There were a few discoveries. Like the box of Ethernet cable I left up there from last time, plus wire cutter and a drill. We used up that 500ft box and another 50ft of additional cable. I drilled one hole for the computer to discover that the boards were 6-8″ thick. When we went to run the Kitchen cable there was already a hole drilled. That really saved a lot of energy at the end. It would have been difficult with all the air vents and chimney.

All the major locations have a run to the attic hole. Some locations have other runs. Like between the old and new computer rooms and the new computer room and the kitchen. Though that last one was a mistake. Measure before you cut. The attic hole is close to the house phone line, before it splits. I’m very excited to cut it and rewire the house phones through a DSL filter and put the DSL router closer to the telephone box. So, all the runs to the attic are for getting Internet from one spot. I’ll drop a battery backup up there and run the DSL router, wired Router/Firewall, and Pogoplug off it. I’m really excited at the prospect of faster Internet by cutting out all the interference from the house telephone wiring.

The wall wired Ethernet should make it easier to plug in most anything. At this point, the house is basically networked. Yay.

Cdcovers.cc - Contains fan scanned DVD covers. Many are non-english and non-US and in a wide variety of resolutions.
Amazon.com - has small images and some have this zoom feature that makes them unobtainable and Flash-y.
Netflix - seems to have everything, but only in tiny 5 kb files. Last resort.

Just right click the image and save it. Don’t forget to crop it. Backsides from CDCovers and white edging from Amazon.com are annoying and unnecessary. Macs make this exceedingly easy with Preview.

The Cube by itself doesn’t have enough storage for the songs plus videos. That’s were the Drobo upgrades come in. Two new 1.5Ts in the big box put two 640gigs in the small box and two 500gigs came out without a home. These two can go in an external box and hold more than enough iTunes library to the Cube for the little AppleTV.

That means that videos aren’t limited to being played at my house. We can watch anything at Jennifer’s too. And it provides an offsite backup. Yay

It seems like my computers have sought to colonize every room in the house and to temporarily “go abroad”.

It makes me sad to remember raising Tiger, Dora, and Goldie. Only Tiger is left. Goldie ran away in March. Dora became quite wild while Tiger became docile. It seemed that we weren’t going to domesticate her or her kittens. Taking the to the pound seemed very cruel. However, as wild cats they knew how to catch food be afraid of people. It seemed better to take them out to a known cat colony in the country where they would at least have a chance. Hopefully Bella can be caught next weekend and moved.

I loved little Dora. Wish I could have saved her.

Tiger is a furry ball of purring love. He’s good with a few people and seems to get better all the time.

Mitten, my mom’s cat, still chases him and tries to rule the roost.

The other interesting item is the expanded Genius functionality. Not sure how well it will work, but it seems they have acquired a massive amount of data on people’s songs (54 billion).

Some stuff is kind of dumb. The LP functionality. Really? I’m supposed to want text and graphics that record labels stopped making 25+ years ago when we moved to tape. Uh, yeah, I’ve so been missing album covers and I would never have thought of going to the internet to look for that kind of stuff, because I’m so stupid.

And the sync by genre and artist functionality. What the? I thought Apple got it with the Genius feature. Show me music I like. Who cares who wrote it, sung it, or how it was arbitrarily classified. Most of my songs are ripped from a Windows machine anyway. There is no genre info on a lot of them and many are just wrong. Sync by playlist was fine. The rest just adds more complexity.

http://lifehacker.com/5048189/five-best-calendar-applications
http://lifehacker.com/399407/how-to-sync-any-desktop-calendar-with-google-calendar

From Professional Friends of Wine
Gewürztraminer is one of the most pungent wine varietals, easy for even the beginning taster to recognize by its heady, aromatic scent. While the French have achieved the greatest success with this grape and its name may be German, the history of Gewürztraminer began in Italy’s Tyrollean Alps, near the village of Termeno (Tramin) in Alto Adige.
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Like pinot noir, however, traminer vines do have a propensity to mutate. One of these mutations, a few centuries ago, resulted in a vine that produces dark pinkish-brown, spotted berries and makes very distinctive and heady wine.
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While the gewürztraminer vine is prized for its wine, it can be despised for its viticultural difficulty. It buds early in the Spring, so it is particularly susceptible to damage from frost. Gewürztraminer also has weak defenses against viral vine infections. Even healthy vines are not very productive, with small clusters, so there is a great temptation for growers to over-crop, which results in dilute, lightweight wine.

The berries, with their thick and tough skins, can attain high sugar levels of amazing concentration. Alcohol levels, therefore, can get quite high in dry versions. Conversely, low acidity and high pH in Gewürztraminer are problematic. Close monitoring and precise harvest timing are critical. Early picking retains acid, but without long “hang time” distinctive varietal character fails to develop. Pleasant results are nearly impossible in warm climates.
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