC, etc.

This weekend we finished the basketball season with all star games, parent\kid games, and the awards ceremony. Adam's team and Derek's team both won their age groups and they both had a good time this season. Adam received the "Great Scorer" (aka The Black Hole) award and Derek received the "Top Rebounder" award. I'm still playing with my new camera - the photos above are video frames that I saved as photos.

I've also been consumed with my new (old) XBox Media Center. Me and a few other guys from work bought old XBox consoles ($50 at GameStop) and modified them to run XBox Media Center. It's been a fun little project. I also bought a used modem\wireless router combo so that I could connect the XBox wirelessly, but I may end up running a direct ethernet cable because direct is about twice as fast as wireless.

I've always wanted to be able to play, on our tv/stereo in the family room, our music, tv, videos, photos, etc that are saved on our computer - now we can. There's still some kinks to be worked out, but it's nice. I'm also converting all my music that I originally ripped to Microsoft wma format (and was then converted\copied to Apple m4a for iTunes) to mp3. I originally ripped it to wma instead of mp3 because you can store the same quality recording in a smaller file and then I got an iPod and needed iTunes and now I'm tired of maintaining the duplicate proprietary formats.