Boxee project

Thanks to my brother Jon, the open source community, and the wonders of bit torrent I've finally been successful in building my first true Home Theatre PC. The specs are nothing impressive but thankfully they don't have to be. The important thing is that the PC is discrete, quite and works almost seemlessly allowing us to watch content for free over the net that we would other wise have to pay $60 or better for a month. The picture you see is of our current setup with the 42" LCD, the black HTPC (running XP & Boxee) in the shelf below and the ipod touch that I use to control it all from the plush comfort of my couch. It's not a perfect setup just yet...Boxee on XP doesn't have capability currently to play either Hulu or Netflix content but I'm hopeful that will change in the near future. Honestly though if those 2 issues were resolved then this very cost effective little PC serves the purpose of cutting off any need I have for an expensive cable bill every month.

A gathering of talent...

Saturday night was a loud and busy one at the Bennett household. As you can see we had quite a gathering of musical talent joining us in our quest for rockstar glory. :) We were joined by Jeff Kolb, Tim and Candice Weisbrocker, Jerm and Mandy, and of coarse mom. We all kept our distance from Jeff for fear of being beat to death by the fury of his drum sticks and we were all seriously impressed by Jerm's display of vocals! In time we'll work our way to the top of the rock band charts but for now we'll have to settle for a good evening with friends. :)

The Project that never ends...
We started our most current home renovation project of refinishing the living & dining room in October of 2008 and we are finally putting the finishing touches on it. You may be wondering why this project has taken nearly 7 months to finish up and it's basically because I'm a slacker. We've been sitting with this project 90% done for the last few months and I've unfortunately grown comfortable to seeing raw plaster walls around each window, but beleive it or not that isn't the look we are going for. Thankfully I have good friend and neighbor, Sean Follen, who is willing to spend his time skillfully picking up where my ignorance falls off. With Sean's help the window sills have been cut to sit level and now all that is left is for me to stain them and start putting them in place. I can't wait to have this project behind us as we move on to the next.

With a tear in my eye and a frown on my face I must say goodbye to a fantastic piece of hardware. Behold the Rocketfish Full tower case (aka: Lian Li) in all of it's glory. Now granted unless you have a real interest in PC hardware this probably just looks like a oversized case to you but in material, parts and design this case is in every way superior to your typical case. The difference is comparable to what you would find in a car that gets you from point to point and a purpose built sports car, neither can be fully appreciated unless you understand what makes it high end. Maybe one day when I have enough $ or time to build a water cooled PC I'll get something this nice again but until then I'll just have to sell it on Ebay for 2x what I bought it for. :) Thanks Best Buy.

Our never-ending project

If you've ever seen the house we were thrilled to purchase in August 2007, you know that there is a lot of work to do. That being said we've had a couple of projects in the works recently have just been completed and we thought we'd share our relief. (Whew!)

First off is the guest bedroom on the main floor that mom will be using when she moves in with us. This one was totally gutted and redone, we also refinished the floors and I'd say they turned out alright.


We also had the roof redone which was desperately needed; I have much more peace of mind now when it rains. 2 down a million to go.

Which way to go…

Just a brief apology for being so slow in actually posting anything to the blog. The last month for us has been the busiest of the year, like it has been for everyone else probably, and it's just been tough to find the time to post. Now that the preaching, room project, wedding, roof redo and a host of other things are complete for the time being we should have more time to keep things up to date here. Check back for more updates soon. Thanks.

Oooooh shiny!! :)

So here are the guest room floors, finally finished. The process took about two weeks total to do but I think that it was worth the effort and $. We are planning to take this same refinishing process to the rest of the main floor of the house. This is kind of an experiment room so now that I've done it once and learned what not the do the rest of the house should be a little simpler. Only trim to put up and touching up the paint and we can say it's done. :)